RNELIA.

"P. S. Apropos of your sentimental passion for letters, I
enclose a ridiculous circular which was handed to me
yesterday at the Woman's Exchange. You had better
investigate it. It seems to be rather your kind."

As the letter fluttered out of his hand Stanton closed his eyes with a
twitch of physical suffering. Then he picked up the letter again and
scrutinized it very carefully from the severe silver monogram to the
huge gothic signature, but he could not find one single thing that he
was looking for;--not a nourishing paragraph; not a stimulating
sentence; not even so much as one small sweet-flavored word that was
worth filching out of the prosy text to tuck away in the pockets of
his mind for his memory to munch on in its hungry hours. Now everybody
who knows anything at all knows perfectly well that even a business
letter does not deserve the paper which it is written on unless it
contains at least one significant phrase that is worth waking up in
the night to remember and think about. And as to the Lover who does
not write significant phrases--Heaven help the young mate who finds
himself thus mismated to so spiritually commonplace a nature! Baffled,
perplexed, strangely uneasy, Stanton lay and studied the barren page
before him. Then suddenly his poor heart puckered up like a persimmon
with the ghastly, grim shock which a man experiences when he realizes
for the first time that the woman whom he loves is not shy,
but--_stingy_.

With snow and gloom and pain and loneliness the rest of the day
dragged by. Hour after hour, helpless, hopeless, utterly impotent as
though Time itself were bleeding to death, the minutes bubbled and
dripped from the old wooden clock. By noon the room was as murky as
dish-water, and Stanton lay and fretted in the messy, sudsy
snow-light like a forgotten knife or spoon until the janitor wandered
casually in about three o'clock and wrung a piercing little wisp of
flame out of the electric-light bulb over the sick man's head, and
raised him clumsily out of his soggy pillows and fed him indolently
with a sad, thin soup. Worst of all, four times in the dreadful
interim between breakfast and supper the postman's thrilly footsteps
soared up the long metallic stairway like an ecstatically towering
high-note, only to flat off discordantly at Stanton's door without
even so much as a one-cent advertisement issuing from the
letter-slide.--And there would be thirty or fo