at,
although learning a new thing is always interesting, the practising of
an old one is monotonous. And her pluck appealed to him. It is not easy
for a girl to step from the position of mistress of servants to that of
helping about the housework of a small family in a small town for the
sake of the home to be found in it.

"She's a trump!" said Thorpe to himself, "and she shall have her
everlasting fortune, if there's such a thing in the country."

He jingled the three dollars and sixty cents in his pocket, and smiled.
That was the extent of his everlasting fortune at present.

The letter had been answered from Detroit.

"I am glad you are settled," he wrote. "At least I know you have enough
to eat and a roof over you. I hope sincerely that you will do your best
to fit yourself to your new conditions. I know it is hard, but with my
lack of experience and my ignorance as to where to take hold, it may be
a good many years before we can do any better."

When Helen Thorpe read this, she cried. Things had gone wrong that
morning, and an encouraging word would have helped her. The somber tone
of her brother's communication threw her into a fit of the blues from
which, for the first time, she saw her surroundings in a depressing and
distasteful light. And yet he had written as he did with the kindest
possible motives.

Thorpe had the misfortune to be one of those individuals who, though
careless of what people in general may think of them, are in a
corresponding degree sensitive to the opinion of the few they love. This
feeling was further exaggerated by a constitutional shrinking from any
outward manifestation of the emotions. As a natural result, he was
often thought indifferent or discouraging when in reality his natural
affections were at their liveliest. A failure to procure for a friend
certain favors or pleasures dejected him, not only because of that
friend's disappointment, but because, also, he imagined the failure
earned him a certain blame. Blame from his heart's intimates he shrank
from. His life outside the inner circles of his affections was apt to
be so militant and so divorced from considerations of amity, that as
a matter of natural reaction he became inclined to exaggerate the
importance of small objections, little reproaches, slight criticisms
from his real friends. Such criticisms seemed to bring into a sphere
he would have liked to keep solely for the mutual reliance of loving
kindness, something