I always intended to (no matter what I may have babbled of a
man-I-met-on-the-boat, or of an extremely civil engineer!) from the
first instant I set my wishful eye on his zealot's brow and his
fighter's jaw and heard the burbling brogue that might be eaten with
a spoon?

It's taken me four years and a subway accident, but I consider the
time wholly well spent. I'm snugly and securely engaged to marry
Michael Daragh and he's entirely resigned to it. In fact, one might
even go so far as to say, without undue exaggeration, that he is
pleased!

(I'll wager you dashed right down to the Woman's Exchange and got
towels! Aren't you glad V. is such a nice, easy letter to embroider?)

That subway affair was ghastly, useful as it did prove to me. We
thought surely our hour had struck, but we behaved with Early
Christian Martyr fortitude and much more sprightly cheer, and when
Michael Daragh thought the end had come he staged a love scene which
made all the love scenes I ever wrote and all the love scenes I ever
read sound like time-tables or statistics! Months of misunderstanding
were explained away in minutes; he honestly believed me to be
secretly engaged to Rodney Harrison (there I see the fine Italian
hand of Emma Ellis, poor thing, oh, _poor_ thing--to want Michael
Daragh and not to have him!) and he still more honestly believed
that I lived and moved and had my brilliant being in a world too far
removed from his shabby and cumbered one, and that he was only my
more or less valued but humble friend--oh, miles of that sort of
piffle! Well, when we were safe in the upper air again, he basely
tried to repudiate me,--handsome speeches about not shadowing my
bright life and all that--very fetching as literature but not at all
satisfying to a young woman who had just achieved a betrothal after
long and earnest endeavor! I foiled him! You can't think how brazen
I was. I was still a bit hazy with smoke and exhaustion, and I
honestly believe if he hadn't given in I'd have screamed for a
policeman!

But once he gave up the fruitless struggle, he began to have a very
good time indeed. I will even go so far as to state that he hugs his
chains.

Yours in "a fine, dizzy, muddle-headed joy,"

JANE.

_New York.
April Eighteenth._

SALLY MACHREE,

(See how Irish s