tea!). _Many daughters have done virtuously_ but I shall
excel them all. I admit it.

JANE.

P.S. Michael Daragh is beamish with bliss. He's done himself out in
purple and fine linen and yet manages, miraculously, not to look in
the least like other men, and he doesn't even stoop any more. Sally,
you know when he was in Ireland we all--especially Emma Ellis and the
romantic music students--conjectured as to what he was when he was at
home, and cast him for many fetching roles, from a sacrificial
younger son to a Sin-eater, and always a belted earl at the very
least. He has told me all about himself now, naturally, and it would
be a blow to Emma E. and the little music makers, so I mercifully
mean never to let them know. He hasn't any immediate family, and was
brought up by an uncle who had a large and prosperous wholesale
grocery business in Cork! (Could anything be less lyrical, I ask
you?) He wanted M.D. to go into the business after he had finished
college, and M.D., quite naturally, being M.D., wouldn't and they
quarreled, and M.D. came over here with just his small income from
his father's small estate, and went into settlement work. He was
called home to the uncle's death-bed, but the uncle, contrary to the
best literary precedents, hadn't softened to any extent worth
mentioning, and died as crabbed as he had lived, greatly annoyed, no
doubt, to realize that his demise released certain decent little
incomes from the main family estate to the stubborn nephew, but
immensely pleased with himself for making his fortune over to
outsiders. So, my other-worldly spouse will have a comfortable income
after all, but he may divide it with dope-fiends and Fallen Sisters
and their ilk to his heart's content since my royalties, like
snowballs, gather as they roll!

Sally, you must come down and stay with me. "Please, pretty please!"

JANE.

_New York City,
May Twentieth._

Dearest Sally,

I'm distressed beyond words that your mother is still so wretched,
and I see, of course, that you cannot leave her yet. But she must
hurry and be well enough to let you come for the wedding,--middle or
end of June.

A rather startling thing has happened. I have _a letter from Profesor_
Morales in Guadalajara, saying that--after all the tangling up of
the red tape in the var