ealest and truest side of my nature which finds
expression when I take my pen in hand.

"I wonder if a bit of autobiography would bore you. I should feel that
it would most men; but I think of you as a genial, elderly gentleman
with a face like Thackeray's, and with a broad human interest in all
phases of life."

Flint grinned. "So much," he said to himself, "for the intuitions of
woman." Yet he felt a trifle vexed at being set down as elderly, and
secretly elated at the allusion to Thackeray,--as if a wide mouth, a
turned-up nose, and eye-glasses carried with them fee-simple to "Henry
Esmond" and the "Newcomes."

"I am twenty-two years old!" the letter went on. "As a young girl I
knew nothing of city life. My father owned a sheep ranch in the
Northwest, and there I grew up, roaming about as freely as the sheep
themselves. I learned to ride and to shoot. Until I was a woman grown,
I never took a needle in my hand. Perhaps it may seem strange to you,
but out of this aloofness from feminine pursuits there grew up within
me a sort of reverence for the feminine ideal. I felt a vague awe,
such as I imagine strikes a man at sight of a rose-lined parasol, or a
thimble laid on a pile of stitchery. It is this sense of the poetry of
women's occupation which must give what little value they possess to
my verses; and perhaps you will not care for any more now that you
know they are no part of the real _me_, but only an ideal."

The letter was signed "Amy Bell," and the only address given, a New
York post-office box.

"A pretty name," said Flint to himself, as he studied it, "a very
pretty name!" Then he fell to musing on how this girl must look; and
he found himself making a likeness from the picture over the mantel,
only he would have the face a trifle rounder, with a dimple in either
cheek, and a hint more of tenderness in that firm under-lip, whose
smile savored of delicate irony. His thoughts unconsciously reverted
to the reflections of the morning, as he looked at the portrait.

"How shy we all are of self-revelation!" he murmured, as he folded the
letter slowly, and slid it into his vest-pocket; "and then, when we
have gone about for years hedging ourselves in with barriers of ice,
suddenly some emotion thaws them, and out flow all the tides of
feeling which we have been damming up so long." Flint's musings ended
in a determination to answer this letter, and to answer it now while
the genial mood was on him. The writer