as a very stupid girl, and all the stupider
that she thought herself rather clever. She fancied that she was very
acute in reading character, and she trusted a great deal to instinct,
and first impressions, and all that sort of rubbish by which women
excuse themselves from taking the trouble to use their reason. Well,
once upon a time, this girl met a man whom she did not like. Her
vanity was touched, in the first place, because he disapproved of her
and showed his disapproval."

"What a cad he must have been!" Flint put in.

"Now you are no better than the girl I am telling you about--going off
like that on insufficient evidence. The girl made up her mind at once
that the man must be at fault, since he failed to appreciate her,--all
our estimates are based on vanity, you see in the last analysis,--so
she proceeded to fit him out with a character to match her ideal of
him. He was to be selfish and cold, and regardless of everybody but
himself, and supercilious and domineering, and endowed with all the
other agreeable qualities which go with those engaging epithets. This
answered very well for a while, and I am bound to admit that at first
you--I mean he--seemed to play the part which she had assigned to him
very satisfactorily; but presently little things began to come to her
knowledge which refused to fit into the picture she had made of him.
He had a friend who let slip stories of inconsistently kind things he
had done for a man whom he had known in college, pooh-poohing them all
the time as folly."

"Rubbish!"

"Exactly what the girl said. They didn't go with the character of the
kind of man that she had made up her mind this was to be, so she would
not believe them, and kept repeating every disagreeable thing she had
ever heard him say as an antidote against any change of impression.
But stupid as she was, she was not quite dishonest, even with herself,
and when gradually her eyes were opened to the wrong which she had
done him in her own mind, she longed for an opportunity to make him
some amends; but all the opportunities came to him, and the coals of
fire were heaped on her head till she began to feel them quite too hot
for comfort. So at last she resolved, on the first occasion when she
saw him alone, to ask his pardon very humbly for all her misdoings and
misthinkings. Now, if she did, what do you think the man would say?"

Flint had set down his tea untasted, and sat staring steadily into
the fire, yet n