r her
determination to edit your paper for you. Naturally, she knows nothing
whatever about such work, but she says, with the air of triumphantly
quelching all such argument, that she has talked a great deal to Mr.
Macauley of the 'Journal.' Mr. Macauley is the affair I have alluded to;
he is what she has meant when she has said, at different times, that she
was interested in journalism. But she is very business-like now. She
has bought a typewriter and purchased a great number of soft pencils and
erasers at an art shop; I am only surprised that she does not intend to
edit your miserable paper in water-colors. She is coming at once. For
mercy's sake don't telegraph her not to; your forbiddings work the
wrong way. Our only hope is that she will find the conditions so utterly
discouraging at the very start that she will give it up and come home.
If you are a man you will help to make them so. She has promised to stay
with that country girl with whom she contracted such an incomprehensible
friendship at Miss Jennings's.

"Oh, James, pray for grace to be a man once in your life and send her
back to us! Be a man--try to be a man! Remember the angel you killed!
Remember all we have done for you and what a return you have made, and
be a man for the first time. Try and be a man!

"Your unhappy sister-in-law,

"MARTHA SHERWOOD."

Mr. Fisbee read the letter with a great, rising delight which no sense
of duty could down; indeed, he perceived that his sense of duty had
ceased to conflict with the one strong hope of his life, just as he
perceived that to be a man, according to Martha Sherwood, was, in part,
to assist Martha Sherwood to have her way in things; and, for the rest,
to be the sort of man she persuaded herself she would be were she not a
woman. This he had never been able to be.

By some whimsy of fate, or by a failure of Karma (or, perhaps, by some
triumph of Kismetic retribution), James Fisbee was born in one of the
most business-like and artless cities of a practical and modern country,
of money-getting, money-saving parents, and he was born a dreamer of
the past. He grew up a student of basilican lore, of choir-screens, of
Persian frescoes, and an ardent lounger in the somewhat musty precincts
of Chaldea and Byzantium and Babylon. Early Christian Symbolism, a
dispute over the site of a Greek temple, the derivation of the lotus
column, the restora