), but I do know that
I am adjusting it scientifically. I am arranging my life so that I may
get the most out of it, while the one thing to disorder it, worse than
flood and fire and the public enemy, is love.

I have told you, from time to time, of my book. I have decided to call
it "The Economic Man." I am going over the proofs now, and my brain is
in perfect working order. On the other hand, there is Professor Bidwell,
who is likewise correcting proofs. Poor devil, he is in despair. He can
do nothing with them. "I positively cannot think," he complains to me,
his hair rumpled and face flushed. He did not answer my knock the other
day, and I came upon him with the neglected proofs under his elbows and
his absent gaze directed through window and out of doors to some rosy
cloudland beyond my ken. "It will be a failure, I know it will," he
growled to me. "My brain is dull. It refuses to act. I cannot imagine
what has come over me." But I could imagine very easily. He is in love
(madly in love with what I take to be a very ordinary sort of girl), and
expects shortly to be married. "Postpone the book for a time," I
suggested. He looked at me for a moment, then brought his fist down on
the general disarray with a thumping "I will!" And take my word for it,
Dane, a year hence, when the very ordinary girl greets him with the
matronly kiss and his fever and folly have left him, he will take up the
book and make a success of it.

Of course I am not in love. I have just come back from Hester--I ran
down Saturday to Stanford and stopped over Sunday. Time did not pass
tediously on the train. I did not look at my watch every other minute. I
read the morning papers with interest and without impatience. The
scenery was charming and I was unaware of the slightest hurry to reach
my destination. I remember noting, when I came up the gravel walk
between the rose-bushes, that my heart was not in my mouth as it should
have been according to convention. In fact, the sun was uncomfortable,
and I mopped my brow and decided that the roses stood in need of
trimming. And really, you know, I had seen brighter days, and fairer
views, and the world in more beautiful moods.

And when Hester stood on the veranda and held out her hands, my heart
did not leap as though it were going to part company with me. Nor was I
dizzy with--rapture, I believe. Nor did all the world vanish, and
everything blot out, and leave only Hester standing there, lips curve