ing into her room, shredding some cigarettes, filling
the rather rank bowl, and trying her best to smoke it. But such devotion
was beyond her physical powers; she rinsed her mouth, furious at being
defeated in her pious intentions, and, making an attractive parcel of
the pipe, seized the occasion to write him another letter.

"There is in my heart," she wrote, "no room for anything except
you; no desire except for you; no hope, no interest that is not
yours. You praise my beauty; you endow me with what you might wish I
really possessed; and oh, I really am so humble at your feet, if you
only knew it! So dazed by your goodness to me, so grateful, so happy
that you have chosen me (I just jumped up to look at myself in the
mirror; I _am_ pretty, Duane, I've a stunning colour just now and
there _is_ a certain charm about me--even I can see it in what you
call the upcurled corners of my mouth, and in my figure and
hands)--and I am so happy that it is true--that you find me
beautiful, that you care for my beauty.... It is so with a man, I
believe; and a girl wishes to have him love her beauty, too.

"But, Duane, I don't think the average girl cares very much about
that in a man. Of course you are exceedingly nice to look at, and I
notice it sometimes, but not nearly as often as you notice what you
think is externally attractive about me.

"In my heart, I don't believe it really matters much to a girl what
a man looks like; anyway, it matters very little after she once
knows him.

"Of course women do notice handsome men--or what we consider
handsome--which is, I believe, not at all what men care for; because
men usually seem to have a desire to kick the man whom women find
good-looking. I know several men who feel that way about Jack
Dysart. I think you do, for one.

"Poor Jack Dysart! To-day's papers are saying such horridly
unpleasant things about the rich men with whom he was rather closely
associated in business affairs several years ago. I read, but I do
not entirely comprehend.

"The New York papers seem unusually gloomy this summer; nothing but
predictions of hard times coming, and how many corporations the
attorney-general is going to proceed against, and wicked people who
loot metropolitan railways, and why the district-attorney doesn't do
his duty--which you say he does--oh, dear;