returned from Germantown bursting with enthusiastic details.

Mr. J. F. Bretland is a wealthy and influential citizen, cordially loved
by his friends and deeply hated by his enemies (discharged employees,
who do not hesitate to say that he is a HAR-RD man). He is a little
shaky in his attendance at church, but his wife seems regular, and he
gives money.

She is a charming, kindly, cultivated gentlewoman, just out of a
sanatorium after a year of nervous prostration. The doctor says that
what she needs is some strong interest in life, and advises adopting
a child. She has always longed to do it, but her hard husband has
stubbornly refused. But finally, as always, it is the gentle, persistent
wife who has triumphed, and hard husband has been forced to give in.
Waiving his own natural preference for a boy, he wrote, as above, the
usual request for a blue-eyed girl.

Mrs. Bretland, with the firm intention of taking a child, has been
reading up for years, and there is no detail of infant dietetics
that she does not know. She has a sunny nursery, with a southwestern
exposure, all ready. And a closet full of surreptitiously gathered
dolls! She has made the clothes for them herself,--she showed them to
Betsy with the greatest pride,--so you can understand the necessity for
a girl.

She has just heard of an excellent English trained nurse that she can
secure, but she isn't sure but that it would be better to start with a
French nurse, so that the child can learn the language before her vocal
cords are set. Also, she was extremely interested when she heard that
Betsy was a college woman. She couldn't make up her mind whether to
send the baby to college or not. What was Betsy's honest opinion? If the
child were Betsy's own daughter, would Betsy send her to college?

All this would be funny if it weren't so pathetic; but really I can't
get away from the picture of that poor lonely woman sewing those doll
clothes for the little unknown girl that she wasn't sure she could have.
She lost her own two babies years ago, or, rather, she never had them;
they were never alive.

You can see what a good home it's going to be. There's lots of love
waiting for the little mite, and that is better than all the wealth
which, in this case, goes along.

But the problem now is to find the child, and that isn't easy. The J. F.
Bretlands are so abominably explicit in their requirements. I have
just the baby boy to give them; but with that close