She turned away.

"Here it is," I said, and held it up.

She looked at it a long time, and her brows arched.

"Did the pigs get it?"

"The wrens. It was merely a change of post-office."

"I'd as well write the next one to them," she said, "since they get the
letters."

Georgiana was well aware that she slipped the note into the nest when
they were looking and I was not; but women--_all_ women--now and then
hold a man responsible for what they have done themselves. Sylvia, for
instance. She grew peevish with me the other day because my garden
failed to furnish the particular flowers that would have assuaged her
whim. And yet for days Sylvia has been helping herself with such lack
of stint that the poor clipped and mangled bushes look at me as I pass
sympathetically by them, and say, "If you don't keep her away, we'd as
well be weeds!"

The truth is that Sylvia's rampant session in school, involving the
passage of the Greatest Common Divisor--far more dreadful than the
passage of the Beresina--her blue rosettes at the recent Commencement,
and the prospect of a long vacation, together with further miscellany
appertaining to her age and sex, have strung the chords of her
sentimental being up to the highest pitch. Feeling herself to be
naturally a good instrument and now perfectly in tune, Sylvia requires
that she shall be continually played upon--if not by one person, then
by another. Nature overloads a tendency in order to make it carry
straight along its course against the interference of other tendencies;
and she will sometimes provide a girl with a great many young men at
the start, in order that she may be sure of one husband in the end.
The precautionary swarm in Sylvia's case seems multitudinous enough to
supply her with successive husbands to the end of her days and in the
teeth of all known estimates of mortality. How unlike Georgiana!

I think of Georgiana as the single peach on a tree in a season when
they are rarest. Not a very large peach, and scarcely yet yielding a
blush to the sun, although its long summer heat is on the wane; growing
high in the air at the end of a bough and clustered about by its
shining leaves. But what beauty, purity, freshness! You must hunt to
find it and climb to reach it; but when you get it, you get it
all--there is not a trace left for another. But Sylvia! I am afraid
Sylvia is like a big bunch of grapes that hangs low above a public
pathway: each passer-by