After a minute of consideration, she dictated the draft as follows: "Sir,--I am well aware that scandalous reports at Wurzburg have prejudiced you against me.

Those reports, so far as I know, may be summed up under three heads.
"(First.) That my husband died in debt through my extravagance.
"(Second.) That my respectable neighbors refuse to associate with me.
"(Third.) That I entrapped your son Fritz into asking for my daughter's hand in marriage, because I knew his father to be a rich man.
"To the first calumny I reply, that the debts are due to expensive chemical experiments in which my late husband engaged, and that I have satisfied the creditors to the last farthing.

Grant me an audience, and I will refer you to the creditors themselves.
"To the second calumny I reply, that I received invitations, on my arrival in Wurzburg after my marriage, from every lady of distinguished social position in the town.

After experience of the society thus offered to me, I own to having courteously declined subsequent invitations, and having devoted myself in retirement to my husband, to my infant child, and to such studies in literature and art as I had time to pursue.

Gossip and scandal, with an eternal accompaniment of knitting, are not to my taste; and, while I strictly attend to domestic duties, I do not consider them as constituting, in connection with tea-drinking, the one great interest of a woman's life.