Imagination is the most exhausting of all professions!--and if we women are good for nothing else we _can_ be cushions--we can "stop a chink and keep the wind away." So pay no attention, please, to my father's diatribes.

You will very soon be prosperous--sooner perhaps than you think.

A _home_ is what you want.' Kind and simple sentences!--written so innocently and interpreted so perversely! And yet the fierce and blind bewilderment with which Phoebe read or misread them was natural enough.

She never doubted for a moment but that the bad woman who wrote them meant to offer herself to John.

She was separated from her husband, John had said, declaring of course that it was not her fault.