e-letters are distinctly for lonely people," she added
severely.

"How dared you--How dared you go into the love-letter business in the
first place?" quizzed Stanton dryly. "And when it comes to asking
personal questions, how dared you send me printed slips in answer to
my letters to you? Printed slips, mind you!... How many men are you
writing love-letters to, anyway?"

The oriental lady threw out her small hands deprecatingly. "How many
men? Only two besides yourself. There's such a fad for nature study
these days that almost everybody this year has ordered the 'Gray-Plush
Squirrel' series. But I'm doing one or two 'Japanese Fairies' for sick
children, and a high school history class out in Omaha has ordered a
weekly epistle from William of Orange."

"Hang the High School class out in Omaha!" said Stanton. "It was the
love-letters that I was asking about."

"Oh, yes, I forgot," murmured the oriental lady. "Just two men besides
yourself, I said, didn't I? Well one of them is a life convict out in
an Illinois prison. He's subscribed for a whole year--for a
fortnightly letter from a girl in Killarney who has got to be named
'Katie'. He's a very, very old man, I think, but I don't even know his
name 'cause he's only a number now--'4632'--or something like that.
And I have to send all my letters over to Killarney to be mailed--Oh,
he's awfully particular about that. And it was pretty hard at first
working up all the geography that he knew and I didn't. But--pshaw!
You're not interested in Killarney. Then there's a New York boy down
in Ceylon on a smelly old tea plantation. His people have dropped him,
I guess, for some reason or other; so I'm just 'the girl from home' to
him, and I prattle to him every month or so about the things he used
to care about. It's easy enough to work that up from the social
columns in the New York papers--and twice I've been over to New York
to get special details for him; once to find out if his mother was
really as sick as the Sunday paper said, and once--yes, really, once I
butted in to a tea his sister was giving, and wrote him, yes, wrote
him all about how the moths were eating up the big moose-head in his
own front hall. And he sent an awfully funny, nice letter of thanks to
the Serial-Letter Co.--yes, he did! And then there's a crippled French
girl out in the Berkshires who is utterly crazy, it seems, about the
'Three Musketeers', so I'm d'Artagnan to her, and it's dreadfully hard
wo