nt.

"It's like this, Barbara," he said. "If you want to marry this young
man--and you have made it very clear that you do--I am going to see that
you do it. You are young, of course, but after all your dear mother was
not much older than you are when I married her."

"Father!" I cried, from an over-flowing heart.

"I have noticed that you are not happy, Barbara," he said. "And I shall
not thwart you, or allow you to be thwarted. In affairs of the Heart,
you are to have your own way."

"I want to tell you something!" I cried. "I will NOT be cast off! I----"

"Tut, tut," said Father. "Who is casting you off? I tell you that I
like the young man, and give you my blessing, or what is the present-day
equivelent for it, and you look like a figure of Tradgedy!"

But I could endure no more. My own father had turned on me and was
rending me, so to speak. With a breaking heart and streaming eyes I flew
to my Chamber.

There, for hours I paced the floor.

Never, I determined, would I marry H. Better death, by far. He was a
scheming Fortune-hunter, but to tell the family that was to confess all.
And I would never confess. I would run away before I gave Sis such a
chance at me. I would run away, but first I would kill Carter Brooks.

Yes, I was driven to thoughts of murder. It shows how the first false
step leads down and down, to crime and even to death. Oh never, never,
gentle reader, take that first False Step. Who knows to what it may
lead!

"One false Step is never retreived." Gray--On a Favorite Cat.

I reflected also on how the woman in the book had ruined her life with
a letter. "The written word does not change," she had said. "It remains
always, embodying a dead truth and giving it apparent life."

"Apparent life" was exactly what my letter had given to H. Frankenstein.
That was what I called him, in my agony. I felt that if only I had never
written the Letter there would have been no trouble. And another awful
thought came to me: Was there an H after all? Could there be an H?

Once the French teacher had taken us to the theater in New York, and a
woman sitting on a chair and covered with a sheet, had brought a man out
of a perfectly empty Cabinet, by simply willing to do it. The Cabinet
was empty, for four respectible looking men went up and examined it, and
one even measured it with a Tape-measure.

She had materialised him, out of nothing.

And while I had had no Cabinet, there are many things in this