a young lady robin could fly into your pocket. It is all very
well for you to exhort me to love you "simply and unreservedly,"--I do.
Nothing could be simpler, more elemental, than my love is; and do I
reserve a single thought of it from you? But I am not conventional enough
in heart or training to surrender. My genius for you does not extend so
far. To lose myself does not seem to me wise or logical, however
scriptural or legal the practice is. The truth is, I cannot agree to be
taken, any more than the little petticoated planet above your head can
kick off her diadem of light. I do not know what you will do about it,
because it is not my business to know these things. All I am sure of is
that I love you, and that I belong to you if only you can get my
extradition papers from Nature herself.

Meanwhile I have ventured to prepare my father's mind for a new idea. As
we sat before the library fire this evening, each employed according to
his calling, he with Fletcher's _Appeal_ and I with my sewing, I asked the
usual introductory question to our conversations. And it is always the
signal for him to raise his shield of orthodoxy; for it has long been my
habit to creep around the corner of my private opinion and tease him with
what he is pleased to term "the most blasphemous speculations." Therefore
when I said, "Father, I wish to ask you a question," he looked up with the
guarded eye of a man who expects an assault from an unscrupulous
antagonist.

"Well, my daughter, ask."

"Which would you advise me to marry, father, a humanitarian whose highest
law is the material welfare of his kind, or an ascetic whose spirituality
is something more and something less than scriptural?"

"Neither, Jessica; if you must marry, choose a man who believes in the
divinity of Christ and lives somewhere within the limits of the Ten
Commandments!"--Heavens! think of bondage with a man who is bounded upon
the north, east, south, and west of his soul by laws enacted to discipline
the Israelites in the Wilderness! In that case, I should insist upon a
bridal trip to Canaan, with the hope of reaching the Promised Land as a
widow.

And this reminds me to ask you what manner of man you are yourself. Do you
reflect that we have seen each other only twice? and both times you were
on guard, once as an editor, and once as a lover. Even your face has faded
to a mere shadow, and, if you persist in your petulant obstinacy about the
picture[3], is like t