in Scotland!" she snapped.

"Would you have minded Dolly's marrying Lord Bacon?" I asked.

This gave her food for thought.

"No," she said reflectively, "for, of course, he was a lord, which is
something."

"But how about the associations?"

"I can't explain, but somehow they are not as repulsive to me," she
insisted. "I always think of bacon cooked, not raw, and--the other is
alive!"

As for my own difficulty, it is, after all, a conventional one. I
cannot bear the idea of marrying my employer; a man known by sight and
reputation to everybody in Washington, while I am a relatively unknown
person without fortune, kith, or kin. The thought brings to mind
sensational headlines in cheap newspapers regarding the wedding of
some aged millionaire with his youthful stenographer, and the
consequent alarms of his household; or the alliance of some scion of a
wealthy house with a trained nurse of obscure lineage and vaulting
ambition. I am all alone in the world, and though my father, who died
when he was only five and twenty, left me but the barest support, I
have gloried in my independence and rejoiced in my modest successes.

My people on both sides were of good stock. Even the Winthrops could
climb my family tree and find no bad fruit on it, but the world will
say: "What a splendid match for Charlotte Clifford." ... "I wonder how
Ellen Winthrop will take it?" ... "I shouldn't have thought Clive
Winthrop would marry his secretary, somehow, though there's nothing
against her; but he could look higher!"

The world would be quite right. It is a splendid marriage for
Charlotte Clifford, and Clive Winthrop could look higher. He is my
superior and that is the reason I love him. That he loves me proves
that there is something in me that will rise to his level. All the
same, I wrote him when I came away that I could never cross the bridge
between us (there is a bridge, although he does not see it) until I
was no longer his secretary and until I was sure his sister would
welcome me into the household that has been so harmonious and
delightful to every human being that has ever crossed its threshold.
Nobody could equal Ellen Winthrop as a hostess, with her fine,
spirited face, lovely even at seventy; her gift of repartee, her
stately manner, her simple, trailing dress, always of black or gray,
and always reaching the floor, when most of the feminine world looks,
in its best clothes, as if mounted on stilts, with a skimpy,
sem