nce for the sweet name of Wife must be prepared to find all is
not gold that glitters, nor I would not expect like you to drift down
the stream of Life unfettered and serene as a Summer cloud, such is
not my fate, but come what may will always find in me a resigned and
prayerful Spirit, and hoping this finds you as well as it leaves me, I
remain, my dear Sister,

"Yours truly,

"EVELINA B. RAMY."

Ann Eliza had always secretly admired the oratorical and impersonal tone
of Evelina's letters; but the few she had previously read, having been
addressed to school-mates or distant relatives, had appeared in the
light of literary compositions rather than as records of personal
experience. Now she could not but wish that Evelina had laid aside her
swelling periods for a style more suited to the chronicling of homely
incidents. She read the letter again and again, seeking for a clue to
what her sister was really doing and thinking; but after each reading
she emerged impressed but unenlightened from the labyrinth of Evelina's
eloquence.

During the early winter she received two or three more letters of the
same kind, each enclosing in its loose husk of rhetoric a smaller kernel
of fact. By dint of patient interlinear study, Ann Eliza gathered from
them that Evelina and her husband, after various costly experiments in
boarding, had been reduced to a tenement-house flat; that living in St.
Louis was more expensive than they had supposed, and that Mr. Ramy was
kept out late at night (why, at a jeweller's, Ann Eliza wondered?) and
found his position less satisfactory than he had been led to expect.
Toward February the letters fell off; and finally they ceased to come.

At first Ann Eliza wrote, shyly but persistently, entreating for more
frequent news; then, as one appeal after another was swallowed up in the
mystery of Evelina's protracted silence, vague fears began to assail the
elder sister. Perhaps Evelina was ill, and with no one to nurse her but
a man who could not even make himself a cup of tea! Ann Eliza recalled
the layer of dust in Mr. Ramy's shop, and pictures of domestic disorder
mingled with the more poignant vision of her sister's illness. But
surely if Evelina were ill Mr. Ramy would have written. He wrote a
small neat hand, and epistolary communication was not an insuperable
embarrassment to him. The too probable alternative was that both
the unhappy pair had been prostrated by some disease which left them
pow