are more than usually snappy.
Poor Uncle Bernard! I wish one could help; but I am glad he has not
Mrs Wolff to fidget him. Do you know," said Mollie, fixing her candid
eyes upon Jack's face, and inwardly rejoicing at having hit on an
impersonal topic of conversation,--"do you know Mrs Wolff is an
unending problem to one! I think about her for hours at a time, and try
to puzzle her out, but I never get one step further."

"Really!" Jack searched in his pockets for materials, and began rolling
up one of the everlasting cigarettes. "I'm surprised to hear that. I
should not have thought she could have occupied more than two minutes.
For my own part I find it impossible to think of her at all. She was
born; she exists; she will probably die! Having said so much, you have
exhausted the subject."

"Not at all," contradicted Mollie frankly. "There's lots more to
consider. What is she really, and what is the real life that she lives
inside that funny little shell? And was she ever a child who laughed
and danced, and raced about, and was good and naughty, and played with
toys, and lived among giants and fairies? We _lived_ fairy tales, Ruth
and I, and had giants to tea in a nursery four yards square. And we
hunted ferocious lions and tigers, who either turned out kind and
harmless, or were slain by imaginary swords. Did Mrs Wolff always know
exactly that two and two make four, and never by any chance made a
delicious pretence that it was five? And when she went to school had
she a chum whom she adored, and wrote letters to every other day filled
with `dears' and `darlings,' and did she ever shirk `prep,' or play
tricks on the teachers, or sit up to a dormitory supper?"

"Certainly not! She was a good little girl who never soiled her
pinafore, nor dreamt of anything she could not see, and she worked hard
at school and remained persistently in the middle of the class, and
gained high marks for neatness and decorum. She never had a chum
because she is incapable of caring for one person more than another."

"But what about `poor Mr Wolff'? Surely she must have had, at least, a
preference for him! That's another problem--how did anyone come to fall
in love with her, and what did he fall in love with, and why, and when,
and where? I long to know all about it, for it seems so
incomprehensible."

Jack laughed with masculine amusement at her curiosity.

"Not incomprehensible at all. I can give a very good guess