know--just the
ordinary average every-day love-letter."

I glanced through the little note. He was right. The conventional hearts
and darts epistle. It sounded nice enough: "Longing to see you again;
so lonely in this place; your dear sweet letter; looking forward to the
time; your ever-devoted Sissie."

"That seems straight," I answered. "However, I am not quite sure. Will
you allow me to take it away, with the photograph? I know I am asking
much. I want to show it to a lady in whose tact and discrimination I
have the greatest confidence."

"What, Daphne?"

I smiled. "No, not Daphne," I answered. "Our friend, Miss Wade. She has
extraordinary insight."

"I could trust anything to Miss Wade. She is true as steel."

"You are right," I answered. "That shows that you, too, are a judge of
character."

He hesitated. "I feel a brute," he cried, "to go on writing every day
to Sissie Montague--and yet calling every day to see Miss Tepping. But
still--I do it."

I grasped his hand. "My dear fellow," I said, "nearly ninety per cent.
of men, after all--are human!"

I took both letter and photograph back with me to Nathaniel's. When I
had gone my rounds that night, I carried them into Hilda Wade's room and
told her the story. Her face grew grave. "We must be just," she said at
last. "Daphne is deeply in love with him; but even for Daphne's sake, we
must not take anything for granted against the other lady."

I produced the photograph. "What do you make of that?" I asked. "_I_
think it an honest face, myself, I may tell you."

She scrutinised it long and closely with a magnifier. Then she put her
head on one side and mused very deliberately. "Madeline Shaw gave me her
photograph the other day, and said to me, as she gave it, 'I do so like
these modern portraits; they show one WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN.'"

"You mean they are so much touched up!"

"Exactly. That, as it stands, is a sweet, innocent face--an honest
girl's face--almost babyish in its transparency but... the innocence has
all been put into it by the photographer."

"You think so?"

"I know it. Look here at those lines just visible on the cheek. They
disappear, nowhere, at impossible angles. AND the corners of that mouth.
They couldn't go so, with that nose and those puckers. The thing is
not real. It has been atrociously edited. Part is nature's; part, the
photographer's; part, even possibly paint and powder."

"But the underlying face?"

"Is a minx's."