s a dramatic
story, a poem, and a romance. Sometimes it is a penny-dreadful, as when
you deliberately leave your luggage on an express train going south,
enter another standing upon a side track, and embark for an unknown
destination. I watched you from an upper window of the Junction Hotel,
but could not leave Benella to argue with you. When your respected
husband and lover have charge of you, you will not be allowed such
pranks, I warrant you.

Benella has improved wonderfully in the last twenty-four hours, and I
am trying to give her some training for her future duties. We can never
forget our native land so long as we have her with us, for she is a
perfect specimen of the Puritan spinster, though too young in years,
perhaps, for determined celibacy. Do you know, we none of us mentioned
wages in our conversations with her? Fortunately she seems more alive
to the advantages of foreign travel than to the filling of her empty
coffers. (By the way, I have written to the purser of the ship that she
crossed in, to see if I can recover the sixty or seventy dollars she
left behind her.) Her principal idea in life seems to be that of finding
some kind of work that will be 'interestin'' whether it is lucrative or
not.

I don't think she will be able to dress hair, or anything of that
sort--save in the way of plain sewing, she is very unskilful with her
hands; and she will be of no use as courier, she is so provincial and
inexperienced. She has no head for business whatever, and cannot help
Francesca with the accounts. She recites to herself again and again,
'Four farthings make one penny, twelvepence make one shilling, twenty
shillings make one pound'; but when I give her a handful of money and
ask her for six shillings and sixpence, five and three, one pound two,
or two pound ten, she cannot manage the operation. She is docile, well
mannered, grateful, and really likable, but her present philosophy of
life is a thing of shreds and patches. She calls it 'the science,' as if
there were but one; and she became a convert to its teachings this
past winter, while living in the house of a woman lecturer in Salem,
a lecturer, not a 'curist,' she explains. She attended to the door,
ushered in the members of classes, kept the lecture-room in order, and
so forth, imbibing by the way various doctrines, or parts of doctrines,
which she is not the sort of person to assimilate, but with which she is
experimenting: holding, meantime, a gri