rld to be sentimental. A woman's affections
reaching out toward a man's heart is as much a part of Nature, and
just as pretty a thing in Nature, as the morning-glory--or let us take
the old and oft-used yet good illustration of the ivy and the
oak. When the woman's reaching affections attain the sought heart,
everybody cries out, "How sweet and tender and graceful!" But if they
miss of the hold, then there is derision. Here, as everywhere else,
there are cheers for success and no pity for failure.

Well, however you may receive it, the truth must be acknowledged: my
Susan was sentimental. She had had her longings and dreams, and an
abundance of those great vague heartaches which only sentimental
people can have. She had gone through with the whole--the sweet hopes,
the yearning expectancy, the vague anxiety, the brooding doubt, the
slow giving up--the reluctant acceptance of her fading life. Her
romance died hard. Very gradually, and with many a protest, the woman
of heartaches and sentiment glided into the practical and commonplace
maiden lady who served on all sorts of committees and watched with
sick people.

At an early age, when she was barely sixteen, the suggestion had been
forced on Susan that it was her duty to spread her wings and leave
the paternal nest to earn her living. Of course she went to teaching.
That's what such people as Susan always do in like circumstances. At
first her earnings went into the family fund to buy bread for little
mouths that were not to blame for being hungry, and shoes for little
feet that did not know wherefore they had been set to travel life's
road. But after a while a portion of Susan's salary came to be
deposited in bank as her very own money, to have and to hold. She had
now reached the giving-up period of her life, when the heartaches were
dulling, and the nameless longings were being resolved into occasional
lookings back to the time when there had been hopes of deliverance
from the commonplace. Having tasted the sweets of being a capitalist,
Susan came in process of time to be eager at money-getting and at
money-saving and at speculating. The day arrived when my sentimental
Susan had United States bonds and railroad stocks, and owned a half
acre in city lots in a great, teeming, tempestuous State metropolis.

It was at this period in her affairs that Susan received a gift
of fifteen hundred dollars from her bachelor uncle Adolphus, "as a
token," so the letter of transmi