arrange; but when we went back, I had no desire to take her with us.
I thought her very much better where she was.

Then came the period which is filled, in a subordinate degree, with
Cecily's letters. I do not wish to claim more than I ought; they
were not my only or even my principal interest in life. It was a
long period; it lasted till she was twenty-one. John had had
promotion in the meantime, and there was rather more money, but he
had earned his second brevet with a bullet through one lung, and the
doctors ordered our leave to be spent in South Africa. We had
photographs, we knew she had grown tall and athletic and comely, and
the letters were always very creditable. I had the unusual and
qualified privilege of watching my daughter's development from ten
to twenty-one, at a distance of four thousand miles, by means of the
written word. I wrote myself as provocatively as possible; I sought
for every string, but the vibration that came back across the seas
to me was always other than the one I looked for, and sometimes
there was none. Nevertheless, Mrs. Farnham wrote me that Cecily
very much valued my communications. Once when I had described an
unusual excursion in a native state, I learned that she had read my
letter aloud to the sewing circle. After that I abandoned
description, and confined myself to such intimate personal details
as no sewing circle could find amusing. The child's own letters
were simply a mirror of the ideas of the Farnham ladies; that must
have been so, it was not altogether my jaundiced eye. Alice and
Emma and grandmamma paraded the pages in turn. I very early gave up
hope of discoveries in my daughter, though as much of the original
as I could detect was satisfactorily simple and sturdy. I found
little things to criticize, of course, tendencies to correct; and by
return post I criticized and corrected, but the distance and the