partners, so that he did not want division. But it is difficult--say,
well-nigh impossible--for a middle-aged merchant, not trained in the
graces of letter-writing, to inspire a young lady with personal
regard, even though she is privileged to follow the current of his
thoughts day by day, and to set him his sums.

Next there was a young fellow of nineteen or twenty, who was beginning
life as an assistant-teacher in a commercial school at Lower Clapton.
This way is a stony and a thorny path to tread; no one walks upon it
willingly; those who are compelled to enter upon it speedily either
run away and enlist, or they go and find a secluded spot in which to
hang themselves. The smoother ways of the profession are only to be
entered by one who is the possessor of a degree, and it was the
determination of this young man to pass the London University
Examinations, and to obtain the degree of Bachelor. In this way his
value in the educational market would be at once doubled, and he could
command a better place and lighter work. He showed himself, in his
letters, to be an eminently practical, shrewd, selfish, and
thick-skinned young man, who would quite certainly get on in the
world, and was resolved to lose no opportunities, and, with that view,
he took as much work out of his tutor as he could get for the money.
Had he known that the "I.A." who took such a wonderful amount of
trouble with his papers was only a woman, he would certainly have
extorted a great deal more work for his money. All this Iris read in
his letters and understood. There is no way in which a man more surely
and more naturally reveals his true character than in his
correspondence, so that after awhile, even though the subject of the
letters be nothing more interesting than the studies in hand, those
who write the letters may learn to know each other if they have but
the mother wit to read between the lines. Certainly this young