least false sententiousness in what she says. She means
everything so thoroughly that her very quotations, her echoes
from what she has read, are in truth original.

Her logic and her sympathy are in excellent balance. Her sympathy
is of the swift and ministering sort which, fortunately, she has
found so often in other people. And her sympathies go further and
shape her opinions on political and national movements. She was
intensely pro-Boer and wrote a strong argument in favour of Boer
independence. When she was told of the surrender of the brave
little people, her face clouded and she was silent a few minutes.
Then she asked clear, penetrating questions about the terms of
the surrender, and began to discuss them.

Both Mr. Gilman and Mr. Keith, the teachers who prepared her for
college, were struck by her power of constructive reasoning; and
she was excellent in pure mathematics, though she seems never to
have enjoyed it much. Some of the best of her writing, apart from
her fanciful and imaginative work, is her exposition in
examinations and technical themes, and in some letters which she
found it necessary to write to clear up misunderstandings, and
which are models of close thinking enforced with sweet vehemence.

She is an optimist and an idealist.

"I hope," she writes in a letter, "that L-- isn't too practical,
for if she is, I'm afraid she'll miss a great deal of pleasure."

In the diary that she kept at the Wright-Humason School in New
York she wrote on October 18, 1894, "I find that I have four