The letter had been answered from Detroit.

"I am glad you are settled," he wrote. "At least I know you have
enough to eat and a roof over you. I hope sincerely that you will
do your best to fit yourself to your new conditions. I know it is
hard, but with my lack of experience and my ignorance as to where
to take hold, it may be a good many years before we can do any
better."

When Helen Thorpe read this, she cried. Things had gone wrong that
morning, and an encouraging word would have helped her. The somber
tone of her brother's communication threw her into a fit of the
blues from which, for the first time, she saw her surroundings in a
depressing and distasteful light. And yet he had written as he did
with the kindest possible motives.

Thorpe had the misfortune to be one of those individuals who, though
careless of what people in general may think of them, are in a
corresponding degree sensitive to the opinion of the few they
love. This feeling was further exaggerated by a constitutional
shrinking from any outward manifestation of the emotions. As a
natural result, he was often thought indifferent or discouraging
when in reality his natural affections were at their liveliest. A
failure to procure for a friend certain favors or pleasures
dejected him, not only because of that friend's disappointment, but
because, also, he imagined the failure earned him a certain blame.
Blame from his heart's intimates he shrank from. His life outside
the inner circles of his affections was apt to be so militant and
so divorced from considerations of amity, that as a matter of