answer at once. And if you should want to travel this winter you can come
here; they will treat you ever so much better than you deserve. So good-
by. Yours ever sincerely,

"JOE THORN."

The precise nature of the friendship that existed between Josephine Thorn
and Ronald Surbiton could not be accurately inferred from the above
specimen of correspondence; and indeed the letter served rather to confuse
than to enlighten the recipient as to the nature of his relations with the
writer. He was, of course, very much in love with Joe Thorn; he knew it,
because he had always been in love with her since they were children
together, so there could be no possible doubt in the matter. But whether
she cared a jot for him and his feelings he could not clearly make out,
from the style of the hurried, ungrammatical sentences, crammed with
abbreviations and unpermissible elisions. True, she said three times that
she hoped he would come to America; but America was a long way off, and
she very likely reckoned on his laziness and dislike to foreign traveling.
It is so easy for a young woman writing from Boston to say to a young man
residing in Scotland, "Do come over for a few days"--Surbiton thought it
would be a good joke to take her at her word and go. The idea of seeing
her again so much sooner than he had expected was certainly uppermost in
his mind as he began to make his resolution; but it was sustained and
strengthened by a couple of allusions Joe had made to men of her
acquaintance in Boston, not to say by the sweeping remark that there were
more clever men in Boston society than anywhere else, which made his
vanity smart rather unpleasantly. When Josephine used to tell him, half in
earnest, half in jest, that he was "so dreadfully stupid," he did not feel
much hurt; but it was different when she took the trouble to write all the
way from America to tell him that the men there were much cleverer than at