Garda."
"Dear Margaret,—Lucian has gone for the night, and there's nothing else to do, so I thought I would write to you. Mrs. Lowndes has just been in. She brought a daguerreotype of Mr. Lowndes, taken when he was young, and she says she knows exactly how I feel, because she used to feel just the same; when she was at the window, and saw 'Roger' coming down the street, the very calves of her legs used to quiver, she says. Roger must have been stout—at least he is in the daguerreotype, and he wore glasses.
"Lucian is painting me; but I only wish I could paint him. Oh, Margaret, he is so beautiful!
Garda."
"Dearest Margaret,—I'm so glad I am alive, it's so nice to be alive. People say life's dreadful, but to me it's perfectly delicious every single minute. I thought I would tell you how happy I was before going to bed,—I love to write it down.
Garda."
The Doctor went up to Charleston again. He was much displeased with the course things were taking, he spoke with a good deal of severity to Sally Lowndes.
Sally, who was soft-bodied as well as soft-hearted (her figure was a good deal relaxed), shed tears. Then, recovering some spirit, she wished to know what the Doctor had expected her to do? It was true that that sweet Garda had left off her lessons (up to this time she had "had instruction," that is, teachers had arrived at fixed hours); but Sally was decidedly of the opinion that a girl who was so soon to be married should be relieved at least of "school-room drudgery."
"Nothing of the sort," said the Doctor; "she should be kept even more closely to her books. Your ideas are provincial and ridiculous, Sally; I don't know where you obtained them."
"From my mother," answered Sally, with a pink flush of excitement in her faded cheeks. "From my grandmother too—who was yours also. It is you who are changed, Reginald; it has never been the custom in our family to keep the girls down at their books after sixteen."