"Dear Zaida:
"Please excuse me calling you Zaida, for as Zaida you are enshrined in my thoughts, and I think of you very often when I am sad and lonely and I wish I had a wife like you to cheer me, and to be a help-meet to me like the Bible says, and while I have not married again and again like some people I could name it has not been because I do not have a high opinion of women. And if I should be left alone I should not go looking for some one to take your place right away, for with me to love once is to love always, and, dear Zaida, my heart beats for you alone.
Yours truly,
"James Doolittle."
Agatha was seized with a paroxysm of coughing, the businesslike conclusion of the letter seeming decidedly inconsistent with its impassioned prelude. Then, recovering herself, she went over to Miss Finch and kissed her.
"Well, Fritz, you're a lot too good for either one, but women are, as a rule. Which is it to be?"
Miss Finch looked down at her first love-letters with an anxious expression, hardly befitting the occasion.
"Well, Agatha, I'm not sure. There is a great deal of sentiment in Mr. Doolittle's letter. It's almost poetical in spots. I wouldn't have thought he had so much poetry in him?"
"Nor I," admitted Agatha.
"But the deacon's letter shows a beautiful religious spirit, and when you are choosing a husband you have to think of the things that are really important."
"The deacon is better off than Mr. Doolittle," suggested Agatha. "Though I've always heard he was inclined to be close."
"I wouldn't let such things weigh with me, Agatha. I can't imagine marrying a man because he had more money than somebody else. It's what a man is himself that counts with me."