"Yes, and at once. Here it is: 'Miss Truett is all interest about your wife, and I like to get her going on the subject, for she thinks that Mrs. Somerton is everything that is nice and good and splendid; and when Miss Truett thinks anything, she knows how to say it in a style that beats any lawyer or preacher I ever heard. It ain't a pretty thing to say about a woman, maybe, but I mean only what's right when I say that when she talks it always seems to me that sometime or other she swallowed a big dictionary, colored pictures and all, and not a scrap of it disagreed with her. She says she wishes she had a job just like Mrs. Somerton's, and I told her that there was only one way to get it, and that if ever I saw an unmarried Western merchant of about your age and general style, I'd give him her name and some pointed advice.
"'Most of the goods you wanted are bought and shipped, and when the corn-meal gets here I'll get out for England.
"'With hearty regards to Mrs. Somerton, I am
"'Yours always,
"'Caleb Wright.'"
"Oh, Mary Truett!" exclaimed Grace, when the reading ended. "What fun you've had!"
"As she seems to be the spirit of the letter," said Philip, "tell me something more about her."
"I don't know what more to say. I wasn't familiar with her, for she was a department head, and not of my department, but she had a way of saying kind and merry things to some girls in other parts of the store. She is about thirty; she has parents and brothers, and works merely because she is overflowing with energy, and has no taste for the trivialities of mere society life. Yet her manners are charming, and genuine, too. 'Twas the fashion of the store to worship her, and no one ever tired of it."
"All this, yet unmarried at thirty? How did it happen?"
"I don't know. Perhaps 'twas because she never met you when you were a bachelor. It hasn't been for lack of admirers. Probably she is waiting for a man who is worthy of her. I know she saved many girls in her department and in some others from making foolish marriages, and I committed some of her warnings and arguments to memory—though I got them at second-hand—and I used them on other girls."
"I suppose we couldn't persuade her to come out here, to assist you in the store?"