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[Mrs. Tom Daly, of Bisuka in the Northwest, writes to her invalid sister spending the summer on the coast of Southern California.]

I

You know I am always ready to sacrifice truth to politeness, if the truth is of that poor, stingy upstart variety everybody is familiar with and if the occasion warrants the expense. We all know politeness is not cheap, any more than honesty is politic. But surely I mistook my occasion, one day last winter–and now behold the price!

We are to have a bride on our hands, or a bride-elect, for she isn’t married yet. The happy man to be is rustling for a home out here in the wilds of Idaho while she is waiting in the old country for success to crown his efforts. How much success in her case is demanded one does not know. She is a little English girl, upper middle class, which Mrs. Percifer assures us is the class to belong to in England at the present day,–from which we infer that it’s her class; and the interesting reunion is to take place at our house–the young woman never having seen us in her life before.

She sailed, poor thing, this day week and will be forwarded to us by her confiding friends in New York as soon as she arrives. Meantime she will have heard from us from the Percifers: that is something.

Really they were very nice to us in New York, last winter, the Percifers–though one must not plume one’s self too much. It began as a business flirtation down town between the husbands, and then Tom confidingly mentioned that he had a wife at his hotel. We unfortunate women were dragged into it forthwith, and more or less forced to live up to it. I cannot say there was anything riotous in the way she sustained her part. She was so very impersonal in fact, when we said good-by, that my natural tendency to invite people to come and stay with us, on the spur of any moment, was strangled in my throat.

But one must say something by way of retaliation for hospitality one cannot reject. So I put it off on any friends of theirs who might have occasion to command us in the West. We should be so happy, and so forth. And, my dear, she has taken me up on it! She’s not impersonal now. She is so glad–for dear Kitty’s sake–that we are here, and she is sure we will be very good to her–such a sweet girl, no one could help being–which rather cuts down the margin for our goodness. The poor child–I am quoting Mrs. Percifer–knows absolutely no one in the West but the man she is coming to marry (?)and can have no conception of the journey she has before her. She will be so comforted to find us at the end of it. And if anything unforeseen should occur to delay Mr. Harshaw, the fiance, and prevent his meeting her train, it will be a vast relief to Kitty’s friends to know that the dear brave little girl is in good hands–ours, if you can conceive it!

Please observe the coolness with which she treats his not meeting that train, after the girl has traversed half the globe to compass her share of their meeting.

Well, it’s not the American way; but perhaps it will be when bad times have humbled us a little more, and the question is whether we can marry our daughters at all unless we can give them dowries, or professions to support their husbands on, and “feelings” are a luxury only the rich can afford.

I hope “Kitty” won’t have any; but still more I hope that her young man will arrive on schedule time, and that they can trot round the corner and be married, with Tom and me for witnesses, as speedily as possible.