He was still saying this sort of thing when the famous “Letters” were published—­T.  Sandys, author.  “Letters to a Young Man About to be Married” was the full title, and another almost as applicable would have been “Bits Cut Out of a Story because They Prevented its Marching.”  If you have any memory you do not need to be told how that splendid study, so ennobling, so penetrating, of woman at her best, took the town.  Tommy woke a famous man, and, except Elspeth, no one was more pleased than big-hearted, hopeless, bleary Pym.

“But how the ——­ has it all come about!” he kept roaring.

“A woman can be anything that the man who loves her would have her be,” says the “Letters”; and “Oh,” said woman everywhere, “if all men had the same idea of us as Mr. Sandys!”

“To meet Mr. T. Sandys.”  Leaders of society wrote it on their invitation cards.  Their daughters, athirst for a new sensation, thrilled at the thought, “Will he talk to us as nobly as he writes?” And oh, how willing he was to do it, especially if their noses were slightly tilted!

CHAPTER III

SANDYS ON WOMAN

“Can you kindly tell me the name of the book I want?”

It is the commonest question asked at the circulating library by dainty ladies just out of the carriage; and the librarian, after looking them over, can usually tell.  In the days we have now to speak of, however, he answered, without looking them over: 

“Sandys’s ‘Letters,’”

“Ah, yes, of course.  May I have it, please?”

“I regret to find that it is out.”

Then the lady looked naughty.  “Why don’t you have two copies?” she pouted.

“Madam,” said the librarian, “we have a thousand.”

A small and very timid girl of eighteen, with a neat figure that shrank from observation, although it was already aware that it looked best in gray, was there to drink in this music, and carried it home in her heart.  She was Elspeth, and that dear heart was almost too full at this time.  I hesitate whether to tell or to conceal how it even created a disturbance in no less a place than the House of Commons.  She was there with Mrs. Jerry, and the thing was recorded in the papers of the period in these blasting words:  “The Home Secretary was understood to be quoting a passage from ‘Letters to a Young Man,’ but we failed to catch its drift, owing to an unseemly interruption from the ladies’ gallery.”

“But what was it you cried out?” Tommy asked Elspeth, when she thought she had told him everything. (Like all true women, she always began in the middle.)

“Oh, Tommy, have I not told you?  I cried out, ‘I’m his sister.’”