Mrs. Baker was glad enough to have Howard take her charge off her hands occasionally.  She thought contact with this fine pagan an excellent thing for the girl who took herself so seriously.  She was really fond of Mary Virginia, but she must have found her hand-grenade directness a bit disconcerting at times.  She wanted the child’s visit to be pleasant, and she considered it very amiable of Howard to help her make it so.  She had no faintest notion of danger—­to her Mary Virginia was nothing but a child, a little girl one indulged with pickles and pound-cake and the bliss of staying up later than the usual bedtime.  As for Hunter, his was the French attitude toward the Young Person; she had heard him say he preferred his flowers in full bloom and his fruit ripe—­one then knows what one is getting; one isn’t deceived by canker in the closed bud and worm in the green fruit.  No, Howard wasn’t the sort that hankered for verjuice.

None the less, although Mrs. Baker didn’t know it, Mary Virginia was engaged to the godlike Howard when she returned to school.  It was to be a state secret until after she was graduated, and in the meantime he was to “make himself worthier of her love.”  She hadn’t any notion he could be improved upon, but it pleased her to hear him say that.  Humility in the superman is the ultimate proof of perfection.

The maid who attended her room at school arranged for the receipt of his letters and mailed Mary Virginia’s.  The maid was sentimental, and delighted to play a part smacking of those dime novels she spoiled her brains with.

The little schoolgirl who was in love with love, and secretly betrothed to a man who had stepped alive out of old knightly romance, walked in the Land of April Rainbows and felt the whole joyous universe suffused with a delicious and quivering glow of light and sound and scent.  Surcharged with an emotion that she was irresistibly urged to express, and unable to do so by word of mouth, she was driven to the necessity of putting it down on paper for him.  And she put it down in the burning words, the fiery phrases, of those anarchists of art who had intoxicated and obsessed her.

Just a little later,—­even a year later—­and Mary Virginia could never have written those letters.  But now, very ignorant, very innocent, very impassioned, she accomplished a miracle.  She was like one speaking an unknown tongue, perfectly sure that the spirit moved her, but quite unable to comprehend what it was that it moved her to say.

When Mrs. Baker insisted that her young cousin should come back to her for the Christmas holidays, the girl was more than eager to go.  Seeing him again only deepened her infatuation.

That holiday visit was an unusually gay one, for Mrs. Baker was really fond of Mary Virginia—­the young girl’s tenderness and simplicity touched the woman of the world.  She gave a farewell dance the night before Mary Virginia was to return to school.  It was an informal affair, with enough college boys and girls to lend it a junior air, but there was a goodly sprinkling of grown-ups to deepen it, for the hostess said frankly that she simply couldn’t stand the Very Young except in broken doses and in bright spots.