“It isn’t easy to talk such things out, Nannie.  I should never have written this if I had not realized last night that your feet were following the path which my own have followed for fifteen years.  And I knew that you were envying me and wanting to be like me; and I am saying what I shall say in this letter so that I may save you, Nannie.

“When I first came into Mr. Knox’s office I was young like you, and I had a lover, young and fine like Dick, and he satisfied me.  We had our plans—­of a home and the happiness we should have together.  If I had married him, I should now have sons and daughters growing up about me, and when Christmas came there would be a tree and young faces smiling, and my husband, smiling.

“But Mr. Knox talked to me as he talked to you.  He told me, too, to wait—­for Prince Charming.  He told me I was too fine to be wasted.  He hinted that the man I was planning to marry was a plain fellow, not good enough for me.  He talked and I listened.  He opened vistas.  I saw myself raised to a different sphere by some man like Mr. Knox—­just as well groomed, just as distinguished, just as rich and wonderful.

“But such men don’t come often into the lives of girls like you and me, Nannie.  I know that now.  I did not know it then.  But Mr. Knox should have known it.  Yet he held out the hope; and at last he robbed me of my future, of the little home, my fine, strong husband.  He robbed me of my woman’s heritage of a child in my arms.

“And in return he gave me—­nothing.  I have found in the years that I have been with him that he likes to be admired and looked up to by pretty women.  He likes to mold us into something exquisite and ornamental, he likes to feel that he has molded us.  He likes to see our blushes.  All these years that I have been with him, he has liked to feel that I looked upon him as the ideal toward which all my girlish dreams tended.

“He is not in love with me, and I am not in love with him.  But he has always known that if he had been free and had wooed me, I should have felt that King Cophetua had come to the beggar maid.  Yet, too late, I can see that if he had been free he would never have wooed me.  His ambition would have carried him up and beyond anything I can ever hope to be, and he would have sought some woman of his own circle who would have contributed to his material success.

“And now he is trying to spoil your life, Nannie—­to make you discontented with your future with Dick.  You look at him and see in your life some day a Prince Charming.  But I tell you this, Nannie, that Prince Charming will never come.  And after a time all you will have to show for the years that you have spent in the office will be just a pretty room, a few bits of wood and leather and bronze in exchange for warm, human happiness, clinging hands, a husband like Dick, who adores you, who comes home at