It was a rather touching letter, and she felt its appeal strongly.  Indeed, so stern was her sense of self-sacrifice, that she had an almost guilty feeling when she thought of Ulrich.  If he had not come into her life at the psychological moment, she might have given herself to Bruce McKenzie.

But the letter had come too late.  Oh, how glad she was that she had left it in her apron pocket!

She answered it that night.

“I am going to be very frank with you, Bruce, because in being frank with you I shall be frank with myself.  If Ulrich Stoelle had not come into my life, I should probably have thought I cared for you.  Even now when I am saying ‘no,’ I realize that your charm has always held me, and that the prospect of a future by your pleasant fireside holds many attractions.  But since you left Washington, something has happened which I never expected, and all of my preconceived ideas of myself have been overturned.  Bruce, I am no longer the Emily you have known—­a little staid, gray-haired, with pretty hands, but with nothing else very pretty about her; a lady who would, perhaps, fill gracefully, a position for which her aristocratic nose fits her.  I am no longer the Emily of the Toy Shop, wearing spectacles on a black ribbon, eating her lunches wherever she can get them.  No, I am an Emily who is young and beautiful, a sort of fairy-tale Princess, an Emily who, if she wishes, shall sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam, but who doesn’t wish it because she hates to sew, and would much rather work in her silver-bell-and-cockle shell garden—­oh, such a wonderful garden as it is!

“And I am all this, Bruce, I am young and beautiful and all the rest, because I am seeing myself through the eyes of my lover.

“He is Ulrich Stoelle, as I have said, and you mustn’t think because his name is German that he is to be cast into outer darkness.  He is as American as you with your Scotch blood, or as I with my English blood.  And he is as loyal as any of us.  He is too old to be accepted for service, but he is giving time and money to the cause.

“And he loves me rapturously, radiantly, romantically.  He doesn’t want me as a cushion for his tired head, he doesn’t want me because he thinks it would be an act of altruism to provide a haven for me in my old age, he wants me because he thinks I am the most remarkable woman in the whole wide world, and that he is the most fortunate man to have won me.

“And you don’t feel that way about it, Bruce.  You know that I am not beautiful, there is no glamour in your love for me.  You know that I am not wonderful, or a fairy Princess—.  And you are right and he is wrong.  But it is his wrongness which makes me love him.  Because every woman wants to be beautiful to her lover, and to feel that she is much desired.

“You will ask why I am telling you all this.  Well, there was one sentence in your letter which called it forth.  You say that you want me because I will hold you to the best that is in you.