I don’t mean, in saying all this, to reflect in any way upon the many helpful friendships that exist between youngsters developing into manhood and their elders among women who are not related to them.  There have been thousands of such friendships, no doubt, that have worked for the upbuilding of character; for the inspiring in the unfolding consciousness of what life means in the young boy’s being of a deeper, more lasting, respect for womanhood than would have been attained to under any other circumstances, but that has been the result only when the woman has taken care to maintain her own dignity always, and to regard her course as one wherein she has accepted a degree of responsibility second only to a mother’s, and not a by-path leading merely to pleasure and for the idling away of an unoccupied hour.  Potential manhood is a difficult force to handle, and none should embark upon the parlous enterprise of arousing it without due regard for the consequences.  We may not let loose a young lion from its leash, and, when dire consequences follow, excuse ourselves on the score that we thought the devastating feature was “only a cub.”

These things flashed across my mind as I sat in Goward’s room watching the poor youth in his nerve-distracting struggles, and, when I thought of the tangible evidence in hand against Aunt Elizabeth, I must confess if I had been juryman sitting in judgment of the case I should have convicted her of kidnapping without leaving the box.  To begin with, there was the case of Ned Temple.  I haven’t quite been able to get away from the notion that however short-sighted and gauche poor Mrs. Temple’s performance was in going over to the Talberts’ to make a scene because of Aunt Elizabeth’s attentions to Temple, she thought she was justified in doing so, and Elizabeth’s entire innocence in the premises, in view of her record as a man-snatcher, has not been proven to my satisfaction.  Then there was that Lyman Wilde business, which I never understood and haven’t wanted to until they tried to mix poor Lorraine up in it.  Certain it is that Elizabeth and Wilde were victims of an affair of the heart, but what Lorraine has had to do with it I don’t know, and I hope the whole matter will be dropped at least until we have settled poor Peggy’s affair.  Then came Goward and this complication, and through it all Elizabeth has had a weather-eye open for Dr. Denbigh.  A rather suggestive chain of evidence that, proving that Elizabeth seems to regard all men as her own individual property.  As Mrs. Evarts says, she perks up even when Billie comes into the room—­or Mr. Talbert, either; and as for me—­well, in the strictest confidence, if Aunt Elizabeth hasn’t tried to flirt even with me, then I don’t know what flirtation is, and there was a time—­long before I was married, of course—­when I possessed certain well-developed gifts in that line.  I know this, that when I was first paying my addresses to Maria, Aunt Elizabeth was staying at the Talberts’ as