souls which take .their coloring from chance surroundings.  Conventionality ceases when a human being begins the resolute development of his own. natural law of growth to the utmost extent.  This is true because nature in her higher work is not stereotyped.  I will now be as definite as you can desire.  You, for instance, Marian Vosburgh, are as yet, even to yourself, an unknown quantity.  You scarcely know what you are, much less what you may become.  This conversation, and the feeling which led to it, prove this.  There are traits and possibilities in your nature due to ancestors of whom you have not even heard.  These combine with your own individual endowments by nature to make you a separate and distinct being, and you grow more separate and distinct by developing nature’s gifts, traits, powers,—­in brief, that which is essentially your own.  Thus nature becomes your ally and sees to it with absolute certainty that you are not like other people.  Following this principle of action you cannot know, nor can any one know, to just what you may attain.  All true growth is from within, outward.  In the tree, natural law prevents distortion or exaggeration of one part over another.  In your case reason, conscience, good taste, must supervise and direct natural impulses.  Thus following nature you become natural, and cease to be conventional.  If you don’t do this you will be either conventional or queer.  Do you understand me?”

“I think I begin to.  Let me see if I do.  Let me apply your words to one definite problem,—­How can I be more helpful and companionable to you?”

“Why, Marian, do you not see how infinitely more to me you are already, although scarcely beyond the wish to be different from what you were?  I have talked to you as a man talks to a woman in the dearest and most unselfish relation of life.  There is one thing, however, you never can know, and that is a father’s love for a daughter:  it is essentially a man’s love and a man’s experience.  I am sure it is very different from the affection I should have for a son, did I possess one.  Ever since you were a baby the phrase, ‘my little girl,’ has meant more than you can ever know; and now when you come voluntarily to my side in genuine sympathy, and seek to enter intelligently into that which makes my life, you change everything for the better, precisely as that which was in cold, gray shadow before is changed by sunlight.  You add just so much by your young, fresh, womanly life to my life, and it is all the more welcome because it is womanly and different from mine.  You cease to be a child, a dependant to be provided for, and become a friend, an inspiration, a confidante.  These relations may count little to heavy, stolid, selfish men, to whom eating, drinking, excitement, and money-making are the chief considerations, but to men of mind and ideals, especially to a man who has devoted, his heart, brain, and life to a cause upon which the future of a nation depends, they are