Today's Stichomancy for Eminem

For a time her mind ran on daintiness and its defensive restraints as though it was the one desirable thing. That world of fine printed cambrics and escorted maidens, of delicate secondary meanings and refined allusiveness, presented itself to her imagination with the brightness of a lost paradise, as indeed for many women it is a lost paradise.

"I wonder if there is anything wrong with my manners," she said. "I wonder if I've been properly brought up. If I had been quite quiet and white and dignified, wouldn't it have been different? Would he have dared? . . ."

For some creditable moments in her life Ann Veronica was utterly

had loitered behind to speak to several friends at an adjacent table, took the unoccupied seat by Mrs. Brewster and was soon in animated conversation with the widow and Clymer; Barbara, her healthy appetite asserting itself, devoted her entire attention to the delicious delicacies placed before her. The arrival of the after-the-theater crowd awoke her from her abstraction, and she accepted Clymer's invitation to dance with alacrity. When they returned to the table she discovered that Margaret Brewster and her father had also joined the dancers.

Barbara watched them while keeping up a disjointed conversation with Clymer, whose absentminded remarks finally drew Barbara's

The Red Seal

action. He had brought some papers from his office and he spread them out on his table and squared himself to the task. . . .

It must have been an hour later that he found himself automatically fitting a key into a locked drawer. He had no more notion than a somnambulist of the mental process that had led up to this action. He was just dimly aware of having pushed aside the papers and the heavy calf volumes that a moment before had bounded his horizon, and of laying in their place, without a trace of conscious volition, the parcel he had taken from the drawer.

The letters were tied in packets of thirty or forty. There were a great many packets. On some of the envelopes the ink was fading;

keeping temples rich in votive offerings of gold and silver, and swept them bare of their sacred treasures; he was an arrant traitor--for what treason could be more manifest than Euphron's? First he was the bosom friend of Lacedaemon, but presently chose you in their stead; and, after exchange of solemn pledges between yourselves and him, once more turned round and played the traitor to you, and delivered up the harbour to your enemies. Lastly, he was most undisguisedly a tyrant, who made not free men only, but free fellow-citizens his slaves; who put to death, or drove into exile, or robbed of their wealth and property, not malefactors, note you, but the mere victims of his whim and fancy; and these were ever the better folk. Once again restored by