A MatterOfFact Girl Author:Theo Gift Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3CHAPTER III. "OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY." BERRIE is writing a letter. It is to Edla Von Freilo; and there is a slightly puzzled expression on the English maiden's face as she glances... more » over the closely-written pages of the epistle lying beside her, and then rumples up her short hair and bites her pen perplexedly before returning to her own sheet and the in- completed sentence, the ink of whjch has got dry during her cogitations. Fraulein Von Freilo is a very dear friend, the very dearest friend possible; and Berric admires her more than she does any one else in the world; but her friendship is a slightly onerous possession all the same; for, though she does not expect her intimates to come up to her own level (which would of course be impossible), she does expect them to try to do so; or at all events to follow her intellectual gyrations on a lower and more circumscribed plane; and she also expects, when she condescends to write to an old school-fellow and disciple, to have her letter answered; not merely in the conventional sense of the word, but answered fully and properly as to all the questions and arguments she may please to propound. Now the letter inquestion being written in very German-English, and full of such phrases as "the struggle for existence in the lower type-races," " Kolliker's polyphyletic hypotheses," or "elective strivings after dual inter-spiritualities," is clearly not one to be answered lightly; or rattled over in half an hour under a running fire of grandmamma's comments. Therefore Berrie has arisen early in order to get a nice quiet time before breakfast, and, not having made much use of the privilege at present, hardly knows whether to feel glad or sorry when Parker enters the room with a message that it is breakfast-time, and she is to go down by herself, as her grandmother h...« less