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 from her father. I do not know how, when, or exactly why she formulated such a requirement, any more than I can explain where she got many mother of the ideas with which she has been known to startle or confound me. Long after the story had been completed and while it was undergoing revision, there arrived a day on which I was told that the requirement existed: that Barbara had secretly been counting on me, and with pleasure in the thought. Pleasure! If I could give that and so easily, and to her, it not mine to make a gesture of resistance. I insist only that what I have to say shall be placed where it can stand between no reader and the story.

It would be neither good manners nor good sense for me to attempt any sort of appraisal of this chronicle of Eepersip's adventures in the spacious rooms of her House without Windows. I have been too near to the whole thing, and am too near the chronicler. The most that I can now add without impropriety is a statement of why the first thought, a book to be manufactured but by no means published, gave way after all to a different idea.

It began to strike me that here was something representatively valuablevaluable, I mean, as a representation of something lovely in