Professor Valeyon regarded his visitor -- a tall and broadly built youth with quick, inquisitive eyes . . . His name was interesting -- Bressant! And the young man was himself a strange creature: trained at home to have the most flexible and brilliant of minds -- while being left strangely ignorant of the power of love. Unbeknownst to the professor, his daughters Sophie and Cornelia have already spotted the visitor, and sealed an agreement to never fight over the fine young man -- an agreement doomed from the start.

Author Biography

Julian Hawthorne (1846 - 1934) was an American writer and journalist, the son of novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody. He wrote numerous poems, novels, short stories, mystery/detective fiction, essays, travel books, biographies and histories. As a journalist, he reported on the Indian Famine for Cosmopolitan magazine and the Spanish-American War for the New York Journal. Hawthorne wrote two books about his parents, called Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (1884-85) and Hawthorne and His Circle (1903). In the latter, he responded to a remark from his father's friend Herman Melville that the famous author had a "secret." Julian dismissed this, claiming Melville was inclined to think so only because "there were many secrets untold in his own career," causing much speculation. The younger Hawthorne also wrote a critique of his father's novel The Scarlet Letter that was published in The Atlantic Monthly in April 1886.