“And in your case?” said Sylvia.

“You never mind my case!” I retorted.

“But I do mind it when I suffer by it,” said Sylvia.  “I do mind it if it’s going to affect my character!”

“You know very well, Sylvia,” I replied, “that I never kissed you but three times, and then as a brother.”

“I do not wish any one but my brother to kiss me in that way,” said Sylvia, with a pout of contempt.

It seemed to me that this was a fitting time to guide Sylvia’s powers of discrimination as to the way she should act with indifferent men—­and as to the way that different men would try to act with her.

I had been talking to her in a low tone I do not know how long.  Her ill-nature had quickly vanished; she was, in her way, provoking, charming.  I was sitting close to her.  The moonlight played upon her daring, wilful face through the leaves of the grape-vines.  It was unpremeditated; my nature was, most probably, unstrung at the instant by ungratified longings for Georgiana; but suddenly I bent down and kissed her.

Instantly both Sylvia and I started from the seat.  How long Georgiana had been standing in the entrance to the arbor I do not know.  She may that instant have come.  But there she was, dressed in white—­pure, majestic, with the moon shining behind her, and shedding about her the radiance of a heavenly veil.

“Come, Sylvia,” she said, with perfect sweetness; and, bidding me good-night with the same gentlewoman’s calm, she placed her arm about the child’s waist, and the two sisters passed slowly and silently out of my garden.

At that moment, if I could have squeezed myself into the little screech-owl perched in a corner of the arbor, I would gladly have crept into the hollow of an oak and closed my eyes.  Still, how was I to foresee what I should do?  A man’s conversation may be his own; his conduct may vibrate with the extinct movements of his ancestors.

Georgiana’s behavior then was merely the forerunner of larger marvels.  For next morning I wrote a futile drastic treatise on Woman’s inability to understand Man and Man’s inability to understand Himself, and set it under her window.  It made such a roll of paper that the goldfinch’s nest looked as though it were distent with a sort of misshapen ostrich egg.  All day I waited with a heart as silent as a great clock run down; my system of philosophy swung dead in the air.  To my tortured vision as I eyed it secretly from my porch, it took on the semblance of one of Sylvia’s poetical potatoes, and I found myself urging in its behalf Sylvia’s fondest epithets:  “how homely, yet how beautiful,” “little thought of, but very necessary,” “unostentatious, but of lovely internal appearance.”