“She cannot!” I answered.  I would have put out an arm for further mistreatment, but all at once I pulled up.  What was I coming to, I, John Cowles, this morning when the bees droned fat and the flowers made fragrant all the air?  I was no boy, but a man grown; and ruthless as I was, I had all the breeding the land could give me, full Virginia training as to what a gentleman should be.  And a gentleman, unless he may travel all a road, does not set foot too far into it when he sees that he is taken at what seems his wish.  So now I said how glad I was that she had come back from school, though a fine lady now, and no doubt forgetful of her friends, of myself, who once caught young rabbits and birds for her, and made pens for the little pink pigs at the orchard edge, and all of that.  But she had no mind, it seemed to me, to talk of these old days; and though now some sort of wall seemed to me to arise between us as we sat there on the bank blowing at dandelions and pulling loose grass blades, and humming a bit of tune now and then as young persons will, still, thickheaded as I was, it was in some way made apparent to me that I was quite as willing the wall should be there as she herself was willing.

My mother had mentioned Miss Grace Sheraton to me before.  My father had never opposed my riding over now and then to the Sheraton gates.  There were no better families in our county than these two.  There was no reason why I should feel troubled.  Yet as I looked out into the haze of the hilltops where the red road appeared to leap off sheer to meet the distant rim of the Blue Ridge, I seemed to hear some whispered warning.  I was young, and wild as any deer in those hills beyond.  Had it been any enterprise scorning settled ways; had it been merely a breaking of orders and a following of my own will, I suppose I might have gone on.  But there are ever two things which govern an adventure for one of my sex.  He may be a man; but he must also be a gentleman.  I suppose books might be written about the war between those two things.  He may be a gentleman sometimes and have credit for being a soft-headed fool, with no daring to approach the very woman who has contempt for him; whereas she may not know his reasons for restraint.  So much for civilization, which at times I hated because it brought such problems.  Yet these problems never cease, at least while youth lasts, and no community is free from them, even so quiet a one as ours there in the valley of the old Blue Ridge, before the wars had rolled across it and made all the young people old.

I was of no mind to end my wildness and my roaming just yet; and still, seeing that I was, by gentleness of my Quaker mother and by sternness of my Virginia father, set in the class of gentlemen, I had no wish dishonorably to engage a woman’s heart.  Alas, I was not the first to learn that kissing is a most difficult art to practice!

When one reflects, the matter seems most intricate.  Life to the young is barren without kissing; yet a kiss with too much warmth may mean overmuch, whereas a kiss with no warmth to it is not worth the pains.  The kiss which comes precisely at the moment when it should, in quite sufficient warmth and yet not of complicating fervor, working no harm and but joy to both involved—­those kisses, now that one pauses to think it over, are relatively few.