Once I thought I had found her.  At one of the picnics given in my honor I saw a sober, pretty little thing, with rosy cheeks and chestnut hair, who looked intensely rural.  I fancied I should like to talk to her alone for a while, and took her to a spring that was just in sight of the dancing platform, thinking she would be too timid to go far away from the others.  I found her very sweet and bashful:  I could desire nothing more so.  She blushed at each word she said, and made some very innocent remarks, unfettered by the grammatic rules that restrain less ingenuous people.  Hoping to put her at her ease, I talked about the country, the beautiful views, and all that.

“If you like lovely views,” she said shyly, “I can show you one.”

“I shall be most happy to see it,” I replied.

To tell you of the walk that the treacherous innocent took me, of the rocks we climbed and the marshy brooks we crossed, and the two hours she kept me at the work!  Her stock of conversation was exhausted in the first ten minutes, and I was too angry to be civil.  Two hours of such silent torture man never underwent before, and yet when we returned tired, with the perspiration rolling down our faces, I actually overheard her tell one of her companions that it had been “a delightful walk, I was so agreeable.”  Just my luck!  And that walk made her a belle!  After it all the country beaux flocked around to pay her attention, and she looked upon them as Cinderella might have viewed her other suitors after the prince had danced with her at the ball.  Disgusting!

Dick came to me after a while and said, “Charley, you are so stunning in that velvet coat that all the girls are in love with you.”

“I know it, Dick,” I said in a complaining voice—­“I know it.  It always happens just so.  Think it’s the coat?  I would take it off in a minute if I thought it was.”  Then I added with a burst of confidence, “Dick, ’tis the same with everything I wear:  the fascination is in myself.  I would do anything to lessen it, but I can’t.”

“You are a jolly joker,” replied Dick with a tremendous slap on my back, as if I had said something very funny.  I am often witty when I don’t mean to be.

But why continue a history which was the same thing day after day?  I stayed in the country more than three weeks.  Though doubting, I was conscientious, and left nothing undone to gain my end.  The task bored me far more than my sympathizers did in the summer.  Indeed, any of those friends were bewitching in contrast to the girls I now met, and had one of them dropped in on me during that tiresome period I think I should have forgotten nice distinctions and made serious love to her, sure of finding more pleasure in having a single taste in common than in having none at all.