There was a rustling of silk and a crunching of gravel, and all was quiet.

I lay there thinking for a long while:  I wonder if my poor mother, were she living, would take as much trouble to procure me a wife as Mrs. Stunner is going to take to provide Eva with a husband.  I wonder mothers don’t help their sons to marry, and let their daughters help themselves.  Girls are so much sharper about such things than men are.  Everything is against us.  I suppose women think they deceive us for our good, but they should continue to do so after marriage.  ’Pon honor!  I have seen the sweetest, most amiable girl turn as sour as could be a few months after the ceremony.  The dressiest ones often get dowdy, the most musical can’t abide music, the most talkative have the dumps.  A man has no chance of judging how they are going to turn out.  He is duped by the daughters, inveigled by their mothers, and, what is worse still, as soon as he is married they both undeceive him.  It would not matter if a fellow was cheated if he never knew it, but that’s where it hurts.

I shouldn’t wonder if that pair of old plotters would catch me yet if I don’t take care.  I will tease them a bit, any way:  I’ll pay a deuced lot of attention to Eva, and keep the other fellows away.  No man would try to win her if he thought I was serious.

Blanche Furnaval is an odd girl, I went on musing.  They said she would end badly—­hope she won’t, though.  Bewitching girl, but she don’t seem to care if people admire her or not.  I never can quite understand her.  Once I wrote a few verses and gave them to her—­compared her to an ice-covered stream, quiet on the surface, but all motion and tumult below.  Well, she never even thanked me for them, though she said she liked that simile, it was so new.  There was another couplet about her name—­Blanche and snow and cold:  when she read it she laughed and said, “Though my name means white, it does not mean cold.  You know there are some white things that are very warm, Mr. Highrank—­my ermine muff, for instance.”  But I made a clever answer.  I said, “The muff looks cold, and so does Miss Blanche, but if I could be so fortunate as to touch the heart of either I might find warmth.”  “My muff has no heart,” she answered, looking at me as if she did not understand.  “And is its owner in the same condition?” I asked tenderly. (I make it a rule to speak tenderly to all girls, it is so sad for them to love me when I cannot return it.) “In a poetical sense I believe she is,” she replied, “but for all practical purposes she has one that serves very well.”