I know whereof I speak, for I have been there myself.  I always tell Maria everything that I conveniently can—­it is not well for a man to have secrets from his wife—­and when I occasionally refer to my past flames I find myself often growing more than pridefully loquacious over my early affairs of the heart, but when I thought of the serious study that I once made in my twentieth year of the dozen easiest, most painless methods of committing suicide because Miss Mehitabel Flanders, aetat thirty-eight, whom I had chosen for my life’s companion, had announced her intention of marrying old Colonel Barrington—­one of the wisest matches ever as I see it now—­I drew the line at letting Maria into that particular secret of my career.  Miss Mehitabel was indeed a beautiful woman, and she took a very deep and possibly maternal interest in callow youth.  She invited confidence and managed in many ways to make a strong appeal to youthful affections, but I don’t think she was always careful to draw the line nicely between maternal love and that other which is neither maternal, fraternal, paternal, nor even filial.  To my eye she was no older than I, and to my way of thinking nothing could have been more eminently fitting than that we should walk the Primrose Way hand in hand forever.

While I will not say that the fair Mehitabel trifled with my young affections, I will say that she let me believe—­nay, induced me to believe by her manner—­that even as I regarded her she regarded me, and when at the end she disclaimed any intention to smash my heart into the myriad atoms into which it flew—­which have since most happily reunited upon Maria—­and asserted that she had let me play in the rose-garden of my exuberant fancy because I was “only a boy,” my bump upon the hard world of fact was an atrociously hard one.  Some women pour passer le temps find pleasure in playing thus with young hopes and hearts as carelessly as though they were mere tennis-balls, to be whacked about and rallied, and volleyed hither and yon, without regard to their constituent ingredients, and then when trouble comes, and a catastrophe is imminent, the refuge of “only a boy” is sought as though it really afforded a sufficient protection against “responsibility.”  The most of us would regard the hopeless infatuation of a young girl committed to our care, either as parents or as guardians, for a middle-aged man of the world with such horror that drastic steps would be taken to stop it, but we are not so careful of the love-affairs of our sons, and view with complaisance their devotion to some blessed damozel of uncertain age, comforting ourselves with the reflection that he is “only a boy” and will outgrow it all in good time. (There’s another mem. for my legislative career—­a Bill for the Protection of Boys, and the Suppression of Old Maids Who Don’t Mean Anything By It.)