Thus he blinded himself in these vain, silly vaporings, the result of a false training and the reading of stilted romances.  The thought of studying the girl’s character, of doing and being in some degree what would be agreeable to her, never occurred to him.  That kind of good sense rarely does occur to the egotistical, who often fairly exasperate those whom they would please by utter blindness to the simple things which are pleasing.  Miss Lou had read more old romances than he, but she speedily outgrew the period in which she was carried away by the fantastic heroes described.  They became in her fancy the other extreme of the matter-of-fact conditions in which her uncle and aunt had lived, and as we have seen, she longed to know the actual world, to meet with people who did not seem alien to her young and natural sympathies.  Each new character she met became a kind of revelation to her.  She was the opposite pole of the society belle, whose eyes have wearied of humanity, who knows little and cares less for anything except her mirrored image.  With something of the round-eyed curiosity and interest of a child, she looked at every new face, asking herself, “What is he like?” not whether he will like and admire me, although she had not a little feminine pleasure in discovering that strangers were inclined to do this.  Her disapproval of Maynard arose chiefly from the feeling that his gallantry at such a time, with the dead and dying all about them, was “more shocking than a game of cards on Sunday.”  She regarded his attentions, glances, tones, as mere well-bred persiflage, indulged in for his own amusement, and she put him down as a trifler for his pains.  That he, as she would phrase it, “was just smitten without any rhyme or reason” seemed preposterous.  She had done nothing for him as she had for Scoville.  The friendly or the frankly admiring looks of strangers, the hearty gratitude and goodwill of the wounded, she could accept with as much pleasure as any of her sex; but she had not yet recognized that type of man who looks at a pretty woman and is disposed to make love to her at once.  “Why does Captain Maynard stare at me so?” she asked herself, “when I don’t care a thistle for him and never will.  Why should I care?  Why should he care?  Does he think I’m silly and shallow enough to be amused by this kind of thing when that brave old colonel is dying across the hall?”

It was a relief to her to escape from him and Whately and to visit even poor Waldo, dying also, as she believed.  “Dr. Ackley,” she said, “you may trust me to give him his food now every two hours.  I won’t break down again.”

“You did not break down, Miss Baron.  All my nurses have their hours off.  Why shouldn’t you?  I reckon,” he added, smiling, “you’ll have to obey my orders like the rest.  I will go with you again on this visit.”

To her the youth seemed ghastlier than ever, but the expression of gladness in his eyes was unchanged.