"Will you not have me, lady?" I began that afternoon.
"No, my lord," she demurely responded, "for I've decided it would be too much like living in my Sunday-clothes."
And "I give it up. So what's the answer?" was my annotation.
"Oh, I'm not making jokes to-day. Why are you so--Oh, as we used to say at school," she re-began, "Que diable allais-tu faire dans cette galere?"
"I was born in a vale of tears, Elena, and must take the consequences of being found in such a situation."
She came to me, and her finger-tips touched my hand ever so lightly. "That is another quotation, I suppose. And it is one other reason why I mean not to marry you. Frankly, you bore me to death with your erudition; you are three-quarters in love with me, but you pay heaps less attention to what I say about anything than to what Aristotle or some other old fellow said about it. Oh, that I should have lived to be jealous of Aristotle! Indeed I am, for I have the misfortune to be hideously in love with you. You are so exactly the sort of infant I would like to adopt."
"Love," I suggested, "while no longer an excuse for marriage, is at least a palliation."
"Listen, dear. From the first I have liked you, but that was not very strange, because I like almost everybody; but it was strange I should have remembered you and have liked the idea of you ever since you went away that first time."
"Oh, well, this once I will excuse you--"
"But it happened in this way: I had found everybody--very nice, you know--particularly the men,--and the things which cannot be laughed at I had always put aside as not worth thinking about. You like to laugh, too, but I have always known--and sometimes it gets me real mad to think about it, I can tell you--that you could be in earnest if you chose, and I can't. And that makes me a little sorry and tremendously glad, because, quite frankly, I am head over heels in love with you. That is why I don't intend to marry you."
And I was not a little at sea. "Oh, very well!" I pleasantly announced, "I shall become a prominent citizen at once, if that's all that is necessary. I will join every one of the patriotic societies, and sit perpetually on platforms with a perspiring water-pitcher, and unveil things every week, with felicitous allusions to the glorious past of our grand old State; and have columns of applause in brackets on the front page of the Courier-Herald. I will even go into civic politics, if you insist upon it, and leave round-cornered cards at all the drugstores, so that everybody who buys a cigar will know I am subject to the Democratic primary. I wonder, by the way, if people ever survive that malady? It sounds to me a deal more dangerous that epilepsy, say, yet lots of persons seem to have it--"
But Elena was not listening. "You know," she re-began, "I could get out of it all very gracefully by telling you you drink too much. You couldn't argue it, you know--particularly after your behavior last Tuesday."
"Oh, now and then one must be sociable. You aren't a prude, Elena--"
"However, I am not really afraid of that, somehow. I even confess I don't actually mind your being rather good for nothing. No woman ever really does, though she has her preference, and pretends, of course, to mind a great deal. What I mean, then, is this: You don't marry just me. I--I have very few relations, just two brothers and my mother; yet, in a sense, you know, you marry them as well. But I don't believe you would like being married to them. They are so different from you, dear. Your whole view-point of life is different--"
I had begun to speak when she broke in: "No, don't say anything, please, until I'm quite, quite through. My brothers are the most admirable men I ever knew. I love them more than I can say. I trust them more than I do you. But they are just good. They don't fail in the really important things of life, but they are remiss in little ways, they--they don't care for the little elegantnesses, if that's a word. Even Arthur chews tobacco when he feels inclined. And he thinks no man would smoke a cigarette. Oh, I can't explain just what I mean--"
"I think I understand, Elena. Suppose we let it pass as said."
"And Mamma is not--we'll say, particularly highly educated. Oh, you've been very nice to her. She adores you. You won her over completely when you took so much trouble to get her the out-of-print paper novels--about the village maidens and the wicked dukes--in that idiotic Carnation Series she is always reading. The whole affair was just like both of you, I think."
"But, oh, my dear--!" I laughed.
"No, not one man in a thousand would have remembered it after she had said she did think the titles 'were real tasty'; and I don't believe any other man in the world would have spent a week in rummaging the second-hand bookstores, until he found them. Only I don't know, even yet, whether it was really kindness, or just cleverness that put you up to it--on account of me. And I do know that you are nice to her in pretty much the same way you were nice to the negro cook yesterday. And I have had more advantages than she's had. But at bottom I'm really just like her. You'd find it out some day. And--and that is what I mean, I think."
I spoke at some length. It was atrocious nonsense which I spoke; in any event, it looked like atrocious nonsense when I wrote it down just now, and so I tore it up. But I was quite sincere throughout that moment; it is the Townsend handicap, I suspect, always to be perfectly sincere for the moment.
