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se I'd be bored to death, and the engagement wouldn't last five minutes after I was. I'm simply wild to fall in love, if only to see what it's like. You won't tell me; anyhow, I don't think that would satisfy all my curiosity if you did. I wish some new man would come along." "Alan Rush is charming." "He's too much in love with me." "Mr. Fort keeps your wits on the jump." "My wits are in my brain, not my heart." "Mr. Howard?" "He has so much tact that he has no sincerity." "There is still Mr. Webster." "Poor Dolly!" "What _do_ you want?" Helena was moving restlessly about her boudoir,--a bower of pearl-grey embroidered with wild roses, in which she reclined luxuriously when free from social duties, and improved her mind. A volume of Motley lay on the floor. Walter Pater's "Imaginary Portraits" was slipping off the divan, and there was a pile of Reviews on the table. She was biting the corner of a volume of Herrick. "I haven't any ideal, if that's what you mean. I think it would have to be a man of the world, for conversation so soon gives out with the men of this village. Mr. Fort takes refuge in epigrams. If I married--became engaged to him--I should feel as if I were living on pickles. I think that one reason why Alan Rush and Mr. Howard are so determined to make love to me is because they have nothing left to talk about." "You've told me twice what you don't want, but you don't seem to know what you do. 'A man of the world' is not very definite." "No; he must be capable of falling violently in love with me, and at the same time not make himself ridiculous; to keep his head except when I particularly want him to lose it. Of course I want to inspire a grand passion as well as to feel one, but I don't want to be surrounded by it; and the first time he looked ridiculous would be the last of him as far as I was concerned. I might be in the highest stages of the divine passion, and that would cure me." "Well! is that all? Some men could not be ridiculous if they tried." "You are thinking of Mr. Trennahan, of course. If he did, I do believe you wouldn't see it. But I should; I have a hideous sense of the ridiculous. Well, lemme see. He must have read and travelled and thought a lot, so that he would know more than I, and I could look up to him; also that subjects of conversation would not give out. The platitudes of love! That would be fatal." "I don't believe they ever sound like platit
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