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