to be somewhere else, yet, by a curious contradiction,
nothing could have dragged me from the spot, so fair was she to look on.

"Miss Todd--Mr. Malcolm," said Boller of '89. Then he mopped his brow
with a purple silk handkerchief and added that it was very warm. I
said that it was very warm, and Miss Todd smiled quite the loveliest
smile that I had ever seen.

I realized that this Miss Todd was the doctor's daughter, of whom I had
heard Boller speak in the most extravagant terms, and now it seemed to
me that his praise had quite failed to convey an adequate idea of her
charms. She was very fair, very pink and white, with a Psyche knot of
shimmering hair; a tall, slender girl, clad in clinging, gauzy blue.
To my mind came the picture of Penelope Blight, the only girl to whom I
had ever given a thought; I remembered her tanned cheeks, her brown
arms, and hard little hands, and it seemed to me that even she could
never grow to such loveliness as this.

I loved Miss Todd. Had she offered herself to me at that moment, I
should have married her on the spot, and now there was shattered my
boyish contempt for all that was weak and gentle, however beautiful.
The ideas which composed my mind rattled and tumbled about like the
bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope, and in a flash they formed a
softer and more harmonious design. The world was something more to me
than a happy hunting-ground, life more than an exciting adventure. The
world was the home of Gladys Todd; life was to win her love; happiness
was to sit at her side.

And now I was sitting at her side in a seventh heaven; in one of the
silent places of the seventh heaven, for we had little to say to each
other. We were tyros in the art of conversing, and our promising ideas
born of long mental struggles were stilled with bludgeons of assent and
dissent. We knew not how to nourish and embellish them, and yet,
though there were long stretches of embarrassed silence, we were not
unhappy. Even Boller found his subterfuges to drag me away quite
futile, and Miss Todd herself seemed content, for she met a dozen like
efforts with a quiet and unpenetrable smile.

So Gladys Todd and I sat the evening through as on a calm cloud,
looking down to earth and the antics of little men. They crowded close
to us, laughing and talking; they called up to us and we did not hear
them; they jostled one another and they jostled us, but they could not
entice us into their restless