icious because he had the title searched? Very good; then perhaps
you will tell me that the marriage contract is less important than the
conveyance of real estate? Besides, my doubts on the subject of love
would have defied a catalogue. When I read of the follies and transports
of which it was reported to be the prime factor, I was puzzled. It
seemed to me that I had either a fibre more or a fibre less than other
girls, I could not comprehend. No man I had ever met--and certainly I
had met many--had ever caused me so much as a fleeting emotion. There
were men with whom I found speech agreeable and argument a pleasure,
but, had they worn frocks instead of trousers, such enjoyment as I
experienced would have been unimpaired. You see, it was purely mental.
And when--there, I remember one man in particular. As Stella said of
Swift, he could talk beautifully about a broomstick. He knew the reason
of things; he was up in cuneiform inscriptions and at home with
meteorites; he was not prosy, and, what is more to the point, he never
treated a subject as though it were a matter of life and death. He was
not bad-looking, either, and he was the only man of my acquaintance who
both understood Kant and got his coats from Poole. That man I liked very
much. He was better than a book. I could ask him questions, a thing you
can't do even of an encyclopaedia. One fine day the personal pronoun
cropped out. We had been discussing Herbert Spencer's theory of
conceivability, and abruptly, with an inappositeness which, now I think
of it, would have been admirable on the stage, but which in the
drawing-room was certainly misplaced, he asked me to take a walk with
him down the aisle of the swellest church in the commonwealth. I mourned
his loss, as we say. But wasn't it stupid of him? But what does get into
men? Why should they think that, because a girl is liberal with odd
evenings, she is pining for the marriage covenant?"

With the whip she held she gave the hem of her habit a sudden lash.

"That episode gave me food for thought. H'm. By-and-by the scene was
occupied by a young man who was an authority on orchids, and wrote
sonnets for the _Interstate_. My dear, a more guileful little wretch
never breathed. When my previous young man disappeared, I felt that I
had been hasty. I desired nothing so much as an increase in my store of
knowledge, and I determined that if another opportunity occurred I would
not be in such a hurry to shut the door