oward
Waldenweiter. It was a beautiful evening, and my eyes followed in the
same direction. Thus we sat for quite a long time. Then William Adolphus
gave a laugh.

"She's got to get used to you," he said.

"Precisely," said I.

For that was pretty Elsa's task in life.

CHAPTER XIX.

GREAT PROMOTION.

I should be doing injustice to my manners and (a more serious offence)
distorting truth, if I represented myself as a shy gaby, afraid or
ashamed to make love because people knew the business on which I was
engaged. Holding a position like mine has at least the virtue of curing
a man of such folly; I had been accustomed to be looked at from the day
I put on breeches, and, thanks to unfamiliarity with privacy, had come
not to expect and hardly to miss it. The trouble was unhappily of a
deeper and more obstinate sort, rooted in my own mind and not due to the
covert stares or open good-natured interest of those who surrounded me.
There is a quality which is the sign and soul of high and genuine
pleasure, whether of mind or body, of sight, feeling, or imagination; I
mean spontaneity. This characteristic, with its included incidents of
unexpectedness, of suddenness, often of unwisdom and too entire
absorption in the moment, comes, I take it, from a natural agreement of
what you are with what you do, not planned or made, but revealed all at
once and full-grown; when the heart finds it, it knows that it is
satisfied. The action fits the agent--the exercise matches the faculty.
Thenceforward what you are about does itself without your aid, but
pours into your hand the treasure that rewards success, the very
blossom of life. There may be bitterness, reproaches, stings of
conscience, or remorse. These things are due to other claims and
obligations, artificial, perhaps, in origin, although now of binding
force. Beneath and beyond them is the self-inspired harmony of your
nature with your act, sometimes proud enough to claim for itself a
justification from the mere fact of existence, oftener content to give
that question the go-by, whispering softly, "What matters that? I am."

By some such explanation as this, possibly not altogether wide of the
mark, I sought to account for my disposition in the days that followed
Elsa's arrival. I was conscious of an extreme reluctance to set about my
task. I have used the right word there; a task it seemed to me. The
trail of business and arrangement was over it; it was defaced by