awful hours it has contained I am older than Methuselah."

At last I thought I had it, and a feeling of wrath against Aunt
Elizabeth began to surge up within me. It was another case of that
intolerable "only a boy" habit that so many women of uncertain age and
character, married and single, seem nowadays to find so much pleasure
in. We find it too often in our complex modern society, and I am not
sure that it is not responsible for more deviations from the path of
rectitude than even the offenders themselves imagine. Callow youth just
from college is susceptible to many kinds of flattery, and at the age
of adolescence the appeal which lovely woman makes to inexperience is
irresistible.

I know whereof I speak, for I have been there myself. I always tell
Maria everything that I conveniently can--it is not well for a man to
have secrets from his wife--and when I occasionally refer to my past
flames I find myself often growing more than pridefully loquacious over
my early affairs of the heart, but when I thought of the serious
study that I once made in my twentieth year of the dozen easiest, most
painless methods of committing suicide because Miss Mehitabel Flanders,
aetat thirty-eight, whom I had chosen for my life's companion, had
announced her intention of marrying old Colonel Barrington--one of the
wisest matches ever as I see it now--I drew the line at letting Maria
into that particular secret of my career. Miss Mehitabel was indeed a
beautiful woman, and she took a very deep and possibly maternal interest
in callow youth. She invited confidence and managed in many ways to make
a strong appeal to youthful affections, but I don't think she was always
careful to draw the line nicely between maternal love and that other
which is neither maternal, fraternal, paternal, nor even filial. To my
eye she was no older than I, and to my way of thinking nothing could
have been more eminently fitting than that we should walk the Primrose
Way hand in hand forever.

While I will not say that the fair Mehitabel trifled with my young
affections, I will say that she let me believe--nay, induced me to
believe by her manner--that even as I regarded her she regarded me, and
when at the end she disclaimed any intention to smash my heart into the
myriad atoms into which it flew--which have since most happily reunited
upon Maria--and asserted that she had let me play in the rose-garden
of my exuberant fancy because I was "only a boy," my b