ow ridiculous it was, and not only so,
but how far from original, I could give her papers of lemon
Jackson-balls, hinting simultaneously that, though plump as her cheeks,
they were not half so sweet; and through a figure, whose correct name I
have since learned to be periphrasis, I could suggest how much my soul
yearned to expire on her ruby lips, by asking if she had ever played
doorkeeper; regretting that the atmosphere of refinement and
intellectuality did not admit of that healthful recreation at Moodle's,
and begging her to guess whom I would call out if I were doorkeeper
myself. When she opened her blue eyes innocently, and said, "Miss
Crickey?" the intimation was rejected with a melancholy
dissatisfaction, which would have been disdain but for the character of
my feelings to its source. And when, on my pressing her for the name of
the favored mortal whom she would call out if she were doorkeeper, she
slyly dropped her eyes and asked if Briggs sounded any thing like it, I
savagely refused to consider the proposition at all, and for the rest of
the evening ate sandwiches to that degree I wonder my life was not
despaired of, and fled for relief to the lemony bowl. The result of this
mad vortex having been colic and calomel, after my return to Barker's on
that evening, I foreswore such dangerous excesses at the next
bi-monthly; but putting a larger pair of stockings in each boot-heel, to
impress Miss Tucker with a sense of what she had lost, I devoted myself
during the earlier part of the evening to a growing young woman, of the
name of Wagstaff, considerably older than myself and runing straight up
and down from whatever side one might contemplate her. Her conversation
was not entertaining, unless from the Chinese point of view, which, I
understand, distinctly favors monosyllables, and she giggled at me so
persistently that I feared Miss Tucker would think I must be making
myself ridiculous; but, on her being sent to the piano, I stood and
turned over her music with a consciousness that if I ever looked
impressive it was then. All this I did in the effort to seem gay,
although my heart was breaking. I had no comfort on earth save the
thought that I had been brutal to Briggs, and that he sat in an obscure
corner of the room among some little girls in Long Division, hiding,
behind an assistant teacher's skirts, the whitey-brown toe which my
blacking-brush refused to refresh, while I bore my grief upon a pair of
new boo