ety of strict rules on
both sides, which gave interest and excitement to the day. Every
morning Miss Corinna Haws and her sister girded themselves for the
contest with fresh-rubbed spectacles and vigilance, and every morning
the girls eluded them; that is, some of the girls, namely, Louise Ray
and Kate and Fanny Meadows, cousins, rivals, and beauties of the Western
river-country type, where the full life and languor of the South have
fused somewhat the old inherited New England delicacy and fragile
contours. These three young girls were all interested in handsome Rast
in their fanciful, innocent, sentimental way. They glanced at him
furtively in church on Sunday; they took walks of miles to catch a
distant glimpse of him; but they would have run away like frightened
fawns if he had approached nearer. They wrote notes which they never
sent, but carried in their pockets for days; they had deep secrets to
tell each other about how they had heard that somebody had told somebody
else that the Juniors were going to play ball that afternoon in Payne's
meadow, and that if they could only persuade Miss Miriam to go round by
the hill, they could see them, and not so very far off either, only two
wheat fields and the river between. Miss Miriam was the second Miss
Haws, good-tempered and--near-sighted.

That the three girls were interested in one and the same person was part
of the pleasure of the affair; each would have considered it a very
dreary amusement to be interested all alone. The event of the summer,
the comet of that season's sky, was an invitation to a small party in
the town, where it was understood that young Pronando, with five or six
of his companions, would be present. Miss Haws accepted occasional
invitations for her pupils, marshalling them in a bevy, herself robed in
pea-green silk, like an ancient mermaid: she said that it gave them
dignity. It did. The stern dignity and silence almost solemn displayed
by Rast's three worshippers when they found themselves actually in the
same room with him were something preternatural. They moved stiffly, as
if their elbows and ankles were out of joint; they spoke to each other
cautiously in the lowest whispers, with their under jaws rigid, and a
difficulty with their labials; they moved their eyes carefully
everywhere save toward the point where he was standing, yet knew exactly
where he was every moment of the time. When he approached the quadrille
which was formed in one co