The Project Gutenberg EBook of Who Was She?, by Bayard Taylor

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Title: Who Was She?
From "The Atlantic Monthly" for September, 1874

Author: Bayard Taylor

Release Date: October 24, 2007 [EBook #23166]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by David Widger

WHO WAS SHE?

By Bayard Taylor

From "The Atlantic Monthly" for September, 1874

Come, now, there may as well be an end of this! Every time I meet your
eyes squarely, I detect the question just slipping out of them. If
you had spoken it, or even boldly looked it; if you had shown in your
motions the least sign of a fussy or fidgety concern on my account; if
this were not the evening of my birthday, and you the only friend who
remembered it; if confession were not good for the soul, though harder
than sin to some people, of whom I am one--well, if all reasons were not
at this instant converged into a focus, and burning me rather violently,
in that region where the seat of emotion is supposed to lie, I should
keep my trouble to myself.

Yes, I have fifty times had it on my mind to tell you the whole story.
But who can be certain that his best friend will not smile--or, what
is worse, cherish a kind of charitable pity ever afterward--when
the external forms of a very serious kind of passion seem trivial,
fantastic, foolish? And the worst of all is that the heroic part which I
imagined I was playing proves to have been almost the reverse. The
only comfort which I can find in my humiliation is that I am capable of
feeling it. There isn't a bit of a paradox in this, as you will see;
but I only mention it, now, to prepare you for, maybe, a little morbid
sensitiveness of my moral nerves.

The documents are all in this portfolio under my elbow. I had just read
them again completely through when you were announced. You may examine
them as you like afterward: for the present, fill your glass, take
another Cabana, and keep silent until my "ghastly tale" has reached its
most lamentable conclusion.

The beginning of it was at Wampsocket Springs, three years ago last
summer. I suppose most unmarried men who have