--circumstance--a shaft of moonlight (we were young, my dear)--a
white frock--your acquiescence--who knows?

I jilted you once or twice for other girls--nothing formal, of
course--but only when you had jilted me three or four times. We once
rowed upon a river at night. Did I take your hand, my dear? If I
listen now I can hear the water dripping from the oar. There was
darkness--and stars--and youth (yourself, white-armed, the symbol of
its mystery). Yes, perhaps I am older now.

Was it not Byron who wrote?

I am ashes where once I was fire,
And the soul in my bosom is dead;
What I loved I now merely admire,
And my heart is as gray as my head.

I cannot pretend ever to have had so fierce a passion, but at least my
fire still burns and with a cheery blaze. But you will not know this
love of mine--unless, of course, you read this page--and even so, you
can only suspect that I write of you, because, my dear, to be quite
frank, I paid attention to several girls beside yourself.

Yes, they say that I have come to the top of the hill and that
henceforth the view is back across my shoulder. I am counseled that
with a turn of the road I had best sit with my back to the horses, for
the mountains are behind. A little while and the finer purple will be
showing in the west. Yet a little while, they say, and the bewildering
peaks of youth will be gray and cold.

Perhaps some of the greener pleasures are mine no longer. Certainly,
last night I went to the Winter Garden, but left bored after the first
act; and I had left sooner except for climbing across my neighbors. I
suppose there are young popinjays who seriously affirm that Ziegfeld's
Beauty Chorus is equal to the galaxy of loveliness that once pranced
at Weber and Field's when we came down from college on Saturday night.
At old Coster and Bial's there was once a marvelous beauty who swung
from a trapeze above the audience and scandalously undressed herself
down to the fifth encore and her stockings. And, really, are there
plays now as exciting as the _Prisoner of Zenda_, with its great fight
upon the stairs--three men dead and the tables overturned--Red
Rudolph, in the end, bearing off the Princess? Heroes no longer wear
cloak and sword and rescue noble ladies from castle towers.

And Welsh rabbit, that was once a passion and the high symbol of
extravagance, in these days has lost its finest flavor. In vain do we
shake the paprika can. Pop-beer and real b