ecessity perform them the more
thoughtlessly as well; for, indeed, I find that with experience a man
becomes increasingly difficult to please in affairs of the heart. The
woman one loves then is granted that pre-eminence not merely by virtue
of having outshone any particular one of her predecessors; oh, no!
instead, her qualities have been compared with all the charms of all
her fair forerunners, and they have endured that stringent testing.
The winning of an often-bartered heart is in reality the only conquest
which entitles a woman to complacency, for she has received a real
compliment; whereas to be selected as the target of a lad's first
declaration is a tribute of no more value than a man's opinion upon
vintages who has never tasted wine."

He took a turn about the breakfast room, then came near to her. "I
love you. Were there any way to parade the circumstance and bedeck it
with pleasing adornments of filed phrases, tropes and far-fetched
similes, I would not grudge you a deal of verbal pageantry. But three
words say all. I love you. There is no act in my past life but
appears trivial and strange to me, and to the man who performed it I
seem no more akin than to Mark Antony or Nebuchadnezzar. I love you.
The skies are bluer since you came, the beauty of this world we live in
oppresses me with a fearful joy, and in my heart there is always the
thought of you and such yearning as I may not word. For I love you."

"You--but you have frightened me." Miss Ogle did not seem so terrified
as to make any effort to recede from him; and yet he saw that she was
frightened in sober earnest. Her face showed pale, and soft, and glad,
and awed, and desirable above all things; and it remained so near him
as to engender riotous aspirations.

"I love you," he said again. You would never have suspected this man
could speak, upon occasion, fluently. "I think--I think that Heaven
was prodigal when Heaven made you. To think of you is as if I listened
to an exalted music; and to be with you is to understand that all
imaginable sorrows are just the figments of a dream which I had very
long ago."

She laid one hand on each of his shoulders, facing him. "Do not let me
be too much afraid! I have not ever been afraid before. Oh,
everything is in a mist of gold, and I am afraid of you, and of the big
universe which I was born into, and I am helpless, and I would have
nothing changed! Only, I cannot believe I am worth L10,0