pelled even a tragic swain to laugh. She made a
looking-glass of his face to seek wofully in it whether she was at all
to blame, and when his arms went out for her, and she stepped back so
that they fell empty, she mourned, with dear sympathy, his lack of
skill to seize her. For what her soft eyes said was that she was always
waiting tremulously to be won. They all forgave her, because there was
nothing to forgive, or very little, just the little that makes a dear
girl dearer, and often afterward, I believe, they have laughed fondly
when thinking of her, like boys brought back. You ladies who are
everything to your husbands save a girl from the dream of youth, have
you never known that double-chinned industrious man laugh suddenly in
a reverie and start up, as if he fancied he were being hailed from
far-away?

I hear her hailing me now. She was so light-hearted that her laugh is
what comes first across the years; so high-spirited that she would have
wept like Mary of Scots because she could not lie on the bare plains
like the men. I hear her, but it is only as an echo; I see her, but it
is as a light among distant trees, and the middle-aged man can draw no
nearer; she was only for the boys. There was a month when I could have
shown her to you in all her bravery, but then the veil fell, and from
that moment I understood her not. For long I watched her, but she was
never clear to me again, and for long she hovered round me, like a dear
heart willing to give me a thousand chances to regain her love. She was
so picturesque that she was the last word of art, but she was as young
as if she were the first woman. The world must have rung with gallant
deeds and grown lovely thoughts for numberless centuries before she
could be; she was the child of all the brave and wistful imaginings of
men. She was as mysterious as night when it fell for the first time upon
the earth. She was the thing we call romance, which lives in the little
hut beyond the blue haze of the pine-woods.

No one could have looked less elfish. She was all on a noble scale,
her attributes were so generous, her manner unconquerably gracious, her
movements indolently active, her face so candid that you must swear her
every thought lived always in the open. Yet, with it all, she was a wild
thing, alert, suspicious of the lasso, nosing it in every man's hand,
more curious about it than about aught else in the world; her quivering
delight was to see it cast for her,