lor town and play my part in any
rough-house that started or call all hands to the bar--I didn't know the
first thing I might say or do with this slender little chit of a
girl-woman whose scant skirt just reached her shoe-tops and who was as
abysmally ignorant of life as I was, or thought I was, profoundly wise.

I remember we sat on a bench in the starlight. There was fully a foot of
space between us. We slightly faced each other, our near elbows on the
back of the bench; and once or twice our elbows just touched. And all
the time, deliriously happy, talking in the gentlest and most delicate
terms that might not offend her sensitive ears, I was cudgelling my
brains in an effort to divine what I was expected to do. What did girls
expect of boys, sitting on a bench and tentatively striving to find out
what love was? What did she expect me to do? Was I expected to kiss her?
Did she expect me to try? And if she did expect me, and I didn't what
would she think of me?

Ah, she was wiser than I--I know it now--the little innocent girl-woman
in her shoe-top skirt. She had known boys all her life. She encouraged
me in the ways a girl may. Her gloves were off and in one hand, and I
remember, lightly and daringly, in mock reproof for something I had said,
how she tapped my lips with a tiny flirt of those gloves. I was like to
swoon with delight. It was the most wonderful thing that had ever
happened to me. And I remember yet the faint scent that clung to those
gloves and that I breathed in the moment they touched my lips.

Then came the agony of apprehension and doubt. Should I imprison in my
hand that little hand with the dangling, scented gloves which had just
tapped my lips? Should I dare to kiss her there and then, or slip my arm
around her waist? Or dared I even sit closer?

Well, I didn't dare. I did nothing. I merely continued to sit there and
love with all my soul. And when we parted that evening I had not kissed
her. I do remember the first time I kissed her, on another evening, at
parting--a mighty moment, when I took all my heart of courage and dared.
We never succeeded in managing more than a dozen stolen meetings, and we
kissed perhaps a dozen times--as boys and girls kiss, briefly and
innocently, and wonderingly. We never went anywhere--not even to a
matinee. We once shared together five cents worth of red-hots. But I
have always fondly believed that she loved me. I know I loved her; and I
dre