VI + 

“Will you not have me, lady?” I began that afternoon. + 

“No, my lord,” she demurely responded, “for I’ve decided it would be too much like living in my Sunday-clothes.” + 

And “I give it up. So what’s the answer?” was my annotation. + 

“Oh, I’m not making jokes today. Why are you so⁠—Oh, as we used to say at school,” she re-began, “Que diable allais-tu faire dans cette galere?” + 

“I was born in a vale of tears, Elena, and must take the consequences of being found in such a situation.” + 

She came to me, and her fingertips touched my hand ever so lightly. “That is another quotation, I suppose. And it is one other reason why I mean not to marry you. Frankly, you bore me to death with your erudition; you are three-quarters in love with me, but you pay heaps less attention to what I say about anything than to what Aristotle or some other old fellow said about it. Oh, that I should have lived to be jealous of Aristotle! Indeed I am, for I have the misfortune to be hideously in love with you. You are so exactly the sort of infant I would like to adopt.” + 

“Love,” I suggested, “while no longer an excuse for marriage, is at least a palliation.” + 

“Listen, dear. From the first I have liked you, but that was not very strange, because I like almost everybody; but it was strange I should have remembered you and have liked the idea of you ever since you went away that first time.” + 

“Oh, well, this once I will excuse you⁠—” + 

“But it happened in this way: I had found everybody⁠—very nice, you know⁠—particularly the men⁠—and the things which cannot be laughed at I had always put aside as not worth thinking about. You like to laugh, too, but I have always known⁠—and sometimes it gets me real mad to think about it, I can tell you⁠—that you could be in earnest if you chose, and I can’t. And that makes me a little sorry and tremendously glad, because, quite frankly, I am head over heels in love with you. That is why I don’t intend to marry you.” + 

And I was not a little at sea. “Oh, very well!” I pleasantly announced, “I shall become a prominent citizen at once, if that’s all that is necessary. I will join every one of the patriotic societies, and sit perpetually on platforms with a perspiring water-pitcher, and unveil things every week, with felicitous allusions to the glorious past of our grand old State; and have columns of applause in brackets on the front page of the Courier-Herald. I will even go into civic politics, if you insist upon it, and leave round-cornered cards at all the drugstores, so that everybody who buys a cigar will know I am subject to the Democratic primary. I wonder, by the way, if people ever survive that malady? It sounds to me a deal more dangerous that epilepsy, say, yet lots of persons seem to have it⁠—” + 

But Elena was not listening. “You know,” she re-began, “I could get out of it all very gracefully by telling you you drink too much. You couldn’t argue it, you know⁠—particularly after your behavior last Tuesday.” + 

“Oh, now and then one must be sociable. You aren’t a prude, Elena⁠—” + 

“However, I am not really afraid of that, somehow. I even confess I don’t actually mind your being rather good for nothing. No woman ever really does, though she has her preference, and pretends, of course, to mind a great deal. What I mean, then, is this: You don’t marry just me. I⁠—I have very few relations, just two brothers and my mother; yet, in a sense, you know, you marry them as well. But I don’t believe you would like being married to them. They are so different from you, dear. Your whole viewpoint of life is different⁠—” + 

I had begun to speak when she broke in: “No, don’t say anything, please, until I’m quite, quite through. My brothers are the most admirable men I ever knew. I love them more than I can say. I trust them more than I do you. But they are just good. They don’t fail in the really important things of life, but they are remiss in little ways, they⁠—they don’t care for the little elegantnesses, if that’s a word. Even Arthur chews tobacco when he feels inclined. And he thinks no man would smoke a cigarette. Oh, I can’t explain just what I mean⁠—” + 

“I think I understand, Elena. Suppose we let it pass as said.” + 

“And Mamma is not⁠—we’ll say, particularly highly educated. Oh, you’ve been very nice to her. She adores you. You won her over completely when you took so much trouble to get her the out-of-print paper novels⁠—about the village maidens and the wicked dukes⁠—in that idiotic Carnation Series she is always reading. The whole affair was just like both of you, I think.” + 

“But, oh, my dear⁠—!” I laughed. + 

“No, not one man in a thousand would have remembered it after she had said she did think the titles ‘were real tasty’; and I don’t believe any other man in the world would have spent a week in rummaging the secondhand bookstores, until he found them. Only I don’t know, even yet, whether it was really kindness, or just cleverness that put you up to it⁠—on account of me. And I do know that you are nice to her in pretty much the same way you were nice to the negro cook yesterday. And I have had more advantages than she’s had. But at bottom I’m really just like her. You’d find it out some day. And⁠—and that is what I mean, I think.” + 

I spoke at some length. It was atrocious nonsense which I spoke; in any event, it looked like atrocious nonsense when I wrote it down just now, and so I tore it up. But I was quite sincere throughout that moment; it is the Townsend handicap, I suspect, always to be perfectly sincere for the moment. + 

“Oh, well!” she said; “I’ll think about it.” + 