“Yes?” said Bettie, yawning; and she added: “Do you know, Robin, the saddest and most desolate thing in the world is to practise an étude of Schumann’s in nine flats, and the next is to realize that a man who has been in love with you has recovered for keeps?”
“—It must not be imagined, however, that Miss Hamlyn is untruthful, for when driven by impertinences into a corner she conceals her real opinion by voicing it quite honestly as if she were joking. Thereupon you credit her with the employment of irony and the possession of every imaginable and super-angelical characteristic—”
“Unless we come to a better understanding,” Miss Hamlyn crisply began, “we had better stop right here before we come to a worse—”
“—Miss Hamlyn, in a word, is possessed of no insufferable virtues and of many endearing faults; and in common with the rest of humanity, she regards her disapproval of any proceeding as clear proof of its impropriety.” This was largely apropos of a fire-new debate concerning the deleterious effects of cigarette-smoking; and when I had made an end, and doggedly lighted another one of them, Bettie said nothing. … She minded chiefly that one of us should have thought of the other without bias. She said it was not fair. And I know now that she was right.
But of Bettie Hamlyn, for reasons you may learn hereafter if you so elect, I honestly prefer to write not at all. Four years, in fine, we spent to every purpose together, and they were very happy years. To record them would be desecration.
IV
Meantime, during these years, I had fallen in and out of love assiduously. Since the Anabasis of lad’s love traverses a monotonous country, where one hill is largely like another, and one meadow a duplicate of the next to the last daffodil, I may with profit dwell upon the greensickness lightly. It suffices that in the course of these four years I challenged superstition by adoring thirteen girls, and, worse than that, wrote verses of them.
I give you their names herewith—though not their workaday names, lest the wives of divers people be offended (and in many cases, surprised), but the appellatives which figured in my rhymes. They were Heart’s Desire, Florimel, Dolores, Yolande, Adelais, Sylvia, Heart o’ My Heart, Chloris, Felise, Ettarre, Phyllis, Phyllida, and Dorothy. Here was a rosary of exquisite names, I even now concede; and the owner of each nom de plume I, for however brief a period, adored for this or that peculiar excellence; and by ordinary without presuming to mention the fact to any of these divinities save Heart o’ My Heart, who was, after all, only a Penate.
Outside the elevated orbits of rhyme she was called Elizabeth Hamlyn; and it afterward became apparent to me that I, in reality, wrote all the verses of this period solely for the pleasure of reading them aloud to Bettie, for certainly I disclosed their existence to no one else—except just one or two to Phyllida, who was “literary.”
And the upshot of all this heartburning is most succinctly given in my own far from impeccable verse, as Bettie Hamlyn heard the summing-up one evening in May. It was the year I graduated from King’s College, and the exact relation of the date to the Annos Domini is trivial. But the battle of Manila had just been fought, and off Santiago Captain Sampson and Commander Schley were still hunting for Cervera’s “phantom fleet.” And in Fairhaven, as I remember it, although there was a highly-colored picture of Commodore Dewey in the barbershop window, nobody was bothering in the least about the war except when Colonel Snawley and Dr. Jeal foregathered at Clarriker’s Emporium to denounce the colossal errors of “imperialism.” …
“Thus, then, I end my calendar
Of ancient loves more light than air;—
And now Lad’s Love, that led afar
In April fields that were so fair,
Is fled, and I no longer share
Sedate unutterable days
With Heart’s Desire, nor ever praise
Felise, or mirror forth the lures
Of Stella’s eyes nor Sylvia’s,
Yet love for each loved lass endures.“Chloris is wedded, and Ettarre
Forgets; Yolande loves otherwhere,
And worms long since made bold to mar
The lips of Dorothy and fare
Mid Florimel’s bright ruined hair;
And Time obscures that roseate haze
Which glorified hushed woodland ways
When Phyllis came, as Time obscures
That faith which once was Phyllida’s—
Yet love for each loved lass endures.“That boy is dead as Schariar,
Tiglath-pileser, or Clotaire,
Who once of love got many a scar.
And his loved lasses past compare?—
None is alive now anywhere.
Each is transmuted nowadays
Into a stranger, and displays
No whit of love’s investitures.
I let these women go their ways,
Yet love for each loved lass endures.“Heart o’ My Heart, thine be the praise
If aught of good in me betrays
Thy tutelage—whose love matures
Unmarred in these more wistful days—
Yet love for each loved lass endures.”
For this was the year that I graduated, and Chloris—I violate no confidence in stating that her actual name was Aurelia Minns, and that she had been, for a greater number of years than it would be courteous to remember, the undisputed belle of Fairhaven—had that very afternoon married a promising young doctor; and I was draining the cup of my misery to the last delicious drop, and was of course inspired thereby to the perpetration of such melancholy bathos as only a carefree youth of twenty is capable of evolving.
V
“Dear boy,” said Bettie, when I had made an end of reading, “and are you very miserable?”
Her fingers were interlocked behind her small black head; and the sympathy with which she regarded me was tenderly flavored with amusement.
This much I
