Georgiana has been chilly towards me for two days, and I think is doing her best not to freeze up altogether. I have racked my brain to know why; but I fear that my brain is not of the sort to discover what is the matter with a woman when nothing really is the matter. Moreover, as I am now engaged to Georgiana, I have thought it better that she should begin to bring her explanations to me—the steady sun that will melt all her uncertain icicles.
At last this morning she remarked, but very carelessly, "You didn't answer my note."
"What note, Georgiana?" I asked, thunderstruck.
She gave me such a look.
"Didn't you get the note I put into that—into that—" Her face grew pink with vexation and disgust.
"Did you put a note into the—into the—" I could not have spoken the word just then.
I retired to my arbor, where I sat for half an hour with my head in my hands. What could have become of Georgiana's note? A hand might have filched it; unlikely. A gust of wind have whisked it out; impossible. I debated and rejected every hypothesis to the last one. Acting upon this, I walked straight to the saddle-house, and in a dark corner peered at the nest of the wrens. A speck of white paper was visible among the sticks and shavings. I tore the nest out and shook it to pieces. How those wrens did rage! The note was so torn and mudded that I could not read it. But suppose a jay had carried it to the high crotch of some locust! I ran joyfully back to the window.
"I've found it, Georgiana!" I called out.
She appeared, looking relieved, but not exactly forgiving.
"Where!"
My tongue froze to the roof of my mouth.
"Where did you find it?" she repeated, imperiously.
"What do you want to know for?" I said, savagely.
"Let me see it!" she demanded.
My clasp on it suddenly tightened.
"Let me see it!" she repeated, with genuine fire.
"What do you want to see it for?" I said.
She turned away.
"Here it is," I said, and held it up.
She looked at it a long time, and her brows arched.
"Did the pigs get it?"
"The wrens. It was merely a change of post-office."
"I'd as well write the next one to them," she said, "since they get the letters."
Georgiana was well aware that she slipped the note into the nest when they were looking and I was not; but women—all women—now and then hold a man responsible for what they have done themselves. Sylvia, for instance. She grew peevish with me the other day because my garden failed to furnish the particular flowers that would have assuaged her whim. And yet for days Sylvia has been helping herself with such lack of stint that the poor clipped and mangled bushes look at me as I pass sympathetically by them, and say, "If you don't keep her away, we'd as well be weeds!"
The truth is that Sylvia's rampant session in school, involving the passage of the Greatest Common Divisor—far more dreadful than the passage of the Beresina—her blue rosettes at the recent Commencement, and the prospect of a long vacation, together with further miscellany appertaining to her age and sex, have strung the chords of her sentimental being up to the highest pitch. Feeling herself to be naturally a good instrument and now perfectly in tune, Sylvia requires that she shall be continually played upon—if not by one person, then by another. Nature overloads a tendency in order to make it carry straight along its course against the interference of other tendencies; and she will sometimes provide a girl with a great many young men at the start, in order that she may be sure of one husband in the end. The precautionary swarm in Sylvia's case seems multitudinous enough to supply her with successive husbands to the end of her days and in the teeth of all known estimates of mortality. How unlike Georgiana!
I think of Georgiana as the single peach on a tree in a season when they are rarest. Not a very large peach, and scarcely yet yielding a blush to the sun, although its long summer heat is on the wane; growing high in the air at the end of a bough and clustered about by its shining leaves. But what beauty, purity, freshness! You must hunt to find it and climb to reach it; but when you get it, you get it all—there is not a trace left for another. But Sylvia! I am afraid Sylvia is like a big bunch of grapes that hangs low above a public pathway: each passer-by reaches up and takes a grape.
I caught some one taking a grape the other evening—a sort of green grape. Sylvia has been sending bouquets to the gosling who was her escort on the evening of her Commencement—him of the duck trousers and webbed feet. On one occasion I have observed her walking along the borders of my garden in his company and have overheard her telling him that he could come in and get flowers whenever he wished. I wish I might catch him once.
To cap the climax, after twilight on the evening in question, I strolled out to my arbor for a quiet hour with thoughts of Georgiana. Whom should I surprise in there but Sylvia and the gosling! deep in the shadow of the vines. He had his arm around her and was kissing her.
"Upon my honor!" I said; and striding over to him I thrust my hand under his coattails, gripped him by the seat of his ducks, dragged him head downward to the front fence and dropped him out into the street.
"Let me catch you in here kissing anybody again!" I said.
He had bit me viciously on one of my calves—which are sizable—as I had dragged him along; so that, I had been forced to stoop down and twist him loose by screwing the end of his spongy nose. I met him on the street early the next morning, and it wore the hue of a wild plum in its ripeness. I tapped it.
"Only three persons know of your misbehavior last night," I said. "If you ever breathe it to a soul that you soiled that child by your touch, the next time I get hold of you it will not be your nose: it will be your neck!"
My mortification at Sylvia's laxness was so keen that I should have forborne returning to the arbor had I not felt assured that she must have escaped to the house through modesty and sheer shame. But she had not budged.
"I blush for you, Sylvia!" I exclaimed. "I know all about that fellow! He shouldn't kiss—my old cat!"
"I don't see what you have to do with it!" said Sylvia, placidly. "And I have waited to tell you that I hope you will never interrupt me again when I am engaged in entertaining a young gentleman."
"Sylvia, my dear child!" I said, gravely, sitting down beside her.
"How old are you?"
"I am of the proper age to manage my own affairs," said Sylvia, "with the assistance of my immediate family."
"Well, I don't think you are," I replied. "And since your brother is at West Point, there is one thing that I am going to take the liberty of telling you, which the other members of your family may not fully understand. If you were younger, Sylvia, you might do a good deal of this and not be hurt by it; or you might not be hurt by it if you were a good deal older; but at your age it is terrible; in time it will affect your character."
"How old must I be?" said Sylvia, wickedly.
"Well, in your case," I replied, warmly, a little nettled by her tone, "you'd better abstain altogether."
"And in your case?" said Sylvia.
"You never mind my case!" I retorted.
"But I do mind it when I suffer by it," said Sylvia. "I do mind it if it's going to affect my character!"
"You know very well, Sylvia," I replied, "that I never kissed you but three times, and then as a brother."
"I do not wish any one but my brother to kiss me in that way," said Sylvia, with a pout of contempt.
It seemed to me that this was a fitting time to guide Sylvia's powers of discrimination as to the way she should act with indifferent