Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/251

 if one could forget the well-nigh cosmic depravity of it; but Miss Caroline, it appeared, was not able to forget. She confided as much to Marcella Eubanks and Aunt Delia McCormick, intimating that while she was doubly desirous to be pleased because of her position as an outsider, she was, nevertheless, a silly old woman, encrusted with prejudice, and she could not deny that she found this song suggestive. Her eyes glistened when she said it, and Marcella felt like pinning a white ribbon to her then and there.

Escorting Miss Caroline to her home that night, I listened to her account of this colloquy and found myself wishing that matters had been different. It seemed to me that I must ultimately become the victim of a romantic passion for her, and I told her as much when we parted.

Gossip, the yellow-tongued dragon, had been tracked to its lair and done to death, or at least that one of its heads had been smitten off which babbled slander of Miss Caroline.

Thenceforth she and I were free to think upon other matters. And there were these other matters in both our lives.

As to most of them we did not hold speech together. Our intimacy as yet lay quite within a circle so charmed that it might not be entered by things too personal to either of us. By a kind of tacit treaty we brought thither none but those affairs which invited a not too serious tone. Our late common life had provided an abundance of these, and they had