his own tongue. Put her back in her Welsh castle, and the scales
would fall from her as from a mermaid who loves. If she returns to
her father at the end of the season, I think I will call upon her six
months later. She should go now, though; scales are apt to corrode.
But what is the mystery about the mother? Did she elope with the
coachman? But, no; that is strictly a modern freak of fashion. Perhaps
she died in a mad-house. Not improbable, if she had anything of the
nature of this girl in her, and Sir Iltyd sowed the way with thorns
too sharp. Poor girl! she is too young for mysteries, whatever it is.
I shall like to know her better, but she is so intense that she makes
me feel frivolous. I am never intense except when I have the blues,
and intensity, with my peculiar mental anatomy, is a thing to be
avoided. In what is invariably the last chapter of those attacks of
morbid dissatisfaction I shall some day feel an intense desire to blow
out my brains, and shall probably succumb. I wonder if she will induce
another rhyming attack to-night. Was that night a dream or a reality?
Could I have had a short but sharp attack of brain fever? Perhaps
the less I think about it the better; but it is decidedly hard to be
gifted with the instincts of a poet and denied the verbal formulation.
And it was the most painfully realistic, aggressively material
thing, that conflict in my brain, that mortal ever experienced. That,
however, may have been a mere figment of my excited imagination.
But what excited my imagination? That is the question. If I remember
aright, I was mentally discoursing with some enthusiasm upon Miss
Penrhyn's charms, but in strict impartiality it cannot be said that
I was excited. The excitement was like that produced by an onslaught
from behind. It is the more surprising, as I think it may be conceded
that I have myself pretty well in hand by this time, and that my
nerves, unruly as nature saw fit to make them, are now my very abject
slaves. Occasionally one of our fiction carpenters flies off at a