humanity ... make me handsome, too, O God, so that girls and women will
love me, and wonder at me, in awe, while I pass by unperturbed--till one
day, having kept myself wholly for _her_ as she has kept herself for
me,--give me then the one wonderful and beautiful white maiden who will
be mine ... mine ... all and alone and altogether, as I shall be all and
alone and altogether hers. And let me do things to be wondered at by
watching multitudes, while bands play and people applaud."

Such was my mad, adolescent prayer, while the stars seemed to answer in
sympathetic silence. And I would both laugh and weep, thrilled to the
core with ineffable, enormous joy because of things I could not
understand ... and I would want to shout and dance extravagantly.

* * * * *

The Jenkins girls were curious about me, and while they, together with
the rest of the feed merchant's family, thought me slightly "touched,"
still they liked the unusual things I said about the stars ... and about
great men whose biographies I was reading ... and about Steele's Zoology
I was studying, committing all the Latin nomenclature of classification
to heart, with a curious hunger for even the husks and impedimenta of
learning....

Silvia was a rose, half-opened ... an exquisite young creature. Alva was
gawky and younger. She was callow and moulting, flat-footed and
long-shanked. Her face was sallow and full of freckles.

In the long Winter evenings we sat together by the warmth of the kitchen
stove, alone, studying our lessons,--the place given over entirely to us
for our school work.