teeth mortify me. He used to be engaged to Elizabeth Hamilton Carter,
the niece of the lady at whose house I am boarding this summer, but he
did something he ought not to have done, or he didn't do something he
ought to have done, and they had a fuss. No one seems to know the
cause of it, but it was probably from her wanting him to be blind to
everything on earth but her, and a man isn't going to be blind when he
wants to see, and then she got _hurt_. I'd rather live in a house with
a cackling hen or a grunting pig than the sort of person who is always
getting hurt. But she's very pretty. Pink-and-white pretty, with
uplifting eyes and a little mouth that shuts itself when mad and says
nothing, and oozes more disagreeableness than if it talked. He still
thinks there isn't another girl in town who can touch her in looks. I
don't suppose a man ever gets over a real case of pink-and-white. It's
the kind that makes a tender memory if it isn't the best sort to live
with, and men like to have a memory to sigh over in secret. Her
rejected one may sigh in secret, but in public he does not seem to be
suffering. He isn't suffering. We like each other very much.

The reason I am glad I am in love is that I am sixteen and I was
getting afraid I wasn't ever going to fall in love. Three or four
times I have thought I was in it, but I wasn't, and I was beginning to
be sure I was the sort of person who doesn't fall. And, besides, it is
good for Billy, who, because he is twenty, thinks he is old enough to
have some things settled which there is no need to settle too soon.
Settled things are not exciting. I love excitement and not knowing
what a day may bring forth. Billy doesn't. He wants his ducks to be
always in a row.

Ever since he fished me out of the water-barrel sunk in Grandmother
Hatley's garden, when I was four and he eight, he has seemed to think I