certainly better to be the only one who doesn't appreciate it
than to be the only one who does."

He had never understood why such a responsibility had been
intrusted to him. It was, as he expressed it, not at all in
his line, and young girls who sought to sit at the feet of the
master found him making love to them in the most charming
manner in the world, as though he were not entitled to all the
rapturous admiration of their very young hearts, but had to
sue for it like any ordinary mortal. Carlton always felt as
though some day some one would surely come along and say:
"Look here, young man, this talent doesn't belong to you; it's
mine. What do you mean by pretending that such an idle
good-natured youth as yourself is entitled to such a gift of
genius?" He felt that he was keeping it in trust, as it were;
that it had been changed at birth, and that the proper
guardian would eventually relieve him of his treasure.

Personally Carlton was of the opinion that he should have been
born in the active days of knights-errant--to have had nothing
more serious to do than to ride abroad with a blue ribbon
fastened to the point of his lance, and with the spirit to
unhorse any one who objected to its color, or to the claims of
superiority of the noble lady who had tied it there. There
was not, in his opinion, at the present day any sufficiently
pronounced method of declaring admiration for the many lovely
women this world contained. A proposal of marriage he
considered to be a mean and clumsy substitute for the older
way, and was uncomplimentary to the many other women left
unasked, and marriage itself required much more constancy than