moments of conscious power. But the "making-up" was far less
personal than the fallings-out; these, at least, meant individual
antagonisms, whereas the reconciliations were something larger
than the girl and boy--something which bore them on its current
as a river bears straws upon its breast. But they played with
that mighty current as thoughtlessly as all young creatures play
with it. Elizabeth used to take her engagement ring from the silk
thread about her neck, and, putting it on her finger, dance up
and down her room, her right hand on her hip, her left stretched
out before her so that she could see the sparkle of the tiny
diamond on her third finger. "I'm engaged!" she would sing to
herself.

"'Oh, isn't it joyful, joyful, joyful!'

"Blair's in love with me!" The words were so glorious that she
rarely remembered to add, "I'm in love with Blair." The fact was,
Blair was merely a necessary appendage to the joy of being
engaged. When he irritated her by what she called "silliness,"
she was often frankly disagreeable to him.

As for Blair, he, too, had his ups and downs. He swaggered, and
threw his shoulders back, and cast appraising eyes on women
generally, and thought deeply on marriage. But of Elizabeth he
thought very little. Because she was a girl, she bored him quite
as often as he bored her. It was because she was a woman that
there came those moments when he offended her; and in those
moments she had but little personality to him. In fact, their
love-affair, so far as they understood it, apart from its
elemental impulses which they did not understand, was as much of