trifles, into their willing ears: when they see a flood of moonlight
filling the earth with its soft stillness, they immediately long to
animate the scene by their own presence, but, with some treasured
beauty, leaning on one arm, and looking bewitchingly into their love-lit
eyes, every emotional sight, sound or feeling, brings to them the
possible intensity of a gratified love, the fruits, they _might_ gather
from their own sentiment, if they had power to indulge it. This is why
we meet so many dreamy, romantic girls, who are ever on the _qui vive_,
expecting the hero, with deep eyes and heavy moustaches, that never
comes. Girls who see more beauty, and poetry, and romance, in the
distant "red light of a cigar" twinkling through the darkness, on some
quiet night, than in all the stars of heaven combined; girls who expect
that every silent, handsome man, who gives them a passing glance (of
aimless curiosity) is a wonderful character, just stepped over the
threshold of some of Ouida's or The Duchess' volumes, ready to seize
them in his steady arms, if they sprain an ankle, or faint over some
fright; ready to rescue them from some terrible accident, and then fall
violently in love, marry them, but, unlike the book, in reality, "live
in miserable wretchedness for ever after."

Such also are those _yearning_ men, who are ever taking flights into the
delightful world of the ideal--men, who try, with a pair of plentiful
eyes, to conquer "female heartdom," who think to find the "open sesame"
to that valuable depository, by knocking the practical element out of
life, and by grasping at chance, in the dim, soulful, dreamy, intense,
abstract world of thought. Men, who the punster would say in the dewy
twilight or still moonlight, are _pie_ously all for _soul_, but who in
the raw early afternoon are _sole_ly all for _pie_.

But from a suspicion of an inclination to such influence, I must surely