and watched for the effect, but there was none. Did he know the Major?
Oh, yes, and we fell to piling item upon item in praise of the
quartermaster's virtues and good looks. Presently, with shrewdest
intent, I said the Major was fine enough to be the hero of a novel! Did
not my companion think so?

Yes, he thought so; but I believed the glow in his tone was for novels.
I extolled the romance of actual life! I denounced that dullness which
fails to see the poetry of daily experience, and goes wandering after
the mirages of fiction! And I was ready to fight him if he liked. But he
agreed with me most cordially.

"And yet," he began to add,--

"Yet what?" I snapped out, with horse eyes.

"Doesn't a good story revive the poetry of our actual lives?" He wiped
the rim of his cap with a handkerchief of yellow silk enriched at one
corner with needlework.

"Um-hm!" I thought; "Charlotte Oliver, eh?" I responded tartly that I
had that very morning met four ladies the poetry of whose actual,
visible loveliness had abundantly illustrated to me the needlessness and
impertinence of fiction! By the way, did he not think feminine beauty
was always in its ripest perfection at eighteen?

Well, he thought a girl might be prettiest at eighteen and handsomest
much later. And again I said to myself, "Charlotte Oliver!" But when I
looked searchingly into his eyes their manly sweetness so abashed me
that I dropped my glance and felt him looking at me. I remembered my