I knocked, and an attractive slip of a girl (her niece, as I learned) answered. I was shown into a long, dustless, darkened parlor. After giving me time to weigh the taste and affluence of her relatives according to my standards, she arrived, the beloved, the beautiful. In view of many later sadder things, it seems that here at least I might attempt to do her full justice. She seemed exquisite to me then, a trim, agreeable sylph of a girl, with a lovely oval face, stark red hair braided and coiled after the fashion of a Greek head, a clear pink skin, long, narrow, almond-shaped, gray-blue eyes, delicate, graceful hands, a perfect figure, small well-formed feet. There was something of the wood or water nymph about her, a seeking in her eyes, a breath of wild winds in her hair, a scarlet glory to her mouth. And yet she was so obviously a simple and inexperienced country girl, caught firm and fast in American religious and puritanic traditions and with no hint in her mind of all the wild, mad ways of the world. Sometimes I have grieved that she ever met me, or that I so little understood myself as to have sought her out. I first saw her, after this long time, framed in a white doorway, and she made a fascinating picture. Here, as in Chicago, she seemed shy, innocent, questioning, as one who might fly at the first sound. I gazed in admiration. Despite a certain something in her letters which had indirectly assured me of her affection or her desire for mine, still she held aloof, extending a cool hand and asking me to sit down, smiling tenderly and graciously. I felt odd, out of place, and yet wonderfully drawn to her, passionately interested. What followed by way of conversation I cannot remember now—talk of the Fair, I suppose, some of those we had known, her summer, mine. She took my roses and pinned some of them on, placing the rest in a jar. There was a piano here, and after a time she consented to play. In a moment, it seemed, it was twelve-thirty, and I had to go. I walked on air. It seemed to me that I had never seen any one more beautiful—and I doubt now that I had. There was no reason to be applied to the thing: it was plain infatuation, a burning, consuming desire for her. If I had lost her then and there, or any time within a year thereafter, I should have deemed it the most amazing affair of my life.