“Ain’t I though, by Jove! I wish to Heaven I were not! My dear Charley, the girl is an inveterate flirt,--a decided coquette. Whether she has a particle of heart or not, I can’t say; but certainly her greatest pleasure is to trifle with that of another. Some absurd suspicion that you were in love with Lucy Dashwood piqued her vanity, and the anxiety to recover a lapsing allegiance led her to suppose herself attached to you, and made her treat all my advances with the most frigid indifference or wayward caprice; the more provoking,” continued he, with a kind of bitterness in his tone, “as her father was disposed to take the thing favorably; and, if I must say it, I felt devilish spooney about her myself. “It was only two days before I left, that in a conversation with Don Emanuel, he consented to receive my addresses to his daughter on my becoming lieutenant-colonel. I hastened back with delight to bring her the intelligence, and found her with a lock of hair on the book before her, over which she was weeping. Confound me, if it was not yours! I don’t know what I said, nor what she replied; but when we parted, it was with a perfect understanding we were never to meet again. Strange girl! She came that evening, put her arm within mine as I was walking alone in the garden, and half in jest, half in earnest, talked me out of all my suspicions, and left me fifty times more in love with her than ever. Egad! I thought I used to know something about women, but here is a chapter I’ve yet to read. Come, now, Charley, be frank with me; tell me all you know.” “My poor Fred, if you were not head and ears in love, you would see as plainly as I do that your affairs prosper. And after all, how invariable is it that the man who has been the veriest flirt with women,--sighing, serenading, sonneteering, flinging himself at the feet of every pretty girl he meets with,--should become the most thorough dupe to his own feelings when his heart is really touched. Your man of eight-and-thirty is always the greatest fool about women.” “Confound your impertinence! How the devil can a fellow with a mustache not stronger that a Circassian’s eyebrow read such a lecture to _me?_” “Just for the very reason you’ve mentioned. You _glide_ into an attachment at _my_ time of life; you _fall_ in love at _yours_.” “Yes,” said Power, musingly, “there is some truth in that. This flirting is sad work. It is just like sparring with a friend; you put on the gloves in perfect good humor, with the most friendly intentions of exchanging a few amicable blows; you find yourself insensibly warm with the enthusiasm of the conflict, and some unlucky hard knock decides the matter, and it ends in a downright fight.