“Wait till you hear. I defended it, of course, and said: ‘It isn’t as easy as it looks to make birthday odes.’ ‘It certainly doesn’t _look_ difficult—to make _that_ kind,’ he said. ‘Then why,’ I said, just to stand up for Eddie, ‘why have you never written a poem about my airy tread?’ And Louis said: ‘Well, there may be another reason, but no girl who stands five foot ten in her stockings and weighs a hundred and fifty pounds need ask it.’ _That’s_ the kind of thing.” It was an incident Miss Bella loved to recall. No man could be really in love with a girl he had said _that_ to. But some months later, Hildegarde was obliged, according to the code, to report that Cheviot had been “going on” again. Bella insisted on having all the “horrid details.” “It was last night at the taffy pulling. You know how we’d all been laughing at his stories of Miss Monk meeting the Carters’ black cow—” “Yes, yes.” “Well, I was laughing so I couldn’t stop, and it was so warm in that room the candy was melting. You remember he said—” “Oh, yes,” said Bella, with feeling, “_I_ remember. He said you must come and pull with him.” “—out in the porch where the candy and I would cool off.” “And you went.” “And he made more jokes on the way out. I begged him not to talk any more, for I’d got into a silly mood and everything he said made me laugh. ‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘I labor under the fatal disadvantage of the funny man, but I could make you serious you know.’ And then—then—he had the impertinence—to kiss me.” “Oh, Hildegarde!” “Yes. It was dreadfully grotesque, too—our hands were stuck together by that great yellow rope of taffy, and I could only stammer and get redder. But I did say I was not going to forgive him. Nobody had ever been so rude to me before. Then he got awfully serious and said all kinds of things—” “_What_ kind?” “And at last he asked me what was wrong with Ch-Cheviot—your old joke, you know.” Bella clenched her hands. Sacrilege! to present _her_ joke to another girl! She had always imagined that would be just how he would propose to her. He would say: “Bella, my beautiful, what’s the matter with Ch-Cheviot?” “Well, go on.” “If I didn’t like him enough he said, what sort of man _was_ I going to like? And I thought it only fair to give him some idea, so I tried to soften it by laughing a little—I’d forgiven him by then, you know, for he’d said _such_ things—” “What things?” “Oh, sorry kind of things, and he looked so—so—well, I’d forgiven him. But I told him plainly that if it ever is a question of the sort of man I am to care for, it won’t be some one who is just nice and makes me have a good time. It will be some great, gloomy creature who makes me cry—and lifts me to the stars. I was laughing, but I meant it—and I said: ‘I’d worship _that_ kind of man.’” “What did he say then?” “Well, he looked sort of down I thought, so I said: ‘You wouldn’t let me worship you, even if I could.’ ‘I’d let you love me,’ he said.”