“Oh, no, it’s a story all the same,” he reassured her. “Its title is Much Ado about Nobody.” “Oh? It runs in my head that I’ve met with something or other with a similar title before,” she considered. “Precisely,” said he. “Something or other by one of the Elizabethans. That’s how it came to occur to me. I take my goods where I find them. However, do you want to hear the story?” “Oh, if you’re determined to tell it, I daresay I can steel myself to listen,” she answered, with resignation. “On second thoughts, I’m determined not to tell it,” he teased. “Bother! Don’t be disagreeable. Tell it at once,” she commanded. “Well, then, there isn’t any story,” he admitted. “It’s simply an absurd little freak of child psychology. It’s the story of a boy who fell in love with a girl—a girl that never was, on sea or land. It happened in Regent Street, of all romantic places, ’one day still fierce ’mid many a day struck calm.’ I had gone with my mother to her milliner’s. I think I was ten or eleven. And while my mother was transacting her business with the milliner, I devoted my attention to the various hats and bonnets that were displayed about the shop. And presently I hit on one that gave me a sensation. It was a straw hat, with brown ribbons, and cherries, great glossy red and purple cherries. I looked at it, and suddenly I got a vision—a vision of a girl. Oh, the loveliest, loveliest girl! She was about eighteen (a self-respecting boy of eleven, you know, always chooses a girl of about eighteen to fall in love with), and she had the brightest brown eyes, and the rosiest cheeks, and the curlingest hair, and a smile and a laugh that made one’s heart thrill and thrill with unutterable blisses. And there hung her hat, as if she had just come in and taken it off, and passed into another room. There hung her hat, suggestive of her as only people’s hats know how to be suggestive; and there sat I, my eyes devouring it, my soul transported. The very air of the shop seemed all at once to have become fragrant—with the fragrance that had been shaken from her garments as she passed. I went home, hopelessly, frantically in love. I loved that non-existent young woman with a passion past expressing, for at least half a year. I was always thinking of her; she was always with me, everywhere. How I used to talk to her, and tell her all my childish fancies, desires, questionings; how I used to sit at her feet and listen! She never laughed at me. Sometimes she would let me kiss her—I declare, my heart still jumps at the memory of it. Sometimes I would hold her hand or play with her hair. And all the real girls I met seemed so tame and commonplace by contrast with her. And then, little by little, I suppose, her image faded away.—Rather an odd experience, wasn’t it?”