Fiancées -- Fiction; Missing persons -- Juvenile fiction; Young women -- Juvenile fiction
"Tell us about it this minute." Arline brightened visibly. Elfreda's
promised tale of tragedy was sure to turn out comedy.
"Let me see," began Elfreda with a fine air of reminiscence. "We met
last year in a corridor of the law school, I was making a wild rush down
and he was making an equally wild rush up. Result, we collided. Just
like that," Elfreda brought her hands smartly together to illustrate the
force of that momentous collision. "I wasn't overcome with joy at this
slam-bang introduction. I had seen him often from afar and never admired
him. He was at least three inches shorter than yours truly, had a snub
nose and freckles. All of which was not romantic.
"That was the beginning; but not the ending. The next time I met him, he
claimed beaming acquaintance. After that he pursued me madly. He was
always bobbing up in the most unexpected places. It gave me a feeling of
being haunted. At first I bore it like a martyr. I hated to hurt his
feelings. After a while it began to get on my nerves. About that time he
began to make sentimental remarks. I carefully explained that I did not
believe in love. That only made matters worse. He rolled his eyes and
vowed that he would convince me. Then he began sending me letters and
love lyrics. The lyrics were so original they were positively weird.
"But in my darkest hour of oppression I stumbled upon a remedy. I
happened to remember a girl who was an art student. I also remembered
that she was terribly sentimental. So I dragged my pursuer along with me
to a water-color exhibition that I knew she expected to attend. They
met. I perpetrated the introduction. It turned out even better than I
had dared to hope. The funny part of it was that both of them were
afraid I'd be angry. The deeper they fell in love, the harder they tried
to keep it from me. After a while Charles, that was my perfidious idol's
name, came to me with a long face and confessed. I suppose his
conscience troubled him. He told me that he had made a terrible mistake
in thinking himself in love with me. I humbly agreed with him that he
had. He assured me that he now knew that he could never have been happy
with me. Before he got through explaining, it struck me as being so
funny that I laughed in his face. Now he doesn't speak to me. Neither
does the girl. She evidently believes that she snatched away my last
chance."
The cheerful smile Elfreda turned on her amused listeners as she ended
her recital was hardly an indication of deep sorrow for her double loss.
"That reminds me of Emma Dean's one romance," smiled Grace. "I shan't
tell you about it. Wait until we have the reunion and I'll ask her to
dig up her sentimental past for your benefit."
"I hope I can arrange my vacation so that I can attend the reunion,
too," sighed Kathleen. "As Patience Eliot and I have been invited to be
the Sempers' guests of honor, naturally I don't care to miss it."
"Can you get away from the paper at any time during August?" asked Anne
thoughtfully.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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