Who can tell what passes in the heart of a woman? Who can read her as she reads her letters over there in the corner of the summer hotel verandah? Who can say what she is thinking there in the shadow of the birch-tree picking off the petals? “He loves me--he loves me not”--no, surely something more modern. What could be more piquing than that partnership--nature and a woman? If she chooses to take another member into the firm, that is her affair. If she has a tryst, who shall have the meanness to wish any more or less than that he may not keep her waiting an unseemly time--or that she may not have followed a habit she has, and have gone absently to the wrong place? Yet she may have chosen to walk alone and to let the summer pass and the hectic colors of the dying season flaunt themselves in her face without giving a sign. Who can say what passes in the mind of a woman? When she opens the book of her own heart, and turns to the last page first to see how the thing comes out, is she not puzzled sometimes to find all the print running backward? Who can say, if a fairy came out of the wood, what manner of choice she would ask of that fairy, what fortune she would consider sweetest, what form of man she would ask for her Prince Charming? How small the chance that she knows what she wants, or that if she did know she would regard it as safe and symmetrical not to ask for the opposite? In the old romances the dead leaves crackled, and the cavalier of her dreams whispered the soft right word in her ear, and she murmured “Yes!” spelling it with two letters and a capital N as in the present hour. Would the gallant of the past be to her liking to-day? Would she receive him civilly, or would she tease and taunt him in her provoking modern way, abusing the qualities she liked in him, sending him away because she didn’t want him to go, telling him that he should never win her because she had begun to fear that he would? [Illustration] [Illustration] Neither the brusqueness nor the diffidence of the Puritan lover would be likely to please her. The Puritan lover would lack a great many of the qualities she now admires in men, chief among these, mayhap, the quality of not being too solemn. She is far from Puritan severity herself, and she would, I fear, see him go with a sigh of relief. In the quality of not being too solemn, she might find the beau of Louis XVI.’s time more to her liking, though his eagerness to draw his sword for her would certainly make her laugh. She never would appreciate the romance of his dainty duels.