The Masonic fellowship of course was male, but Burns was not forgetting his obligations as a member of the Bachelors’ Club. His own statements and Gilbert’s, already quoted, show a succession of passing infatuations with various girls whose names, even, are doubtful, and of whose personalities the most ardent legend-mongers can scarcely summon up a wraith. By comparison with such shadows as Anne Rankine and Mary Morison, even Nellie Kilpatrick who stirred the poet’s blood for a single harvest, and Peggy Thomson, who overset his trigonometry at Kirkoswald, are three-dimensional. The one figure who half emerges from the shadows is Alison (or Ellison) Begbie. Burns met her in 1780 or 1781, but understanding of the matter is not clarified by the possibility that some of the five letters supposed to have been addressed to her may really be drafts of the love-letters he frequently wrote for his friends. Assuming them all to be Alison’s, they prove mainly that Burns had not yet learned much about women. If ever farm-lass was wooed in such stilted and temperate phrases it is pretty certain that she was not in this humour won. Burns’s intentions were serious; he wanted to marry Alison. Unfortunately the intentions made him serious too. He seemed afraid to commit himself in writing. A bystander is not surprised that Alison refused the man who told her that her company never gave him those giddy raptures so much talked of among lovers, and who announced that in his opinion married life was only friendship in a more exalted degree. It did surprise Burns. Indeed the shock of it led him subsequently to charge her with having jilted him, a difficult feat when his own letters prove she had never accepted him. No doubt she had merely employed the ancient technique of mild and noncommittal encouragement while she was making up her mind. Burns had prided himself on his skill in letter-writing and on his address with women. To be flatly rejected the first time he made a serious proposal upset him for several months. It also completed his sentimental education. Thereafter, until he met Clarinda, he knew better than to do his courting by post.