"I used to meet him on sunshiny mornings going to school," she said. "He was about nineteen and so pale and thin and sad-looking that I named him 'Cassius.' He walked with a crutch. One morning when the wind blew his hat off I saw that his head was very scholarly looking, so from that hour I began thinking of him every second of the time. That is one of the worst features about being in love, you can't get your mind off of the person, and if you _do_ it's on to somebody else. Now, just last week I burnt up a great batch of Turkish candy I was trying to make on account of a person's eyes. They look at you like they're kissing you!" And she fell again into a study, not a brown one this time, just a sort of light tan. "Whose? Cassius's?" I interrupted, shaking her to bring her to. "Pshaw! No! I had almost forgotten about Cassius! I've never seen anything on earth to equal this other person's eyes! But, anyway, going back to finish up with Cassius, I thought _of course_, from his walking with a crutch, that he must have had a bad spinal trouble when he was a child and used to have to sit still and be a scholar, instead of chasing cats and breaking out people's window-panes like healthy boys. I pictured out how lonely he must feel and how he must long for a companion whose mind was equal to his; and it certainly made a changed girl of me! I burnt out gallons and gallons of electricity every night studying deep things to discuss with him when I should get to know him well." "How did you know what kind of things he admired?" I asked, for some men like mathematics and some Dickens and you can't tell the difference by passing them on the street. "Well, it did make a heap of extra trouble to me," she answered, sighing as tiredly as if she had been trying on coat suits all day. "As I didn't know which was his favorite subject I had to study the encyclopedia so as to be sure to hit it." "Gee whiz!" I couldn't help saying. "Oh, that ain't all! I wrote down a list of strange words to say to him so that he could tell at a glance that I was brilliant. They were terrific words too, from aortic and actinic in the a's to genuflections in the g's. That's as far as I got." Mammy Lou called us to breakfast just then, but I could eat only four soft-boiled guinea eggs, wondering what on earth Cassius had said in reply when Jean said genuflections to him. "Pshaw! The rest isn't worth telling," she said with a weary look, as I pulled her down on the steps right after breakfast and begged her to go on about Cassius. "It ended with a disappointment--like everything else that has a man connected with it! You're a lucky girl to be in love with Lord Byron so long, for dead men break no hearts!" "Well, tell it!" I begged.