“If you will promise no more interruptions, I will continue my lecture: Your eyes are too far gazing into the bygone to know to-day’s bliss or to foresee a confident tomorrow. You are forgetting that while life roots in the past, it flowers in the present. To never exchange loving glances with the maiden of the moment, but to dishonor the day by looking off into the eyes of some dream darling who cannot come to your bosom is like another Enoch Arden’s hopeless gaze for a sail that never brings him again to the kisses of Annie Lee. If I mistake not, your name is a patent of your English ancestry, but without that leaf from your family tree, I should recognize you as a countryman; to be loyal to a sweetheart clasped and lost is possible only to the man whose cradle rocked between the English Channel and the Irish Sea. The Anglo-Saxon alone of all peoples can become a martyr to a memory.” Whatever will power I possessed was necessary to keep my eyes away from the “maiden of the moment.” English blood may be phlegmatic enough to turn into ice water, but a twenty-years’ acquaintance with American girls will thaw the most frozen cardiac organ and render it susceptible to the wiles of any witch of a woman who in other days might have hanged at Salem. Elizabeth’s very voice was a caress and sometimes a man forgets to pray, “Lead me not into temptation!” “The sweeter memories are in themselves,” I murmured, “the more loth one is to share them with another. If it please Your Grace, we won’t discuss the—the ‘other girl.’ When a man proposes and the woman disposes of him by a verbal spanking, sending him away, it may be to the embraces of another girl, it may be to cherish a memory, he is seldom in a frame of mind inculcated by gospel precepts. Gratitude comes later. Yet whether a man marries or whether he remains true to his ideal, he never loves any other woman quite so much as she who was pitiless to his pleading. Man’s heart is not like a Manhattan hall room with space for only one pair of shoes under the bed, but it is a St. Regis, in which there are no vacant guest chambers. The cosiest corner of a man’s heart is always reserved for the woman who has refused his hand.” Her Majesty threw up her hands in a pretty gesture of mock dismay.