In silence I nursed a challenging in my breast, where love should have lain secure and warm; and I wrapped the feverish, mewling thing in envy, jealousy, and sullen pride,--fit rags to swaddle such a waif. For once, coming upon Penelope unawares, I did see her gazing upon a miniature picture of Steve Watts, done bravely in his red regimentals. Which, perceiving me, she hid in her bosom and took her milk-pails to the orchard without a word spoken, though the colour in her face was eloquent enough. And very soon, too, I had learned for sure what I already believed of her, that she was a very jade; for it was plain that she had now ensnared Nick, and that they were thick as a pair o' pup hounds, and had confidences between them in low voices and with smiles. Which my coming checked only so far. For it was mostly to him she spoke openly at table, when, the smoking dishes set, she took her seat between us, out o' breath and sweet as a sun-hot rose. God knows they were not to blame; for in one hour I might prove glum and silent as a stone; and in another I practiced carelessness and indifference in my speech; and in another, still, I was like to be garrulous and feverish, insisting upon any point raised; laughing without decent provocation; moody and dull, loquacious and quarrelsome by turns,--unstable, unhinged, out o' balance and incapable of any decent equilibrium. Oh, the sorry spectacle a young man makes when that sly snake, jealousy, hath fanged him! And my disorder was such that I knew I was sick o' jealousy and sore hurt of it to the bones, yet conducted like a mindless creature that, trapped, falls to mutilating itself. And so I was ever brooding how I might convince her of my indifference; how I might pain her by coldness; how I might subtly acquaint her of my own desirability and then punish her by a display of contempt and a mortifying revelation of the unattainable. Which was to be my proper self. Jealousy is sure a strange malady and breaketh out in divers disorders in different young men, according to their age and kind. I was jealous because she had been courted by others; was jealous because she had been caressed by other men; I was wildly jealous because of Steve Watts, their tryst by the lilacs; his picture which I discovered she wore in her bosom; I was madly jealous of her fellowship with my old comrade, Nick, and because, chilled by my uncivil conduct and by my silences, she conversed with him when she spoke at all. And for all this silly grievance I had no warrant nor any atom of lucid reason. For until I had seen her no woman had ever disturbed me. Until that spring day in the flowering orchard I had never desired love; and if I even desired it now I knew not. I had certainly no desire for marriage or a wife, because I had no thought in my callow head of either.