"I dare say my father knew that, to many a girl, it wouldn't really matter much whether she married Harry Wilbur, or any other nice convenient person; but to _me_--" "Come down this street," Ethan said. "You don't want to get into that mob." He felt himself to be in one of those positions where to turn left or right, to go forward or go back, is equally to find offence and suffering. "It doesn't matter about me; I must think of her," he said to himself. At all hazards he must not forget that the girl at his side was little more than a child. He could neither explain to her why he was bound in honor to leave her, nor must he leave her with any haunting memory of the pain this going cost him. She had turned obediently when he suggested the side-street. "Oh, I'm certain of it"--she brought one tight-clinched hand with a quick movement to her breast--"nobody ever cared like this before. Just look at their faces." She stopped on the corner, eying, with a kind of impersonal disdain, the people that passed up the church-steps. "You can see from their faces they've never cared--like this." "Come," said Ethan, nervously, "they'll wonder why we are hanging about." "Most people are only half alive," she said, walking on; "they don't feel, they don't hear, they don't see, they don't even smell." Ethan began to laugh almost hysterically. "They can't turn such unexpected corners, anyhow," he said. His laughter seemed a little to clear the atmosphere. "You don't believe?" she inquired. "No, I suppose people _wouldn't_ believe. But I've felt quite dizzy with joy at smelling hay after a rain. Heliotrope makes me want to laugh and sing. Violets make me feel meek and wistful; but they all _do_ something to me. You, now, simply dislike the pungent smell of marigolds. I feel it stick into me like a kind of goad. But I oughtn't to tell anybody." She sighed. "Why not?" "Even you laughed." "Forgive me, dear." For the "dear" sake she smiled up at him, thrilling. "Oh, I forgive you, though I don't much like the idea of having told you--even that much." "What nonsense! You must tell me everything." "Must I?" She moved closer to his side. "Only I should like you to have a good opinion of me--and--well, to care so much about smell, I'm afraid, is very vulgar." "Oh, I don't think so." "Novelists do. They are ready to tell you her hearing was 'most sensitive,' and all about his 'eagle eye,' that nothing escaped, but they are too refined to say nothing escaped the heroine's nose. Your friends the poets, too, have a very low opinion of smell. Of course, if I could always remember to call it 'fragrance,' it would be better, but I don't always mean fragrance." "No, no," he laughed. "I admit that smell used to be the poor relation of the senses, and was kept decently in the background; but over in France _nous avons changé tout cela_." "Oh, well, that's all right, then." "You aren't going to church?" "Of course not."