I remember, at our first meeting, in answer to some remark of hers, I said, “Nothing matters,” and she reproved me with, “Everything matters.” From that moment her cheeriness began to exert its influence upon my life, for she had immediately divined that something was wrong with me, and she determined to set it right. With a woman’s instinct she guessed it was love. A man would have put it down to liver; but a woman is sure that love is at the root of all evil. So Mrs. Merrysmile began to work in her own cheery, womanly way, and I, little suspecting her methods, lent myself to them entirely. She would draw me out every day on the subject of my love, and I, believing her to be wholly sympathetic, would tell her all that was in my heart, and she would say that she liked me to talk of that other woman. And I would do so, until, without noticing it, I talked less of her, and found that I was drifting into an interest for Mrs. Merrysmile herself, irrespective of her sympathy in my love-affair. Then this became accentuated by her persistent high spirits and jocularity, for though our surroundings of sea and cliff and cornfields, with the infinite poetry of ever-changing skies and moonlit nights, with their majestic mysteries, held me ever in the sentimental mood, and I believed her to be in tune with me, I would frequently receive a shock of discord from her sudden and unconscious leap from the sentimental to the grotesque, from the sublime to the ridiculous. She would rudely break an exquisite silence, which to me had meant a meeting of souls, a mute embrace of thoughts, with some irrelevant remark, some inconsequent gossip, which would jar upon me terribly, but which would really bring me nearer to her, for I would obstinately refuse to believe I had mistaken her soulfulness and beautiful womanliness, notwithstanding those jarring inconsistencies, which I could only regard as the excrescences of her natural cheeriness. So I grew to love her in spite of myself, and then I began to realise that Mrs. Merrysmile was really an agreeable little flirt who had only taken any trouble to cultivate my affection—which she certainly did very artistically—because I was so absorbed in the woman who had naturally grown tired of me. This, to Mrs. Merrysmile, seemed not only a great pity for myself, but a slight to her own vanity, a waste of sound affection, and to remedy it presented an interesting experiment for a few idle weeks’ occupation. Those silences which I thought so beautifully mutual in feeling, as we sat and gazed over the blue deep, and into those wonderful summer skies which seemed to contain a world’s epic in their spacious mysteries, were, after all, most humorous interludes to her, full of amusing conjecture; but she could no more help all this than she could help talking.