“I cannot by the farthest stretch of my imagination picture myself as feeling the least, the slightest—oh, the most infinitesimal!—featherweight of interest in any man again so long as my life shall last. I broke my engagement last night simply on that account. It was not in the most formal sense an engagement, since it hadn’t been announced; but Henry made as much fuss as if I had turned back at the altar. He was frantic, especially as I could give him no reason except that I did not feel for him what I had expected to. He begged and begged to know what he had done to change me. I could only tell him he had done nothing. I had simply become incapable of caring. I think now that I fell in love too often and too intensely in my younger days. My ‘grand passion’ came too soon and since then I have cared less and less each time that I have fancied my interest intrigued. The absurd boy was my Sun-god—and yet I see now that he is and always was a ridiculous person, and I laugh when I remember how I glorified him to myself. He meant nothing. Price Gleason meant nothing. Laurence Grover, Paul Arthur, Capt. Williams, and all the others meant nothing. Henry, so long and tediously a pursuer, means nothing now. None of them mean anything. The spring has gone dry and my heart, that bloomed once so eagerly, is desert sand—desert sand, my dear!” She was rather pleased with this bit of metaphor and read it over aloud, speaking the words lingeringly. Upon the wall beyond the pretty desk there was a mirror facing her; she could see herself when she chose, and she chose to see herself now in her mood of poetic melancholy. She saw a winsome picture in that mirror, too, when she made this choice—an exquisitely fair, delicate creature, slim, though not so fragile as she had been, and, in spite of her heart of desert sand, all alive indeed. Probably induced by pleasure in the metaphor just written, the young lady in the glass was at the moment more sparkling, in fact, than seemed suitable. Therefore, her face became poignantly wistful—an effect so excellent that a surprised approbation was added, a little incongruously, to the wistfulness. The approbation was removed in favour of an inscrutable pathos, which continued throughout a long exchange of looks between the image and its original; then both of these little blonde heads bent once more above their green-painted desks, in a charmingly concerted action, like two glints of sunshine glancing down through foliage;—and the letter was resumed.