ation for my old friend deprives me of the pleasure of
robbing his diary."

I was still out of temper. "Bunsey, I don't mind favoring you
with a further confidence. You're an ass!"

With this parting shot I strode out of the library, when,
remembering the sacredness of my revelation, I turned back.

"Of course you will understand, Bunsey, that however flippantly
you may choose to regard what I have said to you, you will have
the decency to keep the subject-matter to yourself. I do not ask
your congratulations or your approval, but I demand your
secrecy."

"The ass brays acknowledgments," answered Bunsey meekly, helping
himself to another cigar. "You may rely on my loyal and devoted
interest. The fact that I have heard your secret twice before
to-day shall not open my lips or cause me to violate your trust."

Notwithstanding my attitude of indifference I was greatly
troubled by Bunsey's unfeeling suggestion. Could it be possible
that I had mistaken my own heart? Was I, yielding, as I had
believed, to the first strong passion of my life, only deluding
myself with a remembrance of my vanished youth? I dismissed the
thought impatiently. For, after all, was not Bunsey a hopeless
cynic, a fellow without a single emotion of the ennobling
sentiment of man toward woman, a sordid story-teller, who created
characters for money, wrecked homes, committed literary murders,
played unfeelingly on the tenderest sensibilities, and boasted
openly that the only angels were those made by a stroke of the
pen and retailed at department store book-counters? And while
thus reasoning Phyllis came to me, so winsome in her girlish
beauty, so radiant in the happiness I had infused into her life,
so joyous in the pleasures of the present, that I laughed at my
own doubts, reproached myself for my own unworthy suspicions, and
straightway forgot both Bunsey and his evil promptings.

Love at eight and forty is a very pleasant and indolent emotion,
marking the most delightful stage in the progress of the great
human passion. At twenty-five we talk it; at thirty-five we act
it; at forty-five it is pleasant to sit down and think about it.
The very young man loves without really analyzing. Ten years
later he analyzes without really loving. In another decade he has
compounded the proportions of love and analysis, and becomes,
under favoring conditions, the most dangerous and hence the most
acceptable of suitors. The man in middle life takes hi