ove me. I don't wish
you--anything. Why should I wish anything of one who is nothing to
me?"

"Nothing to you! I would you were to me what I am to you!"

"What is that, pray?"

"An adorer!"

"You are a--very amusing gentleman."

"You refuse me a glimpse of hope?"

"You would like to have it as a trophy, I suppose. You men treasure
the memories of your little conquests over foolish women, as an Indian
treasures the scalps he takes."

"Lord! which sex, I wonder, has the busier scalping-knife?"

"I can't speak for all my sex. Some of us seek no scalps--"

"You don't have to. I make you a present of mine. I fling it at your
feet."

"We seek no scalps, I say,--because we don't value them a finger-snap."
And she gave a specimen of the kind of finger-snap she did not value
them at.

"In heaven's name," he said, "say what you do value, that I may strive
to become like it! What do you value, I implore you, tell me?"

"Oh,--my studies, for one thing,--my French and my music,--"

"Could I but translate myself into French, or set myself to an air!"

"Nay, I don't care for _comic_ songs!"

"I see you like flowers. If I might die, and be buried in your garden,
and grow up in the shape of a rose-bush--"

"Or a cabbage!"

"I fear you don't like that flower."

"Better come up in the form of your own Virginia tobacco."

"And be smoked by old Mr. Valentine? No, you don't like tobacco. Ah,
Miss Philipse, this levity is far from the mood of my heart!"

"Why do you indulge in it, then?"

"I? Is it I who indulge in levity?"

"Assuredly, _I_ do not!" Oh, woman's privilege of saying unabashedly
the thing which is not!

"No," said he, "for there's no levity in the coldness with which
beauty views the wounds it makes."

"I'm sure one is not compelled to offer oneself to its wounds."

"No,--nor the moth to seek the flame."

"La, now you are a moth,--a moment ago, a rose-bush,--"

"And you are ten million roses, grown in the garden of heaven, and
fashioned into one body there, by some celestial Praxiteles!"

"Dear me, am I all that?"

"Ay," he said, sadly, "and no more truly conscious of what it means to
be all that, than any rose in any garden is conscious of what its
beauty means!"

"Perhaps," she said, softly, feeling for a moment almost tenderness
enough to abandon her purpose, "more conscious than you think!"

"Ah! Then you are not like common beauties,--as poor and dull within
as they are rich and rad