me. So she let me down most
beautifully----"

"And offered to be a sister to you?"

"Perhaps; I don't remember now; I always felt embarrassed after that
when her name was mentioned. I couldn't help thinking what an infernal
ass I'd made of myself."

"It was all the fault of your friend."

"Of course it was; I'd never have dreamed of proposing to her if I
hadn't been put up to it by the match-maker. Oh, what a lot of miserable
marriages are brought on in just this way! You see when I like a girl
ever so much, I seem to like her too well to marry her. I think it
would be mean of me to marry her."

"Why?"

"Because--because I'd get tired after a while; everybody does, sooner or
later,--everybody save your Mama and Eugene,--and then I'd say something
or do something I ought not to say or do, and I'd hate myself for it; or
she'd say something or do something that would make me hate her. We
might, of course, get over it and be very nice to one another; but we
could never be quite the same again. Wounds leave scars, and you can't
forget a scar--can you?"

"You may scar too easily!"

"I suppose I do, and that is the very best reason why I should avoid the
occasion of one."

"So you have resolved never to marry?"

"Oh, I've resolved it a thousand times, and yet, somehow, I'm forever
meeting some one a little out of the common; some one who takes me by
storm, as it were; some one who seems to me a kind of revelation, and
then I feel as if I must marry her whether or no; sometimes I fear I
shall wake up and find myself married in spite of myself--wouldn't that
be frightful?"

"Frightful indeed--and then you'd have to get used to it, just as most
married people get used to it in the course of time. You know it's a
very matter-of-fact world we live in, and it takes very matter-of-fact
people to keep it in good running order."

"Yes. But for these drudges, these hewers of wood and drawers of water,
that ideal pair yonder could not go on painting and embroidering things
of beauty with nothing but the butterflies to bother them."

"Butterflies don't bother; they open new vistas of beauty, and they set
examples that it would do the world good to follow; the butterfly says,
'my mission is to be brilliant and jolly and to take no thought of the
morrow.'"

"It's the thought of the morrow, Miss. Juno, that spoils today for
me,--that morrow--who is going to pay the rent of it? Who is going to
keep it in food and clothes?