character.
He had not reduced all these unreasonable men's notions to a system by
which to measure femininity. He did not even know he had them. An
excessive constitutional refinement and keenness of perception made him
involuntarily look for such scrupulous delicacy as belonging of course
to every woman he was thrown in contact with. He had always been
disappointed, at first with a feeling of half disgust with himself and
others, that his dreams were so different from the reality. It drove him
apart from the sex, and gained him the reputation of being shy or ill
natured. After finding that disappointments repeated themselves, he
accepted them as the natural order of events, let his fancies go as the
beau ideal that he was to seek for through life, and became the
polished, unimpressible man of society.

But this little Yankee girl had of a sudden realized his ideal.
Something in their first meeting, momentary though it was, and strange
according to conventional notions, struck the chord in his heart that
was waiting silent for the magic fingers that knew the secret of waking
it. If he had fancied that those fingers would never come, or coming,
never find it, that something in his unhappy birth set him apart with
that strange pain of yearning as his portion in life, and so had tried
to forget or choke the want under commonplace attachments and ties, he
was no worse than, nor different from, the rest of humanity. But all
humanity does not meet trial as unflinchingly and honorably--does not
put temptation out of its way as purely and honestly as did this
undisciplined life. It is hard to take at once the path that duty
orders: we linger to play with possibilities, shed some idle tears,
waste life before the necessity, and go back to everyday work weakened
and scarred and aching. And once or twice in a lifetime that black,
hopeless _never_ drops down, not the less grievous and inexorable
because simply a moral obligation.

Well, only babies cry for the moon. Anything clearly impossible and out
of our reach we very soon cease sighing for. Men do not cherish a
passion which they recognize as utterly hopeless; and Clement Moore,
being a man, and moreover an honorable one, put this summer idyl out of
his head and heart with all despatch. 'All blundering is sin.' If he had
blundered in allowing it to take such hold of his life, he expiated the
sin bravely. Sympathies bud and blossom with miraculous quickness in
this tropical a