books of travel, translator, and, in general, magazine writer. Says
Albert H. Smith in the volume on Taylor in the "American Men of
Letters" series: "He was a man of talent, and master of the mechanics
of his craft. On all sides he touched the life of his time." Henry A.
Beers, in his "Initial Studies in American Letters," says that in his
short stories, as in his novels, "Taylor's pictorial skill is greater,
on the whole, than his power of creating characters or inventing
plots." In the present selection, however, he has both conceived an
original type of character in the mysterious heroine, and invented an
ingenious situation, if not plot, and so, in one instance at least, has
achieved a short story classic._

WHO WAS SHE?
BY BAYARD TAYLOR
[Footnote: Reprinted by permission. From "The Atlantic Monthly" for
September, 1874.]

Come, now, there may as well be an end of this! Every time I meet your
eyes squarely, I detect the question just slipping out of them. If you
had spoken it, or even boldly looked it; if you had shown in your
motions the least sign of a fussy or fidgety concern on my account; if
this were not the evening of my birthday, and you the only friend who
remembered it; if confession were not good for the soul, though harder
than sin to some people, of whom I am one--well, if all reasons were
not at this instant converged into a focus, and burning me rather
violently, in that region where the seat of emotion is supposed to lie,
I should keep my trouble to myself. Yes, I have fifty times had it on
my mind to tell you the whole story. But who can be certain that his
best friend will not smile--or, what is worse, cherish a kind of
charitable pity ever afterward--when the external forms of a very
serious kind of passion seem trivial, fantastic, foolish? And the worst
of all is that the heroic part which I imagined I was playing proves to
have been almost the reverse. The only comfort which I can find in my
humiliation is that I am capable of feeling it. There isn't a bit of a
paradox in this, as you will see; but I only mention it, now, to
prepare you for, maybe, a little morbid sensitiveness of my moral
nerves.

The documents are all in this portfolio under my elbow. I had just read
them again completely through when you were announced. You may examine
them as you like afterward: for the present, fill your glass, take
another Cabana, and keep silent until my "ghastly tale" has reached its
most lame