led in pairs. And
strolling girls will look at strolling boys who look. (And to this day,
in any town, city, or village, in which I, in my middle age, find myself,
I look on with the eye trained of old experience, and watch the sweet
innocent game played by the strolling boys and girls who just must stroll
when the spring and summer evenings call.)

The trouble was that in this Arcadian phase of my history, I, who had
come through, case-hardened, from the other side of life, was timid and
bashful. Again and again Louis nerved me up. But I didn't know girls.
They were strange and wonderful to me after my precocious man's life. I
failed of the bold front and the necessary forwardness when the crucial
moment came.

Then Louis would show me how--a certain, eloquent glance of eye, a smile,
a daring, a lifted hat, a spoken word, hesitancies, giggles, coy
nervousnesses--and, behold, Louis acquainted and nodding me up to be
introduced. But when we paired off to stroll along boy and girl
together, I noted that Louis had invariably picked the good-looker and
left to me the little lame sister.

I improved, of course, after experiences too numerous to enter upon, so
that there were divers girls to whom I could lift my hat and who would
walk beside me in the early evenings. But girl's love did not
immediately come to me. I was excited, interested, and I pursued the
quest. And the thought of drink never entered my mind. Some of Louis'
and my adventures have since given me serious pause when casting
sociological generalisations. But it was all good and innocently
youthful, and I learned one generalisation, biological rather than
sociological, namely, that the "Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are
sisters under their skins."

And before long I learned girl's love, all the dear fond deliciousness of
it, all the glory and the wonder. I shall call her Haydee. She was
between fifteen and sixteen. Her little skirt reached her shoe-tops. We
sat side by side in a Salvation Army meeting. She was not a convert, nor
was her aunt who sat on the other side of her, and who, visiting from the
country where at that time the Salvation Army was not, had dropped in to
the meeting for half an hour out of curiosity. And Louis sat beside me
and observed--I do believe he did no more than observe, because Haydee
was not his style of girl.

We did not speak, but in that great half-hour we glanced shyly at each
other, and shyly avoided or