“What can I do to mend it? Do sit down and talk it over. No, really, I won’t if you’ll only sit down!”
She looked at me with a wondering distrust which was much more to my mind than her wholehearted confidence. How primitive and bestial it looks when you put it down in black and white!—and perhaps after all it is only a feeling peculiar to myself. Anyhow, she sat down.
“Now tell me what’s amiss with me?”
“I’m in love with somebody else,” said she.
It was my turn to jump out of my chair.
“It’s nobody in particular,” she explained, laughing at the expression of my face: “only an ideal. I’ve never met the kind of man I mean.”
“Tell me about him. What does he look like?”
“Oh, he might look very much like you.”
“How dear of you to say that! Well, what is it that he does that I don’t do? Just say the word—teetotal, vegetarian, aeronaut, theosophist, superman. I’ll have a try at it, Gladys, if you will only give me an idea what would please you.”
She laughed at the elasticity of my character. “Well, in the first place, I don’t think my ideal would speak like that,” said she. “He would be a harder, sterner man, not so ready to adapt himself to a silly girl’s whim. But, above all, he must be a man who could do, who could act, who could look Death in the face and have no fear of him, a man of great deeds and strange experiences. It is never a man that I should love, but always the glories he had won; for they would be reflected upon me. Think of Richard Burton! When I read his wife’s life of him I could so understand her love! And Lady Stanley! Did you ever read the wonderful