The Princess Aline | Page 4

of their very young hearts, but
had to sue for it like any ordinary mortal. Carlton always felt as though
some day some one would surely come along and say: "Look here,
young man, this talent doesn't belong to you; it's mine. What do you
mean by pretending that such an idle good-natured youth as yourself is
entitled to such a gift of genius?" He felt that he was keeping it in trust,
as it were; that it had been changed at birth, and that the proper
guardian would eventually relieve him of his treasure.
Personally Carlton was of the opinion that he should have been born in
the active days of knights-errant--to have had nothing more serious to
do than to ride abroad with a blue ribbon fastened to the point of his
lance, and with the spirit to unhorse any one who objected to its color,
or to the claims of superiority of the noble lady who had tied it there.
There was not, in his opinion, at the present day any sufficiently
pronounced method of declaring admiration for the many lovely
women this world contained. A proposal of marriage he considered to
be a mean and clumsy substitute for the older way, and was
uncomplimentary to the many other women left unasked, and marriage
itself required much more constancy than he could give. He had a most
romantic and old-fashioned ideal of women as a class, and from the age
of fourteen had been a devotee of hundreds of them as individuals; and

though in that time his ideal had received several severe shocks, he still
believed that the "not impossible she" existed somewhere, and his
conscientious efforts to find out whether every women he met might
not be that one had led him not unnaturally into many difficulties.
"The trouble with me is," he said, "that I care too much to make
Platonic friendship possible, and don't care enough to marry any
particular woman--that is, of course, supposing that any particular one
would be so little particular as to be willing to marry me. How
embarrassing it would be, now," he argued, "if, when you were turning
away from the chancel after the ceremony, you should look at one of
the bridesmaids and see the woman whom you really should have
married! How distressing that would be! You couldn't very well stop
and say: `I am very sorry, my dear, but it seems I have made a mistake.
That young woman on the right has a most interesting and beautiful
face. I am very much afraid that she is the one.' It would be too late
then; while now, in my free state, I can continue my, search without
any sense of responsibility."
"Why"--he would exclaim--"I have walked miles to get a glimpse of a
beautiful woman in a suburban window, and time and time again when
I have seen a face in a passing brougham I have pursued it in a hansom,
and learned where the owner of the face lived, and spent weeks in
finding some one to present me, only to discover that she was
self-conscious or uninteresting or engaged. Still I had assured myself
that she was not the one. I am very conscientious, and I consider that it
is my duty to go so far with every woman I meet as to be able to learn
whether she is or is not the one, and the sad result is that I am like a
man who follows the hounds but is never in at the death."
"Well," some married woman would say, grimly, "I hope you will get
your deserts some day; and you WILL, too. Some day some girl will
make you suffer for this."
"Oh, that's all right," Carlton would answer, meekly. "Lots of women
have made me suffer, if that's what you think I need."
"Some day," the married woman would prophesy, "you will care for a

woman so much that you will have no eyes for any one else. That's the
way it is when one is married."
"Well, when that's the way it is with ME," Carlton would reply, "I
certainly hope to get married; but until it is, I think it is safer for all
concerned that I should not."
Then Carlton would go to the club and complain bitterly to one of his
friends.
"How unfair married women are!" he would say. "The idea of thinking
a man could have no eyes but for one woman! Suppose I had never
heard a note of music until I was twenty-five years of age, and was then
given my hearing. Do you suppose my pleasure in music would make
me lose my pleasure in everything else? Suppose I met and married a
girl at twenty-five. Is that going