Miss Stanley was nearly the whole time by my side, and I found myself more and more charmed with her. I was flattered by her manner, and felt that there would be great satisfaction in gaining her approval in my future career at Woolwich.
“I shall always look out for your name in the papers,” she said, “to see when you get any prizes. I saw your name in the Times as having passed when I was at Brussels, and I was so glad.”
“I am not likely to get any prizes,” I replied, “except my commission; that will be a good prize.”
“Oh, you are certain to get some if you try for them! Why, see how well you have done already. I am certain if young men had some one to back them up, and give them encouragement, there would not be so many failures as there are. I think there is nothing so charming as an intellectual, clever man!”
I did not know what to reply to this remark, for I was not only very young but very inexperienced at that time, and was not aware of a fact which I believe experience has since taught me, viz, that young ladies usually like a man who is not intellectual, but who can talk any amount of what is termed nonsense, whilst it is usually middle-aged ladies who seek after intellect and prefer the society of those who possess it.
A week passed at General Holloway’s like a dream, and it came to an end as suddenly, as the General was taken seriously ill, and we all had to leave. Before I left I had confessed to Helen Stanley that I was desperately in love with her, and that I should never be happy without her; but to my utter discomfiture she informed me that she was engaged to her cousin, and had been so from a child, though she did not care for him one bit. I believed fully when I heard this that I should never be happy again, and that I should wander about one of those “blighted beings” that one hears and reads of, and occasionally sees, who have been disappointed in love, and who never recover from it; but I am happy to say that, though for many days I felt terribly desolate, and seemed to live without a purpose, yet before I had been a week at the Academy I had begun to laugh at my own folly in having fallen in love in less than a week with Miss Helen Stanley.