"It would be rather fun to make a date with her at some absurd, impossible place,—say a ferry-boat, for instance."
"Nonsense," said Brignoli, "a ferry-boat is not romantic enough. She wouldn't think of coming to a ferry-boat to meet her ideal!"
"She would come anywhere," declared Gottschalk, not at all vaingloriously, but as one stating a simple truth. "I'll make her come; and you shall come too and see her do it!"
"Will you bet?" asked Brignoli.
"I certainly will," replied Gottschalk.
They promptly put up quite a large sum of money and Gottschalk won. That dear, miserable goose of a girl did go to the ferry-boat to meet the illustrious pianist of her adoration, and Brignoli was there to see. If only girls knew as much as I do about the way in which their stage heroes take their innocent adulation, and the wicked light-heartedness with which they make fun of it! But they do not; and the only way to teach them, I suppose, is to let them learn by themselves, poor little idiots.
As I look back I feel a continual sense of outrage that I mixed so little with the people and affairs that were all about me; interesting people and important affairs. My dear mother adored me. It is strange that we can never even be adored in the particular fashion in which we would prefer to be adored! My mother's way was to guard me eternally; she would have called it protecting me. But, really, it was a good deal like shutting me up in a glass case, and it was a great pity. My mother was an extraordinarily fine woman, upright as the day and of an unusual mentality. Uncompromising she was, not unnaturally, according to her heritage of race and creed and generation. Yet I sometimes question if she were as uncompromising as she used to seem to me, for was not the life she led with me, as well as her acceptance of it in the beginning, one long compromise between her nature and the actualities? At any rate, where she seemed to draw the line was in keeping me as much as possible aloof from my inevitable associates. I led a deadly dull and virtuous life, of necessity. To be sure, I might have been just as virtuous or even more so had I been left to my own devices and judgments; but I contend that such a life is not up to much when it is compulsory. Personal responsibility is necessary to development. Perhaps I reaped certain benefits from my mother's close chaperonage. Certainly, if there were benefits about it, I reaped them. But I very much question its ultimate advantage to me, and I confess freely that one of the things I most regret is the innocent, normal coquetry which is the birthright of every happy girl and which I entirely missed. It is all very well to be carefully guarded and to be made the archetype of American virtue on the stage, but there is a great deal of entirely innocuous amusement that I might have had and did not have, which I should have been better off for having. My mother could hardly let me hold a friendly conversation with a man—much less a flirtation.
