Having bolted your dinner, you retire to the barn loft to revel in the missive. The double sheet of miniature stationery has a rosebud imprinted at the top.
Alas! underneath are the thorns.
Friend Will: No, I don’t have George Brown to run races with any more, but I have somebody lots better, and we run races every night. Don’t you wish you knew who it was, smartie?
Even yet the lines rankle. They but indicate the tenor of the whole letter—a letter from which you failed, no matter how earnestly you pored over it, to obtain one grain of comfort.
You try her again, with another clumsy essay at wit. Answer never comes, and for a while you sneak about afraid that the truth will leak out, and you be made a butt by your schoolmates.
The queen is dead! Live the queen! This Fourth Love is a “new girl,” a stranger who one morn dawns upon your vision in the school-room. She is an adorable creature, with blue eyes, golden hair, and a bridling air that challenges your attention. With joy you learn, at home, that your folks know her folks; and when your mother proposes that you go with her to make a friendly call, so that “the little girl won’t get lonesome for want of acquaintances,” you accede unhesitatingly.
You are presented at court, and, sitting with her upon the sofa, do your best to be entertaining while the elders chat about “help” and church. You grasp, from her sprightly remarks, that she is well accustomed to boy admirers. She speaks of her “fellow”! She writes to him! He “felt awful bad” to have her leave! Beside hers, your experience in the ways of the world—particularly boy-ways and girl-ways, mingled—appears pitifully meager, and beneath her assertions and giggling sallies you are ofttimes ill at ease.
Impressed with her value, you depart, escorting your mother; and that night, before you go to sleep, you firmly resolve to win this girl or perish.
The Fourth Love resolves into a sad thing of mawkish sentiment. You are not given to mooning or spooning. You are too healthy. Drop-the-handkerchief, clap-in and clap-out, post-office—these tumultuous kissing games, open and aboveboard, are the alpha and omega of the caresses in your set. However, the new girl instils another element, hitherto foreign to the social intercourse.
