“Pooh! Who cares!” you sniff, with a curl of the lip.
Thus lapses behind you the Sixth Love; and although you have a faint vision of her parading, to meet your eyes, your most despised enemy, whom, in bravado, she had immediately adopted, memory indicates that you were unaffected by the sight, save to sneer, and that already the Seventh Love was engrossing your attention.
For there was a Seventh Love, and an Eighth, and more besides, to constitute a long train of wee, innocent heart-troubles as evanescent as a dream, but at their time just as real; until from this series of shallow, dancing ripples of Boy’s Love, lo! one day you suddenly emerged upon the deep ocean of Man’s Love, and anchored in the quiet haven where She awaited—She, the gracious embodiment of the best in these her girlish predecessors.
NOON
NOON
AFTER all, it is no fun posing at being a man. It is not, as you would inform the other boys, the pleasant sinecure that it is currently presumed to be, amongst your kind. The picture has more depth than appears at the distance. As you approach, you note only the surface tints; but when you have arrived, then begin to unfold aspects previously quite unsuspected.
So now, having had experience, you fain would turn back, and doffing for all time those starchy, heavy, strait-jacket garments which you have mistakenly donned, you would resume the free-and-easy blouse and knickerbockers and tattered brim, and would rejoin your gay brethren of school and vacation. You have learned your lesson, and you will leave them no more.
So be it. But alas, unavailingly you stop on your way down-town, beside the vacant lot where the other boys are playing ball, and look wistfully in upon them. None yells: