"Yes, I had so vividly pictured to myself Martha's love that I had finally come to think myself the heroine of it.
"Thus, of course, disenchantment could not fail to come.
"And if only the two had made some further effort to keep pace with the flights of my imagination! But the longer Robert remained in our house, the more I watched Martha's intercourse with him, the more did I become convinced that all interest was unnecessarily wasted upon them.
"She--the type of a timid, insipid, housewife, subject to any fatality of every-day life.
"He--a clumsy, dull, work-a-day fellow, incapable of any degree of emotion.
"In this strain I philosophised as long as the bitter feeling that I was unnoticed and superfluous wholly filled my soul. Then there came an event which not only disposed me to be more lenient, but also gave a new direction to my ideas about this stranger cousin.
* * * * *
"It was on the fourth day of his visit when he unexpectedly stepped up to me and said:
"'Little one, I have a request to make to you. Will you come out for a ride with me?'
"'What an honour,' replied I.