“Why?”
“Well, it takes all choice away. Heavens! You might be destined to marry the lamp-lighter! I shouldn’t want to catch anything from ‘Aurora.’”
“Aurora,” the lamp-lighter, was one-armed and weather-beaten and gnarled like an ancient mariner; his classical name was a Levering invention.
The winding Wissahickon curled over its rocks far below, and thick trees covered every hill. An occasional carriage passed, mostly elegant broughams with liveried footmen and milady taking her afternoon drive; bicycles whizzed by with much churning of warning bells. Near the “Hill” Miss Levering cut off into a secluded side-road roofed by old trees.
Keyser Levering was twenty-two, and had been grown up and more or less her own master since she was fifteen; yet she felt just a little self-conscious on two counts. First she was alone in the secluded woodland with a young man. Of course, a chaperone would have been absurd; America had adopted the European chaperone for only very official affairs. In the ’80’s she would not have thought of going to the theater with him without elderly assistance, but she was permitted by the code to take him driving up the Wissahickon.
Secondly, she had dared openly to discuss with him the awful topic of love. To be sure, they had done it in an academic setting. Who could object to a learned consideration of Elizabethan literature? Nevertheless, she was not unmindful of the personal modern application of Elizabethan “theory.”
She did not want to become personally involved. Her instincts would have fought off any attempt on the young man’s part to bring the topic up to date; yet she found herself, mothlike, desiring him to do just that. His Elizabethan theory of maidens disturbed by unknown forces, holding out willing hands to nameless gentlemen, and hardly sure of recognizing the rescuer when he appeared—that was not only a startling idea to her, but it struck surprisingly near a description of her own state.
For a year or more she had been in a stupor of daydreams over that “not impossible He” that should command her heart and her. He took no visible shape in her mind, but remained near and yet disappointingly aloof and shadowy. Sometimes she had the palpitating feeling that he was just around the corner, that his nearing foot-falls could be heard. At other times she was sure she was dancing with him or talking to him over a dinner table. Many a young man was flattered by her searching gaze or by the subtle intimacy which she contrived to throw into a simple personal question.
Once during the previous winter Blynn had been frightened off by one of these moods of hers, and she knew it and was ashamed. The last thing she meant to do was to apprise this young man of her quest. He was being probed and cross-questioned; that was all; but he had not understood, and had misnamed her, coquette.
This pleasant jog among the leafy bowers of the Wissahickon, charged as it was by thoughts of Gorgas and her perilous rendezvous with Bardek, caused the professor to recast his idea of Keyser Levering. They had talked of love, to be sure, and she had held to the topic deliberately; yet with her eye and a considerable part of her attention necessarily on the horses, she had carried on the chat strictly like a graduate student. Of course, she knew the man. One flashing side-long glance from her fine, brown eyes would have sent him flying to cover and to silence.