I told her no, although I knew a little about him myself, even if he wasn't in that easy Shakespeare that Lamb wrote for kids. And she seemed to be lost in thought, so I got lost too. It never is hard for me to. I thought: "Mercy, how I have grown!" When I first commenced keeping this diary I just despised poetry, and never cared about keeping my hair tied out of my eyes, nor my hands clean. You know that age! But I soon got over that, for when you get a little bigger being in love causes you to admire poetry and also to beautify yourself. Jean and I tried very sour buttermilk (the sourer the better) to make our complexion lovely, with tansy mixed in, until it got so sour that mother said, "Whew! There must be a rat dead in the walls!" So we had to pour it out.
In looking over my past life it seems to me that I've been in love with somebody or other ever since that night so long ago, when Mammy Lou washed me and dressed me up in my tiny hemstitched clothes. And with such lovely heroes, too! When I was awfully little I used to be crazy about the prince that the mermaid rescued while Hans Christian Andersen stood on the beach and watched them. Then I loved Ben Hur from his pictures when I was ten, John Halifax when I was eleven, Lord Byron when I was twelve—I loved him then, do now, and ever shall, world without end, Amen! It is so much easier to love good-looking people than good ones! And, oh, every handsome young Moor, who ever dwelt in "the moonlit halls of the Alhambra!" Washington Irving will have a heap to answer for in the making of me. And I used to dream about "Bonny Prince Charlie," although Miss Wilburn never could hammer it into my head which one of the Stuarts he was. And actors! Well, I would try to make a list and write it on the fly-pages, only it might be a bad example to my grandchildren; then, too, there are so very few fly-pages.
But I started out to tell how much I've changed since I began this book, for now I not only adore poetry, I write it! Fully a quart jar full I've written since I found the first buttercup this spring. An ode to Venus, an ode to Venice, and a world of just plain odes. Mammy Lou washed out a preserves jar and put it on my desk for me to stick them in. It saves trouble for her.
Jean soon woke up out of her brown study and commenced telling about Cassius.
"I used to meet him on sunshiny mornings going to school," she said. "He was about nineteen and so pale and thin and sad-looking that I named him 'Cassius.' He walked with a crutch. One morning when the wind blew his hat off I saw that his head was very scholarly looking, so from that hour I began thinking of him every second of the time. That is one of the worst features about being in love, you can't get your mind off of the person, and if you do it's on to somebody else. Now, just last week I burnt up a great batch of Turkish candy I was trying to make on account of a person's eyes. They look at you like they're kissing you!" And she fell again into a study, not a brown one this time, just a sort of light tan.
"Whose? Cassius's?" I interrupted, shaking her to bring her to.
"Pshaw! No! I had almost forgotten about Cassius! I've never seen anything on earth to equal this other person's eyes! But, anyway, going back to finish up with Cassius, I thought of course, from his walking with a crutch, that he must have had a bad spinal trouble when he was a child and used to have to sit still and be a scholar, instead of chasing cats and breaking out people's window-panes like healthy boys. I pictured out how lonely he must feel and how he must long for a companion whose mind was equal to his; and it certainly made a changed girl of me! I burnt out gallons and gallons of electricity every night studying deep things to discuss with him when I should get to know him well."
"How did you know what kind of things he admired?" I asked, for some men like mathematics and some Dickens and you can't tell the difference by passing them on the street.
"Well, it did make a heap of extra trouble to me," she answered, sighing as tiredly as if she had been trying on coat suits all day. "As I didn't know which was his favorite subject I had to study the encyclopedia so as to be sure to hit it."
"Gee whiz!" I couldn't help saying.