"Oh, that ain't all! I wrote down a list of strange words to say to him so that he could tell at a glance that I was brilliant. They were terrific words too, from aortic and actinic in the a's to genuflections in the g's. That's as far as I got."
Mammy Lou called us to breakfast just then, but I could eat only four soft-boiled guinea eggs, wondering what on earth Cassius had said in reply when Jean said genuflections to him.
"Pshaw! The rest isn't worth telling," she said with a weary look, as I pulled her down on the steps right after breakfast and begged her to go on about Cassius. "It ended with a disappointment—like everything else that has a man connected with it! You're a lucky girl to be in love with Lord Byron so long, for dead men break no hearts!"
"Well, tell it!" I begged.
"Oh, it's too disgusting for words, and was a real blow to a person of my nature! The idiot didn't have spinal trouble at all, I learned it from a lady who knew his mother. He had only sprained his knee, just a plain, every-day knee, with playing basket-ball at school, which was all the good school ever did him, the lady said. My life has certainly been full of disillusions!"
"But, you've learned what genuflections means," I reminded her, for I think people ought to be thankful for everything they learn by experience, whether it's from an automobile or an auction house.
Pretty soon after this we heard the sound of horses' feet (when I saw who it was riding them I just couldn't say hoofs), so Jean and I ran to the front door. We were very glad when we saw who it was, for if it hadn't been for this couple we should have had little to talk about down here in the country except telling each other our dreams and what's good to take off freckles.
It was Miss Irene Campbell riding past our house, with Mr. Gerald Fairfax, her twin flame, in swell tan leggins that come to his knee. Miss Irene comes down here sometimes to spend the summer with her grandmother, Mrs. West. She used to know Mr. Fairfax so well when they were little that there were always several planks off of the fence so they could visit together without going all the way around to the gate. But he grew up and went one direction and she went another and they didn't see each other again until late last summer; but they saw each other then, oh, so often! And they found that they must be twin flames from the way their "temperaments accord."
I had heard Doctor Gordon say that I was of a nervous temperament and was wondering whether or not this was the kind you could have a twin flame with; but father says the temperament that Mr. Fairfax and Miss Irene have is what makes affinities throw skillets at each other after they've been married two weeks. But these two are not going to marry, for their friendship is of the spirit. They talk about incarnations and "Karma," which sounds like the name of a salve to me. Sometimes he seems to like her looks as much as her soul, and says she's a typical maid of Andalusia. I learned about Andalusia out of Washington Irving too, so I know he thinks she's pretty. She has some splendid traits of character, mother says, which means I reckon that she doesn't fix her hair idiotically just because other women do, nor use enough violet sachet to out-smell an automobile.
Miss Irene is very sad, both on account of her liver and her lover. Mrs. West says the books she reads are enough to give anybody liver complaint, but she has had a disappointment lately that is enough to give her appendicitis.