"I don't know," I answered weakly.
And I don't know! Oh, Jane, your simple experiment proposition is abouit to become compound quadratics.
Then I got a still further surprise.
"I wouldn't in the least mind telling Mr. James how I like him—if you think it is all right," Nell mused, looking pensively at the first pale star that was rising over Old Harpeth. "I would enjoy it, because I have always adored him, and it would be so interesting to see what he'd say."
"Nell," I said suddenly with determination, "do it! Tell any man you like how much you like him—and see what happens."
"I feel as if—as if"—Nell faltered and I don't blame her; I wouldn't have said as much to her—"I feel that to tell Mr. James I love him would ease the pain, the—pain—that I feel about Polk. It would be so interesting to tell a man a thing like that."
"Do it!" I gasped, and went foot in the class in romantics.
If any jungle explorer thinks he has mapped and charted a woman's heart he had better pack up his instruments of warfare and recorders and come down to Glendale, Tennessee.
Nell and I must have talked further along the same lines, but I don't remember what we said. I have recorded the high lights on the conversation, but long after I lost her I kept my whirlwind feeling of amazement. It was like trying to balance calmly on the lid of the tinder-box when you didn't know whether or not you had touched off the fuse.
Has honeysuckle-garbed Old Harpeth been seeing things like this go on for centuries and not interrupted? I think I would have been sitting there questioning him until now, if Lee and Caroline hadn't stopped at the gate and called to me.