"Any answer?"
I unfolded the note, and this is what I read:
I'm stuck on you. Will you keep company with me?
I had to laugh, though I knew my furiously red swain was watching me anxiously.
"Any answer?" again asked the boy. I wrote on a piece of paper the one word, "Maybe."
People who have called me clever, talented, etc.,—oh, all women writers get accused of such things!—have not really reckoned with a certain weak and silly side of my character. If as I proceed with this chronicle I shock you with the ease and facility with which I encouraged and accepted and became constantly engaged to men, please set it down to the fact that I always felt an inability to hurt by refusing any one who liked me enough to propose to me. I got into lots of trouble for this,—call it moral lack in me,—but I could not help it at the time. Why, it's just the same way that I once felt in a private Catholic hospital, and little Sister Mary Eulalia tried to convert me. Out of politeness and because I loved her, I was within an ace of acknowledging her faith, or any other faith she might choose.
If you could have seen the broad smile of satisfaction that wreathed the face of my first stock-yards "mash," you, in my place, would not have regretted that little crumb of hope that I had tossed him. Yet I had no more intention of "keeping company" with him that I had of flying.
It pleases me much to record that on this my first day in the yards I received three "mash" notes, which one of the girls later told me "was going it some for fair."
My second note was a pressed flower, accompanied by these touching lines:
The rose is red; the violet's blue,