“Talk to you about that by and by.” He was indisposed to have too much made of the incidents of the morning. Why, he could hardly have explained. He did not want Miss Lyndsay discussed. Perhaps this was what the doctors call a prodrome—of a malady known to man and maid. Love may, like other forces in life, assume many forms before it unmasks and we know it as love. The correlation of forces obtains in the world of the emotions as well as in that of matter.
“How confoundedly queer you are sometimes, Fred! I can wait, I suppose; but I don’t see why.”
“Oh, because my mind is an absolute vacuum. That is a rather interesting thought, Oliver, quite worthy of Boston! Fancy an entire mental vacuum! Is it any more possible than a physical one? Don’t you think there may be a zero of thought, as of cold—or of heat, I should say?”
“Nonsense!” cried Ellett.
“Want to know? Do you? Well, I was seriously thinking that when we can get photographs in colors, it will be a delightful thing to collect sunsets.”
“I don’t care a continental malediction for sunsets, or thought-zeroes, either. What’s the matter with you? Michelle says you shot a bear, or a young woman—I am not sure which. He was a little mixed about it. But why you should—”
“I was only chaffing you, old man.” He was really, and like a child, putting off an inevitable annoyance. He knew he must talk of it all to his friend, and felt himself ridiculously unwilling either to make it seem grave or to treat it as a matter for jesting comment. Not to understand the cause of your own states of indecision is, for the habitually decisive, most unpleasant, and yet silence may make a thing seem important which is not.
“What happened, Oliver, was this.” And he quietly narrated the incidents of the morning.
“I congratulate you, Fred.”
“And why?”