‘If I tell you, you won’t laugh at me or let anybody else know?’
‘Never.’
‘Then I will tell you,’ she said quite seriously. ‘’Tis because I get tired o’ my lovers as soon as I get to know them well. What I see in one young man for a while soon leaves him and goes into another yonder, and I follow, and then what I admire fades out of him and springs up somewhere else; and so I follow on, and never fix to one. I have loved FIFTEEN a’ready! Yes, fifteen, I am almost ashamed to say,’ she repeated, laughing. ‘I can’t help it, sir, I assure you. Of course it is really, to ME, the same one all through, on’y I can’t catch him!’ She added anxiously, ‘You won’t tell anybody o’ this in me, will you, sir? Because if it were known I am afraid no man would like me.’
Pierston was surprised into stillness. Here was this obscure and almost illiterate girl engaged in the pursuit of the impossible ideal, just as he had been himself doing for the last twenty years. She was doing it quite involuntarily, by sheer necessity of her organization, puzzled all the while at her own instinct. He suddenly thought of its bearing upon himself, and said, with a sinking heart—
‘Am I—one of them?’
She pondered critically.
‘You was; for a week; when I first saw you.’
‘Only a week?’
‘About that.’
‘What made the being of your fancy forsake my form and go elsewhere?’