“I met her in the Adirondacks, and knew her only one summer. After that, I couldn’t see her just as a friend—and she was unwilling to be anything else to me. So, all my life, I’ve associated her with the woods and lakes, with the sincerity and wholesomeness of the great Outdoors. She had the freedom of Diana, and her lack of self-consciousness. I never saw her except roughly clad, but she always suggested that line of Virgil—‘She walked the goddess.’
“She was strong and lithe as a boy, could climb mountains, row, play golf and tennis with any of us; and what a good sport. She never fussed over getting caught in drenching rains, being bruised and torn by rocks and thorns; and once when a small party of us lost our way, and had to spend the night on a lonely mountainside within sound of wolves and catamounts, her gayety made a ‘lark’ of it. She could drive horses with a man’s steady hands; she knew the birds by name, and all the plants and trees that grew within miles, and she was familiar with the tracks and habits of all the small creatures of the forest. To me she was—simply wonderful, and, I confess, always has been.”
“What became of her?” they asked.
“Later, she married—a man who didn’t know a pine from a palm! I always wondered....”
The Diplomat came next.
“That sort,” he said, “is a little too independent and upstanding to belong to my type of woman. The rough, tanned skin, the strong, capable hands—big, probably—the woolen skirt and blouse—they’ll do very well in a girl chum, for a summer. But when it comes to a wife, one’s demands are different. The girl I wanted first—and I’ve never forgotten her; she was a queen—I knew during my first winter in Washington. You talk of Diana; I prefer Venus—wholly feminine, but never cloying. She was the kind that looks best in thin, clinging things. I remember yet a shimmering green and silver ‘creation’ she wore at the Inaugural Ball. She didn’t take hikes with me through scratchy forests, but she’d dance all night long, and her little feet would never tire. She didn’t handle guns or tillers, but you should have seen her pretty fingers deftly managing the tea things in a drawing-room, of a winter’s afternoon, or playing soft, enchanting airs on the piano at twilight; or, for the matter of that, placing a carnation in a man’s button-hole—I can feel her doing it yet! She probably didn’t know birds, but, by George! she knew men! And there wasn’t one of us young fellows that winter that wouldn’t gladly have had her snare him. Only—that was the one thing she didn’t do!”
“Didn’t she ever do any snaring?”
“Oh—finally. And—the pity of it!—a man who couldn’t dance, and had no use for Society! Sometimes....”
“How about you?” the third member of the group was asked, an Engineer of national reputation. “Was there a first best girl for you, too?”
“Guilty!” he replied. “But my account will sound prosaic after these others. You know, my early days weren’t given to expensive summer camps, nor to Washington ballrooms. I made my own way through college, and ‘vacations’ meant the hardest work of the year. But when I was a Senior, all the drudgery was transformed. Paradise wouldn’t have been in it with that little co-educational college campus and library and chapel and classrooms; for I found her. Just a classmate she was. You tell how your girls dressed; I never noticed how she dressed; it might have been in shimmering green and silver, and it might have been in linsey-woolsey, for all I knew. But—she could think, and she could talk! We discussed everything together, from philosophy and the evolution of history to the affairs of the day. I spent every hour with her that I could, and in all sorts of places. There’s a spot in the stackroom of the old library that I always visit yet, when I go back—because of her. I’ve never known a woman since with such a mind, such breadth and clearness; and it showed in her face—the face of Athena, not Diana or Venus! I believed that with such a companion at my side, to turn to in every perplexity, I could make my life worth while. But she—saw it differently.”