"Charming, highly delightful, very promising," I replied, with a happy combination of diffidence and child-like openness of manner.
He gave me a look out of his shrewd old eyes. "So attractive a person will be an acquisition to the regiment," he remarked, and let me pass on to my tent.
I am half-asleep. Good-night!
Robert Adair.
Camp Everett, June, 1861.
Things go on grandly at the camp, and between ourselves the colonel has just said that Company B is better disciplined than any other in the regiment—a compliment I'm very proud of, coming, as it does, from an old West Point martinet.
And now for the second part of my idyl. Every afternoon, Vaughan and I go up to his place and smoke awhile in the orchard. Then, by accident—it is wonderful, the unerring accuracy of accident at times—we appear at the east window of the green parlor, and there are Miss Vaughan and her niece, sewing or drawing, and sometimes Miss Sybil sings, to the accompaniment of a charming Pleyel piano, canzonets of Haydn in a style as fine, as pure, as exquisite as the composition. She—Sybil, I mean—has never danced a German or heard Faust! Duly shielded by the presence of aunt or brother, she is sometimes taken to hear the Nozze di Figaro or to see Hamlet, or to some other unexceptionable afternoon entertainment. I smile sometimes to see her absolute ignorance of life, and wonder that, in a village not twenty miles distant from a city where the world runs riot, this being has sprung into womanhood, unconscious of the existence of anything less spotless than herself.
This guarded life has given to her manners a certain high breeding that would keep one at a distance but for her kind, frank nature. No one can venture to fancy himself distinguished above others.
Do you know what this makes me feel? That hitherto, and I am nearly twenty-five years old, I have looked at women with a coxcomb's eyes. Any day, any hour, I feel ready to throw myself on her mercy, but an instinct tells me that her love must be won by something better than professions. When I have suffered in the cause she loves well enough to give her only brother to defend it, then I will speak.
Noblesse oblige—I see that in a certain lofty sense this is the motto of her life, and it shall be mine. Do you remember what our dear old philosopher used to say in the scientific school? "The better you begin, the harder is the work before you." And when we asked what he meant, he only said, "Noblesse oblige." It is true, whether the noblesse acts upon us in the form of intellectual strength or of spiritual gifts, or in the old material sense of inherited rank.