“Don’t, please. That gets on my nerves.”
The moody girl is hyper-nervous.
Here is another story of her. She was my visitor, and I led her to a seat and spoke of this and that. She listened absently, then said, as she glanced at a penny bunch of sweet violets distant from her by the length of a large room—
“Would you mind that bouquet’s being taken away? I smell to agony.”
Rather unamiable that, but not intentionally unamiable. Now there are moody girls who are intentionally unamiable—Baubles, for instance. We call her by that name, because she has the word “baubles” much on her lips, and in sound it is not very remote from Barbara, which is her baptismal name.
Baubles is always in deadly earnest; that one may be in lively earnest she does not dream. Another thing; she knows that there is such a thing as “a foolish face of praise.” She has still to learn that there is such a thing as a foolish face of blame. Bauble’s face is her misfortune. In the following I give a conversation which I once had with another girl regarding her.
“She loves you,” said this other girl.
“Does she?” I asked, pleased, but surprised. “She looks at me as if I were especially abhorrent to her.”
“She always,” was the answer, “looks like that at people whom she loves.”