This, then, my reader, is the way we talk while we write this story; some account of which I thought might interest you; and it was after a discussion like that just recorded that we three agreed (by a strictly party vote of two to one) that our lovers must, for the rest of the book, be reduced to a single pair. We reached this decision at the conclusion of our labors on the forty-fifth chapter. We also settled it to our own satisfaction, that by the time our future readers had reached this stage in our story, they would probably be consumed with curiosity to know whether it was Lucy or Mary, that, with the Don, was to constitute that favored pair. The fact is, it had now begun to dawn upon us that (although we knew better) we had actually given the supposed reader some right to look upon our mysterious hero as an emissary from Utah. So putting our heads together, we decided that it was time that he showed his colors. With a view to forwarding this end, therefore, I requested Alice and Charley to give me some account of a certain interview had between them, when the former had endeavored to discover from him which of the two girls had captured the Don. For Alice had often told me that she had made up her mind, on the night before that dinner at Oakhurst, to make an attack on the redoubtable Mr. Frobisher on that day, with this information in view. And she had formed this resolution owing to something that had occurred between Mary and herself.
It appears that on the night previous to this dinner, that reserve which Mary had shown Alice ever since the Don had crossed her path had suddenly given way. The two girls had gone to bed together, as was their wont. The Don’s visits to Oakhurst had been growing in frequency, and it was understood that this dinner was given in his honor.
“What, aren’t you asleep yet?” said Alice.
“No,” said Mary. Something in her voice touched her friend.
“You must not lie awake in this way,” said Alice. And she began to pass her fingers across Mary’s forehead and through her hair.
It was a simple action, but Mary broke down under it. Throwing her arms around her life-long friend, she pressed her convulsively to her bosom, and hiding her face in her pillow, wept in silence. After a while they began to talk, and they talked all night, as I am told that sex and age not unfrequently do. Alice arose next morning with a fixed determination to unravel the mystery that was giving her friend so much pain. Mr. Frobisher could make things plain, if he would. But would he? At any rate, she would try; for she was a plucky little soul. And so, when Charley had offered her his arm, that day, after dinner, for a promenade on the piazza, she felt that she had her opportunity. But it would appear that Charley had been looking for an opportunity himself; and so, the other day, when I asked this couple to let me have an account of the matter, with a view to the forty-sixth chapter of the Symphonic Monograph, it leaked out that Master Charles had, on this occasion, taken up Alice’s time not in telling her whom the Don loved, but whom Charles adored. This discovery, coming upon me so suddenly, upset my determination to exclude the loves of Charley and Alice from our story, and I called for an account of the courtship. For I felt assured that an authentic account of the first and only love-making of Charles The Silent would be the most delicious morsel in the whole Monograph. But at the merest allusion to such a thing, Alice blushed in the most becoming way; and when Charley, clearing his throat and putting on a bold look, made as though he were about to begin, her face became as scarlet; and rising from her seat she gave him the most dignified look that I have ever seen in those merry-glancing hazel eyes. Thereupon Charley and I laughed so heartily that Alice saw that she had been taken in by her husband’s serious face. “I thought not!” said she, laughing in turn. But the idea of a chapter given to the amours of Charles The Silent and Alice The Merry had seized upon my mind with so strong a fascination that I could not shake it off; and, as soon as I reached my bachelor quarters that night, I seized my pen. My eyes were soon in a fine phrensy rolling, I presume; for in the forty-sixth, or Galaxy Chapter, as I call it, from the numerous stars with which it is bespangled, distinct traces of Genius may be detected by the practised eye (with my assistance).
What I mean is, that chapter was composed in the manner in which true Creative Genius is in the habit of composing, as I understand; made, that is, out of the whole cloth,—woven of strands of air. But even here, though mounted on a genuine (though borrowed) earth-spurning Pegasus, I have not swerved far from the line that the great Bœotian would have marked out for me. Charley’s courtship was quite real. It was the words only that I have had to invent, left in the lurch as I was by my two collaborators. And I was going to add that, in all probability, Charley made use of not one of those I have put in his mouth, when I recalled a coincidence so singular that I feel that the reader is entitled to hear of it. When I read to my coadjutors my version of their amours, their merriment was uproarious. Charley, I may mention, who only smiled when he was a bachelor, has, since his marriage, grown stout and taken to laughing. So far as he was concerned, my putting the word “abyss” in his mouth was the master-stroke of the whole chapter.
“Why,” said he, choking with laughter, “I am sure I never made use of the word in my whole life!”
“Neither had you ever before in your life made love to a girl,” I objected.
“Don’t be too sure of that!” said Charley, with a knowing look.