They are all equally wonderful. Masculine
observation leads one to suppose that woman's first vision of man
similarly precludes discrimination.
Ah me! it is easy to laugh to-day, but it was heart--bleeding tragedy
when those powers that oughtn't to be decreed Alice's exile to a
boarding-school in some central Africa of the midland counties.
The hemorrhage of those two young hearts! But, for a time, each
plastered the other's wounds with letters--dear letters--letters every
post. For the postal authorities made no objection to Narcissus
corresponding with two or more maidens at once. And it is only fair to
Alice to say, that she knew as little of the Miller's Daughter as the
Miller's Daughter knew of her.
So, when Narcissus was reciting _Endymion_ to his Miller's Maid, it was
not without a minor chord plaining through the major harmonies of the
present happiness; the sense that Alice was but fifteen miles away--so
near she could almost hear him if he called--only fifteen miles away,
and it was a long three months since they had met.
It now becomes necessary to admit a prosaic fact hitherto concealed
from the Reader. Narcissus rode a bicycle. It was, I must confess, a
rather 'modern' thing to do. But surely the flashing airy wheel is the
most poetical mode of locomotion yet invented, and one looks more like a
fairy prince than ever in knickerbockers. Whenever Narcissus turned his
gleaming spokes along some mapped, but none the less mysterious,
county--road, he thought of Lohengrin in his barge drawn by white swans
to his mystic tryst; he thought of the seven-leagued boots, the flying
carpet, the wishing-cap, and the wooden Pegasus,--so called because it
mounted into the clouds on the turning of a peg.
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