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Page 64
Before long I had become a regular and a welcome visitor at the Greene
home. I shook my wild habits from me like a worn-out cloak. I
trained for the conflict with the care of a prize-fighter and the
self-denial of a Brahmin.
As for Chloe Greene, I shall weary you with no sonnets to her eyebrow.
She was a splendidly feminine girl, as wholesome as a November pippin,
and no more mysterious than a windowpane. She had whimsical little
theories that she had deduced from life, and that fitted the maxims of
Epictetus like princess gowns. I wonder, after all, if that old
duffer wasn't rather wise!
Chloe had a father, the Reverend Homer Greene, and an intermittent
mother, who sometimes palely presided over a twilight teapot. The
Reverend Homer was a burr-like man with a life-work. He was writing a
concordance to the Scriptures, and had arrived as far as Kings.
Being, presumably, a suitor for his daughter's hand, I was timber for
his literary outpourings. I had the family tree of Israel drilled
into my head until I used to cry aloud in my sleep: "And Aminadab
begat Jay Eye See," and so forth, until he had tackled another book.
I once made a calculation that the Reverend Homer's concordance would
be worked up as far as the Seven Vials mentioned in Revelations about
the third day after they were opened.
Louis Devoe, as well as I, was a visitor and an intimate friend of the
Greenes. It was there I met him the oftenest, and a more agreeable'
man or a more accomplished I have never hated in my life.
Luckily or unfortunately, I came to be accepted as a Boy. My
appearance was youthful, and I suppose I had that pleading and
homeless air that always draws the motherliness that is in women and
the cursed theories and hobbies of pater-familiases.
Chloe called me "Tommy," and made sisterly fun of my attempts to woo
her. With Devoe she was vastly more reserved. He was the man of
romance, one to stir her imagination and deepest feelings had her
fancy leaned toward him. I was closer to her, but standing in no
glamour; I had the task before me of winning her in what seems to me
the American way of fighting--with cleanness and pluck and everyday
devotion to break away the barriers of friendship that divided us, and
to take her, if I could, between sunrise and dark, abetted by neither
moonlight nor music nor foreign wiles.
Chloe gave no sign of bestowing her blithe affections upon either of
us. But one day she let out to me an inkling of what she preferred in
a man. It was tremendously interesting to me, but not illuminating as
to its application. I had been tormenting her for the dozenth time
with the statement and catalogue of my sentiments toward her.
"Tommy," said she, "I don't want a man to show his love for me by
leading an army against another country and blowing people off the
earth with cannons."
"If you mean that the opposite way," I answered, "as they say women
do, I'll see what I can do. The papers are full of this diplomatic
row in Russia. My people know some big people in Washington who are
right next to the army people, and I could get an artillery commission
and--"
"I'm not that way," interrupted Chloe. "I mean what I say. It isn't
the big things that are done in the world, Tommy, that count with a
woman. When the knights were riding abroad in their armor to slay
dragons, many a stay-at-home page won a lonesome lady's hand by being
on the spot to pick up her glove and be quick with her cloak when the
wind blew. The man I am to like best, whoever he shall be, must show
his love in little ways. He must never forget, after hearing it once,
that I do not like to have any one walk at my left side; that I detest
bright-colored neckties; that I prefer to sit with my back to a light;
that I like candied violets; that I must not be talked to when I am
looking at the moonlight shining on water, and that I very, very often
long for dates stuffed with English walnuts."
"Frivolity," I said, with a frown. "Any well-trained servant would be
equal to such details."
"And he must remember," went on Chloe, to remind me of what I want
when I do not know, myself, what I want."
"You're rising in the scale," I said. "What you seem to need is a
first-class clairvoyant."
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