She is as handsome
as any fair woman I ever saw, but she doesn't know it. Every time any
one pays her a compliment, her mother, who is a caution, discovers that,
for some reason, the girl is a fright, so she has no appreciation of her
looks."
"And you were in daily association two months with a girl like that! How
about it, Phil?"
"If you mean, did I trifle with her, no!" cried Philip hotly. "I told
her the second time I met her all about Edith. Almost every day I wrote
to Edith in her presence. Elnora gathered violets and made a fancy
basket to put them in for Edith's birthday. I started to err in too open
admiration for Elnora, but her mother brought me up with a whirl I
never forgot. Fifty times a day in the swamps and forests Elnora made a
perfect picture, but I neither looked nor said anything. I never met any
girl so downright noble in bearing and actions. I never hated anything
as I hated leaving her, for we were dear friends, like two wholly
congenial men. Her mother was almost always with us. She knew how much I
admired Elnora, but so long as I concealed it from the girl, the mother
did not care."
"Yet you left such a girl and came back whole-hearted to Edith Carr!"
"Surely! You know how it has been with me about Edith all my life."
"Yet the girl you picture is far her superior to an unprejudiced person,
when thinking what a man would require in a wife to be happy."
"I never have thought what I would 'require' to be happy! I only thought
whether I could make Edith happy.
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