“Why, son,” said Eliza with a touch of malice, “that girl was fooling you all the time. She was just leading you on.”
“Oh, stop it, please.”
“Cheer up!” said Helen heartily. “Your time’s coming. You’ll forget her in a week. There are plenty more, you know. This is puppy love. Show her that you’re a good sport. You ought to write her a letter of congratulation.”
“Why, yes,” said Eliza, “I’d make a big joke of it all. I wouldn’t let on to her that it affected me. I’d write her just as big as you please and laugh about the whole thing. I’d show them! That’s what I’d—”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” he groaned, starting up. “Leave me alone, won’t you?”
He left the house.
But he wrote the letter. And the moment after the lid of the mailbox clanged over it, he was writhen by shame. For it was a proud and boastful letter, salted with scatterings of Greek, Latin, and English verse, quotable scraps, wrenched into the text without propriety, without accuracy, without anything but his pitiful and obvious desire to show her his weight in the point of his wit, the depth of his learning. She would be sorry when she knew her loss! But, for a moment at the end, his fiercely beating heart stormed through:
"… and I hope he’s worth having you—he can’t deserve you, Laura; no one can. But if he knows what he has, that’s something. How lucky he is! You’re right about me—I’m too young. I’d cut off my hand now for eight or ten years more. God bless and keep you, my dear, dear Laura.
“Something in me wants to burst. It keeps trying to, but it won’t, it never has. O God! If it only would! I shall never forget you. I’m lost now and I’ll never find the way again. In God’s name write me a line when you get this. Tell me what your name is now— you never have. Tell me where you’re going to live. Don’t let me go entirely, I beg of you, don’t leave me alone.”
He sent the letter to the address she had given him—to her father’s house. Week melted into week: his life mounted day by day in a
