Almost every girl in her teens at some time falls violently
in love with some remote being almost old enough to be her father--a
being whom she endows with all the graces and perfections of her dream
Adonis. For, after all, it isn't that she is in love with _him_, this
man of flesh and blood before her; it is that she is in love with
_love_. A very different matter.
My especial attack of this kind came to me when I was barely eighteen,
the spring I was being graduated from the Andersonville High School.
And the visible embodiment of my adoration was the head master, Mr.
Harold Hartshorn, a handsome, clean-shaven, well-set-up man of (I
should judge) thirty-five years of age, rather grave, a little stern,
and very dignified.
But how I adored him! How I hung upon his every word, his every
glance! How I maneuvered to win from him a few minutes' conversation
on a Latin verb or a French translation! How I thrilled if he bestowed
upon me one of his infrequent smiles! How I grieved over his stern
aloofness!
By the end of a month I had evolved this: his stern aloofness
meant that he had been disappointed in love; his melancholy was
loneliness--his heart was breaking. How I longed to help, to heal, to
cure! How I thrilled at the thought of the love and companionship _I_
could give him somewhere in a rose-embowered cottage far from the
madding crowd! (He boarded at the Andersonville Hotel alone now.
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