This conversation, the reader perceives, is not monumentally grand or important. Next in flatness to the ordinary talk of two lovers comes, I think, the ordinary[Pg 54] talk of two young persons of the opposite sexes. In the first place they are young, and therefore have few great ideas to interchange and but limited ranges of experience to compare; in the second place they are hampered and embarrassed by the mute but potent consciousness of sex and the alarming possibility of marriage. I am inclined to give much credit to the saying that only married people and vicious people are agreeably fluent in an assembly of both sexes. When therefore I report the conversation of these two uncorrupted young persons as being of a moderately dull quality, I flatter myself that I am publishing the very truth of nature. But it follows that we had best finish with this pic-nic as soon as possible. We will suppose the chickens and sandwiches eaten, the champagne drunk, the segars smoked, the party gathered into the omnibusses and rockaways, and the vehicle in which we are chiefly interested at the door of the New Boston House. As the Lieutenant-Colonel enters with Miss Ravenel a waiter hands him a telegraphic message.

[Pg 54]

"Excuse me," he says, and reads as they ascend the stairs together. On the parlor floor he halts and takes her hand with an air of more seriousness than he has yet exhibited.

"Miss Ravenel, I must bid you good-bye. I am so sorry! I leave for Washington immediately. My application for extension of leave has been refused. I do sincerely hope that I shall meet you again."

"Good bye," she simply said, not unaware that her hand had been pressed, and for that reason unable or unwilling to add more.

He left her there, hurried to his room, packed his valise, and was off in twenty minutes; for when it was necessary to move quick he could put on a rate of speed not easily equalled.

Miss Ravenel walked to her father's room in deep meditation. Without stating the fact in words she felt that the presence of this mature, masculine, worldly gentleman[Pg 55] of the army was agreeable to her, and that his farewell had been an unpleasant surprise. If he was inebriate, dissipated, dangerous, it must be remembered that she did not know it. In simply smelling of wine and segars he had an odor of Louisiana, to which she had been accustomed from childhood even in the grave society of her father's choice, and which was naturally 

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