up my mind about you.”
“Very well, Miss Dorothy. Allow me to express a sincere hope that after you have come to know what sort of person I am, you’ll like me well enough to bid me drop the handle to your name.”{51}
{51}
“But why should you care whether a girl like me likes you or not?”
“Why, because I am very strongly disposed to like a girl like you.”
“How can you feel that way, when you don’t know me the least little bit?”
“But I do know you a good deal more than ‘the least little bit,’ ” answered the young man smiling.
“How can that be? I don’t understand.”
“Perhaps not, and yet it is simple enough. You see I have been training my mind and my eyes and my ears and all the rest of me all my life, into habits of quick and accurate observation, and so I see more at a glance than I should otherwise see in an hour. For example, you’ll admit that I have had no good chance to become acquainted with your hounds, yet I know that one of them has lost a single joint from his tail, and another had a bur inside one of his ears this morning, which you have since removed.”
The girl laid down her fork in something like consternation.
“But I shan’t like you at all if you see things in that way. I’ll never dare come into your presence.”
“Oh, yes, you will. I do not observe for{52} the purpose of criticising; especially I never criticise a woman or a girl to her detriment.”
{52}
“That is very gallant, at any rate,” answered the girl, accenting the word “gallant” strongly on the second syllable, as all Virginians of that time properly did, and as few other people ever do. “But tell me what you started to say, please?”
“What was it?”
“Why, you said you knew me a good deal. I thought you were going to tell me what you knew about me.”
“Well, I’ll tell you part of what I know. I know that you have a low pitched voice—a contralto it would be called in musical nomenclature. It has no jar in it—it is rich and full and sweet, and
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