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.) What nobler career could I have than the blotting out of his stricken heart the memory of that faithless woman who had so wounded him and blighted his youth?
What, indeed?
If only he could see it as I saw it.

If only by some sign or token he could know of the warm love that was his but for the asking! Could he not see that no longer need he pine alone and unappreciated in the Andersonville Hotel?
Why, in just a few weeks I was to be through school.