"You mustn't blush when you come to town," she cried, "or they'll make a ballad on you, and cry you in the streets for a monster." "The oftener comes the cause, the rarer shall the effect be," said I.
"The excuse is well put," she conceded.

"We should make a wit of you in town." "What do you in town ?" I asked squarely, looking her full in the eyes.
"Perhaps, sometimes," she laughed, "what I have done once--and to your good knowledge--since I came to the country." Thus she would baffle me with jesting answers as often as I sought to find out who and what she was.

Nor had I better fortune with her mother, for whom I had small liking, and who had, as it seemed, no more for me.
For she was short in her talk, and frowned to see me with her daughter.
Yet she saw me, I must confess, often with Cydaria in the next days, and I was often with Cydaria when she did not see me.

For Barbara was gone, leaving me both sore and lonely, all in the mood to find comfort where I could, and to see manliness in desertion; and there was a charm about the girl that grew on me insensibly and without my will until I came to love, not her (as I believed, forgetting that Love loves not to mark his boundaries too strictly) but her merry temper, her wit and cheerfulness.
Moreover, these things were mingled and spiced with others, more attractive than all to unfledged youth, an air of the world and a knowledge of life which piqued my curiosity and sat (it seems so even to my later mind as I look back) with bewitching incongruity on the laughing child's face and the unripe grace of girlhood.

Her moods were endless, vying with one another in an ever undetermined struggle for the prize of greatest charm.