It was a gray autumn day--was it not actually drizzling ?--and I was cold sitting on the bench; but I was thrilled through and through with the sense of the magnitude of my troubles, and of the romantic nature of the rendezvous.

Who that was even half awake when he was growing up does not know what all these symptoms betokened?
Miss Dillingham understood, and she wisely gave me no inkling of her diagnosis.

She let me talk and kept a grave face.

She did not belittle my troubles--I made specific charges against my home, members of my family, and life in general; she did not say that I would get over them, that every growing girl suffers from the blues; that I was, in brief, a little goose stretching my wings for flight.
She told me rather that it would be noble to bear my sorrows bravely, to soothe those who irritated me, to live each day with all my might.
She reminded me of great men and women who have suffered, and who overcame their troubles by living and working.

And she sent me home amazingly comforted, my pettiness and self-consciousness routed by the quiet influence of her gray eyes searching mine.