"Not like to like, but like in difference."
"_The Princess._"
I have always misjudged Victorine--I admit it now with shame. While other
girls have become engaged--and disengaged quite soon after--she has
remained unattached and solitary. As I watched the disappointed suitors
turn sadly away I put it down to pride and self-sufficiency, but I was
wrong. I see now that she always had the situation well in hand.
As for Algernon, he is the sort of man who writes sonnets to lilies and
butterflies and the rosy-fingered dawn--this last from hearsay as he really
knows nothing about it. He is prematurely bald and suffers from the
grossest form of astigmatism, and I thought that no woman would ever love
him. I never dreamt that Victorine had even noticed he was there.
One day I heard that they were engaged. It was too hard for me to
understand.
On the third morning I went to see her.
"Victorine," I said, "you have never loved before?"
"Never," she assented softly.
"Now, this man you have chosen--you do not care overmuch for lilies and
butterflies and rosy-fingered dawns?"
"Not overmuch," she admitted sadly.
"Then what is it brings you together? What strange link of the spirit has
been forged between you? To speak quite plainly, what do you see in him?"
"Yesterday we lunched together, and two days before that he got here in
time for breakfast."
"And the engagement still holds?" I am no optimist.
"Before that we dined. Yes, I do not exaggerate. It was my suggestion. One
sees so much unhappiness now-a-days, and I wished to be quite sure we were
suited to one another."
"And you are convinced of the sincerity of the attachment?"
"Why, I feel for him as Mother does for the knife-and-boot boy, and Uncle
Stephen for the charlady. We cannot be separated. It would be monstrous."