[Sidenote: “A Wet Blanket” for Infatuation]
Clarence Miller was an exceedingly handsome young teacher in a small
village high school. In his second year of service, Carolyn Brush,
daughter of the great man of the town, decided that she would not return
to the fashionable boarding school which she had been attending, but
would go to the village school and subjugate Clarence Miller, whom she
met during the Christmas vacation. She was very pretty and very clever,
and her stay in a girl’s boarding school had not made her less romantic
than other girls are.
The lessons were easy for her, and during the first few days she recited
brilliantly, hoping to win special attention from the young principal.
He accepted her most studied efforts with the same pleasant courtesy he
gave to all, and then Carolyn tried another plan. She failed to recite
altogether, looking at Mr. Miller with a pitiful, hurt look whenever he
called upon her, and shaking her pretty head sadly. The village boys and
girls, somewhat awed at best by Carolyn’s pretty clothes and polished
manners, and keenly conscious of everything she did, observed all this
with much interest. Carolyn became more and more enamored of Mr. Miller
the more she saw of him.
One morning she stepped to the desk when there were no other pupils
near. “Mr. Miller,” she said, “I wonder if I may speak to you—alone—some
time? Tonight, after school, perhaps? Just for a moment. I am in such
trouble.”
“Of course you may, Miss Carolyn,” said Mr. Miller, heartily. “I’ll be
glad to help you if I can.”
But Carolyn was not at school that afternoon. She called up the school
by telephone at five after four, however, said that her mother had
required her help that afternoon, and added that they all wanted Mr.
Miller to come up for supper. “And I hope you will, for I do feel that
you can help me. We can talk after supper.”
“Sorry, but I have some work that is going to take my whole evening,
Miss Carolyn. You can tell me about that matter at recess tomorrow.
Please thank your mother for the invitation, and tell her how sorry I am
I can’t come.”
At recess the next morning, Carolyn said, when she was sure no prying
boy lingered near:
“Oh, Mr. Miller, I have been so worried lately I just couldn’t study. I
have a dear friend at school, whom I’ve trusted and loved for two years
more than anyone else. And now I find that she has deceived me, and it
almost breaks my heart. It seems as if everything has just stopped, you
know; life isn’t the same. What can one do? If one can’t trust one’s
friends, what is there one can count upon?” She looked up at him with
tears in her eyes, the lovely picture of disillusioned youth in its most
appealing form. “I just had to talk to some one about it, and you’re the
only person here who is—you know—like myself—who would understand.”
Mr. Miller neither fell into this fair trap nor shied at it. He said,
“Now, I’ll tell you just what I would do if I were you. You talk to your
father. He knows all about people, and he’ll give you more good advice
in a minute than I could in a year. If it were I, and a girl had treated
me like that, I’d find a better chum and let her go, and not weep over
it either. Just stop worrying about her. You can’t afford to lose out on
your lessons for a snip of a girl who doesn’t know a good friend when
she has one. Oh—you’ll excuse me, won’t you? I promised the boys to show
them a new curve, and here they are for me.” And the cautious, sensible
principal vanished out-of-doors.
Carolyn, being really infatuated, made one more attempt. “I know you
don’t like me,” she told the principal one day. “But why is it? What
have I done, that you should hate me so? I have tried to get my lessons,
and tried to be good in school; but you seem to hate the very sight of
me.”
“Now, that’s all nonsense,” Mr. Miller averred. “I like you just as well
as anyone else in the room, and, so far as I know and intend, I treat
you just as I do the others.”
To be treated just as the others were treated, was exactly what Carolyn
did not want. She suddenly discovered that the principal was not
handsome, and that she did not care for him. She told her father that
the school was so much poorer than Grey Gables that she wanted to go
back there, and at the Easter vacation she left the high school. So
Carolyn came and went, and not one of the other pupils knew of the
little comedy of sentiment and sense that had taken place there that
winter.
The quickly-veering emotion of youth is easily stimulated or inhibited
by suggestion. Mr. Miller saw through the schemes of his pupil, and,
instead of falling in with them, as he might have done had he wanted
excitement or adulation or romantic adventure, he cut them off in a
friendly, but matter-of-fact way that nipped expectation in the bud. A
flirtation with his pretty pupil might have been a great deal of fun,
but it would have marred his influence with the people of the village
and with his pupils; and he was wise enough to deny himself that fun for
the sake of his professional duty. He might have stimulated an adventure
in half a dozen ways; he steadily declined even to suggest the thought
of such a thing until Carolyn was cured of her fancy. Without
humiliating her in any way, before the other students, he kept his
relations with her impersonal and free of romantic elements, and so
gradually overcame her infatuation by giving it nothing to feed upon.