Narcissus be off with the old love this Sunday, and visibly on with the
new the next.

Dear little plump, vegetable-marrow Alice! Will Narcissus ever forget
that Sunday night when the church, having at last released its weary
worshippers, he stole, not as aforetime to the soft side of Emily, but
to the still softer side of the little bewildered Alice. For, though
Alice had worshipped him all the time, and certainly during the whole of
the service, she had never dared to hope that he would pass her dashing,
dark-eyed sister to love _her_--little, blonde, phlegmatic, blue-eyed
Alice.

But Apollo was bent on the capture of his Daphne. Truth to say, it was
but the work of a moment. The golden arrow was in her heart, the wound
kissed whole again, and the new heaven and the new earth all arranged
for, in hardly longer time than it takes to tell.

In youth the mystery of woman is still so fresh and new, that to make a
fuss about a particular woman seems like looking a gift-horse of the
gods in the mouth. The light on the face of womanhood in general is so
bewilderingly beautiful that the young man literally cannot tell one
woman from another. They are all equally wonderful. Masculine
observation leads one to suppose that woman's first vision of man
similarly precludes discrimination.

Ah me! it is easy to laugh to-day, but it was heart--bleeding tragedy
when those powers that oughtn't to be decreed Alice's exile to a
boarding-school in some central Africa of the midland counties.

The hemorrhage of those two young hearts! But, for a time, each