the house as were girls, they soon seemed to me as commonplace and
matter-of-course and free from sentimental interest as were the girls.

Again wise little mother!

But, of course, even this did not prevent my falling in love with some
one older than myself, some one quite outside of my own circle of
intimates. Almost every girl in her teens at some time falls violently
in love with some remote being almost old enough to be her father--a
being whom she endows with all the graces and perfections of her dream
Adonis. For, after all, it isn't that she is in love with _him_, this
man of flesh and blood before her; it is that she is in love with
_love_. A very different matter.

My especial attack of this kind came to me when I was barely eighteen,
the spring I was being graduated from the Andersonville High School.
And the visible embodiment of my adoration was the head master, Mr.
Harold Hartshorn, a handsome, clean-shaven, well-set-up man of (I
should judge) thirty-five years of age, rather grave, a little stern,
and very dignified.

But how I adored him! How I hung upon his every word, his every
glance! How I maneuvered to win from him a few minutes' conversation
on a Latin verb or a French translation! How I thrilled if he bestowed
upon me one of his infrequent smiles! How I grieved over his stern
aloofness!

By the end of a month I had evolved this: his stern aloofness
meant that he had been disappointed in love; his melancholy was
loneliness--his heart was breaking. How I longed to help, to heal, to