"My love is like a white, white rose. H." And sent it to myself.

It was deception, I acknowledge, but having put my hand to the Plow,
I did not intend to steer a crooked course. I would go straight to the
end. I am like that in everything I do. But, on delibarating things
over, I felt that Violets, alone and unsuported, were not enough. I felt
that If I had a photograph, it would make everything more real. After
all, what is a love affair without a picture of the Beloved Object?

So I bought a photograph. It was hard to find what I wanted, but I got
it at last in a stationer's shop, a young man in a checked suit with a
small mustache--the young man, of course, not the suit. Unluckaly, he
was rather blonde, and had a dimple in his chin. But he looked exactly
as though his name ought to be Harold.

I may say here that I chose "Harold," not because it is a favorite name
of mine, but because it is romantic in sound. Also because I had never
known any one named Harold and it seemed only discrete.

I took it home in my muff and put it under my pillow where Hannah would
find it and probably take it to mother. I wanted to buy a ring too, to
hang on a ribbon around my neck. But the violets had made a fearful hole
in my thirteen dollars.

I borrowed a stub pen at the stationer's and I wrote on the photograph,
in large, sprawling letters, "To YOU from ME."

"There," I said to myself, when I put it under the pillow. "You look
like a photograph, but you are really a bomb-shell."