Meantime, during these years, I had fallen in and out of love
assiduously. Since the Anabasis of lad's love traverses a monotonous
country, where one hill is largely like another, and one meadow a
duplicate of the next to the last daffodil, I may with profit dwell
upon the green-sickness lightly. It suffices that in the course of
these four years I challenged superstition by adoring thirteen girls,
and, worse than that, wrote verses of them.

I give you their names herewith--though not their workaday names, lest
the wives of divers people be offended (and in many cases, surprised),
but the appellatives which figured in my rhymes. They were Heart's
Desire, Florimel, Dolores, Yolande, Adelais, Sylvia, Heart o' My
Heart, Chloris, Felise, Ettarre, Phyllis, Phyllida, and Dorothy. Here
was a rosary of exquisite names, I even now concede; and the owner of
each _nom de plume_ I, for however brief a period, adored for this or
that peculiar excellence; and by ordinary without presuming to mention
the fact to any of these divinities save Heart o' My Heart, who was,
after all, only a Penate.

Outside the elevated orbits of rhyme she was called Elizabeth Hamlyn;
and it afterward became apparent to me that I, in reality, wrote all
the verses of this period solely for the pleasure of reading them
aloud to Bettie, for certainly I disclosed their existence to no one
else--except just one or two to Phyllida, who was "literary."

And the upshot of all this heart-burning is most succinctly given in
my own far from impeccable verse, as Bettie Hamlyn heard the summing-up
one evening in May. It was the year I graduated from King's
College, and the exact relation of the date to the Annos Domini is