Perhaps I half dreamed it in some fugitive moment of half
sleep; but it was as if I were again an awkward, silent boy, worshipping
a girl new to the school, a girl who wore two long yellow braids. I
worshipped her from afar so that she saw me not, being occupied with
many adorers less timid, who made nothing of snatching a hair ribbon.
But the face in that instant of dream was the face of Miss Katharine
Lansdale, and coupled with the vision was a prescience that in some
later life I should again look back and see myself as now, a grown but
awkward boy, still holding aloof--still adoring from some remote
background while other and bolder gallants captured trophies and lightly
carolled their serenades. It seemed like borrowing trouble to look still
farther into the future, but the vision was striking. Surely, History
does repeat itself. I should have made this discovery for myself had it
not been exploited before my day. For on the morrow I found my woman
child on the Lansdale lawn when I went home in the afternoon. She had
now reached an age when she was beginning to do "pretties" with her lips
as she talked--almost at the age when I had first been enraptured by her
mother, with the identical two braids, also the tassels dangling from
her boot tops.
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