I employed my second summer in looking for a sympathetic woman, with the intention of making her my wife.  May I never see such a hard-working, distracting season again!  Not that such women were hard to find—­they were only too plenty:  at one time I had six who were devoted to me.  One sympathized with my love of music; we sang duets together in the evening; it was delightful, for I need hardly say that I sing as I do everything else—­remarkably well.  Another sympathized with my sketching propensities.  We rambled in the woods together with boxes and colors.  I found it charming.  “Nothing amateurish” about my style, Miss Pinklake said.  A third sympathized with my taste for horses:  my restive Nero was the “sweetest pet” she ever saw. (My groom says, “He’s the divvil hisself, Muster Charley.”) With her I rode in the afternoon.  She told me—­Miss Vernon, you know her? brunette, deuced pretty—­she said one day, when we were taking a canter together, “I can believe those wonderful stories of the Centaurs when I see you ride, Mr. Highrank.”  She had a pleasant voice, and such a figure!  I had almost decided to propose to her one day, and was even thinking of the words I should use, when the pale Miss Anabel Lee came walking along the road by us, looking like a fairy, her hat hanging on her arm filled with wild flowers, and her dress looped with ferns.  As she passed she raised her beautiful blue eyes to mine, and at the same time—­it might have been chance—­she pressed a bunch of forget-me-nots to her lips.  I remembered I had an engagement to walk with Miss Lee on the beach that night:  there was a lovely moon—­we talked poetry.  It was Miss Annie Darling who said I “waltzed divinely.”  Miss Annie laid her hand on one’s sleeve when she talked to one, mutilated her fan with various tappings on a fellow’s shoulder for being naughty, as she called it ("naughty” meant giving her a kiss in a dark corner of the verandah), said saucy things to the snobs, and used her eyes.  She walked with the Grecian bend.  When I had a serious fit there was young Miss Carenaught, who was plain and read the reviews, spoke sharply against fashion, and knew a man of my education “must despise the butterfly existence of the surrounding throng.”  Sometimes she would invite me to go with her to catch beetles and queer insects—­“not that she needed my help,” she would say, “but my intellectual society was indeed a treat in this crowded desert.”

All this was very agreeable, but also very perplexing.  At the end of the season I found myself as far from making a choice as ever.  If I indulged one taste at the expense of the others, I should become a less perfect man; nor could I decide in which of my pursuits I needed sympathy the most—­music, painting, dancing, riding, reading.  Alas! could I find one woman congenial in all my moods I would marry her immediately.  Wearied by the attentions of so many, I yet feared an imperfect life spent with but one.  I saw that I had made another mistake, and retired to my country-seat, “The Beauties,” to recruit.