Now, though I bless my stars that it wasn’t in my power to marry Miss Nelly, I am not going to deny my boyish regard for her nor laugh at it.  As long as it lasted it was a very sincere and unselfish love, and rendered me proportionately wretched.  I say as long as it lasted, for one’s first love doesn’t last forever.

I am ready, however, to laugh at the amusing figure I cut after I had really ceased to have any deep feeling in the matter.  It was then I took it into my head to be a Blighted Being.  This was about two weeks after the spectral appearance of Mr. Waldron.

For a boy of a naturally vivacious disposition the part of a blighted being presented difficulties.  I had an excellent appetite, I liked society, I liked out-of-door sports, I was fond of handsome clothes.  Now all these things were incompatible with the doleful character I was to assume, and I proceeded to cast them from me.  I neglected my hair.  I avoided my playmates.  I frowned abstractedly.  I didn’t eat as much as was good for me.  I took lonely walks.  I brooded in solitude.  I not only committed to memory the more turgid poems of the late Lord Byron—­“Fare thee well, and if forever,” &c.—­but I became a despondent poet on my own account, and composed a string of “Stanzas to One who will understand them.”  I think I was a trifle too hopeful on that point; for I came across the verses several years afterwards, and was quite unable to understand them myself.

It was a great comfort to be so perfectly miserable and yet not suffer any.  I used to look in the glass and gloat over the amount and variety of mournful expression I could throw into my features.  If I caught myself smiling at anything, I cut the smile short with a sigh.  The oddest thing about all this is, I never once suspected that I was not unhappy.  No one, not even Pepper Whitcomb, was more deceived than I.

Among the minor pleasures of being blighted were the interest and perplexity I excited in the simple souls that were thrown in daily contact with me.  Pepper especially.  I nearly drove him into a corresponding state of mind.

I had from time to time given Pepper slight but impressive hints of my admiration for Some One (this was in the early part of Miss Glentworth’s visit); I had also led him to infer that my admiration was not altogether in vain.  He was therefore unable to explain the cause of my strange behavior, for I had carefully refrained from mentioning to Pepper the fact that Some One had turned out to be Another’s.

I treated Pepper shabbily.  I couldn’t resist playing on his tenderer feelings.  He was a boy bubbling over with sympathy for anyone in any kind of trouble.  Our intimacy since Binny Wallace’s death had been uninterrupted; but now I moved in a sphere apart, not to be profaned by the step of an outsider.

I no longer joined the boys on the playground at recess.  I stayed at my desk reading some lugubrious volume—­usually The Mysteries of Udolpho, by the amiable Mrs. Radcliffe.  A translation of The Sorrows of Werter fell into my hands at this period, and if I could have committed suicide without killing myself, I should certainly have done so.