It may have been pride — I know not what it was, that I could notice the doings of Sir John and of young Walter Butler and remain aloof, even indifferent. Yet, this was so. Never had a woman’s beauty stirred me otherwise than blamelessly,” never had I entertained any sentiment toward fashionable folly other than aversion and a kind of shamed contempt.

Nor had I been blind at Guy Park and Butlersbury and Tribes Hill, nor in Albany, either. I knew Clarissa Putnam; I also knew Susannah Wormwood and her sister Elizabeth, and all that pretty company; and many another pretty minx and laughing, light-minded lass in county Tryon. And a few in Cambridge, too. So I was no niais, no naive country fool, unless to remain aloof were folly. And I often wondered to myself how this might really be, when Boyd rallied me and messmates laughed.