Washington Standard

The Dangerous Girl.

But now we come at last to the real "dangerous girl"-the girl who seems by some fine fitness to walk into the empty room in a man's heart which has never been opened to another and take up her abode there. "She is just as high as my heart," Orlando says of Rosalind, and there can be no more accurate measurement for a lover's delight in his sweetheart. She fits him, she suits him. She may not be pretty, she may not be clever; she may be both these things in a remarkable degree, and a ball-room belle besides, and a chef d'oeuvre of millinery art into the bargain. She has a way of listening which makes the most reserved men eloquent, and her little speeches, never audacious and rarely brilliant, have yet something tenacious about them, and cling to his memory while he sits over his fire by night or goes about his daily work. Then her face, her distinct and vivid personality, pursues him; it is the girl herself, not her bangles nor her flounces, that he remembers. It seems natural to him that he is thus taken possession of and held captive.

No matter how cold he may have been heretofore, he now becomes ardent, warm-hearted and rash. He may have admired a pretty girl with her furbelows and flounces and her nice perception of the most becoming; he may have been a little heavy-hearted over the sumptuous beauty of the belle, and have enjoyed the society of the clever girl who saved him the trouble of doing all the talking, being able to do it herself so much more brilliantly. But this hankering after private felicity, this long fervid belief in attainable happiness, this large faith in the future which marriage may assure to him, is only followed by his acquaintance with the "dangerous girl" who upset his boasted ideas of independent employment, overturned all his preconceived notions of bachelorhood and set him longing to be engaged. Until he saw her he said with Benedict, "One woman is fair, yet I am well: another is wise, yet I am well: another virtuous, yet I am well; but till all graces come into one, woman shall not come into my grace."