I have said that this thing of falling in love is a very complex catastrophe. I might say that it is also a very uncertain one. Since we all of us "rub clothes with fate along the street," who knows whether Charlton would not, by this time, have been in love with Miss Marlay if he had not seen Miss Minorkey in the stage? If he had not run against her, while madly chasing a grasshopper? If he had not had a great curiosity about a question in botany which he could only settle in her company? And even yet, if he had not had collision with Isa on the question of Divine Providence? And even after that collision I will not be sure that the scale might not have been turned, had it not been that while he was holding this conversation with Isa Marlay, his mother and sister had come into the next room. For when he went out they showed unmistakable pleasure in their faces, and Mrs. Plausaby even ventured to ask: "Don't you like her, Albert?"
And when the mother tried to persuade him to forego his visit to the hotel in the evening, he put this and that together. And when this and that were put together, they combined to produce a soliloquy:
"Mother and Katy want to make a match for me. As if _they_ understood _me_! They want me to marry an _average_ woman, of course. Pshaw! Isabel Marlay only understands the 'culinary use' of things. My mother knows that she has a 'knack,' and thinks it would be nice for me to have a wife with a knack. But mother can't judge for _me_. I ought to have a wife with ideas. And I don't doubt Plausaby has a hand in trying to marry off his ward to somebody that won't make too much fuss about his accounts."
And so Charlton was put upon studying all the evening, to find points in which Miss Minorkey's conversation was superior to Miss Marlay's. And judged as he judged it--as a literary product--it was not difficult to find an abundant advantage on her side.
Albert Charlton had little money, and he was not a man to remain idle. He was good in mathematics, and did a little surveying now and then; in fact, with true democratic courage, he turned his hand to any useful employment. He did not regard these things as having any bearing on his career. He was only waiting for the time to come when he could found his Great Educational Institution on the virgin soil of Minnesota. Then he would give his life to training boys to live without meat or practical jokes, to love truth, honesty, and hard lessons; he would teach girls to forego jewelry and cucumber-pickles, to study physiology, and to abhor flirtations. Visionary, was he? You can not help smiling at a man who has a "vocation," and who wants to give the world a good send-off toward its "goal." But there is something noble about it after all. Something to make you and me ashamed of our selfishness. Let us not judge Charlton by his green flavor. When these discordant acids shall have ripened in the sunshine and the rain, who shall tell how good the fruit may be? We may laugh, however, at Albert, and his school that was to be. I do not doubt that even that visionary street-loafer known to the Athenians as Sokrates, was funny to those who looked at him from a great distance below.