Jasper County Democrat, Volume 13, Number 103, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 April 1911 — One More Dance [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

One More Dance

It Turned a Bachelor Away From a Chit to a Woman

By GEORGE L. PARKS

- While there Is no fixed rule respecting the comparative ages of husband and wife, there is a likelihood that a very young man will seek at least the companionship of a woman older than, himself. But let him pans over ten, or twenty years and ten to one he will be ambitious to win some girl in her teens. At eighteen I fulfilled the first part of this statement. I was an oldish sort of fellow, fond of study and reading books that youngsters of my age seldom look into. I was half through college and taking a good stand in my class, but I was not tied down to the courses I pursued. I Was rather thinking how I might utilize them. I had but little to do with the young ladies who were of an appropriate age for collegians. I found them mostly given to commonplace chitchat, with which I had no sympathy. They were schoolgirls on It beginning to know how to entertain a grown man. During my junior year in college I formed the acquaintance of Leona Whitney, a young lady of twenty-six. I think she was disposed to be interested in that freshness of youth there was about me. especially as it showed itself not in college pranks and athletics, but In a certain original way I had in looking upon a world just opening up to me. At any rate. she liked to chat with me. preferring evidently to hear me talk to talking herself. At first she treated me as a half grown man, but by the time I was ready to leave college I could see no difference in her bearing toward me and the other young men of her acquaintance. All this while, though I was unconscious of it. Miss Whitney was exciting in me feelings other than those

pertaining to friendship. I would call upon her in the evening when I should be studying, intending to do the latter during the later hours of the night. But on returning to my room and taking down my books I found myself going over in my mind the topics we had discussed rather than those I was to be called to recite upon the next day. or. rather. I would be thinking of Miss Whitney herself. She would thrust herself between me and my studies in an aggravating but at the same time pleasing way. However, I was assigned a part at commencement and acquitted myself fairly well. Meanwhile I had discovered that I wished Leona Whitney to be my companion through that career upon which I was about to enter. Immediately before leaving college I made her a proposition of marriage. I had a certain dread since I was so juvenile and she so mature of facing her and breaking over the line that had thus far separated us. So I wrote her a note in which in a very few words I asked her -to be my wife. I left college, a couple of days later, and before-ha ring receded an answer I left my address with the registrar so that any letters coming for me might be forwarded. Every day after my return home I looked eagerly for some word from Miss Whitney. None came.

With all the sensitiveness of a youngster who had offered himself to a woman considerably older than himself, and one, tpo, who was not without offers from mature men. some of them desirable parties. I made up my mind that the lady considered my offer in the light of presumption and had not deigned a reply. This view of the case was certainly not flattering to her, but when sensitiveness comes into a question valid reasons take flight. Twelve years passed. One day it was announced that the government was about to erect a building in the town in which I lived. A year later it was finished and the postoffice moved into it Going to the door one morning to receive my mail from the carrier, he handed me a letter, at the same time giving me an explanation with regard to it. In tearing ajvay the fixtures of the old postoffice several letters had been discovered that from time to time had slipped down out of sight. The letter he brought me was one of these. It was postmarked at the town where was located the college at

which I was graduated, had been for warded, and the date stamped on it was just twelve years before. It had been addressed to me at the college and forwarded. The handwriting was that of a lady, but unfamiliar to me. I opened it without any thought whatever as to who had written it; but, looking first at the signature, 1 saw it was Leona Whitney. It was a reply to my proposal of marriage. E It is singular to be transported by some.incident backward in time. Holding that letter in my hand, I was again a youngster of twenty, in love with a woman I considered far above me. Then it occurred to me that Miss Whitney must now be within a few years of forty, while I was thirty-two, and old at that. While these thoughts were flashing through me I began to read the letter. It told me that the lady had been touched at the expression of the tender feelings I had avowed for her and considered my proposal, to say the least, an honor. But there were reasons why she should hesitate. While I was far more matured than most men of my age. it must be remembered that In ten or a dozen years I would still be a young man. while she would be past middle age. She confessed that this was her only reason for not returning a favorable reply to my proposal. She suggested that I was just at the beginning of my career and if as time passed I felt the same she would be pleased to hear from me again. While I was reading this letter I was sensible of having passed from my youth to that period where a man begins to feel that young girls Consider him old. I had been much flattered t hat my recent attentions to a girl of eighteen had been h. ked * upon with favor. I had taken her out a number of times and persuaded myr >lf that the tender passion was stealing into my aging breast. But I was not and never had been anything of a butterfly. I was and always had been a serious man. I found' it somewhat irfcsoiiie to go about as an escort to a young girl to amusements in which I took no interest. The very night before 1 received the epistle from a distant past I had attended my little girl to a ball where she had kept me for “just on more dance;’ till 3 o’clock in the morning. It is not strange that I was affected by Miss Whitney’s reply to a proposition made twelve years before. The dozen years she had spoken of had passed and while I was still on the lower side of middle age she had passed beyond it. Nevertheless my interest in bachelor life—if I ever had anyhad died down until its pleasures had turned to gall. My recent attendance upon a society bud during the small hours of the morning was still fresh in my memory,while the insipid nothings I had been obliged to say and listen to nauseated me. I wrote at once to a relative of Miss Whitney asking what had become of her, and received a reply that she lived in house in which she had always lived, and in wljich I had so often called upon her while I was a student. She was beloved and respected by all who knew her and my correspondent wondered that though she had received many offers she<.had accepted none. A few days after the receipt of this information I was in Miss Whitney’s home and sent up my card with the letter I had so recently received, having underscored on the envelope the postmark showing the day it was mailed and another giving the day it was received.

When Miss Whitney came down to receive me, with considerate embarrassment m her manner and a telltale blush on her was surprised that she did not show her years by half a dozgn, and there was not a gray hair in her head. She looked much, younger for a woman than I for a man. However. I had not come to see her for beauty, but in the horie of a renewal.jof that had enjoyed a decade before. She told me had been at a loss to understand my silence, for since her letter had not been returned to her through the dead letter office she could not doubt that I had received it. During an hour’s conversation with her the fact became impressed upon tijy mind that I was not the man to marry a chit of a girl and that I would find the companionship I needed in Whitney. I received a promise that she would correspond with me. and since my home was not a long journey from hers I made her a number of visits. But my own mind was made up at our reunion, and fortunately I had only to wait for the Ityiy to be satisfied that I would not be likely to regret the step I was bent upon taking. That regretting is one of the most improbable things in the world is manifest in the fact that we have been married twenty years and are more companionable by far than at the time of the w’edding. More than this, opr affection has increased steadily, and it seems to me that with us the period of romance has been inverted, coming as it has in our old age. Indeed, not a year passes but we find ourselves more dependent upon each other. I never go by a certain building in the town in which we live without remembering that the old” trap it replaced for a dozen years contained the first answer to my proposal to my wife. And associated with this remembrance is another—l think of the maiden who kept me till 3 o’clock in the morning waiting for that one dance. I feet very kindly disposed to that maiden, for it was"fier giddiness that kept me waiting,"gapping, at times nodding, while she was flitting about like a butterfly. And was it not this lesson she gave me in the nick of time that turned me to a more satisfactorv love?

MY OWN MIND WAS MADE UP AT OUR REUNION.