Quaint Courtships

Quaint Courtships

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Title: Quaint Courtships
Author: Howells & Alden, Editors
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QUAINT COURTSHIPS
Harper's Novelettes
EDITED BY WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS AND HENRY MILLS
ALDEN
1906
MARGARET DELAND
AN ENCORE
NORMAN DUNCAN
A ROMANCE OF WHOOPING HARBOR
MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN
HYACINTHUS
SEWELL FORD
JANE'S GRAY EYES
HERMAN WHITAKER
A STIFF CONDITION
MAY HARRIS
IN THE INTERESTS OF CHRISTOPHER
FRANCIS WILLING WHARTON
THE WRONG DOOR
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
BRAYBRIDGE'S OFFER
ELIA W. PEATTIE
THE RUBAIYAT AND THE LINER
ANNIE HAMILTON DONNELL
THE MINISTER

Introduction
To the perverse all courtships probably are quaint; but if ever human
nature may be allowed the full range of originality, it may very well be

in the exciting and very personal moments of making love. Our own
peculiar social structure, in which the sexes have so much innocent
freedom, and youth is left almost entirely to its own devices in the
arrangement of double happiness, is so favorable to the expression of
character at these supreme moments, that it is wonderful there is so
little which is idiosyncratic in our wooings. They tend rather to a type,
very simple, very normal, and most people get married for the reason
that they are in love, as if it were the most matter-of-course affair of life.
They find the fact of being in love so entirely satisfying to the ideal,
that they seek nothing adventitious from circumstance to heighten their
tremendous consciousness.
Yet, here and there people, even American people, are so placed that
they take from the situation a color of eccentricity, if they impart none
to it, and the old, old story, which we all wish to have end well, zigzags
to a fortunate close past juts and angles of individuality which the
heroes and heroines have not willingly or wittingly thrown out. They
would have chosen to arrive smoothly and uneventfully at the goal, as
by far the greater majority do; and probably if they are aware of
looking quaint to others in their progress, they do not like it. But it is
this peculiar difference which renders them interesting and charming to
the spectator. If we all love a lover, as Emerson says, it is not because
of his selfish happiness, but because of the odd and unexpected chances
which for the time exalt him above our experience, and endear him to
our eager sympathies. In life one cannot perhaps have too little
romance in affairs of the heart, or in literature too much; and in either
one may be as quaint as one pleases in such affairs without being
ridiculous.
W.D.H.

AN ENCORE
BY MARGARET DELAND
According to Old Chester, to be romantic was just one shade less
reprehensible than to put on airs. Captain Alfred Price, in all his
seventy years, had never been guilty of airs, but certainly he had
something to answer for in the way of romance.
However, in the days when we children used to see him pounding up
the street from the post-office, reading, as he walked, a newspaper held

at arm's length in front of him, he was far enough from romance. He
was seventy years old, he weighed over two hundred pounds, his big
head was covered with a shock of grizzled red hair; his pleasures
consisted in polishing his old sextant and playing on a small
mouth-harmonicon. As to his vices, it was no secret that he kept a fat
black bottle in the chimney-closet in his own room; added to this, he
swore strange oaths about his grandmother's nightcap. "He used to
blaspheme," his daughter-in-law said,