The girls, like us, strolled in pairs.

And strolling girls will look at strolling boys who look.

(And to this day, in any town, city, or village, in which I, in my middle age, find myself, I look on with the eye trained of old experience, and watch the sweet innocent game played by the strolling boys and girls who just must stroll when the spring and summer evenings call.) The trouble was that in this Arcadian phase of my history, I, who had come through, case-hardened, from the other side of life, was timid and bashful.

Again and again Louis nerved me up.

But I didn't know girls.
They were strange and wonderful to me after my precocious man's life.