I think he has noticed me, too, although it is hard to say for I am so shy with him. He is gallant—oh, Meg, he is so very gallant, so very charming—to everyone, with a smile and a cheery word for all, and everyone in the house is enthralled by him, from little Kitty and Minnie, who giggle and toss their heads when they see him and won’t pay me heed afterwards, to clever Miss Norton, who has praised his head to me as “perfectly classical in proportion,” to poor little Annie the under parlormaid, who turns red as a beet in his presence and clatters the coal against the hod like so many castanets in confusion. But I fancy I notice an extra attentiveness in his bow to me of late, a tenderness in those rich cerulean eyes as he says, in that melodious voice of his, “Gut morning, Mees Marsch.” I can’t feel as strongly as this and not have it returned at least a little bit. It isn’t possible.

Don’t say a word to Marmee or Beth of any of this. But I am fancying a day when we sit together, he and I alone with each other, before a fire—in a garret somewhere; we shouldn’t want much—and I lay my head upon his shoulder, and he touches my face with his long slender hand, and I call him Friedrich and he calls me Jo …

Meanwhile, the dear old Professor awaits me in the parlor, to try to assist me in making some sense of Hans Andersen’s tale of the Little Mermaid. Poor man, I pity him sorely … when I am not weaving dreams about Herr B.

Ever your loving (and, these days, dreaming and sighing),

Jo.

Lulu dropped the letter and looked up into the blue sky above the attic window, smiling at what must surely be her great-great-grandmother’s first sight of her great-great-grandfather. Until now, Lulu had always pictured her great-great-grandfather, Professor Bhaer, as a staid and middle-aged man; but before he became Professor Bhaer, he must of course have been plain young Herr Bhaer, and how curiously gratifying it was to know that he had been handsome, too. Lulu’s boyfriends had so far tended to the scientific and eccentric: she had never attracted the attention of a handsome man. Handsome men fell for Sophie with her blond hair and easy charm, while Emma had always drawn the solid and dependable types, beginning with a brown-haired and rather solemn little boy whom she had known in kindergarten, who had spent endless evenings at their house doing jigsaws and who had gone on, Lulu thought, to become an architect, and ending with Matthew, who was about as solid and as dependable as it was humanly possible for a person to be.

If Lulu were asked to identify the sort of man who was attracted to her, she could not precisely say, and the truth was that no one much seemed to have been attracted at all lately; in fact, now that she thought of it, she had not had a serious boyfriend since university. It was probably as well, she reminded herself sternly: she had never seen the point of having a boyfriend just for the sake of having one, and there were, besides, so very many other questions currently surrounding her life that the idea of romance was probably too distracting to take on. Nevertheless, she thought now, it would be nice to be fallen in love with; and to be fallen in love with by a handsome man would be positively luxurious.