Transcriber's Note:

 The original text noted chapters as 1, 2, 3 etc. In the TOC, and I, II, III etc. In chapter headers. These have been retained. 

 * * * * *

 THE

 LOVE AFFAIRS OF AN OLD MAID

 BY LILIAN BELL

 "_Some ships reach happy ports that are not steered_"

 NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

 Copyright, 1893, by HARPER & BROTHERS. _All rights reserved. _

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated very fondly to my beloved family, who, in theiranxiety to render me material assistance, have offered me such diverseopinions as to its merit that their criticisms radiate from me in as manydirections as there are spokes to a wheel. 

This leaves the distraught hub with no opinion of its own, and withflaring, ragged edges. 

Nevertheless, thus must it appear before the public, whose opinion will bethe tire which shall enable my wheel to revolve. If it be favorable, onemay look for smooth riding; if unfavorable, one must expect jolts. 

PREFACE

It is a pity that there is no prettier term to bestow upon a girl bachelorof any age than Old Maid. "Spinster" is equally uncomfortable, suggesting, as it does, corkscrew curls and immoderate attenuation of frame; while"maiden lady, " which the ultra-punctilious substitute, is entirely toomincing for sensible, whole-souled people to countenance. 

I dare say that more women would have the courage to remain unmarried werethere so euphonious a title awaiting them as that of "bachelor, " which, when shorn of its accompanying adjective "old, " simply means unmarried. 

The word "bachelor, " too, has somewhat of a jaunty sound, implying to thesensitive ear that its owner could have been married--oh, several timesover--if he had wished. But both "spinster" and "old maid" have narrow, restricted attributes, which, to say the least, imply doubt as to pastopportunity. 

Names are covertly responsible for many overt acts. Carlyle, when he said, "The name is the earliest garment you wrap around the earth-visiting me. Names? Not only all common speech, but Science, Poetry itself, if thouconsider it, is no other than a right naming, " sounded a wonderful note inMoral Philosophy, which rings false many a time in real life, when to ringtrue would change the whole face of affairs. 

Thus I boldly affirm, that were there a proper sounding title to cover theclass of unmarried women, many a marriage which now takes place, witheither moderate success or distinct failure, would remain in pleasingembryo. 

Of the three evils among names for my book, therefore, I leave you todetermine whether I have chosen the greatest or least. The writing of itcame about in this way. 

In a conversation concerning modern marriage, the unwisdom people displayin choice, and the complicated affair it has come to be from a pastoralbeginning, I said lightly, "I shall write a book upon this subject somefine day, and I shall call it 'The Love Affairs of an Old Maid, ' becausepopular prejudice decrees that the love affairs of an old maid necessarilyare those of other people. "

No sooner had the name suggested in broad jest taken form in my mind thanstraightway every thought I possessed crystallized around it, and I foundmyself impelled by a malevolent Fate to begin it. 

It became a fixed intention on a Sunday morning in church during a mostexcellent sermon, the text and substance of which I have forgotten. Doubtless more of real worth and benefit to mankind was pent up in thatsermon than four books of my own writing could accomplish. But, with thedelightful candor of John Kendrick Bangs, I explain my lapse of memorythus--

 "I dote on Milton and on Robert Burns; I love old Marryat--his tales of pelf; I live on Byron; but my heart most yearns Towards those sweet things that I've penned myself. "

So the book has been written. The existence of the Old Maid often has beena precarious one; she has been surrounded by danger, once narrowlyescaping cremation. But my humanity towards dumb brutes saved her. I mighthave sacrificed a woman, but I could not kill a cat. So she lives, unconsciously owing her life to her cat. 

Thus she comes to you, bearing her friends in her heart. I should scarcelydare ask you to welcome her, did I not suspect that her friends are yours. You have your Flossy and your Charlie Hardy without doubt. Pray Heaven youhave a Rachel to outweigh them. 

CHICAGO, _March, 1893_. 

 CONTENTS

 CHAPTER PAGE

 1. I INTRODUCE ME TO MYSELF 1

 2. I COME INTO MY KINGDOM 8

 3. MATRIMONY IN HARNESS 18

 4. WOMEN AS LOVERS 30

 5. THE HEART OF A COQUETTE 51

 6. THE LONELY CHILDHOOD OF A CLEVER CHILD 65

 7. A STUDY IN HUMAN GEESE 78

 8. A GAME OF HEARTS 91

 9. THE MADONNA OF THE QUIET MIND 120

 10. THE PATHOS OF FAITH 137

 11. THE HAZARD OF A HUMAN DIE 156

 12. IN WHICH I WILLINGLY TURN MY FACE WESTWARD 174

 THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF ON OLD MAID

 * * *

 I

 I INTRODUCE ME TO MYSELF

 "There is a luxury in self-dispraise; And inward self-disparagement affords To meditative spleen a grateful feast. "

To-morrow I shall be an Old Maid. What a trying thing to have to say evento one's self, and how vexed I should be if anybody else said it to me!Nevertheless, it is a comfort to be brutally honest once in a while tomyself. I do not dare, I do not care, to be so to everybody. But with myown self, I can feel that it is strictly a family affair. If I hurt myfeelings, I can grieve over it until I apologize. If I flatter myself, Iam only doing what every other woman in the world is doing in herinnermost consciousness, and flattery as honest as flattery from one'sown self naturally would be could not fail to please me. Besides, it wouldhave the unique value of being believed by both sides--a situation in theflattery line which I fancy has no rival. 

It is well to become acquainted with one's self at all hazards, and as Iam going to be my own partner in the rubber of life, I can do nothingbetter than to study my own hand. So, to harrow up my feelings as only Idare to do, I write down that it is really true of me that I passed thefirst corner five years ago, and to-morrow I shall be 30. 

What a disagreeable figure a 3 is; I never noticed it before. It looks soself-satisfied. And as to that fat, hollow 0 which follows it--I alwaysdid detest round numbers. 

30; there it goes again. I must accustom myself to it privately, so Iwrite it down once more, and it laughs in my face and mocks me. Then Ilaugh back at it and say aloud that it is true, and for the time being Ihave cowed it and become its master. What boots it if the laughter is atrifle hollow? There is no harm in deceiving two miserable little figures. 

Let me revel in my youth while I may. To-night I am a gay young thing oftwenty-nine. To-morrow I shall be an Old Maid. I have very little timeleft in which to make myself ridiculous and have it excused on account ofmy youth. But somehow I do not feel very gay. I have a curious feelingabout my heart, as if I were at a burial--one where I was buryingsomething that I had always loved very dearly, but secretly, and whichwould always be a sweet and tender memory with me. I feel nervous, too, quite as if I did not know whether to laugh or to cry. I remember thatAlice Asbury said she was hysterical just before she was married. I wonderif a woman's feelings on the eve of being an Old Maid are unlike those ofone about to become a bride. 

My cat sits eying me with sleepy approval. I always liked cats. And tea. Why have I never thought of it before? It is not my fault that I am an OldMaid. I was cut out for one. All my tendencies point that way. Pleasedon't blame me, good people. Come here, Tabby. You and Missis will growold together. 

After all, it is a sad thing when one realizes for the first time thatone's youth is slipping away. But why? Why do women of great intelligence, of intellect even, blush with pleasure at the implication of youth?

There are fashions in thought as well as in dress, and the best of usfollow both, as sheep follow their leader. We will sometimes follow ourneighbor's line of insular prejudice, when worlds could not bribe us tocopy her grammar or her gowns. Dull people admire youth. They excuse itsfollies; they adore its prettiness. That it is only a period of education, and that real life begins with maturity, does not enter into their minds. The odor of bread and butter does not nauseate them. Dull people, Isay--and God pity us, most of us are dull--admire youth. Men love it. Therefore we all want to be young. We strive to be young, nay, we _will_be young. 

I am no better than my neighbors. I, too, am young when I am with people. But there are times when I am alone when the strain of being youngrelaxes, and I luxuriate in being old, old, old, when I cease beingcontemporary, and look back fondly to the time when the world and Iwere in embryo. 

And yet I wonder if extreme age is as repulsive to everybody as it isto me. Forty seems a long way off. I fancy people at forty become veryuninteresting to the oncoming generation. Fifty is grandmotherly andsuitable for little else. Sixty, seventy, and beyond seem to me onehorrible jumble of wrinkles and wheezes and false beauty and generalunpleasantness. Oh, I hope, if I should live to be over fifty, that I maybe a pleasant old person. I hope my teeth will fit me, and the parting tomy wave be always in the middle. I hope my fingers will always come fullyto the ends of my gloves, and that I never shall wear my spectacles on topof my head. But I hope more than all that it isn't wicked to wish to diebefore I come to these things. 

Before I entirely lose my youth--in other words, before I become an OldMaid, let me see what I must give up. Lovers, of course. That goeswithout saying. And if I give them up, it will not do to have theirphotographs standing around. They must be--oh! and their letters--mustthey too be destroyed? Dear me, no! I'll just fold them all together andlay them away, like a wedding-dress which never has been worn. And I'llput girls' pictures or missionaries' or martyrs' into the empty frames. Martyrs' would be most appropriate. 

Now for a box to put them in. A pretty box, so that one who runs may read?Not so, you sentimental Elderly Person. Take this tin box with a lock onit. There you are, done up in a japanned box and padlocked. I would saythat it looks like a little coffin if I wasn't afraid of what my Alter Egowould say. She seems cross to-night. I wonder what is the matter with her. She must be getting old. I should like to hang the key around my neck on ablue ribbon, but I am afraid. "What if you should be run over and killed, "she says, "or should faint away in church? Remember that you are an OldMaid. " How disagreeable old maids can be! And I've got to live with thisone always. I'll put the key in my purse. Nice, sensible, prosaic place, a purse. 

How late it grows! I have only a little time left. I believe that clockis fast. Dear, dear! Do I want to just sit still and watch myself turn?I meant to have old age overtake me in my sleep. I think I'll stop thatclock and let my youth fade from me unawares. 

 II

 I COME INTO MY KINGDOM

 "There is no compensation for the woman who feels that the chief relation of her life has been no more than a mistake. She has lost her crown. The deepest secret of human blessedness has half whispered itself to her and then forever passed her by. "

I have become an Old Maid, and really it is a relief. I feel as if I hadleft myself behind me, and that now I have a right to the interests ofother people when they are freely offered. My friends always have confidedin me. I suppose it is because I am receptive. Men tell me their old loveaffairs. Girls tell me the whole story of their engagements--how they cameto take this man, and why they did not take that one. And even the mostordinary are vitally interesting. Before I know it, I am rent with thesame despair which agitates the lover confiding in me; or I am wreathedin the smiles of the engaged girl who is getting her absorbing secretcomfortably off her mind. It seems to comfort them to air their emotion, and sometimes I am convinced that they leave the most of it with me. 

Now I can feel at liberty to enjoy and sympathize as I will. Well, thelove affairs of other people are the rightful inheritance of old maids. In sharing them I am only coming into my kingdom. 

Alice Asbury has made shipwreck of hers. The girl is actively miserableand her husband is indifferently uncomfortable, which is the habit thismarried couple have of experiencing the same emotion. 

Alice is a mass of contradictions to those who do not understand her--nowin the clouds, now in the depths. Bad weather depresses her; so does a sadstory, the death of a kitten, solemn music. She is correspondinglyvolatile in the opposite direction and often laughs at real calamitieswith wonderful courage. She has a fund of romance in her nature which hasled her to the pass she now is in. She is clever, too, at introspectionand analysis--of herself chiefly. She studies her own sensations anddissects her moods. Her selfishness is of the peculiar sort which shouldhave kept her from marrying until she found the hundredth man who couldappreciate her genius and bend it into nobler channels. Unfortunately shemarried one of the ninety-nine. She is not, perhaps, more selfish thanmany another woman, but her selfishness is different. She is mentallycross-eyed from turning her eyes inward so constantly. 

She became engaged to Brandt--a man in every way worthy of her--and theyloved each other devotedly. Then during a quarrel she broke theengagement, and he, being piqued by her withdrawal, immediately marriedMay Lawrence, who had been patiently in love with him for five years, andwho was only waiting for some such turn as this to deliver him into herhands. A poetic justice visits him with misery, for he still cares forAlice. May, however, is not conscious of this fact as yet. 

Alice, being doubly stung by his defection, was just in the mood to dosomething desperate, when she began to see a great deal of Asbury, freshfrom being jilted by Sallie Cox. Asbury was moody, and confided in Alice. Alice was foolish, and confided in him. They both decided that theirhearts were ashes, love burned out, and life a howling wilderness, andthen proceeded to exchange these empty hearts of theirs, and to go throughthe howling wilderness together. 

Alice came to tell me about it. They had no love to give each other, shesaid sadly, but they were going to be married. I would have laughed at herif she had not been so tragic. But there is something about Alice, inspite of her romantic folly, (which she has adapted from the French tosuit her American needs, ) which forbids ridicule. Nevertheless I felt, with one of those sudden flashes of intuition, that this choice of herswas a hideous mistake. The situation repelled me. But the very strangenessof it seemed to attract the morbid Alice. And it was this one curiousstrain of unexplained foolishness marring her otherwise strong and in manyways beautiful character which prevented my loving her completely andsafely. Nevertheless, I cared for her enough to enter my feeble and futileprotest; but it was waved aside with the superb effrontery of a woman whofeels that she controls the situation with her head, and whose heart isnot at liberty to make uncomfortable complications. I would rather arguewith a woman who is desperately in love, to prevent her marrying the manof her choice, than to try to dissuade a woman from marrying a man she hasset her head upon. You feel sympathy with the former, and you have humannature and the whole glorious love-making Past at your back, to give youconfidence and eloquence. But with the latter you are cowed and beatenbeforehand, and tongue-tied during the contest. 

So she became Alice Asbury, and these two blighted beings took a flat. Before they had been at home from their honeymoon a week she came down tosee me, and told me that she hated Asbury. 

Imagine a bride whose bouquet, only a month before, you had held at thealtar, and heard her promise to love, honor, and obey a man until deathdid them part, coming to you with a confession like that. Still, if butone half she tells me of him is true, I do not wonder that she hates him. 

With her revolutionary, anarchistic completeness, she has renounced theidea of compromise or adaptability as finally as if she had seen andpassed the end of the world. There is no more pliability in her withregard to Asbury than there is in a steel rod. How different she used tobe with Brandt! How she consulted his wishes and accommodated herself tohim!

When a woman born to be ruled by love only passes by her master spirit, she becomes an anomaly in woman--she makes complications over which thepsychologist wastes midnight oil, and if he never discovers the solution, it is because of its very simplicity. 

All the sweetness seems to have left Alice's nature. She keeps somebodywith her every moment. That one guest chamber in her flat has beenoccupied by all the girls that she can persuade to visit her. Asburydislikes company, but she says she does not care. She cannot keepvisitors long, because as soon as they discover that they are unwelcometo Asbury, naturally they go home. 

Fortunately, Asbury does not care for Sallie Cox any more. When his vanitywas wounded, his love died instantly. I think he is more in love withhimself than he ever was with any woman. There are men, you know, whoseone grand passion in life is for themselves. But Alice knows that Brandtstill cares for her, and she feeds her romantic fancy on this fact, andhas her introspective miseries to her heart's content. She is far toocool-headed a woman to do anything rash. Sometimes I think her morbidnature obtains more real satisfaction out of her joyless situation thanpositive happiness would compensate her for. She appears to take a certainnegative pleasure in it. Their marriage is the product of a falsecivilization, and I pity them--at a distance--from the bottom of my heart. I am sorry for Brandt, too, for he honestly loved Alice and might haveproved the hundredth man--who knows?

I do not quite know whether to be sorry for May Brandt or not, for shemade complications and made them purposely. She made them so promptly, too, that she precluded the possibility of a reconciliation between Aliceand Brandt. If Brandt had remained single, I doubt whether Alice wouldhave had the courage to form an engagement with any other man. She lovedhim too truly to take the first step towards an eternal separation. Womenseldom dare make that first move, except as a decoy. They are naturallysuperstitious, and even when curiously free from this trait in everythingelse, they cling to a little in love, and dare not tempt Fate tooinsolently. 

A woman who has quarrelled with her lover, in her secret heart expects himback daily and hourly, no matter what the cause of the estrangement, untilhe becomes involved with another woman. Then she lays all the blame of hisdefection at the door of the alien, where, in the opinion of an Old Maid, it generally belongs. 

If other women would let men alone, constancy would be less of a hollowmockery. (Query, but is it constancy where there is no temptation to befickle?) Nevertheless, let "another woman" sympathize with an estrangedlover, and place a little delicate blame upon his sweetheart and flatterhim a great deal, and _presto!_ you have one of those criss-crossengagements which turns life to a dull gray for the aching heart whichis left out. 

If, too, when this honestly loving woman appears to take the first step, her actions and mental processes could be analyzed and timed, itfrequently would prove that, with her quicker calculations, she foresawthe fatal effect of the "other-woman" element, and, desirous of protectingher vanity, reached blindly out to the nearest man at her command, andmarried him with magnificent effrontery, just to circumvent humiliationand to take a little wind out of the other woman's sails. But could youmake her lover believe that? Never. 

And so May Lawrence played the "other woman" in the Asbury tragedy. Iwonder if she is satisfied with her rôle. A girl who wilfully catches aman's heart on the rebound, does the thing which involves more risk thananything else malevolent fate could devise. 

On the whole, I think I am sorry for her, for she has apples of Sodom inher hand, although as yet to her delighted gaze they appear the fairestof summer fruit. 

 III

 MATRIMONY IN HARNESS

 "What eagles are we still In matters that belong to other men; What beetles in our own!"

The more I know of horses, the more natural I think men and women are inthe unequalness of their marriages. I never yet saw a pair of horses sowell matched that they pulled evenly all the time. The more skilful thedriver, the less he lets the discrepancy become apparent. Going up hill, one horse generally does the greater share of work. If they pull equallyup hill, sometimes they see-saw and pull in jerks on a level road. And Inever saw a marriage in which both persons pulled evenly all the time, andthe worst of it is, I suppose this unevenness is only what is alwaysexpected. 

Having no marriage of my own to worry over, it is gratuitous when I worryover other people's. Old maids, you know, like to air their views onmatrimony and bringing up children. Their theories on these subjects havethis advantage--that they always hold good because they never are tried. 

There never was such an unequal yoking together as the Herricks'. Nobodyhas told me. This is one of the affairs which has not been confided to me. Only, I knew them both so well before they were married. I knew BronsonHerrick best, however, because I never used to see any more of Flossy thanwas necessary. 

To begin with, I never liked her name. I have an idea that names showcharacter. Could anybody under heaven be noble with such a name as Flossy?I believe names handicap people. I believe children are sometimes torturedby hideous and unmeaning names. But give them strong, ugly names inpreference to Ina and Bessie and Flossy and such pretty-pretty names, withno meaning and no character to them. Take my own name, Ruth. If I wantedto be noble or heroic I could be; my name would not be an anomalousnightmare to attract attention to the incongruity. We cannot be toothankful to our mothers who named us Mary and Dorothy and Constance. Whatan inspiration to be "faithful over a few things" such a name as Constancemust be!

But Flossy's mother named her--not Florence, but Flossy. I suppose she wasone of those fluffy, curly, silky babies. She grew to be that kind of agirl--a Flossy girl. It speaks for itself. I suppose with that name shenever had any incentive to outgrow her nature. 

It came out on her wedding cards:

 "Mr. And Mrs. CHARLES FAY CARLETON request you to be present at the marriage of their daughter FLOSSY to Mr. BRONSON STURGIS HERRICK. "

The contrast between the two names, hers so nonsensical and his sodignified and strong, was no greater than that between the two people. In truth, their names were symbolic of their natures. It looked reallypitiful to me. 

I wondered if anybody besides Rachel English and me looked into theirfuture with apprehension. Our misgivings, I must admit, were all forBronson. 

Ah, well-a-day! It is so easy to feel sympathy for a man you admire, especially if he is strong and loyal, and does not ask or desire it ofyou. 

Flossy was one of those cuddling girls. She appealed to you with her eyes, and you found yourself petting her and sympathizing with her, when, if youstopped to think, you would see that she had more of everything than youhad. She possessed a rich father, a beautiful house, and perfect health. Nevertheless, you found yourself asking after "poor Flossy, " and yourvoice commiserated her if your words did not. She invariably had sometrifling ill to tell you of. She had hurt her arm, or scratched her hand, or the snow made her eyes ache, or she was tired. She never seemed atliberty to enjoy herself, although she went everywhere, and seemed to doso successfully in spite of her imaginary ills, if you let her enjoyherself by telling you of them. 

Everybody helped Flossy to live. Everybody protected and looked after her. There was some one on his knees continually, removing invisible bramblesfrom her rose-leaf path. She didn't know how to do anything for herself. She never buttoned her own boots. When her maid was not with her, otherpeople put her jacket on for her, and carried her umbrella and buttonedher gloves. Men always buttoned her gloves, and her gloves always had morebuttons, and more unruly buttons, than any other gloves I ever saw. Butthen I am elderly. 

I never knew Flossy to do anything for anybody. She never gave thingsaway, but on Christmas and her birthdays she received remembrances fromeverybody. I used to make her presents without knowing why or eventhinking of it. Flossy's name was on all the Christmas lists, and she usedto shed tears over the kindness of her friends, and write the prettiestnotes to them, so plaintive and self-deprecatory. Then they took her todrive, or did something more for her. Flossy read poetry and cried overit. She wrote poetry too, and other people cried over that. 

When Bronson Herrick told me he was going to marry her, I wanted to say, "No, you are not. " But I didn't. I did not even seem to be surprised, forhe is so proud he would have resented any surprise on my part. He told meabout it of course, knowing that I could not fail to be pleased. (Hisphotograph is in that japanned box of mine. This smile on my face, Tabby, is rather sardonic. Why is it that men expect an old sweetheart to take anactive interest in their bride-elect, and are so deadly sure that theywill like each other?)

"She is the most sympathetic little thing, " he said enthusiastically. "Shereminds me of you in so many ways. You are very much alike. "

"Oh, thank you, Bronson Sturgis Herrick! I assure you I would cheerfullydrown myself if I thought you were right about that, " I exclaimedmentally. 

He repeated over and over that she was "so sympathetic. " He meant, ofcourse, that she had wept over him. Flossy's tears flow like rain if youcrook your finger at her, and tears wring the heart of a man like Bronson. To think he was going to marry her! I just looked at him, I remember, ashe stood so straight and tall before me, and said to myself, "Well, youdear, honest, loyal, clever man! You are just the kind of a man that womenfool most unmercifully. But it's nature, and you can't help it. Go andmarry this Flossy girl, and commit mental suicide if you must. "

"Sympathetic!"

So he married her five years ago, and became her man-servant. 

When they had been married about a year, people said that Bronson wasworking himself to death. I, being an Old Maid, and liking to meddle withother people's business, told him that I thought he ought to take avacation. He said he couldn't afford it. I was honestly surprised at that, because, while he was not rich, he was extremely well-to-do, with arapidly increasing law practice. And then Flossy's father had been verygenerous when she married him. He was considerate enough to reply to mylook. 

"You know I married a rich girl. Flossy's money is her own. She has savedit--I wished her to save it, I _wished_ it--and I am doing my level bestto support her as nearly as possible in the way in which she has beenaccustomed to live. She ought to have an easier time, poor child. "

So he did not take a vacation, and the summer was very hot, and whenFlossy came home from Rye she found him wretchedly ill, and discoveredthat he had had a trained nurse for two weeks before he let her knowanything about it. Then people pitied Flossy for having her summerinterrupted, and Flossy felt that it was a shame; but she very willinglysat and fanned Bronson for as much as an hour every day and answeredquestions languidly and was pale, and people sent her flowers and wereextremely sorry for her. 

When Bronson became well enough to go away, as his doctors ordered, for acomplete rest, Rachel English happened to go on the same train with them, and the next day I received a letter, or rather an envelope, from her, with this single sentence enclosed: "And if she didn't make him hold herin his arms in broad daylight every step of the way, because the trainjarred her back!"

(Tabby, there is no use in talking. I must stop and pull your ears. Comehere and let Missis be really rough with you for a minute. )

There are some women who prefer a valet to a husband; who think that themore menial are his services in public, the more apparent is his devotion. It is a Roman-chariot-wheel idea, which degrades both the man and thewoman in the eyes of the spectators. I wrote to Rachel, and said in theletter, "One horse in the span always does most of the pulling, you know, especially uphill. " And Rachel wrote back, "Wouldn't I just like to drivethis pair, though!"

Bronson had his ideals before he was married, as most men have, concerningthe kind of a home he hoped for. He always said that it was not so muchwhat your home was, as how it was. He believed that a home consisted morein the feelings and aims of its inmates than in rugs and jardinières. Hesaid to me once, "The oneness of two people could make a home in Sahara. "

He was ambitious, too, feeling within himself that power which makesorators and statesmen, but needing the approval and encouragement of someone who also realized his capabilities, to enable him to do his best. Hehimself was the one who was sympathetic, if he had only known it. Hisnature responded with the utmost readiness to whatever appealed to himfrom the side of right or justice. 

He had noble hopes in many directions, hopes which inspired me to believein his truth and goodness, aside from his capabilities for achievinggreatness. His eagle sight, which read through other men's shams andpretences; his moral sense, which bade him shun even the appearance ofevil, not only permitted, but urged him, seemingly, into this marriagewith Flossy, by which he effectually cut himself off from his dearestaspirations. One by one I have seen him relinquish them, holding to themlovingly to the last. The hours at home, which he intended to give tostudy and research, have been sacrificed to the petting and nursing of aperfectly well woman, who demanded it of him. His home life, where he haddreamed of a congenial atmosphere, where the centripetal force should bethe love of wife and children, merged into frequent journeys forFlossy--who would have been happy if she never had been obliged to stay inone place over a week--and a shifting of their one child Rachel into thecare of nurses, because Flossy fretted at the care of her and demanded allof Bronson's time for herself. 

Thus was Bronson's life being twisted and bent from its natural course. Was it a weakness in him? To be sure he might have shown his strength bybreaking loose from family ties, and, hardening his heart to his wife'splaints, have carried out his ambitions with some degree of success. Hedid attempt this, nor did he fail in his career. He was called a fairlysuccessful man. I dare say the majority of people never knew that he wascreated for grander things. But something was sapping his energy at thefountain-head. Was he realizing that he had helped to shatter his idealswith his own hand?

I never am so well satisfied with my lot of single-blessedness as when Icontemplate the sort of wife Flossy makes. That may sound arrogant, butthis is a secret session of human nature, when arrogance and allnative-born sins are permissible. 

Flossy is perfectly unconscious of the spectacle she presents to theworld. Ah, me! I know it is said, "Judge not, that ye be not judged. " Imight have made him just such a wife, I suppose. O heavens! no, Ishouldn't. Tabby, that is making humility go a little too far. 

 IV

 WOMEN AS LOVERS

 "In every clime and country There lives a Man of Pain, Whose nerves, like chords of lightning, Bring fire into his brain: To him a whisper is a wound, A look or sneer, a blow; More pangs he feels in years or months Than dunce-throng'd ages know. "

I have had such a curious experience. I have been confided in, twice inone day. Two more bits out of other lives have been given to me, and it isastonishing to see how well they piece into mine. 

To begin with, Rachel English came in early. There is somethingparticularly auspicious about Rachel. She fits me like a glove. She neverjars nor grates. When she is here, I am comfortable; when she is gone, Imiss something. If I see a fine painting, or hear magnificent music, Ithink of Rachel before any other thought comes into my mind. Oneinvoluntarily associates her with anything wonderfully fine in art orliterature, with the perfect assurance that she will be sympathetic andappreciative. She understands the deep, inarticulate emotions in thekindred way you have a right to expect of your lover, and which you areoftenest disappointed in, if you do expect it of him. If I were a man, Ishould be in love with Rachel. 

Her sensitiveness through every available channel makes her of no use togeneral society. Blundering people tread on her; malicious ones tear herto pieces. Rachel ought to be caged, and only approached by clever peoplewho have brains enough to appreciate her. I should like to be her keeper. But her organization is too closely allied to that of genius to be happy, unless with certain environments which it is too good to believe will eversurround her. She is so clever that she is perfectly helpless. If you knewher, this would not be a paradox. Possibly it isn't anyway. 

I do not say that Rachel is perfect. She would be desperatelyuncomfortable as a friend if she were. Her failings are those belonging toa frank, impulsive, generous nature, which I myself find it easy toforgive. Her gravest fault is a witty tongue. That which many people wouldgive years of their lives to possess is what she has shed the most tearsover and which she most liberally detests in herself. She calls it herprivate demon, and says she knows that one of the devils, in the woman whowas possessed of seven, was the devil of wit. 

Wit is a weapon of defence, and was no more intended to be an attribute ofwoman than is a knowledge of fire-arms or a fondness for mice. A wittywoman is an anomaly, fit only for literary circles and to be admired at adistance. 

It is of no use to advise Rachel to curb her tongue. So tender-heartedthat the sight of an animal in pain makes her faint; so humble-minded thatshe cannot bear to receive an apology, but, no matter what has been theoffence, cuts it off short and hastens to accept it before it is uttered, with the generous assurance that she, too, has been to blame; yet shewounds cruelly, but unconsciously, with her tongue, which cleaves like aknife, and holds up your dearest, most private foibles on stilettos of witfor the public to mock at. Not that she is personal in her allusions, buther thorough knowledge of the philosophy of human nature and the deep, secret springs of human action lead her to witty, satiricalgeneralizations, which are so painfully true that each one of her hearersgoes home hugging a personal affront, while poor Rachel never dreams oflacerated feelings until she meets averted faces or hears a whisper ofher heinous sin. This grieves her wofully, but leaves her with no mode ofredress, for who dare offer balm to wounded vanity? I believe her when shesays she "never wilfully planted a thorn in any human breast. "

She scarcely had entered before I saw that she had something on her mind. And it was not long before she began to confide, but in an impersonal way. 

There is something which makes you hold your breath before you enter theinner nature of some one who has extraordinary depth. You feel as if youwere going to find something different and interesting, and possiblydifficult or explosive. It is dark, too, yet you feel impelled to enter. It is like going into a cave. 

Most people are afraid of Rachel. Sometimes I am. But it is the alluring, hysterical fear which makes a child say, "Scare me again. "

Imagine such a girl in love. Rachel is in love. She would not say withwhom--naturally. At least, naturally for Rachel. I felt rather helpless, but as I knew that all she wanted was an intelligent sympathizer, notverbal assistance, I was willing to blunder a little. I knew she wouldspeedily set me right. 

"You are too clever to marry, " I said at a hazard. 

"That is one of the most popular of fallacies, " she answered mecrushingly. "Why can't clever women marry, and make just as good wives asthe others? Why can't a woman bend her cleverness to see that her house isin order, and her dinners well cooked, and buttons sewed on, as well asto discuss new books and keep pace with her husband intellectually? Do yousuppose because I know Greek that I cannot be in love? Do you supposebecause I went through higher mathematics that I never pressed a flower hegave me? Do you imagine that Biology kills blushing in a woman? Do youthink that Philosophy keeps me from crying myself to sleep when I think hedoesn't care for me, or growing idiotically glad when he tells me he does?What rubbish people write upon this subject! Even Pope proved that he wasonly a man when he said, "'Love seldom haunts the breast where learning lies, And Venus sets ere Mercury can rise. '

"Did you ever read such foolishness?"

"Often, my dear, often. But console yourself. A wiser than Pope says, 'Thelearned eye is still the loving one. '"

"Browning, of course. I ought not to be surprised that the prince of poetsshould be clever enough to know that. It is from his own experience. 'Whowrites to himself, writes to an eternal public. ' You see, Ruth, men can'thelp looking at the question from the other side, because they form theother side. You might cram a woman's head with all the wisdom of the ages, and while it would frighten every man who came near her into hysterics, itwouldn't keep her from going down abjectly before some man who had senseenough to know that higher education does not rob a woman of herwomanliness. Depend upon it, Ruth, when it does, she would have beenunwomanly and masculine if she hadn't been able to read. And it is the manwho marries a woman of brains who is going to get the most out of thislife. "

"Men don't want clever wives, " I said feebly. 

"Clever men don't. Why is it that all the brightest men we know haveselected girls who looked pretty and have coddled them? Look at Bronsonand Flossy. That man is lonesome, I tell you, Ruth. He actually hungersand thirsts for his intellectual and moral affinity, and yet even he didnot have the sense--the astuteness--to select a wife who would have stoodat his side, instead of one who lay in a wad at his feet. Oh, thebungling marriages that we see! I believe one reason is that like seldommarries like. For my part I do not believe in the marriage of opposites. Look at Robert Browning and his wife. That is my ideal marriage. Their artand brains were married, as well as their hands and hearts. It is puremusic to think of it. And, to me, the most pathetic poem in the Englishlanguage is Browning's 'Andrea del Sarto. '"

"Isn't it strange to see the kind of men who love clever women like you?You never could have brought yourself to marry any of them, expecting tofind them congenial. They would have admired you in dumb silence, untilthey grew tired of feeling your superiority; after that--what?"

"The deluge, I suppose. Ruth, I don't see how a woman with anyself-respect can marry until she meets her master. That is high treason, isn't it? But it is one of those sentient bits of truth which we nevermention in society. The man I marry must have a stronger will and agreater brain than I have, or I should rule him. I'll never marry until Ifind a man who knows more than I do. Yet, as to these other men who haveloved me--you know what a tender place a woman has in her heart for themen who have wanted to marry her. My intellect repudiated, but my heartcherishes them still. Odd things, hearts. Sometimes I wish we didn't haveany when they ache so. I feel like disagreeing with all the poets to-day, because they will not say what I believe. Do you remember this, fromBeaumont and Fletcher, "'Of all the paths that lead to woman's love Pity's the straightest'?

"Men are fond of saying that, I notice, but I don't think we women bearout the truth. I couldn't love a man I pitied. I could love one I wasproud of, or afraid of, but one I pitied? Never. It is more true to sayit of men. I believe plenty of girls obtain husbands by virtue of theirweakness, their loneliness, their helplessness, their--anything whichmakes a man pity them. Pleasant thought, isn't it, for a woman who lovesher own sex and wishes it held its head up better! You may say that it isthis sort who receive more of the attentions that women love, chivalryand tenderness and devotion. But if all or any of these were inspired bypity, I'd rather not have them. I would rather a man would be rough andbrusque with me, if he loved me heroically, than to see him fling his coatin the mud for me to step on, because he pitied my weakness. Do you know, Ruth, I think men are a good deal more human than women. You can work themout by algebra (for they never have more than one unknown quantity, and inthe woman problem there would be more _x_'s than anything else), and youcan go by rules and get the answer. But nothing ever calculated or evolvedcan get the final answer to one woman--though they do say she is fond ofthe last word! We understand ourselves intuitively, and we understand menby study, yet we are made the receivers, not the givers; the chosen, notthe choosers. It really is an absurd dispensation when you view it apartfrom sentiment, yet I, for one, would not have it changed. I should notmind being Cupid for a while, though, and giving him a few ideas in themating line. 

"I think women are often misjudged. Men seem to think that all we want isto be loved. Now, it isn't all that I want. If I had to choose betweenbeing loved by a man--_the_ man, let us say--and not loving him at all, or loving him very dearly and not being loved by him, I would choose thelatter, for I think that more happiness comes from loving than from beingloved. "

"Why _don't_ you marry somebody?" I asked in an agony of entreaty, forfear all of this would be wasted on me, an Old Maid, rather than upon someman. She shook her head. 

"It needs a compelling, not a persuasive, power to win a woman. No man whotakes me like this, " closing her thumb and forefinger as if holding abutterfly, "can have me. The one who dares to take me like this, "clenching her hand, "will get me. But he will not come. "

Then I walked with her to the door, and she bent over me, and whisperedsomething about my being a "blessed comfort" to her, and went away. Ah, Tabby, my dear, it is worth while being an Old Maid to be a blessedcomfort to anybody. But I would just like to ask you, as a cat ofintelligence, what in the world I did for her!

Imagine some man making that girl care for him so much. For, of course, it is somebody. A girl does not say such things about the abstract man. 

I was in an uplifted state of mind all day, as I am always after a talkwith Rachel, and when Percival came in the evening, I felt that I coulddeluge him with my gathered sentiment, and he would be receptive. Besides, Percival has a positive genius for understanding. I did not know it, however, this morning. I seldom know as much in the morning as I do atnight. 

Percival approves of sentiment. He said once that a life which hadprinciple and sentiment needed little else, for principle was to standupon, and sentiment was to beautify with. He said this after I had toldhim rather apologetically that I wished there was more sentiment in theworld, because I liked it. Is it strange that I like Percival? You can'thelp admiring people who approve of you. 

Percival is a genius. People in general do not recognize this fact. He isan inarticulate genius. Men feel that he is in some occult way differentfrom them, yet they do not know just how. Nor will they ever take thetrouble to study out a problem in human nature, either in man or woman, unless they are philosophers. 

Women care for Percival in proportion to their intuitions. You mustcomprehend him synthetically. You cannot dissect him. With generousappreciation and sympathetic encouragement, Percival's genius would becomearticulate. To discover it he must needs marry--but he must wait for thehundredth woman. This, of course, he will not do. If he can find a Flossy, he will go down on his knees to her, when she ought to be on hers to him;metaphorical knees, in this case. 

I am very much afraid he has found her. He is in love. You can always tellwhen a man is in love, Tabby, especially if he is not the lovering kindand has never been troubled in that way before. The best kind of love hasto be so intuitive that it often is grandly, heroically awkward. Dependupon it, Tabby, a man who is dainty and pretty and unspeakably smooth whenhe makes love to you, has had altogether too much practice. 

Percival knows that he is in love--that is one great step in the rightdirection. But he is in that first partly alarmed, partly curious frame ofmind that a man would be in who touched his broken arm for the first timeto see how much it hurt. Whoever she is, he loves her deeply and thinksshe never can care for him. He did not tell me this. If he thought that Iknew it, he would wonder how in the world I found it out. Women are bornlovers. They have to do the bulk of the loving all through the world. Itold Percival so. At first he seemed surprised; then he said that it wastrue. I believe some men could go through life without loving anybody onearth. But the woman never lived who could do it. A woman must lovesomething--even if she hasn't anything better to love than a pug-dog orherself. 

"Why aren't women the choosers?" said Percival seriously. The samequestion twice in one day, Tabby. "Whenever I think of understanding thequestion of love, I wish for a woman's intuitions. Women know so muchabout it. They absorb the whole question at a glance. But, with so manydifferent kinds of women, how is a man to know anything?"

I always liked Percival, but a woman never likes a man so well as whenhe acknowledges his helplessness in her particular line of knowledge, andthrows himself on her mercy. Mentally, I at once began to feel motherlytowards Percival, and clucked around him like an old hen. He went on tosay that men often are not so blind that they cannot see the prejudicesand complexities of a woman's nature, but they are not constituted tounderstand them by intuition as women understand men. "The masculinemind, " he said, "is but ill-attuned to the subtle harmonies of thefeminine heart. "

I was secretly very much pleased at this remark, but I made myself answeras became an Old Maid, just to make him continue withoutself-consciousness. If I had blushed and thanked him, he would have gonehome. 

"They set these things down to the natural curiousness and contrarinessof women, and often despise what they cannot comprehend. "

He answered me with the heightened consciousness and slight irritation ofa man who has been in that fault, but has seen and mended it. 

"All men do not. Still, how can they help it at times?"

Then, Tabby, I went a-sailing. I launched out on my favorite theme. 

"Men must needs study women. Often the terror with which some men regardthese--to us--perfectly transparent complexities, could be avoided if theywould analyze the cause with but half the patience they display in thecase of an ailing trotter. But no; either they edge carefully away fromsuch dangers as they previously have experienced, or, if they blunder intonew ones, they give the woman a sealskin and trust to time to heal thebreach. "

I thought of the Asburys when I said that. But Percival ruminated upon it, as if it touched his own case. A very good thing about Percival is thathe does not think he knows everything. It encourages me to believe in hisgenius. To rouse him from a brown-study over this Flossy girl, I saidrather recklessly, "I should like to be a man for a while, in order to make love to two orthree women. I would do it in a way which should not shock them with itscoarseness or starve them with its poverty. As it is now, most women denythemselves the expression of the best part of their love, because theyknow it will be either a puzzle or a terror to their lovers. "

Percival was vitally interested at once. 

"Is that really so?" he asked. "Do you suppose any of them withholdanything from such a fear?" His face was so uplifted that I plunged on, thoroughly in the dark, but, like Barkis, "willin'. " If I could be of useto him in an emergency, I was only too happy. 

"Men never realize the height of the pedestal where women in love placethem, nor do they know with how many perfections they are invested nor howreligiously women keep themselves deceived on the subject. They cannotcomprehend the succession of little shocks which is caused by the real mancoming in contact with the ideal. And if they did understand, they wouldthink that such mere trifles should not affect the genuine article oflove, and that women simply should overlook foibles, and go on loving thedamaged article just as blindly as before. But what man could view hisfavorite marble tumbling from its pedestal continually, and losing first afinger, then an arm, then a nose, and would go on setting it up each time, admiring and reverencing in the mutilated remains the perfect creationwhich first enraptured him? He wouldn't take the trouble to fill up thenicks and glue on the lost fingers as women do to their idols. He wouldn'teven try to love it as he used to do. When it began to look too batteredup, he would say, 'Here, put this thing in the cellar and let's get it outof the way. '"

Percival listened with specific interest, and admitted its truth with afair-mindedness surprising even in him. 

"Do you suppose it is possible for a man ever to thoroughly understand awoman?" he asked, with a retrospective slowness, directed, I was sure, towards that empty-headed sweetheart of his. 

"I really do not know, " I said honestly. "I think if he tried with all hismight he could. "

"Do you think--you know me better than any one else does--do you think_I_ could, if I gave my whole mind to it?"

"You, if anybody. " I answered him with the occasional absolutetruthfulness which occurs between a man and a woman when they arecompletely lifted out of themselves. Something more than mere pleasureshone in his eyes. It was as if I had reached his soul. 

"If no man ever has been all that a woman in love really believes him, thebest a man could do would be to take care that she never found out hermistake, " he said slowly. 

"Exactly, " I said; "you are getting on. It is only another way of makingyourself live up to her ideal of you. "

"Supposing after all, that the woman I love will have none of me, " hesaid, unconsciously slipping from the third person to the first. 

"I wouldn't admit even the possibility if I were a man. I would besiegethe fortress. I would sit on her front doorstep until she gave in. Don'task her to have you. Tell her you are going to have her whether or no, " Icried, thinking of Rachel's words. He looked so encouraged that I amafraid I have sent him post-haste to the Flossy girl, and gotten him intolife-long trouble. But I had gone too far. I quite hurried, in myaccidental endeavor to shipwreck him. 

"Men do not understand these things, because they will not give timeenough to them. Real love-making requires the patience, the tenderness, the sympathy which women alone possess in the highest degree. Possibly sheloves you deeply, only you do not believe it. Gauged by a woman's love, many men love, marry, and die, without even approximating the real grandpassion themselves, or comprehending that which they have inspired, forno one but a woman can fathom a woman's love. "

I couldn't help going on after I started, for he was thinking of the otherwoman, and looking at me in a way that would have made my heart turn over, if I hadn't been an Old Maid, and known that his look was not for me. 

Then he ground my rings into my hand until I nearly shrieked with thepain, and said, "God bless you!" very hoarsely, and dashed out of thehouse before I could pull myself together. _I_ say so too. God bless me, what have I done? I've sent him straight to that Flossy girl. I feel it. I've smoothed out something between them. I have accidentally made himarticulate, and articulation in such a man as Percival is overpowering. Heis a murdered man, and mine is the hand that slew him. 

Tabby, old maids are a public nuisance, not to say dangerous. They oughtto be suppressed. 

 * * * * *

I wonder if he will burst in upon her with that look upon his face!

 V

 THE HEART OF A COQUETTE

 "Strange, that a film of smoke can blot a star!"

He did. And the woman was--Rachel. Tabby, I never was better pleased withmyself in my life. I love old maids. I think that whenever they areaccidental they are perfectly lovely. But _what_ a risk I ran!

I did not know a thing about it until I received their wedding-cards. Itwas just like Rachel not to tell me, and it was insufferably stupid in menot to use the few wits I am possessed of, and see how matters stood. Butmy fears and tremors were that Frankie Taliaferro would get him, so I havewatched her all this time. Percival laughed almost scornfully when I toldhim this, and said I had been barking up the wrong tree. I retaliated bysaying that if they had been ordinary lovers, I never could have madesuch a mistake, and they took it as a great compliment. When I considerthe general run of engaged people, I am inclined to agree with them. Everybody seems to think they are making an experiment of marriage, because they are so much alike. But, then, doesn't every one who marriesat all, Jew or Gentile, black or white, bond or free, make an experiment?I myself have no fear as to how the Percival experiment will turn out. Rachel says that they are so similar in all their tastes and ideals thatif she were a man she would be Percival, and if he were a woman he wouldbe Rachel. "Then you still would have a chance to marry each other, " Isaid frivolously. But she assented with a depth of feeling which ignoredmy feeble attempt to be cheerful. "Yet, " she continued, "there is asubtle, alluring difference in our thoughts; just enough to add piquancy, not irritation, to a discussion. I do not love white, and he does not loveblack, as so many husbands and wives do. We both love gray; differenttones of gray, but still gray. It is very restful. " The Percivals are notonly restful to themselves, but to others. They used to be in the highlyirritable, nervous state of those whose sensitive organisms are a littletoo fine for this world. I never objected to it myself, but I have saidbefore that Rachel was of no use to ordinary society, and Percival waslittle better. When people failed to understand her, she retired intoherself with a dignity which was mistaken for ill-temper. She is toorefined and high-minded to defend herself against the "slings and arrowsof outrageous" people, although if she would, she could exterminate themwith her wit. And some could so easily be spared. It seems, too, that sheis great enough to be a target, so she is under fire continually. This, while it causes her exquisite suffering, is from no fault of her own--savethe unforgivable one of being original. "A frog spat at a glow-worm. 'Whydo you spit at me?' said the glow-worm. 'Why do you shine so?' said thefrog. " And as to Percival--the man I used to know was Percival in embryo. He is maturing now, and is radiant in Rachel's sympathetic comprehensionof him. He refers to the time before he knew her as his "protoplasmicstate, " as indeed it was. But there are a good many of us who would bewilling to remain protoplasm all our lives to possess a tithe of hisgenius--you and I among the number, Tabby. You needn't look at me soreproachfully out of your old-gold eyes. You know you would. 

You have seen Sallie Cox, haven't you? Then you know how it jarred mynerves to have her rush in upon me when my mind was full of the Percivals. 

Sallie has flirted joyously through life thus far, and has appeared tohave about as little heart as any girl I ever knew. Sallie is the _saucepiquante_ in one's life--absolutely necessary at times to make thingstaste at all, but a little of her goes a long way. At least so I thoughtuntil to-day. 

"I've got something to tell you, Ruth, " she said, "so come with me, and wewill take a little drive before going to cooking-school. "

I went, knowing, of course, that she wanted to confide something aboutsome of her lovers. 

"I am going to be married, " she announced coldly. "It's Payson Osbornethis time, and I'm really going to see the thing through. It's rather ajoke on me, because it commenced this way. I was sick of lovers, and someof the last had been so unpleasant, not to say rude, when I threw themover, that I thought I would take a vacation. So when I met Payson, Isaid, 'What do you say to a Platonic friendship?' It sounds harmless, youknow, Ruth, and he, not knowing me at all, assented. If he had been a manwho knew of my checkered career, he would have refused, suspecting, ofcourse, that I was going to flirt with him under a new name. But, as I wasserious this time, I knew it was all right. So we began. I suppose youknow he is enormously rich, besides being so handsome, and there will notbe a girl in town who won't say I raised heaven and earth to get him; butI don't mind telling you, Ruth--because you are such an old dear, andnever are bothered with lovers(!); besides, it will do me good to tell it, and I know you will never betray me--that I never cared for any man onearth except Winston Percival. You needn't jump, and look as though thehouse was on fire. It's the solemn truth, and I never dreamed that hecared for Rachel until he married her. Mind you, he never pretended tolove me. It is every bit one-sided, and I don't care if it is. I am gladthat a frivolous, shallow-minded, rattle-brained thing like me had senseenough to fall in love with the most glorious man that ever came into herlife. I shouldn't have made him half as good a wife as Rachel does--Ireally feel as if they were made for each other--but he would have made awoman of me. I'm honestly glad he is so happy, and things are much moresuitable as they are, for Payson is a thorough-going society man, anddoesn't ask much in a wife or he wouldn't have me, and he doesn't expectmuch from a wife or he couldn't get me. 

"Perhaps you don't know that a girl who makes a business of wearing scalpsat her belt never stands a bit of a chance with a man she really loves, for she is afraid to practise on him the wiles which she knows fromexperience have been successful with scores of others, because she feelsthat he will see through them, and scorn her as she scorns herself in hispresence. She loses her courage, she loses control of herself, and, beingused to depend on 'business, ' as actors say, to carry out her rôlesuccessfully, she finds that she is only reading her lines, and readingthem very badly too. If you could have seen me with Percival, you wouldknow what I mean. I was dull, uninteresting, poky--no more the Sallie Coxthat other men know than I am you. He absorbed my personality. I didn'tcare for myself or how I appeared. I only wanted him to shine and be hisnatural, brilliant self. I never could have helped him in his work. Themost I could have hoped to do would have been not to hinder him. I wouldhave been the gainer--it would have been the act of a home missionary forhim to marry me. "

She laughed drearily. 

"Isn't it horribly immoral in me to sit here and talk in this way about amarried man? It's a wonder it doesn't turn the color of the cushions. Ifyou hear of my having the brougham relined, Ruth, you will know why. Ruth, I am so miserable at times it seems to me that I shall die. I'd loveto cry this minute--cry just as hard as I could, and scream, and beat myhead against something hard--how do you do, Mrs. Asbury?--but instead, Ihave to bow from the windows to people, and remember that I am supposed tobe the complaisant bride-elect of the catch of the season. It is ajudgment on me, Ruth, to find that I have a heart, when I have always goneon the principle that nobody had any. Yes--how-de-do, Miss Culpepper?excuse me a minute, Ruth, while I hate that girl. What has she done to me?Oh, nothing to speak of--she only had the bad taste to fall in love withthe man I am going to marry. Writes him notes all the time, making love tohim, which he promptly shows to me--oh, we are not very honorable, or veryupright, or very anything good in the Osborne matrimonial arrangement. Anybody but you would hate me for all this I've told you, but I know youare pitying me with all your soul, because you know the empty-headedSallie Cox carries with her a very sore heart, and that it will take morethan Payson Osborne has got to give to heal it. I call him Pay sometimes, but he hates it. I only do it when I think how much he does pay for a verybad bargain. But he doesn't care, so why should I?

"It really does seem odd, when I look back on it, to see how easy it wasto get him, when all the time I was perfectly indifferent to him, andreceived his attentions on the Platonic basis to keep him from making loveto me. I really think I never had any one to care for me in so exactly theway I like, and to be so easy in his demands, and to think me soaltogether perfect and charming, no matter what I do. It was because I wasabsolutely indifferent to him. I never cared when he came. I never caredwhen he went. Other lovers fussed and quarrelled and were jealous anddisagreeable when I flirted with other men, but Payson never cared. Hedidn't tease me, you know. And whenever he said anything, I could lookinnocent and say, 'Is that Platonic friendship?' So he would have tosubside. I know he thought some of my indifference was assumed, for whenhe told me about Miss Culpepper he thought I would be vexed. I _was_vexed, but I had presence of mind not to show it. I only laughed and madeno comment at all--asked him what time it was, I believe. Then when helooked so disappointed and sulky, I knew I was right, and I patted SallieCox on the head for being so clever--so clever as not to care, chiefly. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, you cannot do with a man who lovesyou, if you don't care a speck for him. And the luxury of perfectindifference! Emotions are awfully wearing, Ruth. I wonder that theseemotional women like Rachel get on at all. I should think they would dieof the strain. Men are always deadly afraid of such women. I believePayson wouldn't stop running till he got to California if I should burstinto tears and not be able to tell him instantly just exactly where myneuralgia had jumped to. No unknown waverings and quaverings of the heartfor my good Osborne. There goes Alice Asbury again. I am dying to tell yousomething. You know why she hates me, and understand why she treats me soabominably? Well, Asbury gave her the same engagement ring he gave me, andshe doesn't know it. Rich, isn't it? Here we are at the cooking-school. Iam so glad I can slam a carriage-door without being rude. It is such arelief to one's overcharged feelings. "

Tabby, dear, if your head ever spun round and round at some of theconfidences I have bestowed upon you, I can sympathize with you, for, as Iwent into that class, my feelings were so wrenched and twisted that I wasas limp as cooked macaroni. You will excuse the simile, but that was oneof the articles at cooking-school to-day, and when the teacher took it upon a fork, it did express my state of mind so exquisitely that I cannotforbear to use it. 

Sallie Cox! Well, I am amazed. Who would think that that bright, saucy, clever little flirt, who rides on the crest of the wave always, could havesuch a heart history? And Percival of all men! I wonder what he would sayif he knew. I don't know what to think about her marrying Payson Osborne. The last thing she whispered to me as we came out of cooking-school was, "Don't be too sorry for me because I am going to marry him. Believe me, itis the very best thing that could happen to me. "

I am very fond of the girl to-night. What a pity it is that everybody doesnot know her as she really is! No one understands her, and she has flirtedso outrageously with most of the men that the girls' friendship for her isvery hollow. A few, of whom Alice Asbury is one, dare to show this quiteplainly, and of course Sallie doesn't like it. She pretends not to carefor women's friendship, but she does. She would love to be friendly withall the girls, but they remember the misery she has made them suffer, andwon't have it. 

Still, there is no doubt that she is marrying the man most of them want, so that again she triumphs. But, unless I am much mistaken, even as Mrs. Payson Osborne it will take her a long time to recover her place with thewomen which she has lost by having so many of their sweethearts andbrothers in love with her. 

Ah, Tabby, what a deal of secret misery there is in the world! Everybodywill envy Sallie Cox and think that she is the luckiest girl, and Salliewill smile and pretend--for what other course is left to her, and who canblame women who pretend under such circumstances? Perhaps there arereasons just as good for many other pretenders in this world. Who knows?We would be gentler if we knew more. 

There will be other sore hearts besides Sallie's at her wedding. I hadheard before that Miss Culpepper was quite desperate over Osborne, but, asshe was a girl whom everybody thought a lady, I had no idea that she hadgone so far as Sallie says. Osborne probably didn't object to being madelove to. A man of his stamp would not be over-refined. Strange, now, Sallie does not love Osborne herself, but she promptly hates every othergirl who dares to do it. Aren't girls queer?

Then there are a score of men who will gnash their teeth for Sallie--somany men love these Sallie Coxes. 

Frankie Taliaferro, the Kentucky beauty, who is staying with her thiswinter, tells me that Sallie has had several dreadful scenes withdiscarded suitors--that one said he would forbid the banns, and anotherthreatened to shoot himself if she really married Osborne. 

I wonder how many marriages there really are where both are perfectly freeto marry. I mean, no secret entanglements on either side, no other manwanting the bride, no girl bitterly jealous of her. I never heard ofone--not among the people _I_ know, at least. 

Oh, Tabby, think of all the fusses people keep out of who promptly settledown at the appointed time and become peaceful old maids. How sensible wewere, Tabby, you and Missis. 

But doesn't it seem to you that people marry from very mixed motives? Iused to have an idea--when I was painfully young, of course--that theymarried because they were so fortunate as to fall in love with each other. Are you quite sure that foolish notion is out of your head too?

 VI

 THE LONELY CHILDHOOD OF A CLEVER CHILD

 "Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?. .. To be great is to be misunderstood. "

I have been away since early last summer, and consequently never had seenFlossy's new baby until the newness had worn off, and it had arrived atthe dignity of a backbone, and had left its wobbly period far behind. I amin mortal terror of a very little baby. It feels so much like a sponge, yet lacks the sponge's recuperative qualities. I am always afraid if Ident it the dents will stay in. You know they don't in a sponge. 

As soon as I came home, of course I went to see Flossy's baby, and wasvery much disconcerted to discover that she had named it for me. I wasafraid, I remember, that she would want to name the first girl for me, butshe did not. She named her after Rachel. I had an uncomfortable idea, however, that my name had been discussed and vetoed, by either Flossy orBronson. But this time the baby is named Ruth, and I found that it was allFlossy's doing. 

I was irritated without knowing why. I didn't want anybody to know itthough, and so I was vexed when Bronson said to me, "I couldn't help it, Ruth. " There was no use in pretending not to understand. I could with somemen, but not with Bronson. He is too magnificently honest himself, anduplifts me by expecting me to be equally so. Nevertheless I failed him inone particular, for I answered him in my loftiest manner, "I am not at alldispleased. It is a great compliment, I am sure. "

There is nothing so uncivil at times as to be cuttingly polite. What Isaid wasn't so at all. But a woman is obliged to defend herself from a manwho reads her like an open book. 

Flossy does not like children, and poor little Rachel never has had a lifeof roses. Flossy says children are such a care and require so muchattention. 

"Rachel was all that I could attend to, and here all winter I have hadanother one on my hands to keep me at home, and make me lose sleep, andgrow old before my time. I don't see why such burdens have to be put uponpeople. Children are too thick in this world any way. "

She fretted on in this strain for some time, until Bronson looked up andsaid, "Don't, Flossy. You don't mean what you say. Do tell her the little thingis welcome. "

"I do mean what I say, " answered Flossy. 

Then, as Bronson left the room abruptly, Flossy said, "And I was determined to name her after you. Bronson didn't want me to. Hesaid you wouldn't thank me for it, but I told him that Rachel Percival wasquite delighted with her namesake. "

I hid my indignantly smarting eyes in the folds of the baby's dress, as Iheld her up before my face, and made her laugh at the flowers in my hat. Flossy thought I was not listening to her with sufficient interest; so shegot up and crossed the room with that little stumble of hers, which usedto be so taking with the men when she was a girl, and took Ruth away fromme. 

There was a great contrast between the two children. Rachel Herrick is ashy child, with a delicate, refined face, lighted by wonderful gray eyeslike Bronson's. I do not understand her. She seems afraid of me, and Iconfess I am equally afraid of her. Even Rachel Percival does not get onwith her very well, although she has bravely tried. The child spends mostof her time in the library, devouring all the books she can lay her handson. Little Ruth is a round, soft, fluffy baby, all dimples and smiles andgood-nature, willing to roll or crawl into anybody's lap or affections. Avery good baby to exhibit, for strangers delight in her, and pet her justas people always have petted Flossy. Rachel stands mutely watching allsuch demonstrations, her pale face rigid with some emotion, and her eyesbrilliant and hard. She is not a child one would dare take liberties with. No one ever pets her. Flossy complains continually of her to visitors andto Bronson, so that Bronson has gotten into the way of reproving hermechanically whenever his eye rests upon her. Her very presence, alwayssilent, always inwardly critical, seems to irritate her parents. She wasnot doing a thing, but sitting sedately, with a heavy book on her lap, watching the baby, with that curious expression on her face; but Flossycouldn't let her alone. 

"Baby loves her mother, doesn't she? She is not like naughty sisterRachel, who won't do anything but read, and never loves anybody butherself. Sister says bad things to poor sick mamma, and mamma can't loveher, can she? But mamma loves her pretty, sweet baby, so she does. "

Rachel glanced at me with a hunted look in her eyes which wrung my heart. But, before I could think, she slid down and the big book fell with acrash to the floor. She ran towards the baby with a wicked look on hersmall face, and the baby leaped and held out its hands, but Rachelclenched her teeth, and slapped the outstretched hand as she rushed pasther and out of the room. 

Poor little Ruth looked at the red place on her hand a minute, then herlip quivered, and she began to cry pitifully. 

I instinctively looked to see Flossy gather her up to comfort her. It isso easy to dry a child's tears with a little love. But she rang for thenurse and fretfully exclaimed, "Isn't that just like her! I declare I can't see why a child of mineshould have such a wicked temper. Here, Simpson, take this young nuisanceand stop her crying. Oh, poor little me! Ruth, I'm thankful that you haveno children to wear your life out. "

I dryly remarked that I too considered it rather a cause for gratitude, and came away. 

Poor little Rachel Herrick! Unlovely as her action was, I cannot helpthinking that it was unpremeditated; that it was the unexpected result ofsome strong inward feeling. She looked like one who was justly indignant, and, considering what Flossy had said, I felt that her anger wasrighteous. That her disposition is unfortunate cannot be denied. She seemsalready to be an Ishmaelite, for whenever she speaks it is to fling out aremark so biting in its sarcasm, so bitter and satirical, that Flossy isafraid of her, and Bronson reproves her with unnecessary severity, becauseher offence is that of a grown person, which her childish stature mocks. Other children both fear and hate her. They resent her cleverness. Theylike to use her wits to organize their plays, but they never include her, for she always wants to lead, feeling, doubtless, that she inherentlypossesses the qualities of a leader, and chafing, as a heroic soul must, under inferior management. Flossy makes her go out to play regularly withthem every day, but it is a pitiful sight, for she feels her unpopularity, and children are cruel to each other with the cruelty of vindictivedulness; so Rachel, after standing about among them forlornly for a while, like a stray robin among a flock of little owls, comes creeping in alone, and sits down in the library with a book. She is the loneliest child Iever knew. If she cared, people would at least be sorry for her; but sheseems to love no one, never seeks sympathy if she is hurt, repels allattempts to ease pain, and cures herself with her beloved books. I neversaw any one kiss or offer to pet her, but they make a great fuss over thebaby, and Rachel watches them with glittering eyes. I thought once that itwas jealousy, and, going up to her, laid my hand on her head, but sheshook it off as if it had been a viper, and ran out of the room. 

I had grown very fond of my namesake, and used to go there when Flossy wasaway, and sit in the nursery. The nurse told me once that Mrs. Herrick sawso little of the baby that it was afraid, and cried at the sight of her. Ireproved her for speaking in that manner of her mistress, but she onlytossed her head knowingly, and I dropped the subject. Servants often areaware of more than we give them credit for. 

Saturday before Easter I stopped at Flossy's, but she was not at home. Ileft some flowers for her, and asked to see the baby, but the nurse saidshe was asleep. 

Easter morning I did not go to church, and Rachel Percival came early inthe afternoon to see if I were ill. While she was here this note arrivedby a messenger:

 "DEAR RUTH, --I know you will grieve for me when I tell you that our baby went away from us quite suddenly this morning, while the Easter bells were ringing so joyfully. They rang the knell of a mother's heart, for they rang my baby's spirit into Paradise. 

 "I feel, through my tears, that it is better so, for she will bind me closer to Heaven when I think that she, in her purity, awaits me there. 

 "Hoping to see you very soon, I am "Your loving FLOSSY. 

 "P. S. --Bronson seems to feel the baby's death to a truly astonishing degree. F. H. "

I flung the note across to Rachel, and, putting my head down on my twoarms, I cried just as hard as I could cry. 

Rachel read it, then tore it into twenty bits, and ground her heel intothe fragments. 

"Why, Rachel Percival! what is the matter?"

"She wasn't even at home. She was at church. She must have been. She toldme that Bronson was afraid to have her leave the baby, and wouldn't comehimself, but that she didn't think anything was the matter with it, andwouldn't be tied down. Then such a note so soon afterwards! Ruth, what isthat woman made of?"

We went together to Flossy's. She came across the room to meet us, supported by Bronson. She stumbled two or three times in the attempt. Tears were running down Bronson's face, and he wiped them away quitehumbly, as if he did not mind our seeing them in the least. I could notbear to watch him, so I slipped out of the room and went upstairs. 

"In here, 'm, " said the nurse; "and Miss Rachel is here too. She won'tmove that far from the cradle, and she hasn't shed a tear. "

Ruth lay peacefully in her little lace crib, covered with violets, andbeside her, rigid and white and tearless, stood Rachel. I was almostafraid of the child as I looked at her. She turned her great eyes upon medumbly, with so exactly Bronson's expression in them that all at once Iunderstood her. I knelt down beside her, and gathering her little tenseframe all up in my arms, I began whispering to her. The tears rolled downher cheeks, and soon she was crying hysterically. Bronson came boundingupstairs at the sound, but she seized me more tightly around the neck andheld me chokingly. I motioned him back, and succeeded in carrying her awayto a quiet place, where I sat down with her in my arms, and made love toher for hours. 

I never heard a more pitiful story than she told me, between stranglingsobs, of her hungry life. The child has been yearning for affection allthe time, but has unconsciously repelled it by her manner. She said nobodyon earth loved her except the baby, and now the baby was dead. 

"There is no use of your trying to make things different, " she said, "especially with mamma. She wouldn't care if I was dead too. But papacould understand, I think, if he would only try to love me. But I loveyou--oh! I love you so much that it hurts me. Nobody ever came and huggedme up the way you did, in my whole life. You have made things over for me, and I'll love you for it till I die. Why is it that everybody gives mammaand the baby so much love, when they never cared for it, and I care somuch and never get a single bit? Nobody understands me, and everyone--every one calls me bad. I'm not bad. I love plenty of people whocan't love me. I am not bad, I tell you!"

She cried herself nearly sick, and then, exhausted, fell asleep, with herface pressed against mine. Thus Bronson found us. He offered to take her, and I put her into his arms. Then I told him all that she had said, andasked him to hold her until she wakened, and give her some of the love herlittle heart was hungering for. He couldn't speak when I finished, and Iwent down, to find Rachel bathing Flossy's head with cologne, and lookingworn and tired. 

Percival came for Rachel, and one could see that the mere sight of himrested her. She told him all about it, in her wonderfully comprehensiveway, and he felt the whole thing, and we were all very quiet and peacefuland sad, as we drove home through the early darkness of that Easter day. 

They left me at my door, and I went in alone, with the memory of thatgrieving household--the lonely father, and the selfish mother, and theunloved child--hallowed and made tender by the presence of the little deadbaby, asleep under its weight of violets. 

I feel very much alone sometimes; but the Percivals carry their world withthem. 

 VII

 A STUDY IN HUMAN GEESE

 "I am myself indifferent honest. "

I have just made two startling discoveries. One is that I am not honestmyself, and the other is that I detest honesty in other people. 

To-day I was sitting peacefully in my room, harming nobody, when I sawlittle Pet Winterbotham drive up in her cart and come running up to thedoor. I supposed she had come with a message from her sister, and wentdown, thinking to be detained about ten minutes. 

It seems but a few years ago since Pet was in the kindergarten. I wassurprised to see that she wore her dresses very long, and that she lookedalmost grown up. 

"My dear Pet, " I exclaimed, "what is the matter?"

"Oh, Miss Ruth, I am in such a scrape, " she answered me. "I hope you won'tthink it's queer that I came to you, but the fact is, I've watched you inchurch, and you always look as if you knew, and would help people if theywould ask you to; so I thought I'd try you. 

"Ever and ever so long ago, when I was a little bit of a thing, and playedwith other children, and you and sister Grace went out together, I used to'choose' you from all the other young ladies, because you wore such lovelyhats, and always had on pearl-colored gloves. I suppose it is so long agothat you were a young lady and had beaux that you've forgotten it. But Iknow you used to have lovers, for I heard Mrs. Herrick and Mrs. PaysonOsborne talking about you once, and Mrs. Herrick said you seemed sotranquil and contented that she supposed you never had had any really goodoffers, or you would be all the time wishing you had taken one. And Mrs. Osborne spoke up in her quick way, and said, 'Don't deceive yourself socomfortably, my dear Flossy. I know positively that Ruth has had severaloffers that you and I would have jumped at. ' And then she turned away andlaughed and laughed, although I didn't see anything so very funny in whatshe said, and neither did Mrs. Herrick. 

"I do think Mrs. Osborne is the loveliest person I know. She is my idealyoung married woman. She always has a smile and a pretty word for everyone, and young men like her better than they do the buds. Why, your faceis as red as fire. I hope I haven't said anything unpleasant. Mamma says Iblunder horribly, but she always is too busy to tell me how not toblunder. 

"Now, I want to know which of these two men you would advise me to marry. I've got to take one, I suppose. "

"Marry!" I exclaimed, so explosively that Pet started. "Why, child, howold are you?"

"I'm nineteen, " she said, in rather an injured tone, "and I've always madeup my mind to marry young, if I got a good enough offer. I hate old maids. Oh, excuse me. I don't mean you, of course. I wouldn't marry a clerk, youunderstand, just to be marrying. I'm not so silly. I have plenty ofcommon-sense in other things, and I'm going to put some of it into themarriage question. Don't you think I'm sensible?"

"Very, " I answered; but I didn't, Tabby. I thought she was a goose. 

"Well now, " proceeded my young caller, settling her ribbons with a prettyair of importance, and looking at me out of the most innocent eyes in theworld, "my sister Grace married Brian Beck because he had such a lot ofmoney. But you know he is dissipated, and at first Grace almost wentdistracted. Then she made up her mind to let him go his own gait, and shehas as good a time as she can on his money. His Irish name Brian is herthorn in the flesh, and he teases her nearly out of her wits about it. Wehave great fun on the yacht every summer. Brian is awfully good to me, andinvites nice men to take with us; still, much as I like Brian as abrother-in-law, I shouldn't care to have a husband like him. Now, Isuppose you wonder why on earth I am telling you these things, and why Idon't tell one of the girls I go with. "

"Oh, no!" I exclaimed in protest. 

"Of course. I see you think it wouldn't be safe. Girls just can't helptelling, to save their lives. Sometimes they don't intend to, and thenit's bad enough. But sometimes they do it just to be mean, and you can'thelp yourself. I have plenty of confidence in you though, and you don'tlook as if you'd be easily shocked. You look as though you could tell agood deal if you wanted to. You're an awfully comfortable sort of aperson. Now, let me tell you. I have two offers. One is from ClintonFrost, and the other is from Jack Whitehouse. You have seen me with Mr. Frost, haven't you? A dark, fierce, melancholy man, with black eyes andhair, and very distinguished looking. 

"I think he has a history. He throws out hints that way. He is gloomy witheverybody but me, and Brian will do nothing but joke with him. There isnothing Mr. Frost dislikes as much as to laugh or to see other peoplelaugh. Brian calls him 'Pet's nightmare, ' and threatens to give him ink todrink. 

"I believe Mr. Frost hates Brian. He says the name of our yacht, _HittieMagin_, is unspeakably vulgar. Nothing pleases Brian more than to forceMr. Frost or Grace to tell strangers the name of it. Their mere speakingthe words throws Brian into convulsions of laughter. Then, if peoplecomment on it, he tells them that the name is of his wife's selection, indeference to his Irish family. And Grace almost faints with mortification. Mr. Frost says he will give me a yacht twice as good as Brian's. He adoresme. He says I am the only thing in life which makes him smile. "

I felt that I could sympathize with Mr. Frost on this point. 

"Then there's Jack Whitehouse, Norris Whitehouse's nephew. Mr. NorrisWhitehouse is a great friend of yours, isn't he? Do you know, I neverthink of him as an 'eligible, ' although he is a bachelor. I should as soonthink of a king in that light. He impresses me more than any man I everknew. Don't you consider him odd? No? I do. He is so clever that you wouldbe afraid of him, if it wasn't for his lovely manners, which make youfeel as though what you are saying is just what he has been wanting toknow, and he is so glad he has met some one who is able to tell him. Actually he treats me with more respect than some of the young men do. Hemakes me feel as if I were a woman, and he had a right to expect somethinggood of me. I never said that to anybody before, but I can talk to you andfeel that you understand me. I like to feel that people think there issomething to me, even if I know that it isn't much. Mrs. Asbury says thatMr. Whitehouse is the courtliest man she knows. You know the story of theWhitehouse money, don't you? Jack told it to me with tears in his eyes, and I don't wonder at it. You know Jack's father and mother died when hewas very young. Norris was his father's favorite, and the old gentlemanmade a most unjust will, leaving only a life interest in the property toJack's father; then it all went to his favorite younger son, Norris. Now, you know what most men would do under the circumstances. They wouldacknowledge the injustice of the will, but they would keep the money. This proves to me what an unusual man Mr. Norris Whitehouse is, for heimmediately made over to his little nephew Jack one half of theproperty--just what his father ought to have been able to leave him--andJack is to come into that when he is twenty-five. Don't you think that wasnoble? Jack worships him. He says no father could have been more devotedto an only son than his uncle Norris has been to him. He travelled withhim, and gave up years of his life to superintending Jack's education. 

"Now, whoever marries Jack will really be at the head of that eleganthouse, for you know it hasn't had a mistress since Jack's mother died, years ago. I should like that, although I do wish more of the expense wasin furniture instead of in pictures and tapestries. But that is hisuncle's taste. 

"Poor Jack talks so beautifully about his young mother, whom he canscarcely remember. He says his uncle has kept her alive to him. He isperfectly lovely with other fellows' mothers, and with mine. He treatsthem all, he says, as he should like to have had others treat his mother. Of course it is only sentiment with him. If she had lived, he might havegiven her as much trouble as other boys give theirs. She must have beenlovely. Mamma says she was. But I'd just as soon not have anymother-in-law to tell me to wrap up, and wear rubbers if it looked likerain. You know there isn't a bit of sentiment in me. I'm practical. Myfather says if I had been a boy he would have taken me into business atfifteen. Jack thinks I am all sentiment. He says nobody could have a facelike mine and not possess an innate love of the beautiful in art andpoetry and all that. I have forgotten just what he said about that part ofit. But I know he meant to praise me. I didn't say anything in reply, butI smiled to myself at the idea of Pet Winterbotham being credited withfine sentiment. 

"Jack is horribly young--only twenty-two--so he won't have his money forthree years, and Mr. Frost is thirty-nine. Jack has curly hair, and whenhe wears a white tennis suit and puts his cap on the back of his head andholds a cigarette in his hand, he looks as if he had just stepped out ofone of the pictures in _Life_. He looks so 'chappie. ' He is a good dealeasier to get along with than Mr. Frost, and will have more money someday, although Mr. Frost has enough. Now, which would you take?"

"Why, my dear Pet, " I said in an unguarded moment, "which do you love?"

I shrivelled visibly under the look of scorn she cast upon me. 

"I don't love either of them. I've had one love affair and I don't carefor another until I make sure which man I'm going to marry. "

"Can you fall in love to order?" I asked in dismay. 

"Not exactly. 'To order!' Why, no. Anybody would think you were havingboots made. But it's being with a man, and having him awfully good to you, and admiring everything you say, and having lots of good clothes, and notbeing in love with any other fellow, that makes you love a man. I'm surefrom your manner that you like Jack Whitehouse the best, so I think I'lltake him. You are awfully sweet, and not a bit like an old maid. I telleverybody so. "

"Am I called an Old Maid?" I asked quickly. I could have bitten my tongueout for it afterwards. 

"Oh, yes indeed, by all the younger set. You see you belonged to Grace'sset and they are all married. It makes you seem like a back number to us, but you don't look like an old maid. I suppose you can look back ages andages and remember when you had lovers, can't you? Or have you forgotten? Ican't imagine you ever getting love-letters or flowers or any such things. I hope I haven't offended you. I am horribly honest, you know. I say justwhat I think, and you mustn't mind it. Mamma says I am too truthful to bepleasant. But I like honesty myself, don't you?"

And with that, Tabby, she went away. 

How terrible the child is! Now, Pet is one of those persons who go aboutlacerating people and clothing their ignorance, or their insolence, in thegarb of honesty. 

"I am honest, " say they, "so you must not be offended, but is it true thatyour grandfather was hanged for being a pirate?" Or, "I believe in beingperfectly honest with people. How cross-eyed you are!"

This is why honesty is so disreputable. When you say of a woman, "She isone of those honest, outspoken persons, " it means that she will probablyhurt your feelings, or insult you in your first interview with her. 

I don't like to admit it even to you, Tabby, but I am horribly shaken up. After all these years of talking about myself to you as an Old Maid, andknowing that I am one, to hear myself called such, and to catch a glimpseof the way I appear to the oncoming generation, shakes me to thefoundation of my being. Soon _I_ shall be pushed to the wall, as somethingtoo worn out to be needed by bright young people. Soon _I_ shall be one ofthe old people whom I have so dreaded all my life. Dear Tabby-cat! You canremember when Missis received love-letters, can't you? They are not all inthe japanned box, are they? Do I seem old to you, kitty? Why, there isactually a tear on your gray fur. Dear me, what a silly Old Maid Missisis!

You see, after all, I have not been honest, even with myself. And, justbetween you and me, I will say that I abominate honesty in other people. There!

 VIII

 A GAME OF HEARTS

 "Man proposes, but Heaven disposes. "

Tabby, did you ever hear me speak of Charlie Hardy? No, of course not. Your mother must have been a kitten when I knew Charlie the best. He is anice boy. Boy! What am I talking about? He is as old as I am. But he isthe kind of man who always seems a boy, and everybody who has known himtwo days calls him Charlie. 

Rachel Percival never thought much of him. She said he was weak, andweakness in a man is something Rachel never excuses. She says it istrespassing on one of the special privileges of our sex. Thus she disposedof Charlie Hardy. 

"Look at his chin, " said Rachel; "could a man be strong with a chin likethat?"

"But he is so kind-hearted and easy to get along with, " I urged. 

"Very likely. He hasn't strength of mind to quarrel. He is unwilling, likemost easy-going men, to inflict that kind of pain. But he could be ascruel as the grave in other ways. Look at him. He always is in hot waterabout something, and never does as people expect him to do. "

"But he doesn't do wrong on purpose, and he makes charming excuses andapologies. "

"He ought to; he has had enough practice, " answered Rachel, with herbeautiful smile. "He has what I call a conscience for surface things. Heregards life from the wrong point of view, and, as to his always intendingto do right--you know the place said to be paved with good intentions. No, no, Ruth. Charlie Hardy is a dangerous man, because he is weak. Throughsuch men as he comes very bitter sorrow in this world. "

That conversation, Tabby, took place, if not before you were created, atleast in your early infancy--the time when your own weight threw you downif you tried to walk, and when ears and tail were the least of yourmake-up. 

All these years Charlie has never married, but was always with the girls. He dropped with perfect composure from our set to Sallie Cox's--was herslave for two years, though Sallie declares that she never was engaged tohim. "What's the use of being engaged to a man that you can keep on handwithout?" quoth Sallie. But Charlie bore no malice. "I didn't stand theghost of a show with a girl like Sallie, when she had such men as WinstonPercival and those literary chaps around her. It was great sport to watchher with those men. You know what a little chatterbox she is. By Jove!when that fellow Percival began to talk, Sallie never had a word to sayfor herself. It must have been awfully hard for her, but she certainly lethim do all the talking, and just sat and listened, looking as sweet as apeach. Oh! I never had any chance with Sallie. "

Nevertheless, he was usher at her wedding, then dropped peacefully to thenext younger set, and now is going with girls of Pet Winterbotham's age. 

I thoroughly like the boy, but I can't imagine myself falling in love withhim. If I were married to another man--an indiscreet thing for an Old Maidto say, Tabby, but I only use it for illustration--I should not mindCharlie Hardy's dropping in for Sunday dinner every week, if he wanted to. He never bothers. He never is in the way. He is as deft at buttoning aglove as he is amiable at playing cards. You always think of Charlie Hardyfirst if you are making up a theatre party. He serves equally well asgroomsman or pall-bearer--although I do not speak from experience ineither instance. He never is cross or sulky. He makes the best ofeverything, and I think men say that he is "an all-round good fellow. "

I depend a great deal upon other men's opinion of a man. I neverthoroughly trust a man who is not a favorite with his own sex. I wish menwere as generous to us in that respect, for a woman whom other women donot like is just as dangerous. And I never knew simple jealousy--thereason men urge against accepting our verdict--to be universal enough tocondemn a woman. There always are a few fair-minded women in everycommunity--just enough to be in the minority--to break continuousjealousy. 

Be that as it may, the man I am talking about has kept up his acquaintancewith Rachel and Alice Asbury and me in a desultory way, and occasionallyhe grows confidential. The last time I saw him he said:

"Sometimes I wish I were a woman, Ruth, when I get into so much troublewith the girls. Women never seem to have any worry over love affairs. Allthey have to do is to lean back and let men wait on them until they seeone that suits them. It is like ordering from a _menu_ card for them toselect husbands. You run over a list for a girl--oysters, clams, orterrapin--and she takes terrapin. In the other case she runs over her ownlist--Smith, Jones, or Robinson--and likewise takes the rarest. But she isnot at all troubled about it. Marrying is so easy for a girl. It comesnatural to her. "

Tabby, I did wish that he knew as much of the internal mechanism of theengagements that you and I have participated in, by proxy, as we do--if hewould understand, profit by, and speedily forget the knowledge. 

But, like the hypocrite I am, I only smiled indulgently at him, as if, forwomen, marrying was mere reposing on eider-down cushions, with the tillerropes in their hands, while men did the rowing. I was not going to admit, Tabby, that the most of the girls we know never worked harder in theirlives than during that indefinite and mysterious period known as "makingup their minds. " You see I uphold my own sex at all hazards--to men. 

He was standing up to go when he said that, but there was something abouthim which led me to suspect that he was in a condition when he needed somewoman to straighten out his affairs. I made no reply, which threw theburden of continuing the conversation upon him. I was in that passivestate which made me perfectly willing to have him say good-night and gohome or stay and confess to me, just as he chose. I knew he needed me; agood many men need their mothers once in a while as much as they ever didwhen boys. There was something whimsically boyish about Charlie as heleaned over the back of a tall chair and debated secretly whether or nothe should confide in me. 

"Why don't you ask me why I said that?" he said. 

"Because I know without asking. You were induced to say it by what youhave been thinking of all the evening. It sounded like a beginning, butreally it was an ending. "

He looked as though he thought me a mind-reader, but I fancy the knack ofdivining when people need a confidant is preternaturally developed in oldmaids. 

"How good you are, Ruth. "

"You men always think women are good when they understand you. But itisn't goodness. "

"No, you're right. It's more comfortable than goodness. It's odd how youdo it. May I tell you about it? You won't think half as well of me as youdo now, but it needs just such women as you to keep men straight, and ifyou will give me your opinion I vow I'll do as you say, even if it killsme. "

I was afraid from that desperate ending that it was something serious, andit was. He made several attempts before he could begin. Finally he burstout with, "Although you are the easiest person in the world to talk to, and I'veknown you always, it is pretty hard to lay this case before you so thatyou won't think me a conceited prig. That is because you are a woman andcan't help looking at it from a woman's standpoint. For a good manyreasons it would be easier to tell it to some man, who would know how itwas himself; but you see I want a woman's conscience and a woman'sjudgment, because you can put yourself in another woman's place. "

He grew quite red as he talked, and I waited patiently for him to go on, but gave him no help. 

"Well, here goes. If you hate me afterwards I can't help it. I had no ideait would be so hard to tell you or I shouldn't have attempted it. Butsince you have been sitting there looking at me I am beginning to thinkdifferently of it myself, and I'm sure that, with all your kindness, youwill be very hard on me, and tell me to accept the hardest alternative. Now, Ruth, you'd better shake hands with me and say good-by while you likeme, because you will think of me as another Charlie Hardy when I'vefinished. "

He actually held out his hand, but I folded mine together. 

"No, " I said, smiling, "I shall not bid you good-by until I really amthrough with you. Don't look so discouraged. Come; possibly I may be abetter friend to you than you think. "

"You are awfully good, " he said again. I don't know when I have soimpressed a man with my extraordinary goodness as I did by listening toCharlie while he did all the talking. If I could have held my tongueanother hour, he would have called me an angel. 

"Well, although you may not know it, I am engaged to Louise King. Ialways have been very fond of her, and when I found I couldn't getSallie, I was sure I cared as much for Louise as I ever could care foranybody, and I was perfectly satisfied with her--thought she would make mean awfully good wife, and all that. But while Miss Taliaferro was up herevisiting Sallie, I was with her a good deal, and the first thing I knew wewere dead in love with each other. You know we were both in Sallie'swedding-party, and I tell you, Ruth, to stand up at the altar with a girlhe is already half in love with, plays the very deuce with a man. Kentuckygirls are all pretty, I suppose--everybody says so, and you have to makebelieve you think so whether you do or not; but this one--you know her?Isn't she the prettiest thing you ever saw? Well, of course she didn'tknow I was engaged, and I kept putting off telling her, until the firstthing I knew I was letting her see how much I thought of her. I don'tsuppose it was at all difficult to see, but girls are keen on suchsubjects, and a man can't be in love with one more than a week before sheknows more about it than he does. Then, after she told me that she lovedme, how could I tell her that, in spite of what I had said, I was engagedto another girl? Wouldn't she have thought I was a rascal? No; I had tolet her go home thinking that, if we were not already engaged, we shouldbe some time, and I went part way with her, and--it was a mean trick toplay, but the nonsensical things that unthinking people do precipitateaffairs which perhaps without their means might never fully develop. BrianBeck heard that I was going a few miles with her, and he and Sallie andPayson came down to the train to see us off. Just as we pulled out of thestation, Brian made the most frantic signs for me to open the window, andwhen I did so, he threw a tissue-paper package at me. Frankie and I bothmade an effort to catch it. Of course it burst when we touched it, and agood pound of rice was scattered all over us. You never saw such a sight. It flew in every direction; her hat and my hair were full of it. Some wentdown my collar. Of course everybody in the car roared and--well, I'm notdone blushing at it yet. Frankie took it much better than I, and onlylaughed at it. But I--I felt more like crying. I saw instantly how itcomplicated things. It was a nail driven into my coffin. 

"We had no more than settled down from that and were just having a goodlittle talk, after the passengers had stopped looking at us, when theporter appeared, bringing a basket of white flowers with two turtle-dovessuspended from the handle, and Brian Beck's card on it. I wish you couldhave heard the people laugh. I declare to you, Ruth, when I saw that greatwhite thing coming and knew what it meant, it looked as big as abilliard-table to me. I was going to pay the fellow to take it out again, but no--Frankie wanted it. She made me put it down on the opposite seatand there it stood. Those sickening birds were too much for me, so Ijerked them off and threw them out of the window, conscious that my facewas very red and that I was amusing more people than I had bargained for. 

"When the time came for me to get off and take the train back, Frankieimplored me to go on with her, urging how strange it would look topeople, who all thought we were married, to see me disappear and have hergo on alone. I railed at the idea, but she was in earnest, and when I toldher positively that I couldn't--thinking more, I must admit, of the stateof my affairs than of hers--she began to cry under her veil. That settledit. Of course I couldn't stand it to see the girl I loved cry, so I wenthome with her, fell deeper in love every minute I was there, and came awayfeeling like a cur because I had not spoken to her father. Her people metme in the cordial, honest manner of those who have faith in mankind, but Icouldn't look them in the face without flinching. 

"Since I came back, of course, I've been visiting Louise as usual. I toldher all about the rice and flowers, thinking that if she quarrelled withme about the affair she would break off the engagement. But she onlylaughed and said it served me right for flirting with every girl that camealong, and didn't even reproach me. She has absolute faith in me. Shedoesn't believe I could sink so low as I have, any more than she could. She has idealized me until I don't dare to breathe for fear of destroyingthe illusion. She thinks that I love her in the way she loves me, but Icouldn't. It isn't in me, Ruth. I don't even love Frankie that way. Totell the truth, Louise is too good for me. She is magnificent, but I amrather afraid of her. She has so many ideals and is so intense. Her faithin me makes me shiver. I am not a bit comfortable with her. I do not evenunderstand how she can love me so much. I am nothing extraordinary, but ifyou knew the way she treats me, you would think I was Achilles or some ofthose Greek fellows. She has refused better and richer men than I. NorrisWhitehouse has loved her all her life, and you know what a splendid man heis, but Louise ridicules the idea of ever caring for anybody but me. Sheis so perfect that there is absolutely no flaw in her for me to recognizeand feel friendly with. She reads me like a book, but I am less acquaintedwith her than I was before we were engaged. She says such beautiful thingsto me sometimes, things that are far beyond my comprehension, and she canget so uplifted that I feel as if I never had met her. There's no use intalking; after a girl falls in love with a man she often ceases to be thegirl he courted. "

I recalled what I had said to Percival--"Often a woman denies herself theexpression of the best part of her love, for fear that it will be eithera puzzle or a terror to her lover. " Such a saying belonged to Percival. I shouldn't think of repeating it to Charlie, for he could not comprehendit. I should puzzle him as much as Louise did. It made me heartsick. Howcould even Charlie Hardy so persistently misunderstand the grandeur ofLouise King? Yet how could such a glorious girl imagine herself in lovewith nice, weak, agreeable Charlie Hardy?

Louise is a younger, handsomer, more impetuous, less clever edition ofRachel Percival; but she is of that order. She is less concentrated andmore emotional than Rachel. I did not quite know how a great sorrow wouldaffect Louise. Rachel would use it as a stepping-stone towards heaven. 

I have seen a young, untried race-horse with small, pointed, restlessears; with delicate nostrils where the red blood showed; with full, softeyes where fire flashed; with a satin skin so thin and glossy that eventhe lightest hand would cause it to quiver to the touch; where pride andfire and royal blood seemed to urge a trial of their powers; and I havethought: "You are capable of passing anything on the track and comingunder the wire triumphant and victorious; or you might fulfil yourprophecy equally well by falling dead in your first heat, with the redblood gushing from those thin nostrils. We can be sure of nothing untilyou are tried, but it is a quivering delight to look at you and to shareyour impatience and to wonder what you will do. "

Occasionally I see women who affect me in the same way--idealists, capableof being wounded through their sensitiveness by things which we ordinarymortals accept philosophically; capable also of greater heights ofhappiness and lower depths of misery, but of suffering most through beingmisunderstood. To this class Rachel and Louise belong. Rachel, inPercival, has reached a haven where she rides at anchor, sheltered fromsuch storms as had hitherto almost engulfed her, and growing moreheroically beautiful in character day by day. Poor Louise is still at sea, with a great storm brewing. How hard, how terribly hard, to talk toCharlie Hardy about her, when, after the solemnity of an engagement tiebetween them, he was capable of misunderstanding, not only her, but thewhole situation so blindly! But what a calamity it would be if Louiseshould marry him!

"Go on, Ruth. Say something, do. I imagine all sorts of things while youjust sit there looking at me so solemnly. I realize that I am in a tightplace. I did hope that you could see some way out of it for me; but Iknow, by the way you act, that you think I ought to give up Frankie--dearlittle girl!--and marry Louise, and by Jove! if you say it's the handsomething to do, I'll do it. "

This still more effectually closed my lips. He so evidently thought thathe was being heroic. He added rather reluctantly, "I must say that Isuppose Frankie Taliaferro would get over it much more easily than Louisecould. "

"Charlie, " I said slowly, "you don't mean to be, but you are too conceitedto live. I wonder that you haven't died of conceit before this. "

Charlie's blond face flushed and he looked deeply offended. 

"Conceited!" he burst out. "Why, Ruth, there isn't a fellow going who hasa worse opinion of himself than I have. I don't see what either of thosegirls sees in me to love, I tell you. I am not proud of it. I wish toHeaven they didn't love me. _I_ haven't made them. "

"'Haven't made them'! Yes, you have. You are just the kind of man whodoes. You say pretty things even to old women, and bring them shawls andput footstools under their feet with the air of a lover. And if you onlyhand a woman an ice you look unutterable things. You have a dozen girls ata time in that indefinite state when three words to any one of them wouldengage you to her, and she would think you had deliberately led up to it;whereas all the past had been idle admiration on your part, and it was arose in her hair or a moment in the conservatory that upset you, and thereyou are. Oh, these girls, these girls, who believe every time a man at aball says he loves them that he means it! Why can't you be satisfied tohave some of them friends, and not all sweethearts?"

"It can't be done. I've tried and I know. Sallie tried it and it marriedher off--a thing not one of her flirtations could have accomplished. Thisis the way it goes. You arrange with a girl not to have any nonsense, butjust to be good friends. You take her to the theatre, drive with her, dance with her. Soon her chaperon begins to eye you over. Fellows at theclub drop a remark now and then. You explain that you are only friends, and they wink at you and you feel foolish. Next time they see you withher, they look knowing, and you see, to your horror, that the girl isblushing. Evidently she is under fire too. Still, you keep it up. Shemakes a better comrade than any of the men. You feel that you are out ofmischief when you are with her. She keeps you alert. You never are bored, but really you are not as fond of her as you were of your college chumeven. She treats you a trifle, just a trifle, differently from all theother men. This goes to your head. You begin to make a little differenceyourself. You take her hand when you say good-night, just as you would oneof the men. But it is not the same. The girl has needles or electricity inher hand. You can't let go. You begin to feel that friendship, too, can bedangerous. Next day you send her flowers, with some lines about thedelights of friendship. She accepts both beautifully, but you have aguilty feeling that you did it to remind her. She does not seem tounderstand that there had been any necessity. Still, you feel rather mean, and to make up for it you try to atone by your manner. She is lookingperfectly lovely. She wears white. You particularly like white. She knowsit. You think perhaps she wore it to please you. _How_ pretty she is! Youlose your head a little and say something. She looks innocent andsurprised. She 'thought we were just friends. Surely, ' she says, 'youhave said so often enough. Why change? Friends are so much morecomfortable. ' She wants to 'stay a friend. ' You are miserable at the idea, although that morning it was just what you wanted. You were even afraidshe would think differently. What an ass a man can be! You flingdiscretion to the winds and tell her--you tell her--well, you go homeengaged to her. That's how a friendship ends. Bah!"

"A realistic recital. From hearsay, of course! The next day the man wisheshe were well out of it, I suppose?"

"Not quite so soon as that, but soon enough. "

"Ah, I wish you knew, Charlie Hardy, how all this sounds even to such agood friend of yours as I am. It is such men as you who lower the standardof love and of men in general. Do you suppose a girl who has had anencounter with you, and seen how trifling you are, can have her firstbeautiful faith to give to the truly grand hero when he comes? No; it hasbeen bruised and beaten down by what you call 'a little flirtation, ' andpossibly her unwillingness to trust a second time may force her truelover into withdrawing his suit. How dare men and women trifle with theShekinah of their lives? And when it has been dulled by abuse, what apitiful Shekinah it appears to the one who approaches it reverently, confidently expecting it to be the uncontaminated holy of holies! It isthis sort of thing which makes infidels about love. "

Charlie began to look sulky, feeling, I suppose, that I was piling thesins of the universe on to his already burdened shoulders. 

"I dare say you are right, but what am I to do?"

"There is only one thing for you to do, but I know you won't do it. "

"Yes, I will. Only try me, " he said, brightening up. 

"You must go and tell Louise that you are in love with FrankieTaliaferro. "

"Tell Louise? Why, Ruth, it would kill her. You don't know her. Shewouldn't let me off. You don't know how a girl in love feels. Ruth, wereyou ever in love?"

"That is not a pertinent question, " I said. "It comes quite near beingthe other thing. But let me tell you, Charlie Hardy, I know Louise King, and it won't kill her. You know 'men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love. ' That might be said of women. " (I didn't know, Tabby, whether it might or might not. I couldn't afford to let him see my doubts, if I had any. ) "We don't die as easily as you men seem to think. "

"But is this your view of what is right?" he asked. "I was sure you wouldcounsel the other. I've been fortifying myself to give Frankie up andmarry Louise, and, with all due respect to you, I must say that I thinkyou are wrong here. You must remember that my honor is involved. "

"Bother your honor!" I cried explosively. Charlie seemed rather pleasedthan otherwise at my inelegance. "I am tired to death of hearing men fallback on nonsense about their honor. I notice they seldom feel called uponto refer to it unless they are involved in something disreputable. "

Charlie straightened up at this and settled his coat with an indignantjerk. 

"I hardly think, " he began stiffly, "that I am involved in anythingdisreputable in being engaged to Miss King. "

"What are a man's debts of honor?" I went on with growing excitement. "Gaming debts and things he would scarcely care to explain to the publicat large. Your honor is involved in this, is it? And you must save yourhonor at all hazards, no matter who goes to the wall in the process! Isuppose if you made the rash vow that, if your horse won the race, youwould cut your mother's head off, while you were still in the flush ofvictory, you would seize your bowie-knife and go to work! No? Oh, yes, Charlie. Your honor, as you call it, is involved. I insist upon it. Youmust do it. Oh, I am going too far, am I? Not one step further than men goin the mire whither their honor leads them. Debts of honor, indeed! Debtsof dishonor I call them. So do most women. "

"Yes, but, Ruth, " interrupted Charlie uneasily, "an engagement isdifferent. I don't dispute what you say in regard to gambling debts--"

"You can't, " I murmured rebelliously. 

"--but a man can't, with any decency, ask a girl to release him when hehas sought her out and asked her to marry him. "

"Perhaps not with decency. But it is a place where this precious honor ofyours might come into play. It would at least be honorable. "

"There isn't a man who would agree with you, " he cried. 

"Nor is there a woman who would agree with you, " I retorted. But both ofus stretched things a little at this point. 

He thought over the situation for a few minutes, then said, "You understand that, in my opinion, Louise loves me the best. "

"The best--yes. For that very reason you must not marry her. O Charlie!try to understand, " I pleaded. "She must love the best when she loves atall. She has loved the best in you, until she has put it out of your reachever to attain to it. It would not be fair to the girl, it would berobbing her, to accept all this beautiful love for you, and give her inreturn--your love for another girl. Do you suppose for an instant thatyou could continue to deceive her after you were married? Supposing shefound out afterwards, then what? She might die of that. I cannot say. Itwould be enough to kill her. But not if you are honest and manly enough totell her in time to save her self-respect. You are powerless to touch itnow. You could kill it if you were married. "

"Honest and manly enough to confess myself a rascal? I don't see where itwould come in, " he replied gloomily. 

"It is the nearest approach to it which lies in your power. "

"If the girls' places were only reversed now! I could tell Frankie that Ihad been false to our engagement and had fallen in love with Louise. Shewould know how it was herself. But Louise couldn't comprehend such things. I believe she has been as true to me, even in thought, as if she had beenmy wife. How can I tell her?"

"The more you say, the plainer you make it your duty. I say, how can younot tell her?"

"I might go away for a year and not let her know and not write to her. Then she would know without my having to tell her. "

"You wouldn't stand it if a man called you a coward. Don't try my woman'sfriendship for you too far. You insult me by offering such a suggestion. "

"Gently, gently, Ruth. I beg your pardon. " (Rachel was right in saying hewould not quarrel. I wished he would. I never wanted to quarrel so much inmy life. )

"I am a coward, " he broke down at last. "I'll spare you the trouble ofsaying so. But oh, Ruth, you don't know how I dread a scene! You go andtell her. I can't. I couldn't even write it. "

"How unselfish you are! Spare yourself at all hazards, Charlie, for ofcourse it was not your fault that things got into such a state. "

"Oh, Ruth, don't!"

"Well, I won't. But do you realize how I should insult her if I went toher? It's bad enough for you, the man she loves, to tell her. From any oneelse it would be unforgivable. Do as you like. You promised to follow myadvice. Take it and do as you will with it. But I will guarantee theresult if you will do as I say. Come, Charlie. One hour, and it will allbe over, and you can marry Frankie. "

It was like getting him into a dentist's chair. I felt a wholesomeself-contempt as I thus sugar-coated his pill, but he was so abject in hismisery. 

Charlie brightened up perceptibly at the alluring prospect. He shut hiseyes to the dark path which led to happiness, and was revelling in itsglory. 

"Ruth, you dear thing! I don't see how I ever can thank you enough, " hesaid, taking both my hands in his. "I ought to have stuck to you, that'swhat I ought to have done. You would have kept me straight. Do you know, Iused to be awfully in love with you. You really were my first love. I wasabout eighteen then. You don't look a day older, and you are just as sweetas ever. "

I laughed outright. 

"What did I tell you?" I cried. "You can't help making love to save yourlife. Your gratitude is getting you into deeper water every minute. Gohome, do. Run for your life, or you'll be engaged to me too. _Then_who'll help you out?"

He acted upon my suggestion and went hastily. 

Tabby, did you ever? He never was in love with me, never on this earth. Whatever possessed him to say such a thing? He loses his head, that's whathe does. I hope he won't meet any woman younger than his grandmotherbefore he gets home, or he might propose to her. 

 * * * * *

My heart stands still when I think of Louise King. 

 IX

 THE MADONNA OF THE QUIET MIND

 "It is not true that love makes all things easy, but it makes us choose what is difficult. "

Across the street, in plain view from my window, has come to dwell alittle brown wren of a woman with her five babies. The house, hithertoinconspicuous among its finer neighbors, at the advent of the Mayo familysuddenly bloomed into a home. The lawn blossomed with living flowers andthe windows framed faces which shamed, in their dimpling loveliness, thepainted cherubs on the wall. 

It was a delight to see Nellie Mayo in the midst of her children. Herswere all babies, such dear, amiable, kissable babies, each of whom seemedpersonally anxious to prove to every one how much sweetness one smallmorsel of humanity could hold. But with five of them, bless me! the housewas one glowing radiance of sunshine, in which the little mother lived andloved, until they absorbed each other's personality, and it was difficultto think of one without the others. 

Sometimes in a street-car or on the elevated train I have seen women who Ifelt convinced had little babies at home. It is because of the peculiarlook they wear, the rapturous mother-look, which has its home in the eyesduring the most helpless period of babyhood--an indescribable look, inwhich dreams and prophecy and heaven are mingled. It is the sweetest lookwhich can come to a woman's face, saying plainly, "Oh, I have such asecret in my heart! Would that every one knew its rapture with me!" Itwears off sooner or later, but with Nellie Mayo, whether because therealways was a baby, or because each was welcomed with such a world of love, the look remained until it seemed a part of her face. 

Long ago we knew her as an unworldly girl, whose peachblow coloring gaveto her face its chief beauty, although her plaintive blue eyes and smoothbrown hair called forth a certain protective faith in her simplicity andgoodness. Sometimes girlhood is a mysterious chaos of traits, out of whichno one can foretell what sort of cosmos will follow, or whether there willbe a cosmos at all or only intelligent chaos to the end. But this girlseemed to carry her future in her face. She was a little mother to us all. It was a tribute to her gentleness and dignity that, although she was apoor girl among a bevy of rich ones, she was a favorite; unacknowledgedperhaps, but still a favorite. She always stood ready with herunostentatious help. She was everybody's understudy. Flossy Carleton, asshe was then, fastened herself like a leech upon Nellie's capacity foraid, and was a likely subject for the exercise of Nellie's swifter brainand willing feet; for to see any one's unspoken need was to her like athrilling cry for help, and was the only thing which could completely drawher from her shy reserve. The chief reason she was popular was that shehad a faculty of keeping herself in the shadow. You never knew where shewas until you wanted her, when she would seem to rise out of the earth toyour side. But, in spite of your intense gratitude at the moment, youreally found yourself taking her as a matter of course. She was one ofthose who are fully appreciated only when they are dead, and who then callforth the bitterest remorse that we have not made them know in life howdear they were and how painfully necessary to our happiness. 

It is rather a sad commentary upon those same girls, who accepted Nellie'sassistance most readily, to record that, when they were launched intosociety and were deep in the mysteries of full-fledged young-ladyhood, little Nellie Maddox was seldom invited to their most fashionablegatherings, but came in, at first, before their memory grew too rusty, for the simpler luncheons and teas. 

This is not a history of intentional or systematic neglect, but a merestatement of the way things drifted along. Not one of the girls wouldwilfully have omitted her, if she had been in the habit of being asked;but it was easy to let her name slip when all the rest did it, and sogradually it came to pass that we seldom saw her. Then she married FrankMayo, who would not be offended if he heard a newsboy refer to him as "agent, " or a maid-servant describe him as "a pretty man. " Of such a one itis scarcely necessary to add that he was selfish, inordinately conceited, and, to complete the description, a trifle vulgar. He never suspected hiswife's cleverness nor appreciated her worship. It almost made me doubt hercleverness to see how she idolized him, but this instance went far towardsproving that love, with some women, is entirely an affair of the heart. Itirritates Rachel to hear any one say so. She says it argues ignorance of anice distinction in terms, and that when the brain is not concerned itshould be called by a baser name. 

I doubt if she could have brought herself to say so if she had beenlooking into Nellie Mayo's blue eyes, which looked tired and a little lessblue than as I remembered them. They had pathetic purple shadows underthem, which told of sleepless nights with the babies, and there were finelines around her mouth; but her light-brown hair was as smooth and herdress as plain and neat as ever. 

It was like watching a nest of birds. I felt my own love expand to see thewealth of affection Nellie had for her precious family. Her unselfish zealnever flagged. She flitted from one want to another as naturally as shebreathed and with as little consciousness of the process. Her householdmachinery ran no more smoothly than many another's, but Nellie met andsurmounted all obstacles with an unruffled brow. Her outward calm was theresult of some great inward peace. She simply had developed naturally fromthe girl we had known before we grew up and went away to be "finished bytravel. "

Nothing could go so wrongly, no nerves throb so pitilessly, that theyprevented her meeting her husband with the smile reserved for him alone. None of the babies could call it forth. When he came home tired, Nelliefluttered around him making him comfortable, as if life held for her nosweeter task. 

Being a woman myself, and having no husband to wait upon until it becamenatural, I used to feel somewhat vexed that he never served her, insteadof receiving the best of everything so complacently. He never seemed torealize that she might be tired or needed a change of routine. Thathousehold revolved around him. Of course it was partly Nellie's fault thathe had fallen into the habit of receiving everything and making no return. Fallen into it? No. With that kind of a man, an only son, and consideredby the undiscriminating to be good-looking, his wife had only to take uphis mother's unfinished work of spoiling him. It is true that theseunselfish women inculcate a system of selfishness in their families whichoften works their ruin. They rob the children of their rightful virtue ofself-sacrifice. 

So Nellie idolized her husband. He was her king, and the king could do nowrong. She taught the babies a sweet system of idolatry, which so far hadbeen harmless. He cared very little for children; so, when yearning toexpress their love for the hero of all their mother's stories, with theirlittle hearts almost bursting with affection, their love was mostfrequently tested by being obliged to keep away from their idol in order"not to bother him" with their kisses. Fortunately these same withheldkisses were dear to Nellie, and she never was too busy to accept andreturn them. Thus they never knew how busy she was. She was sure to beabout some sweet task for others. If she ever rested, it was with thecosiest corner occupied by somebody else. 

I wonder what will happen when, in heaven, one of these selfless mothersis led in triumph to a solid gold throne, all lined with eider-downcushions, where she can take the rest she never had on earth. Won't shestagger back against the glittering walls of the New Jerusalem and say, "Not for me. Not for me. Surely it must be for my husband?" But there, where places are appointed, she will not be allowed to give it up--whichmay make her miserable even in heaven. Ah me, these mothers! It bringstears to my eyes to think of their unending love, which wraps around andshelters and broods over every one, whose helplessness clings to theirhelp, whose need depends upon their exhaustless supply. Theirs it is tobear the invisible but princely crest, "Ich dien. "

Nellie had no time for literary classes. Her music, of which we used topredict great things, had resolved itself into lullabies and kindergartenditties for the children. She seldom found an opportunity to visit evenme. So it was I who went there and saw how her life was literally bound bythe four walls of that little brown house; yet I never felt anyinclination to pity her, because she was so contented. I knew of otherswho seemed happier--that is, the word seemed to describe them better--butnone of them possessed Nellie Mayo's placid content. 

Still, I did not like her husband. He was not of Nellie's fine fibre. Hewas dull, while she was delightfully clever. His eyes were rather good, but he had a way of throwing expressive glances at me, as he talked upontrifling subjects, which disgusted me. I reluctantly made up my mind thathe considered himself a "lady-killer, " but I felt outraged that he shouldwaste his ammunition upon me. I tried to be amused by it, when I foundindignation was useless with him. I used to call him "Simon Tappertit" tomyself, until I once forgot and referred to him as "Simon" before Nellie, when I gave up being amused and let it bore me naturally. I always hadtreated him with unusual consideration for Nellie's sake, and even hadtried genuinely to admire him because it gave her such pleasure; but whenI discovered that the jackanapes took it as an evidence that he wasprogressing in my esteem, I did not know whether to laugh or cry withvexation. 

All at once, without any explanation or preface, Sallie began calling uponMrs. Mayo and sending her flowers from her conservatories. Often whenSallie came to see me her coachman had orders to be at Mrs. Mayo'sdisposal, to take the children for a drive, while Sallie and I sat andtalked about everything except why she had embarked upon this venture. Iwas sure there was something in it which must be kept out of sight, because Sallie never would talk about them. 

I noticed that whenever Frank was away from home--which grew more and morefrequent--an invitation was sure to come for the Mayos from Sallie. ButNellie never accepted without him, whether from pride or timidity I couldnot then determine, and all Sallie's efforts to persuade her wereunavailing. 

It was such an unusual proceeding in Mrs. Payson Osborne to seek out anyone that it excited my wonder. But she was not to be balked by anything;moreover, I had great faith in her motives, which were sound and good, even if her plans of carrying them out inclined to the frivolous. 

But all at once her frivolity seemed to reach a climax. She issuedinvitations for a lawn fête, to be followed by a very private, very selectdinner, after which came the cotillon. She had decorators from New York, and otherwise ordered the most extravagant setting for her entertainment. This might not seem unusual to every one, but with us, who are accustomedto extracting our enjoyment from one party at a time, this seemed rather asuperb affair. Pet Winterbotham was almost wild with delight. 

"Only think, " she cried, "she has asked Jack and me to lead the cotillon!Isn't that sweet of her? Oh, I do think she is the dearest thing! Though Imust say I'd rather have been asked to the dinner. That's going to beperfectly elegant. I heard it was to be given for somebody, but I don'tknow who it could be. It might be for Frankie Taliaferro. Mrs. Osborne hasasked her to come up for it. "

Pet's remarks rushed on until I soon found myself carried along the tideof her enthusiasm, which she assured me was shared by every girl in town. 

I shall not attempt to describe Sallie's success. The weather, the people, fortune itself, was in her favor, and the whole afternoon was admirable. Iconfess, however, that it was with some slight curiosity that I awaitedthe dinner. 

Sallie's cheeks were flushed and her eyes shone with an unusual brilliancyas she greeted us, but the proverbial feather would have felled any one ofher guests when Payson offered his arm to Mrs. Frank Mayo, who rose out ofa shadowy corner in a high-throated gown and led us to the dining-room. Icaught Sallie's eye as she laid her hand on Frank Mayo's arm, and she gaveme a comical look, half imploring, half defiant. 

I was guilty of wondering if Sallie had been demented when she plannedthat dinner-table, for this is the way we found ourselves:

Next to Frank Mayo came Alice Asbury, encased in freezing dignity. BrianBeck, at his worst, supported her on the other hand. After Brian wereLouise King and Charlie Hardy, both looking to my practised eyesexceedingly stiff and uncomfortable. I had no time to wonder if the blowhad fallen, in casting a glance at the other guests. Nellie Mayo wasadmirably situated between Charlie Hardy and Payson Osborne, both of whomwere deference itself to her. The difference in her simple attire from thefull dress all around her in no wise disturbed her unworldly spirit. Shelooked with quiet admiration at the handsome shoulders of Louise andRachel, evidently never dreaming that the babies' mother might beexpected to follow their example in dress. 

[Illustration: Seating plan. ]

Grace Beck, sitting by Norris Whitehouse, would have an excellentopportunity of cementing or breaking off the prospective match, which asyet was unannounced, between her sister and his nephew. Rachel would bepolite, but not wildly entertaining, to Asbury; but he could count on meto be decent to him, while I snatched crumbs of intellectual comfort fromPercival on my other hand. But Sallie had placed the funereal ClintonFrost between that rattle-pated Frankie Taliaferro and her lively self, probably with the laudable intention of seeing whether his face would bepermanently disfigured by a smile. Nor was the poor wretch out of BrianBeck's reach, but was made the objective point of Brian's liveliestsallies, the hero of his most piquant and impossible stories, whichconvulsed us until I felt sure that the irritated Mr. Frost must cherisha secret but lively desire to punch his head. Possibly Brian was the onlyone who thoroughly enjoyed himself at that ill-starred dinner, for he iskeen on the scent of a precarious situation which is liable to involveeverybody in total collapse. In this instance he seemed to snuff thebattle from afar and stirred up all the slumbering elements of discordwith unctuous satisfaction; and if it had not been for the wicked twinklein his Irish blue eyes, which none of his victims could withstand, itmight have resulted seriously. He gayly rallied Charlie Hardy on hisflirtations; predicted seeing him yet brought up with a round turn in abreach-of-promise case; seemed highly edified by Frankie Taliaferro'sefforts to appear unconcerned at these pleasantries; railed openly atClinton Frost's being so unresponsive to the general mirth around him;shivered visibly at that gentleman's icy retorts; playfully calledattention to his wife's endeavors to frown him into silence; and, in spiteof Sallie's angry glances, really saved her dinner from proving a dismalfailure. Indeed, the cases were too real, and too much genuine misery wasconcealed behind impassive faces, not to prove a dangerous situation, thetension of which was relieved by Brian's extravagant nonsense. Percivaland Norris Whitehouse were sincerely amused by the wit in which Brianclothed his droll remarks. But the greatest misfortune of the dinner-giverwas realized in Frank Mayo, the man who thinks he can tell a good story. The Mayos were so new to all of us that this peculiarity was not suspecteduntil Brian discovered it and dragged it forth. He persuaded Frank totalk, listened with absorbing interest to the flattest tales, encouragedhim if he flagged, and laughed until the tears came if he by chance forgotor slurred a point. 

However, no one seemed to think that there was anything seriously amissexcept Sallie, who is a human barometer when she has guests. She knows byinstinct when they are or are not being entertained. Nor was her tact atfault in seating the people, for I was the only one laden with almostunbearable knowledge, and I fell asleep that night thinking that possiblythe situation was not so unusual as it appeared to me. I dare say plentyof dinners are given with just as many unsuspected trap-doors tosensationalism. 

 X

 THE PATHOS OF FAITH

 "To him who is shod the whole world is covered with leather. "

The next afternoon I was resting and thinking over the brilliancy of thePayson Osborne entertainment, when Sallie came in, dressed from head tofoot in black. There was not a suspicion of white at wrist or throat. Iwas too startled to ask a question until her burst of laughter relievedme. 

"You poor thing!" she cried, "did I frighten you? But I _am_ in mourning;yes, truly, for my dinner-party. Ruth, Ruth, what was the matter with it?"

"Why, nothing. It was exquisitely served, and oh, Sallie, your lawn fêteand the cotillon were beautiful. They were perfect. Truly, you do give themost successful entertainments in town. "

"Certainly--why shouldn't I, " said Sallie sharply, "when I have never doneanything, _anything_ all my life but go to parties and study how to givethem? Oh, Ruth, dear, I do get so tired of it all. But, " taking on abrisker tone, "all the more reason why I should never give such a sadaffair as that dinner. That dinner, Ruth, was what Brian Beck calls ahowling failure. Payson never criticises anything that I do, but even hecame to me quite gingerly this morning, after I had read what the papershad to say about it, and said, 'My dear child, what was the matter withyour tea-party?' Now, let us admit the success of the other two, and weepa little in a friendly way over the 'tea-party. '"

"I had a lovely time--" I began, but Sallie interrupted me. 

"Hypocrite!" she cried vehemently. "You know you didn't. Your eyes were asbig as turkey platters with apprehension. "

"My dear Sallie, " I expostulated. 

"Don't you dare put on airs with me, then, " she said mutinously. "Now, what ailed them all? It couldn't have been the advent of the Mayos. I'velaunched more ticklish craft than they. Nor could it have been thatabominable Brian Beck, who would spoil Paradise and be the utter ruin ofa respectable funeral. Every one seemed to conspire to make my dinner afailure. "

"Oh, Sallie, I think Percival especially exerted himself. He was in hismost exquisite mood. "

"Oh, Percival, of course. He must have suspected that something was goingwrong. Did you ever notice, when he talks, how Rachel turns her head away?But you can see the color creep up into her face. She is too proud and shyto let people see how much she cares for him. But when _she_ speaksPercival looks at her with all his eyes, and positively leans forward sothat he shall not miss a word. I love to watch those two. Sometimes when Ihave been with them I feel as if I had been to church. "

"Then, too, Payson's manner to Nellie Mayo was the most chivalric thing Iever saw. He treated her as if the best in the land were not too good forher. "

"Nor is it, " said Sallie warmly. 

"I'm glad you think so. What a sweet, unworldly spirit she has! Almost anywoman would have been distressed because of her gown; but she was sosuperior to her dress, with that uplifted face of hers, that I feltashamed to think of it myself. You gave her a rare pleasure last night, for she never meets clever men and women. The Percivals and Mr. Whitehousedelighted her, and you saw how well she sustained her part of theconversation. You see she thinks, if she doesn't have time to study. Shewas particularly fortunate in having Payson to take her out, for he has afaculty of putting people at their ease. Do you know, Sallie, PaysonOsborne has come out wonderfully since you married him. He is morethoughtful, more considerate, and his manners always have been _so_ good. I declare, last night I caught him looking at you in a way which made mequite fond of him. "

"I'm fond of him myself, " said Sallie candidly. "He undoubtedly is a dearold thing, and he is tremendously good to me. By the way, did you noticehow red Frankie Taliaferro's eyes were last night? She had the toothache, poor girl. It came on quite suddenly just before dinner, and it alarmed mefor fear she couldn't appear. Just before dinner I was naming over the waythe people were to go in, and I said that I had to put engaged peopletogether and separate husbands and wives, after the manner of real life, and Payson asked if I was sure Louise King and Charlie Hardy were engaged, and I said yes, although it never had been announced, and just thenFrankie burst into tears. It was a suspicious time for crying, especiallyas that egregious flirt had paid her a great deal of attention; butFrankie would tell _me_, I am sure, and then she really had been to thedentist's that morning. So I gave her something for it which she saidcured it. I was so vexed at her for making her eyes red, for her bluedress brought it out. If she had been crying over the other, she mighthave spared her tears, for I don't believe Charlie and Louise are engaged. I think they have quarrelled, for when Charlie offered his arm to Louise, she looked up with that way she has of throwing her head back, and Ideclare to you, Ruth, I saw, I positively saw, forked lightnings shootfrom her eyes. They blazed so I was afraid they would set his tie on fire. As for Charlie, he turned first green, then magenta, then a rich andlively purple. I give you my word they did not speak to each other duringthat dinner, nor would Louise stay to the cotillon. Charlie danced it withFrankie. Nice state of affairs, isn't it?"

I felt myself grow weak. But Sallie proceeded gayly: "Then you know howhard I have tried to propitiate those miserable Asburys. I declare, Ithink Alice might meet me half way. Perhaps she didn't like being seatedbetween Frank Mayo and Brian Beck, but both she and that awful Frost mansat as stiff and unsmiling as if they had swallowed curtain-poles by thedozen. " Sallie does not mind an extra word or two to strengthen a simile. I tried to imagine Alice and Mr. Frost gulping down the articles Salliementioned, but mine was no match for Sallie's nimble fancy and I gave itup. "I do hope that Pet Winterbotham will not marry that man. I should assoon see her led to the altar by a satin-lined casket. I had to invite himwhen I found that Frankie could come. Wasn't Brian Beck dreadful, anddidn't you think you would go to sleep under Frank Mayo's stories? Anddidn't Grace Beck's airs with Mr. Whitehouse amuse you? Oh, she will holdthat head of hers so high if Pet marries Jack. How bored Asbury looked, didn't he? So selfish of him not to pretend to be pleased. Even Rachelvexed me by not being nicer to Asbury. I declare, Ruth, I was so irritatedat the queer way every one acted, I felt as if it would be a relief tomake faces at them, instead of beaming on them the hospitable beam of ahostess. I wonder how they would have liked it. "

"They might have considered it rather unconventional perhaps. "

Sallie smiled absent-mindedly, pressed her hand to her flushed cheek, looked over towards the Mayo house, and then, meeting my inquiring glance, dropped her eyes in confusion. 

"Well, " I said tentatively. 

Sallie leaned back in her chair, put her hands behind her head, and closedher eyes. 

"I wonder, " she said dreamily, "why I ever attempt to do things. Why can'tpeople let me alone, and why don't I let them alone? Most of all, why do Iever try to keep a secret?"

I knew then that she had been rattling on because her mind was full ofsomething else. I don't believe she knew half that she had said. Presentlyto my surprise I saw a tear steal down her cheek. 

"O Sallie!" I exclaimed, now really worried, "what is it?"

"I'll tell you, Ruth, for you are the only one who seems really to knowand love that dear little Nellie Mayo and those blessed babies. Ruth, there is a Damocles sword hanging over that nest of birds, and it isliable to fall at any moment. Oh, it has weighed on my heart like leadever since I discovered the secret. I know you don't like Frank Mayo, butyou will despise him when I tell you the mischief he is up to, and thatpoor little wife of his trusting him as if he were an archangel. Oh, heis common, Ruth, and horrid, and if it is ever found out it will killNellie. But he is carrying on dreadfully with a soubrette in New York. Heis wasting his money on her--and you know he has none to spare--and seemsto be infatuated with her; while she, of course, is only using him toadvertise herself. In fact, that is how I found it out. Payson is in asyndicate which is trying to buy one of those up-town theatres in New Yorkand turn it into something else; I forget just what they want to do withit, but any way, he came in contact with the manager of the theatre wherethis woman was playing. He gave them a dinner and afterwards they occupiedhis box, and while this woman was on the stage her manager told how someman was causing nightly sensations by the flowers he sent her, and he saidthat he--her manager--thought he would have it written up for the papersto advertise her before she started out on her tour. He said the man wasmaking a fool of himself, but the actress didn't care, and when he pointedout the fellow to them, Payson saw to his horror that it was Frank Mayo. He didn't say a word before the other gentlemen, but the next day he wentto the manager and begged him to advertise the woman in some other way. Hetold him who Frank was and all about his poor little wife and thechildren, and the manager, who seems to be a good hearted man, said it wasa shame and promised not to allow it. He even went so far as to offer tospeak to the actress herself and request her to refuse to be interviewedon the subject. So Payson came home quite relieved. But the next time hesaw the manager Payson asked him how things were going, and he said worsethan ever as far as Frank himself was concerned, and he added that when hementioned the subject to the actress she tossed her head and said Mayomust take care of himself. 

"Then I thought I would do what I could to introduce him into societyhere, for you know he is ambitious in that line, and perhaps I might gethim away from the creature. So I gave that whole thing yesterday for theMayo family, with what result you know, except that I haven't told youthat the presumptuous dolt made love mawkishly to me all the evening. Yes, actually! Did you ever hear of such impertinence? Oh, the man issimply insufferable, Ruth. 

"Now, what I am constantly afraid of is that it will get into the papersafter all. I read them, I fairly study them, so that it shall not escapeme; but, if it does come out, what shall we do for Nellie? It will breakher heart. "

I looked at Sallie with gnawing conscience that I had ever called herlawn fête the climax of frivolity. The dear little soul! who would havesuspected that she had such a worthy motive for her ball? But, do youknow, sometimes in fashionable life we catch a glimpse of thesimple-minded, homely kindliness which we are taught to believe existsonly among horny-handed farmers, rough miners, and hardy mountaineers. 

"Sallie, dear child, " I said, "I beg your pardon for not knowing how nobleyou are. "

"Noble? I? Sallie Cox? Now, nobody except Payson ever hinted at such athing, and I hushed him up instantly. No, Ruth, it was nothing. I dare sayRachel or you would have thought of some grand project which would havebeen effectual, but _I_ couldn't think of anything to do but to tickle hisvanity by making him the guest of honor at the best affair of the season. "

"Indeed, I think neither Rachel nor I could have thought of anything sosure to captivate a shallow mortal like Frank Mayo. "

"Set a thief to catch a thief, " said Sallie merrily. "I'm shallow myself, _I_ knew how it would feel to have such a fine thing given for me. Mydear, if the ball were only fine enough it would cure a broken heart. "

"Not if the heart were really broken, Sallie. "

"Well, you must admit that it would help _some_, " she said whimsically. 

And so she went away and left the burden upon me. Then I, too, fell todevouring the papers, as I knew Sallie was doing with me. I went more thanever to the little brown house which lay in such peril, and I never sawNellie with a paper in her hand that I did not shudder. 

At last the thing we so dreaded came to pass. In the evening paper therewas quite a sensational account of it. Thank Heaven, no name was given;but alas, the description of him, of his wife and five little children, was unmistakable. I felt as though I had sat still and watched a cat killa bird. It was raining, not hard, but drearily, and the dead leavesfluttered against the windows as the chill wind blew them from where theyclung. I was lonesome, and the autumn evening intensified my feelings. Iglanced over to where a red glow came from Nellie's windows. I fancied hersitting there with the paper in her hand, as she always did in the onespare moment of her busy day, with her heart crushed by the news. Shewould be alone, too, for Frank was out of town. Poor child! Poor child! Istarted up and decided to go and see her. If she didn't want me I couldcome back, but what if she did want me and I was not there?

I found her sitting, as I had expected, alone. The paper, with the fatalpage uppermost, lay in her lap, as if she had read it and laid it down. There was only the firelight in the room. 

"Come in, dear, " she said gladly. "I was just thinking of you andwondering if such weather did not make you blue. Sit down here by thefire. It was sweet of you to come in the rain. "

She searched my distressed face anxiously as she spoke. I made no reply. My heart was too full at being comforted when I had come to comfort. As Isat on a low stool at her side she seemed to divine my mood, for she drewmy head against her knee with a mother touch, and threaded my hair with amother hand, and pressed down my eyelids as I have seen her do when sheputs her baby to sleep. And though she must have felt the tears come, shedid not appear to know. 

"Dear Ruth, " she said, "I have been sitting here thinking about you, andwondering if you were satisfied, such a loving heart as you have, to facethe rest of your life without the love you deserve. You won't be vexedwith me for speaking of it to you, for you know I am so old-fashioned thatI think love is the only thing in this world worth having. It is all thatI live for. Of course my children love me, but, until they grow older, theirs is only an instinctive love. It isn't like the love of a husband, which singles you out of all the other countless women in the world to behis and only his forever. There is power enough in that thought to nervethe weakest woman to do a giant's task. The mere fact that you are all inall, the _only_ woman, to the man you so dearly love, the one person whocan make his world; when you think that your being away from one meal orout of the house when he comes in will make him miss you till his heartaches--this will keep down a moan of pain when it is almost beyondbearing, for fear it might cause him to suffer with you; it will nerveyou to stand up and smile into his eyes when you are ready to drop withexhaustion. Love, such as a husband's love for his wife, is the mostprecious, the most supporting thing a woman can have. You never hear metalk much about my husband, but he is all this and more to me. I cannotbegin to tell you about it. I read about unhappy marriages--why, I reada dreadful thing to-night in the paper, which set me to thinking how safeand happy I am, and how thankful I ought to be that I can trust myhusband so. It was about a man who was unfaithful to his wife, and theyhad five children just as we have. I know such things do occur, but how orwhy is a mystery to me. I hope I am not too hard when I say that in such acase it must be the wife's fault. Surely if she had been a good wife, anunselfish and loving wife, he could not have been enticed away. Poorthing! I wonder how she felt when she heard it. Probably she wouldn'tbelieve it. Probably she had too much faith in him. You shake your head. Why, Ruth, you dear thing, you don't know anything about it. A wife_couldn't_ believe such a thing. Why, I wouldn't believe it if told by anangel from heaven. But then my husband is so dear to me. I do sometimeswonder if all women care as much for their husbands as I do for mine. Doyou know, dear, I think about you so much. I know that there have beenseveral hearts in which you have reigned, and yet you have not cared. Butthe true love, the right lover, has not come, or you could not have passedhim by. He is waiting for you; somewhere, somehow, he will come to you, Iam sure, and you will know then that you have belonged to each other allthis time; that this love has been coming down the ages from eternity forjust you two. You will not refuse it then. Why, I could never have refusedto marry Frank when I found that I was as much to him as he was to me! Heis so handsome, so good. I shall never cease to thank God that He made himturn aside into the quiet places to find me. But, in spite of all this, you know I don't think he is perfect. He doesn't care for books as muchas I wish he did. He has no ear for music, and he cannot tell a storystraight to save his life, the dear boy! Love does not blind my eyes, butthis is what it does do. It makes me overlook in him what would annoy mein others. When, at that beautiful dinner of Mrs. Osborne's, Frank toldthose stories of his that I've heard for years, I don't think any onecared to hear them except Mr. Beck and me. I knew they were not well told, but it was my husband who was telling them, and I could listen to hisvoice, even if I couldn't sit next him. 

"How the wind blows. Don't you think it has a lonesome sound to-night?There isn't a glimmer of light from any of your windows yet, and see whata lovely glow this fire casts all through the room. It makes the coldwalls look warm, and if it makes shadows, it chases them away when itblazes its brightest. It is your fault that there is no light in yourwindows, and your fault that you have closed your heart against love. Youcould have the glow that lights my house and my heart if you only would. You know, dear, I am not talking to you as a neighbor now or even as afriend, but as a woman talks to a woman out of her inmost heart. It isonly because I love you so and because I have seen you with my babies thatI know what a home-maker you are. You seem so sad sometimes, and I knowyour heart is wistful if your eyes are not. How can you have the courageto shut out love? How can you see the happiness of all your friends andnot want a share of it yourself? Why do you cry so, my dear? Is there someone you love? Has any trouble come between you? No? No? Well, there, there! It was selfish of me to show you the way I look at things and totry to make you dissatisfied. Never mind. You are stronger than I. I couldnot live without love; I should die. But if you can, it may be that youare fulfilling your destiny more nobly than many another who has more ofwhat I should choose. 

"Oh, must you go? Forgive me if I have said what I should not. Good-night, and God bless you, my dear. "

 XI

 THE HAZARD OF A HUMAN DIE

 "The tallest trees are most in the power of the wind. "

Last night at the theatre there were theatricals all over the house. Myeyes followed the play on the stage, but my mind was filled with the farcein the next box and with the tragedy in the one opposite. 

I was with the Ford-Burkes, and, hearing familiar voices, I pulled asidethe curtain, and in the next box were the Payson Osbornes, PetWinterbotham, and Jack Whitehouse. Pet thrust her hand over the railingand whispered, "I'm engaged. Put your hand here and feel the size of my ring. You can getan idea of it through my glove. I'd take it off and show it to you, only Ithink it would look rather pronounced, don't you?"

"Rather, " I assented faintly. 

I glanced beyond her into the fresh blue eyes of young Jack Whitehouse, and I wondered if the alert, manly young fellow, with his untried butinherited capabilities, knew that he had been accepted as a husbandbecause his hair curled and he looked "chappie. "

"I suppose you have heard the news, haven't you?" she went on. 

"Nothing in particular. What news?"

"Look across the house and you will see. "

Just entering their box opposite were Louise King and Norris Whitehouse, Jack's uncle. 

"What do you mean?" I asked, with a wrench at Pet's little hand which madeher wince. 

"It's an engagement. Uncle and nephew engaged the same season. Isn't itrich? Think of Louise King being my aunt. She is only twenty-three. "

Then they saw us and bowed. I felt faint as my mind adjusted itself tothis new arrangement. I levelled my glass at them. 

Louise, magnificently tall and handsome, looked quite self-contained. Sheis one of the best-bred girls I know, but it required a strongerimagination than mine to fathom what mysterious change had transformedher from the impulsive, loving creature of Charlie Hardy's story to thisserene-eyed woman, who had deliberately elected to marry at the funeralof her own heart. 

As I looked across at her during that long evening, I felt that it wasimpertinent to probe her heart with my wonderings and surmises. I knewinstinctively just how carefully she was hiding her hurt from all humaneyes. I knew how her fierce pride was bearing up under the cruelty of it. I felt how she had rushed from the humiliation one man had brought her tothe waiting love of the one who should have been her first choice by thedivine right of natural selection. This strong man had loved her foryears, but he would never allow her to imperil either his dignity or herown. He was just the man her impulsive, high-strung nature could accept asa refuge, beat against and buffet if need be, then learn to appreciate andcling to. 

I had an impression that he was not totally ignorant of the state ofaffairs. He was older and wiser than she, and capable of the bravery ofthis venture. No, he was not being deceived. I was sure of it. Louise wastoo high minded to attempt it. She would be scornfully honest with him. Her scorn would be for herself, not for him, and he had accepted herjoyfully on these terms. His daring was tempered with prudence, and hisclear vision doubtless forecast the end. His insight must have shown himthat, with a girl like Louise, the rebound from the self-disdain to whichCharlie Hardy's confession must have reduced her would be as intense asher humiliation had been, and that her passionate gratitude to the man whorestored her self-respect would be boundless. Not every man--not evenevery man who loved her--could do this. He must possess strong nerves whodescends into a volcano. He must have a more unbending will who tames anywild thing; but what an intoxicating thrill of pride must come to him who, having confidence in his own powers, makes the attempt and succeeds. 

Perhaps if Louise had been strong enough to fight this cruel battle outwith herself as Rachel would have done, and win as Rachel would have won, she might have been able to choose differently. She might then, strong inher own strength, marry a man of lesser personality, a younger man, andthey two could have adjusted their lives to each other gradually. Now itmust be Louise who would be adjusted, and Norris Whitehouse was just theman to know the curious fact that the more fiery and impetuous a womanis, the more easily, if she is in love, will she mould herself tocircumstances. The more untamed and unbending she seems, the more helplesswill she be under the strong excitement of love or grief. 

A strong-minded woman is easier to persuade than a weak one. The granderthe nature the greater its pliability towards truth. The longer I sat andgazed into the opposite box the clearer it grew in my mind that thesuddenness of this venture did not imply rashness, but serene-eyed faithonly, and such faith would captivate Louise King more than would love. Theonly impossible thing about it to a sceptical Old Maid was that it wasthe man who was proving himself such a hero, and who was upsetting myfavorite theory that men never understand emotional women. Still, it wasnot difficult to except as unusual a man like Norris Whitehouse, and yethave my theory hold good. In imagination I leaped forward to the peacefuloutcome of this turbulent beginning, and overlooked the way which led toit. I found myself hoping, with painful intensity, that this venture inwhich Norris Whitehouse and I had embarked would prove successful. I hadknown and loved Louise King all her life. I had loved her dear motherbefore her, and the beautiful daughterhood of this girl had always touchedme as the highest and sweetest type I ever had known. I did not want to bethe one to bring her face to face with her first great sorrow, although Idared not interfere to less purpose. For

 "'Tis an awkward thing to play with souls, And matter enough to save one's own. Yet think of my friend and the burning coals We played with for bits of stone. "

They could not know that I had had anything to do with it; yet, if illcame of it, I should blame myself all the rest of my life. 

Not long afterwards they were married very quietly and went away for a fewweeks. When they returned I sought Louise with eagerness, and found thatmy fears were not groundless. I tried to think what to do. If it wouldhave eased matters, I would willingly have gone to her and confessed thatI instigated Charlie Hardy's confession. But I felt that the root of thematter lay deeper than that, so I said nothing that could be construedinto an unwelcome knowledge of her affairs. 

In the short time which elapsed between their return and the date set fortheir departure for Europe, where they were to stay a year, I saw Louisecontinually. She sought me as if she liked to be with me, although hereyes never lost the anxious, hunted expression which you sometimes see inthe eyes of some trapped wild creature. 

It was a raw morning, with a chill wind blowing, when their steamer was tosail. Mr. Whitehouse, thinking I might have some last private word to sayto Louise, skilfully detached everybody else and strolled with them beyondearshot, but where his eyes could continually rest upon his wife's face. 

As Louise and I walked up and down I took in mine the small hand whichemerged from the great fur cuff of her boat cloak, and gradually itsrigidity relaxed under my friendly pressure. I remembered, as Ioccasionally tightened my grasp upon it, that my dear little baby sisterLois, who was taken away from us before she outgrew her babyhood, used tosqueeze my hand in this fashion, and when I asked her what it meant, sheinvariably said, "It means dat it loves you. " I wondered if the sameinarticulate language could be conveyed to poor, suffering Louise. Suddenly she turned to me and said, "You have thrown something gentle, a softness around me this morning. Ican feel it. What is it, Ruth?"

"I don't know, dear, unless it is my love for you. "

"It is something more. Your eyes look into mine as if you knew all aboutit and wished to comfort me. "

As I made no answer, she turned and looked down at me from her superbheight. 

"Tell me, " she said quite gently; "I shall not be angry. Tell me, _do_ youknow?"

"Yes, Louise, I know. "

She hesitated a moment as if she really had not believed it. Then she saidslowly, "If any other person on earth except you had told me that, I should die. Icould not live in the knowledge. But you--well, your pity is not an insultsomehow. "

"Because it is not pity, Louise, " I said steadily. "There is a differencebetween pity and sympathy. One is thrown at you--the other walks withyou. "

She only pressed my hand gratefully. Suddenly she turned and saidimpulsively, "Then you must know how utterly wretched I am. "

Glancing over her shoulder I could see the eyes of her husband fastenedupon her with an expression which stirred me to put forth my bestefforts. 

Then it came over me how pent-up all this intensity of feeling must be. Irealized how impossible it would seem to her to speak of it. Taking mylife in my hand--for I was mortally afraid--I rushed in, after the mannerof my kind, where angels fear to tread. 

"Did you love him then so much?"

The pupils of her eyes enlarged until they were all black with excitement. She caught both my hands in hers. 

"Only God Himself knows how I loved him, " she whispered. 

I knew then that all Charlie had said was true, and, weak coward that Iwas, if I could have undone the past, I would have given him back to her. I was borne away by a glimpse of such love. O Charlie Hardy! And you castthis from you for a pair of blue eyes!

"How came you to love such a weak man?" I asked tremblingly. 

"That is what I want to know. How could I? How can girls of my sort loveso hopelessly beneath us? I've thought and wondered over that questionuntil my brain has almost turned, and the only consolation I find is thatI am not the only one. Other women, cleverer than I, have loved the mostcontemptible of men and have been deceived just as I was. Oh, if he or Ihad only died before I discovered the truth! If I could have mourned himhonorably and felt that my grief was dignified! But I won't allow myselfto grieve over him. I tell myself that I am well out of it and that Iought to be glad. But instead of gladness there is a dull, miserable achein my heart, which I feel even in my sleep. Not for him; I don't mourn forhim, but for myself--for my fallen idols and my shattered ideals. Whatwill such men have to answer for? I doubt if I ever can believe inanything human again. "

"Anything _human_, " I repeated gladly. 

Louise looked down. 

"He was not omnipotent, " she said huskily. "He ruled my heart only, notmy soul. "

"I suppose you have tried to love your husband?" I said. 

"Tried? Oh, Ruth, I have tried so hard! He is so good to me. He knowseverything. Of course I told him. That was why we were married sosuddenly. He wished it and urged such excellent reasons, and I had so muchrespect for him and his wisdom in what is best, that I married him. Ithought I could love him. I always thought that if I didn't love--theother one--I should love Norris; but I can't. I believe my power of loveis gone forever. I feel sometimes as if the best part of me had beenkilled--not died of its own accord, but as if it had been murdered. "

"Poor child!" I said. "Why don't you talk this over with your husband?"

"Oh, Ruth, how could I?"

"Well, may I talk to you? Will it hurt you?"

"Nothing that you would say can hurt me, dear. "

"Then let me say just this. You have been trying to do in weeks whatnature would take years to do. In real life you cannot lose your love andheal your worse than widowed heart and love anew as you would in privatetheatricals. You have outraged your own delicate sensibilities, but notwith your husband's consent. He does not want you to try to love him. Nogood man does. He wants you to love him because you can't helpyourself--because it seems to your heart to be the only natural thing todo. 'When the song's gone out of your life, you can't start another whileit's a-ringing in your ears. It's best to have a bit o' silence, and outof that maybe a psalm'll come by and by. '"

"Oh, Ruth, dear Ruth, say that again, " she cried, turning towards me withtears in her lovely eyes. I repeated it. 

"How restful to dare to take 'a bit o' silence'!"

"No one can prevent you doing so but yourself. Mr. Whitehouse married youto give you just that, confident that he loved you so much that the psalmwould come by and by. "

"I believe he did, " said Louise gently, with color rising in her cheeks. 

"Another thing. Don't try not to grieve. Don't repress yourself. It isright that you should mourn over your lost ideals. Nothing on earthbrings more poignant grief than that. You will never get them back. Do notexpect what is impossible. They were false ideals, none the less beautifuland dear to you for being that, but truly they were distorted. You willsee this some time. You have begun to see it now. You realize that thisman was in no way what you thought him. You had idealized him, had almostcrowned him. Now you can't help trying to invest Mr. Whitehouse with thesame unnamable, invisible qualities. But no man has them. Your husband isa thousand times more worthy than the other, yet even he does not deserveworship. Let the man do the crowning if you can, although a woman of yourtemperament would find even that difficult--that which the most inane ofwomen could accept with calmness and a smile. You have the magnificenthumility of the truly great. Still it is not appreciated in this world. Try resting for a while and let your husband love you. "

I knew that I was saying, though perhaps in a different way, things whichNorris Whitehouse had urged upon her. Not that she said so. She wouldhave regarded that as sacrilege. But it was a look, a little tremblingsmile, which betrayed the ingenuous young creature to me. I felt that Iwas in the presence of a nature very fair and exquisitely pure. It was asacred feeling. I almost felt as if I ought not to read the signs in herface, because she had no idea that they were there. 

"I have such horrible doubts, " she said suddenly with suppressedbitterness. "I do not belittle my love. I know that I loved him with allmy heart and soul, and that I gave him more than most women would havedone, because love means infinitely more to me than it does to them. Iknew all the time that I loved him more than he loved me, but I did notcare, for I believed, blind as I was, that we loved each other all we werecapable of doing, and if I had more love to give it was only because I wasricher than he, and I meant to make him the greater by my treasure. Now Ifeel that both I and my love have been wasted. Oh, it was a cruel thing, Ruth. I feel so poor, so poor. "

"Louise, you think, but you do not think rightly. _Are_ you poorer forhaving loved him? What is his unworth compared with your worth? Isn't yourlove sweeter and truer for having grown and expanded? No love was everwasted. It enriches the giver involuntarily. You are a sweeter, betterwoman than before you loved, unless you made the mistake of small naturesand let it embitter you. You have no right to feel that it has beenwasted. "

"Do you think so?" she said doubtfully. "That is an uplifting thought. "Then she added in a low voice, "There is one thing more. It is veryunworthy, I am afraid, but it is a canker that is eating my heart out. Andthat is the mortification of it. Can you picture the thing to yourself?Can you form any idea of how I felt? It grows worse the more I think ofit. "

"I know, I know. But, dear child, there is where I am powerless to helpyou. If I were in your place I think I should feel just as you do. It wasa cruel thing. I wonder that you bore it as well as you did. "

"What! Should _you_ feel that way? Then you do not blame me?"

"Why mention blame in connection with yourself? You are singularly freefrom it. But did you ever consider what an honor the love of such a manas your husband is? Do you know how he is admired by great men? Do yourealize how he must love you, and what magnificent faith he must have towish to marry a young girl like you who admits that she does not love him?If you never do anything else in this world except to deserve the faith hehas in you, you will live a worthy life. "

We were standing still now, and Louise was looking at her husband at adistance with a look in her eyes which was good to see. 

"You never can love him as you loved the other one. A first love nevercomes again. Would you want it to? When you love your husband, as he andI both know that you will do some time--perhaps not soon, but he is verypatient--still, I say, when you love him you will love him in a gentler, truer way. "

"Can you tell me why such a bitter experience should have been sent to meso early in life?"

"To save you pain later and to make of you what you were planned to be. "

Tears rolled down her cheeks and she bent to kiss me, for the last mailhad been put aboard and we had only a moment more. 

What she whispered in my ear I shall never tell to any one, but it willsweeten my whole life. 

As we went towards Mr. Whitehouse Louise involuntarily quickened her pacea little and held out her hand to him with a smile. It was good to see hisface change color and to view the quiet delight with which he receivedher. 

Then there were good-byes and hurried steps and a great deal of shoutingand hauling of ropes, and there were waving of hands and a tossing ofroses from the decks above and a few furtive tears and many heart-aches, and then--the great steamer had sailed. 

 XII

 IN WHICH I WILLINGLY TURN MY FACE WESTWARD

 "Grow old along with me. The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made. Our times are in His hand Who saith, 'A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust God, see all, nor be afraid. '"

The years cannot go on without destroying the old landmarks, and I am soold-fashioned that change of any kind saddens me. People move away, strangers take their houses, the girls marry, children grow up, andeverything is so mutable that sometimes my cheerfulness has a haze to it. 

I am in a mood of retrospection to-night. I am living over the past andknitting up the ravelled ends. 

Dear Rachel! I am thankful that she and Percival continue so happy. It iswonderful how every one recognizes and speaks of the completeness ofthese two. They do not parade their affection. They seem rather to try tohide it even from me, as if it were almost too sacred for even my kindlyeyes. It is in the atmosphere, and, though they go their separate ways, they are more thoroughly together than any other married people I know. 

Both Percival and Rachel are becoming very generally recognized now. People are discovering how wonderfully clever their work is, and theyshare themselves with the public, although it is a sacrifice every timethey do so. Rachel's rather turbulent cleverness has softened down. Shesays it is because it is "billowed in another greater and gentler sort. "She looks at me rather wistfully sometimes. I know what she thinks, butshe does not bore me with questions. I wonder if she thinks I regretanything. Unless I consider that the Percivals have redeemed the record Iam keeping, there is nothing especially tempting in the marriages I amwatching. I cannot think that they are any happier than I am. 

Sallie Cox seems contented most of the time. She has a magnificentestablishment, handsomer than all the rest of the girls' put together. Herhusband "doesn't bother" her, she says, and the Osbornes are very popular. 

"I'm glad I'm shallow, " she said to me once. "Shallow hearts do not achelong. If I had a deep nature I should go mad or turn into a saint. As itis, I wear the scars. "

Once, when I went with her to Rachel's, she sat and looked around thesimple, inexpensive house, with the walls all lined with books and no roomtoo good to live in every day, and she said, "This is the prettiest home I ever was in in my life, and there is not alace curtain in the house!"

We laughed--everybody laughs at Sallie--and Rachel said gently, "We don't need them. "

Sallie looked up quickly and took in the full significance of the words, as she answered in the same tone, "No, you do not, but I do. " And each woman had told her heart history. Now, Rachel must know almost as much about Sallie as I do; but she neverwill know all. 

Sallie said she went home and hated every room in her house separately andspecifically; then she had a good cry over "the perfectness of thePercivals, " and issued invitations to a masked ball. 

"That ball was full of significance, Ruth, " she told me afterwards withher most whimsically knowing look. "It was bristling with it. But nobodythought of it except a certain little goose I know named Sara CoxOsborne. "

Jack Whitehouse and Pet Winterbotham are married. They had the mostbeautiful wedding I ever saw; but it was like watching the babes in thewood, for they are _such_ a young-looking pair. 

I understand better now what Pet meant when she talked about Jack'sappearance so much. I think he expressed to her the idea of perpetualyouth and eternal spring-time. To me, too, it seems as if he ought alwaysto be yachting in blue and white, or lying at full length on the grass atsome girl's feet. And Pet herself makes an admirable companion-piece. When I see her in a misty white ball-dress, with one man bringing her anice and another holding her flowers and a third bearing her filmy wraps, Ifeel that things are quite as they should be. Some people seem to be bornfor fair weather and smooth sailing. 

It is too soon to judge them finally. Norris Whitehouse's nephew willoutgrow the ball-room, and Pet will find in Louise an incentive to growwomanly. 

The Asburys have built a fine house since Alice's father died, and goabout a great deal, but seldom together. Asbury lives at the club, andAlice has her mother with her. Alice has embraced Theosophy and spells hername "Alys. " She always is interested in something new and advanced, andwhenever I meet her I am prepared to go into ecstasies over a plan to savemen's souls by electricity, or something equally speedy in the moral line. She is daft on spiritual rapid transit. 

She does these things because she is a disappointed, clever, ambitiouswoman, who would have made a noble character if she had been surroundedby right influences. 

What would have been the result if Alice had taken as her creed: "Thesituation that has not its duty, its ideals, was never yet occupied byman. Yes, here in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal; work it outtherefrom, and working, live, be free. Fool! the Ideal is in thyself; thycondition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same ideal out of; whatmatters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the form thou giveit be heroic, be poetic? Oh, thou that pinest in the imprisonment of theActual and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule andcreate, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, 'here or nowhere, ' couldst thou only see"?

Ah, well, she could not. She still is crying to the gods and spelling hername "Alys. " Her cleverness must have an outlet, and, with worse than nohusband to lavish it upon, she scatters it to the four winds of heavenand gets herself talked about as "queer. "

May Brandt has bitten into her apples of Sodom, and the taste of ashes isbitter indeed to her. She knows now that Brandt never loved her, and didlove Alice. I do not know whether she thinks he still cares for Alice ornot. May never had much beauty to lose, but she looks worn and unhappy, and watches Alice with a degree of feeling which would appear vulgar to meif I did not know just how miserable she is. She is hopelessly plain now, and Alice is still like a tall, stately lily. Brandt devours her with hiseyes, but Alice makes him keep his distance. 

Sallie Cox has been diplomatic and harmless enough to make Alice forgiveher, and they are quite good friends; but Alice is magnificent in herscorn of Brandt's wife, who almost cowers in her presence. 

Poor May! I wish I could take that look of suffering from her littlepinched, three-cornered face for just one hour. But how could I? How couldanybody who knew all about it?

She does not understand Alice in all her moods and vagaries, and Alicedoes not condescend to explain herself even to her friends. I do notbelieve that Alice and Brandt have ever spoken on the subject whichoccupies three minds whenever they two are thrown together. Yet I imagineit would be a relief to May if she were told that. However, she isscarcely noble enough to believe it, even if Alice herself should tellher. But Alice never will. She never gives it a thought. Brandt, too, hashonor, though, even if he had not, Alice would have it for him and forbida word. 

It is a fortunate thing for some people's chances for a future life thatthere are a reasonable number of consciences distributed through theworld, although it would be an Old Maid's suggestion that sometimes theybe allowed to drive instead of being used as a liveried tiger--forornament and always behind. It is a great pity that people who aresupplied with them--and well-cultivated consciences too--have not thecourage to live up to them, but allow themselves to be gently and feeblymiserable all their lives. 

Now, Charlie Hardy has periods of being the most miserable man I everknew. His last interview with Louise must have been as serious a thing ashe ever experienced. He has married Frankie Taliaferro, and she makes thesweetest little kitten of a wife you ever saw. In Louise he would havebeen protected by a coat of mail. In Frankie he finds it turned into apale-blue eider-down quilt, which suits his temperament much better. 

Louise Whitehouse is coming home soon. Her year abroad has lengthened intoseveral years, and they have been the most beautiful of her life, shewrites. "Living with a song in one's life may be the sweetest while itlasts and before one thinks; but to live by a psalm is to find lifeinfinitely more beautiful and worthier. I never can be thankful enoughthat my life was taken out of my hands at the time when I clung to it mostblindly, and ordered anew by One stronger and wiser than I. "

Tears come to my eyes whenever I think of this girl. I do not quite knowwhy, unless it is that there always is something sad in watching thetempering of a bright young enthusiasm, even though it becomes more usefulthan when so sparkling and high-strung. 

I have been at great pains to have Charlie Hardy realize how happy Louiseis, but his conscience still troubles him at times. He says he knows hedid the right thing for every one concerned, but he dislikes the idea ofhimself in so disagreeable a rôle; and Louise's opinion of him now, afterthe one she did have, is a constant humiliation to him. Women always haveadmired him, and he objects very strongly to any exception to the rule. Ithink he misses the mental ozone which he found in Louise. I often wonderif men who have loved superior women and married average ones do not haveoccasional wonderings and yearnings over lost "might have beens. "

The Mayos still live in the brown house, which has been enlarged andgreatly beautified recently. I have an enthusiastic friendship with thechildren, who are growing into slim slips of girls and sturdy, clear-eyedboys, and their house is still a home. Frank's admiration for soubrettesdied a sudden and violent death at the masked notoriety of his initialescapade, and for a time he was shocked into better behavior. We hear oddrumors floating around, however, of whose truth we never can be sure, butwhich we shake our heads over, after the fashion of those whose confidencehas been caught napping once. We never knew whether Nellie discovered thetruth or not. If Frank denied it, it would not affect matters with her ifthe world rang with it. Her idolatry has a certain blind stubbornness init which I should not care to beat against. 

Bronson does not stand as straight as he did when I first knew him. Rachelsays he has "a scholarly stoop. " But she knows, and I know, that somethingbesides law-books and parchment has taken the elasticity out of his step. 

Many years have gone by since I became an Old Maid. I want to call myAlter Ego's attention to this fact gently but firmly, because I have anidea that she still considers herself "only thirty, " and that she thinksshe has just begun to be an Old Maid. Whereas she is old and so am I. Ido not mind it at all. Neither does she; it is only that she had notrealized it. We have so much to think about more important than our stupidages. People have grown used to seeing us about, and we like the samethings, and keep going at about the same pace and in the same road, and Ithink we have come to be an Institution. 

I have no worries which I do not borrow from my married friends. I keep upwith the fashions; my clothes fit me; my fingers still come to the ends ofmy gloves; I feel no leaning towards all-over cloth shoes; I have not gonepermanently into bonnets. I have tried to be a pleasant Old Maid, and myreward is that my friends make me feel as if they liked to have me about. I am not made to feel that I am _passé_. One's clothes and one's feelingsare all that ever make one _passé_. 

Nevertheless, I have turned my face resolutely towards the setting sun. Iam resting now. I have given up struggling against the inevitable. That isa privilege and an attribute of youth. I feel as though I were onlybeginning to live, now that I have passed through the period of turmoiland come out from the rapids into gently gliding water. There is so muchin life which we could not see at the beginning, but which grows with ourgrowth and bears us company in the richness of evening-tide. I havelearned to love my life and to cultivate it. Who knows what is in her lifeuntil she has tended it and made it know that she expects something fromit in return for all her aspirations and endeavors? Even my wasted effortsare dear to me. 

 "'Tis greatly wise to talk with our past hours, And ask them what report they bore to Heaven, And how they might have borne more welcome news. "

Yet there is a sadness in looking back. I see the many lost opportunitieslifting to me their wistful faces, and dumbly pleading with me to acceptthem and their promises; yet I carelessly passed them by. I see worse. Isee the rents in the hedge, where I forced my wilful way into forbiddenfields, and only regained my path after weary wandering, brier-torn, andnone the better for my folly. Lost faces come before me which I might havegladdened oftener. Voices sound in my ear whose tones I might have madehappier if I would. Withheld sympathy rises up before me deploring itswasted treasure. How can any one be happy in looking back? The onlypleasure in looking forward is in hope. Yet now both grief and joy aretempered with a softness which enfolds my fretted spirit gratefully. 

 "Time has laid his hand Upon my heart gently; not smiting it, But as a harper lays his open palm Upon his harp to deaden its vibrations. "

And so I am looking forward to-night to an old age more peaceful, lessturbulent, than my youth has been. I reach forward gladly, too, for lifeholds much that is sweet to old age, which youth can in no wisecomprehend. Possibly this is one reason why youth is so anxious toconcentrate enjoyment. But I am tired of concentration. There is a wearand tear about it which precludes the possibility of pleasure. I want totake the rest of my life gently, and by redoubled tenderness repay it forrude handling in my youth--that youth which lies very far away from meto-night and is wrapped in a rainbow mist. 

 THE END

 LOVE-LETTERS OF A WORLDLY WOMAN. 

By Mrs. W. K. CLIFFORD, Author of "Aunt Anne, " "Mrs. Keith's Crime, " etc. 16mo, Cloth, Ornamental, Uncut Edges and Gilt Top, $1 25. 

This volume contains three brilliant love-stories well worth reading. .. . The letters are original and audacious, and are full of a certainintellectual "abandon" which is sure to charm the cultivated reader. .. . We trust that Mrs. W. K. Clifford will give us more fiction in thisdelicately humorous, subtle, and analytic vein. --_Literary World_, Boston. 

Mrs. Clifford's literary style is excellent, and the love-letters alwayshave their special interest. --_N. Y. Times. _

There is abundant cleverness in it. The situations are presented withskill and force, and the letters are written with great dramatic proprietyand much humor. --_St. James's Gazette_, London. 

In short analytical stories of this kind Mrs. Clifford has come to take aunique position in England. In the delicate, ingenious, forcible use oflanguage, to express the results of an unusual range of observation, shestands to our literature as De Maupassant and Bourget stand to theliterature of France. --_Black and White_, London. 

The study of character is so acute, the analysis of motives and conduct soskilful, and, withal, the wit and satire so keen, that the reader does nottire. --_Christian Intelligencer_, N. Y. 

 * * *

_Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. _

_The above work will be sent by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of theUnited States, Canada, or Mexico, on receipt of the price. _

 UNHAPPY LOVES OF MEN OF GENIUS. 

By THOMAS HITCHCOCK. With Twelve Portraits. 16mo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 25. 

A fascinating book. So taking are its rapidly interchanging lights andshadows that one reads it from beginning to end without any thought ofpossible intrusion. --_Observer_, N. Y. 

The simple and perspicuous style in which Mr. Hitchcock tells thesestories of unhappy loves is not less admirable than the learning and theextensive reading and investigation which have enabled him to gather thefacts presented in a manner so engaging. His volume is an importantcontribution to literature, and it is of universal interest. --_N. Y. Sun. _

The stories are concisely and sympathetically told, and the book presentsin small compass what, in lieu of it, must be sought through manyvolumes. --_Dial_, Chicago. 

A very interesting little book. .. . The studies are carefully and aptlymade, and add something to one's sense of personal acquaintanceship withthose men and women who were before not strangers. --_Evangelist_, N. Y. 

 * * *

_Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. _

_The above work will be sent by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of theUnited States, Canada, or Mexico, on receipt of the price. _