THE HEART’S COUNTRY

BY

MARY HEATON VORSE

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
ALICE BARBER STEPHENS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1914

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY THE CROWELL PUBLISHING COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY MARY HEATON O’BRIEN
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published April 1914

YOU MUST COME!
(p. [151])

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE HEART’S COUNTRY

PROLOGUE

The actors in this drama are dead, or else life has turned them into such different beings that their transformation is hardly less than that of death itself. Their thoughts are scattered to the winds, or live, oddly changed, in the bodies of their children—the girl who brought me the journals and packages of letters smiled up at me with the flashing smile of Ellen.

This girl, with a gesture of the hand, opened for me the gates of the past, and when she was gone I walked through them with beating heart, back over the steep path of years. This little package of long-forgotten papers which she had given me, and of whose contents she was ignorant, were a strange legacy, for it was my own youth that I found in them and the youth of Ellen.

As I went over the scrawled journals and through the packages of letters, the land of memory blossomed for me and the tears that came to my eyes thawed the ice of many years. Ellen herself had forgotten her youth; she may not have remembered that in the bottom of an old trunk she had left for me things which she could not bear to destroy—for there they found them after her death with a letter addressed to me. As I read on, it was as though I had before me the broken pieces of her heart, and as I looked, my own childhood and even my girlhood lived again.

I had often looked for my girlhood and had never found it. Those years when women are in the making—that land of glamour—are the hardest thing of all for grown-up people to understand. Nothing stays fixed there, all the emotions are at their point of effervescence and their charm is their evanescence. The very power of early youth is in the violence of its changes; it is the era of chaos in the souls of people; when they are in the making; when the crust is only forming, and the fire may break forth at any moment; and when what seems most secure and fixed trembles under the feet and disappears in some new-made gulf of the emotions. Then, too, in our youth they teach us such cruel things, we spend ourselves in trying to keep alive such spent fires, and no one tells us that it is anything but noble to live under the destructive tyranny of love. We have to find our way alone—

The thought came to me that I would try to write a sort of story of my friend. And yet, although I had before me the picture of a heart in the making, I have taken up my pen and laid it down again because it is not a story which “marches.” Its victories and defeats went on in the quiet of Ellen’s heart, but I have learned that this silent making and marring of the hearts of women means the fate of all men forever.

I fancy that women will have another bar of judgment and that the question asked us there will be: “Have you loved well? Were you small and grudging and niggardly? Did you make of love a sorry barter, or did you give with such a gesture as spring makes when it walks blossoming across the land?” I do not think that old age often repents the generosities of its youth; perhaps it is my own too careful sowing that makes me wish to write the life of my friend, who asked only to spend herself and her own sweetness with both reckless hands.

CHAPTER I

Ellen and her mother drove in a “shay” to take possession of the old Scudder house, which had been vacant long enough to have a deserted and haunted look. It was far back from the street and was sentineled on either side by an uncompromising fir tree. Great vans, of the kind used in that early day to move furniture from one town to another, disgorged their contents on the young spring grass, and though Mildred Dilloway and Janie Acres and I walked to the village store and back on a half-dozen errands, we saw nothing of the new little girl that day; but there remains in my mind the memory of her little mother, a youthful, black-clad figure, moving helplessly, and it seemed at random, among her household effects that squatted so forlornly in the front yard and then started on their processional walk to the house, impelled by the puissant force of Miss Sarah Grant.

Ellen’s account of this time is as follows:—

“We are going to live by ourselves, though we can’t afford it, because we are ourselves, mamma says, and will really give less trouble this way, though my aunt and uncle think not. ‘I want you to win your aunt and uncle,’ she said to me. It will be so much easier for me to win them if they don’t know me too well. That is one of her reasons for not living in the house with them. ‘They would find us so slack that we should become a thorn in their flesh.’ ‘Couldn’t we stop being slack?’ I said. Mamma looked at me, and after a long time she said, ‘You and I, Ellen, will always be slack inside. Material things don’t interest us.’ My mother doesn’t know me. I like some material things, like ploughing. I said to her: ‘Wouldn’t they be a thorn in our flesh?’ She tried not to smile, and said quite sternly: ‘Ellen, you must never think of your dear aunt and uncle in that way.’ If it is so, why shouldn’t I think so, I wonder? As soon as I saw them I knew what mother meant. They are very nice and I love them, but they have never leaned over the gate to talk to peddlers. A lost dog wouldn’t be happy in their home. We have never had any dogs but lost ones. And Aunt Sarah didn’t like Faro’s name or his ways. I like Aunt Sarah. She says just what she feels like saying. Mother doesn’t. Mother says the things she wants to feel like saying. I annoyed my Aunt Sarah by forgetting to come home to help, and mother said, ‘Oh, dear, why did you need to go and read the Bible to that woman next door when we were moving in, and I wanted your aunt to have a high opinion of you?’ I said, ‘She had the rheumatism.’ Aunt Sarah said, ‘Does she read with her knee; and how came you there anyway, Ellen?’ I said, ‘By the back door, because I like back doors and I hate going in front doors.’ Aunt Sarah looked at me very sharply and said, ‘That child of yours, Emily, is just such a child as I should expect you to have, reading the Bible to strangers who have the rheumatism when a pair of willing hands would have been useful at home.’ The way she looked at me, I knew deep inside she didn’t really mind, so I suddenly kissed her. Later mother said, ‘Mercy! I would never have dared to kiss your Aunt Sarah like that.’ I told her I knew Aunt Sarah wanted me to. ‘How can you tell?’ asked mother; but I always know things like that. It makes me feel rather vain, and vanity is a sin. My Uncle Ephraim is like a picture and so is the big house they live in. I had a moment that mamma called ‘flesh-pottish’ and longed to live there. ‘That’s just it, Ellen,’ she said. ‘They are like pictures, and you and I would be sure to injure their lovely surfaces. We are not violent, but so careless.’”

After this arduous day I remember Miss Sarah popped down in my grandmother’s sitting-room. Said she: “I’m all out of breath.” My grandmother waited for further information. “I’ve been settling,” Miss Sarah informed her with that frankness that kept all the older ladies in town in a state of twittering expectation. “I’ve been settling my do-less sister and her do-less child.” She spoke in some exasperation.

My grandmother allowed a long pause and said reflectively:—

“You’d make any one do-less, Sarah.”

And, indeed, Miss Sarah Grant was one of those energetic ladies who leave no place for the energies of others to expand. But here the wind shifted and her irritation disappeared.

“Oh, my dear,” she said, “it’s too sad. Those children are as little fit to take care of themselves and to live alone as young robins in the nest.”

“The Lord looks after such,” said my grandmother.

“Well,” replied Miss Sarah, with asperity, “you may be sure that after what I’ve seen of this world I’m not going to leave it with the Lord.” She was on terms of familiarity with the Deity that even permitted criticism of his ways. Then she said: “Send Roberta soon to see that poor, fatherless Ellen of mine.”

This my grandmother did, shortly afterwards, and I started forth on my first visit to the “poor, fatherless Ellen” at the slow and elegant gait of a hearse with plumes. We were not far removed from that period when young ladies employed their leisure by limning lachrymose females weeping over urns. We were therefore expectant of a certain pomp of mourning; long, black draperies were the least we demanded. Ellen, I learned, was in the apple orchard, and thither I bent my solemn footsteps.

It was in full bloom, one tree after another looking like bridal nosegays of some beneficent giant. All was quiet save for the droning of honey-bees. Suddenly two inches above my head there burst forth the roars of an infant of tender years. I looked up and there I beheld my tragic heroine. Her dress was of blue, checked gingham, a piece of which was caught on a twig of the apple tree and rent nearly in a three-cornered tear. One stocking was coming down in a manner unbecoming to any girl. Her hair was plaited in two neat little “plats,” as we used to call them, and tied tightly with meager ribbons; but though I took these things in at a glance, that which naturally most arrested my attention was the fact that Ellen cherished to her bosom a large, red-headed infant, whom I immediately recognized as being one of the brood of the prolific Sweeneys.

The child ceased roaring for a moment, upon which Ellen remarked to me with grave self-composure:—

“How do you do? I suppose you have come to play with me, but my brother and I can’t come down for a moment until I have managed to get my dress from that twig. Perhaps you could come up and undo it, or if you could perhaps come and get him—”

“Your brother!” I cried. “That’s one of the Sweeney children.”

Ellen’s eyes flashed. “It is my brother,” she insisted. “You can see for yourself it’s my brother. Would one have taken anything but one’s brother up a tree? I have to take care of him all the time.”

Said I: “I’ve known the Sweeney boys all my life; there are seven of them and the third but one biggest always takes care of the smallest. There’s one littler ’n this.”

“Oh, there is!” said Ellen. Her brow darkened. “And I got up the tree with this large, hulking thing in my arms—and goodness knows how I ever did get up it!” She spoke with vigor and precision.

“Aha!” I cried, “you say yourself it’s a Sweeney.”

“I say nothing of the kind,” rejoined Ellen. “This is my brother. Come,” she wheedled, “why won’t you say it’s my brother?”

I bit my lip; I wanted to go, for I was not used to being made game of. Moreover, I disapproved of her present position extremely. There was I, my mouth made up, so to speak, for a weeping-willow air, lachrymose ringlets, dark-rimmed eyes, and black raiment, and I had encountered fallen stockings, torn blue gingham, and the Sweeney baby, and the whole of it together up a tree.

Ellen now looked down on me. Her generous mouth with its tip-tilted corners—an exotic, lovable mouth, too large for beauty, but of a remarkable texture and color—now drooped and her eyes filled,—filled beautifully, and yet did not brim over. And for all the droop of the mouth, the saddest little smile I have ever seen hovered about its corners.

“Won’t you please say that this is my brother?” she pleaded.

Though I knew it was the Sweeney baby and though I knew she was play-acting all of it, stubborn and downright child though I was, something gripped my heart. Though I couldn’t have then put it into words, there was a wistfulness and a heart-hunger about her that played a game with me. It was my first encounter and my first overthrow.

“Have it your brother,” said I in a surly fashion.

When we had got the baby down from the tree, Ellen finished me by looking at me with her sincere, sweet eyes in which there was a hint of tears, and saying softly: “Once I had a little brother who died.” That was all. She turned her face away; I turned my face away; our hands met. It was as though she was explaining to me her insistence on the Sweeney baby.

It was her look and this silent and averted hand-clasp that brought me to my feet in a very torrent of feeling when Alec Yorke, an engaging youth of eleven summers, came ramping through the orchard shouting:—

“Oh, you’ll get it! You’ll get it! Mrs. Sweeney’s given Ted a good one already—she’s after you!”

It was not the gusto in his tone at her ultimate fate that irritated me, but this taking away of Ellen’s baby brother.

“Mrs. Sweeney’s got nothing to do with this baby!” I cried. “It’s Ellen’s brother!”

I bent down and picked up a stone and threw it at Alec. Ellen did the same. In one second we had performed one of those amazing sleights of hand that are so frequent and so disconcerting at this moment of girlhood. A moment before we had been swimming along the upper levels of sentiment and crossing the tender, heart-breaking line of the love of women for little children; now our teary mistiness vanished and we were back at the green-apple-hearted moment of childhood. That afternoon I had already been a young lady with all the decorous manners of eighteen; I had been no age,—just a woman whose heart is touched with pity and affection; and now I was just stern, hard twelve, and I threw a rock at my little friend, Alec Yorke. So did Ellen.

Together, with hoots and pebbles, we drove the invading male from our midst. Ellen, I remember, had a “Yip! Yip! Yip!” which was blood-thirsty and derisive at once. She barked it out like a terrier gone mad. I remember also her crying out in a ferocious agony of desire: “Oh, if I get near you, won’t I spit on you!”

These were her first words to Alec. He said in later years that their first meeting was indelibly engraven on his memory. He retreated over the fence vanquished by superior force, but with his head well up and his thumb to his gallantly tilted nose. Here Ellen turned to me, the light of victory flashing from her eyes, which fought with my interrogatory gaze, filled with tears again, and at last sought the distance.

“I never had a little brother,” she muttered thickly.

Anger surged over me and then died as quickly as it had come. Again she had me. The quiver in her voice showed me what her sincerity had cost her, and so did her next words:—

“I wanted one so always that I just had to make-believe.”

Here one had the heart of truth, stripped of the spirit of make-believe which it had clothed in quaint and absurd garments. Again I squeezed Ellen’s hand in mine.

I tell all these things in detail because this was so Ellen. She had this dual nature which fought forever in her heart,—the passion for make-believe and the fundamental need of telling the truth,—always to herself, and often embarrassingly to those she loved.

She comments as follows on this episode, unconsciously showing me as the young prig I was:—

“The moment Roberta picked up a rock to fight for my brother, I knew I should have to tell her the truth. I saw right away how good Roberta was. She has very lovely blue eyes and her hair is so smooth and shiny that I don’t believe she musses it when she sleeps. She looked at me so straight and her eyes were so round that it was very hard work to tell her that the Sweeney baby was not my brother, but I gritted my teeth and did it. The rest was easy on account of her soft heart.”

CHAPTER II

The heart of man is mysterious. Why a passionately expressed desire to spit upon one should be alluring, God knows—I don’t. It was fatal to Alec. I see him now jumping up and down outside the fence, shouting forth: “Ya ha! Ya ha! You can’t get me!”—or wooing Ellen by the subtle method of attaching a hard green apple to a supple stick and flinging it at her. The relations of these two, as you can see, were deep from the first.

Ellen, more than any of the rest of us, had sharp recrudescences back to little girlhood just as she flamed further ahead on the shimmering path of adolescence. Thus she covered a wide gamut of years in her everyday life. I think it is this ability to roam up and down time that makes life interesting, more than any other thing.

So when Janie Acres and Mildred Dilloway and Ellen and I would be sitting under the trees discussing the important affairs of life, Ellen would suddenly be moved to arise with her ear-rending “Yip! Yip!” and “career” (I use Miss Sarah’s word) across the landscape. Her frocks, because of her mother’s dislike to the dull work of letting down tucks and hems, were shorter than those worn in my decorous young days, and her thin little legs measured the distance like a pair of dividers. There was an intensity to her flight that made one think of a projectile.

From the excursions into tenderness that our little quartette of girls was always making, from our sudden flashes of maturity, Ellen would suddenly leap with both feet into full childhood. I remember sudden jumps from high lofts and swinging from trees and the slipping off of shoes and stockings for the purpose of wading in brooks. And these impassioned returns to the golden age were always heightened by the presence of Alec. Such “performances” were, of course, severely criticized. New England at that time was staider than it is to-day; a higher standard of what was named “decorum” was demanded of the young, and yet smiles flickered around mouths while brows frowned when Ellen played.

As I read Ellen’s journal at this time, it is as though I could see her growing up as the tide comes in; the receding wave toward childhood meant Alec to her. He was a loosely built lad with a humorous and smiling mouth. His shaggy mane of hair, which boys wore longer in those days than they do now, gave him the appearance of a lion’s cub. His whimsical temperament and his easy disposition he got from his mother. She was a placid woman who had spent her life in adapting herself to the difficult temperament of Mr. Yorke, and it was her boast that there was no other woman living who could have got on with her husband without being fidgeted into an early grave. When Miss Sarah opined that if she put her mind on that and on nothing else, she could get on with any man living, Mrs. Yorke replied nothing, but said afterwards to my grandmother:—

“Poor Miss Sarah! Ain’t it queer about these unmarried women; no matter how intellectual they be! It ain’t puttin’ your mind on it ever made a woman get on with the man she’s married to.”

Whatever the knack was that made a woman accomplish this feat, Alec had had imparted by his mother.

“Learnin’ you to get on with your pa real easy an’ smilin’ is goin’ to help you a lot in life, Alec,” the good woman had told her son. “Mebbe it’ll be worth more to you than as if we had money to leave you.”

Understanding the virtues in a good but crotchety and trying man, had bred in Alec a tolerant and humorous spirit of the kind that most people don’t ever acquire at all, and that Youth seldom knows. It made him kind to boys younger than himself, and also made it easy for his mother to make him play the part of nurse to smaller brothers and sisters and also to nieces and nephews, for Mrs. Yorke’s married sister lived next door to her. It was the constant presence of a small child in Alec’s train that made Ellen discover the mystery about him.

“There’s a deep mystery about Alec,” Ellen told me. “Every day he comes and leaves his baby with me at a certain time and runs off rapidly toward the Butlers’.”

Now I had seen Alec Yorke grow up; he was younger than I, and you know the scorn that a girl of thirteen can have toward a boy a year her junior and half a head shorter than she. At that time he fits into no scheme of things; there is no being on earth who arouses one’s sentiment less. As a sweetheart he is impossible; equally impossible is he as an object on which to lavish motherly feelings. For me, Alec was a mere plague; he lured Ellen from me into skylarkings in which I had no part, nor did I wish to have, having, by the New England training of that day, already had my childhood taken from me. It was not mystery that I had ever connected with Alec, but a baffling sense of humor and an intensity in the way he could turn hand-springs. There was a fire in his performance of cart-wheels that seemed to let loose all that was foolish and gay, and, from the point of view of the grown-ups of the time, reprehensible in Ellen. So it was obvious to me that any mysterious doings of Alec’s meant no good.

“We ought to find out,” said I, “what he’s about.”

“Oh, Roberta!” pleaded Ellen; “then it wouldn’t be a mystery any more.”

“We ought to find out what he’s doing,” I pursued, “and get him to stop it. We should use our influence even if he is young.”

We, therefore, stealthily made after Alec. He went out through a hole in the fence of the Scudder place, circled a little wood, scaled some outhouses of the Jones’s, and in this circuitous method came back to old Mrs. Butler’s, next door, and there he lay on his stomach in the woodshed, at a little distance. With a reappearance of guilty stealth, he looked around and seeing no one he dove suddenly into Mrs. Butler’s house. Mrs. Butler was stricken with rheumatism and lived entirely on the first floor, so by the simple method of flattening our noses against the window-pane we might find out anything that was afoot. We fathomed the mystery. There stood Alec, doing old Mrs. Butler’s back hair. He combed it out as best he might, while she punctuated the performance with such remarks as these: “Lor! child, remember it’s hair in your hands, not a hank of yarn.” Then she would groan, “Oh, the day that I lost the use of my arms over my head and must go through this!” All of which Alec bore with patience.

We made off a little shamefacedly while Ellen hissed in my ear, with fine logic: “There, Roberta Hathaway, that’s what you get by snooping into people’s business.” We never mentioned Alec’s mystery to him, though from time to time Ellen would seem maddeningly knowing.

CHAPTER III

When Mrs. Payne had been in our village less than a year and the interest of the village in the “do-less” sister of Miss Sarah had somewhat dwindled, it flamed up again. Mrs. Payne had a visitor, to our country eyes a splendid-looking, middle-aged gentleman. He put up at the little inn and called on Mrs. Payne and brought her such little trifles as a man might bestow upon a lady; sweets also he brought for Ellen, and a most elegant little needlecase with a gold thimble,—an incongruous gift, for since Ellen learned the use of the needle she had abhorred it; if she lived to-day she would have darned her stockings with a sail needle and dental floss. There went through the town, “He’s courting the widow,” for he came again and again, and in the mean time, according to the postmistress, there arrived letters and a package or two.

Concerning this episode Ellen writes:—

“I wish aunts were made of different stuff. When Aunt Sarah comes down here looking like a gorgon, I know that she has come to make my mother cry and I am very glad that I called her ‘old gorgon-face’ right before her one time, though it is a rude way to address one’s female relatives and I apologized to her afterwards, and now I think I will have to undo my apology because I feel so glad and happy every time I think I called her it. I couldn’t help hearing because I was in the next room, and anyway I didn’t mind if I did hear it. She said to my mother: ‘I suppose you’ve made up your mind already what to do about Mr. Dennett.’ ‘About Mr. Dennett?’ said my mother, and she sounded frightened,—she is much more frightened of my Aunt Sarah than I am. ‘Even you can’t be such a ninny,’ said my aunt, ‘as to think he comes here for nothing. A man of his age doesn’t come from Springfield for the purpose of an afternoon’s conversation.’ ‘I hadn’t faced it that way,’ said mamma. ‘Pooh! Pooh!’ said my aunt. ‘There’s a limit to even your folly; I hope you have planned to do the sensible thing and if you have not, you should save him the humiliation of declaring himself, which he’ll do now very soon, no doubt.’ ‘He pretended business brought him here,’ said my mother. ‘Business, indeed,’ said Aunt Sarah, and she made a noise like a snort, which if I made she would consider very rude. I wish there was one day a year when children could tell their aunts how rude they are at times, just as their aunts tell them every day in the week. ‘The business of courting is what he is about, and with an atom of honesty you must know it, and now I want to know what you are going to do.’ ‘It’s rather hard; I’m going to call Ellen,’ said my mother; and I had to move rather rapidly not to be found too near the door, which showed me that I was listening, which one ought never to do. ‘Ellen,’ said my mother; and my aunt then said a word which I am not allowed to say. ‘Squizzelty Betsey,’ said she, ‘what has Ellen to do with it?’ ‘I’m going to consult with Ellen’; and then, when I was in the room, ‘Ellen,’ she said, ‘your aunt seems to think that Mr. Dennett wishes to become a new father to you. How do you like this idea?’ ‘Would you have to keep house for him,’ I said, ‘the way you did for dear papa?’ ‘More so,’ said my mamma. ‘I don’t think we should be happy then,’ said I. At this Aunt Sarah rocked back and forth and she groaned as though her stomach hurt her. While my aunt was groaning, I could see my mother turn her back and I knew by her actions that she was putting her handkerchief to her mouth to keep from laughing, and which I have often seen her do when my aunt was here. ‘It made us both very nervous,’ I explained to her, ‘getting meals exactly on time and doing all the things that a man has a right to have perfect in his own house, which is what papa used to say, but we have not, since we’ve lived together, had to have anything perfect at all; we never think of meal-times or any other sad things.’ ‘Listen, Ellen,’ said my aunt; ‘you are almost more sensible and grown-up than your mother; your mother is still a young woman, a long life of loneliness confronts her,—more than that, a cramped financial situation. You’ll always have to go without and without and without. It would be from every point of view a dignified and suitable alliance and one which your mother should be happy to make and which any woman of her age and position and an atom of sense would do.’ Here my mother flung out her hand in the air as though she were throwing away something and were glad to do it. I wish I could see her do that again. ‘I respect him and I like him, and his liking for me touches me and flatters me, but oh! the running of a big house; but oh! the pent-up city streets.’ ‘And I say so, too,’ I cried. Then she suddenly drew me to her and stood me at arm’s length from her, and she said to me, ‘Ellen, promise me when you grow up, and when your blood shall leap high, and nothing happens in this little town, and when the world calls to you, that you won’t blame me.’ And my aunt said, ‘Don’t worry, Emily; plenty will always happen where Ellen is.’ I hugged and kissed her and promised hard. Now there will be no more presents, and no more bon-bons, for mother is going to shock him so he will not want to come again, which she thinks is a good way to save his vanity, but Aunt Sarah said: ‘Emily, you are incorrigible.’ But we are both, my mother and I, very sorry to lose our good friend. ‘Can’t men be friends with you,’ I asked, ‘without wanting to marry you?’ And my mother said, ‘It seems not, dear.’ But when I grow up it is going to be different with me.”

CHAPTER IV

Ellen wrote about this time:—

“Grandma Hathaway, Aunt Sarah and mamma, all don’t know what to do about me. I should be much grown-upper than I am. ‘Mercy,’ said Aunt Sarah, ‘that great girl of yours, Emily, acts so that she makes me tremble for fear she will some day swing by a tail from a bough, like a monkey.’ [Here we see Miss Grant foreshadowing the Darwinian theory.] They don’t know I try to be good, but I do try; but when joy gets into my feet I have to run, and I love to feel like that. I think I only try to be good when I am not happy. I have said my prayers about it, and the awful thing is when I say my prayers I feel as if God said: ‘Never mind, Ellen, run if you like.’ They always say to me: ‘Why can’t you sit and sew under the trees with the other girls?’ Oh, if they only knew what we talked about when we sit and sew! And even Roberta does, though she disapproves of all silliness. I have never seen any girl disapprove of all silliness as does Roberta. But what we sit and talk about is beaux, though Roberta doesn’t call hers that, and he isn’t. And when Roberta talks so beautifully, I often talk the same way, but deep in my heart I know I wish I had a real beau, like the grown-up girls we talk about. It’s strange, though, that Roberta has none, because she has more of one than any of the rest of us, because she writes notes to Leonard Dilloway and he carries home her books. When I said, ‘He is your beau,’ she was very shocked. ‘I wish you would not speak so to me,’ she said, ‘it pains me. I shall never love, anyway, but once. I am far too young to think of such things.’ ‘Why do you do it?’ I asked her. This made her cross. ‘I don’t,’ she answered. ‘Leonard is my friend.’ But the rest of us know she is in love. So when they talk to me about being a hoyden and ask me to sit and sew, I feel like a hypocrite, because I know that young girls like us are much more grown-up than they were when Aunt Sarah and Grandma Hathaway were young, and that they would dislike one as much as the other. Though I am young in actions I have such old thoughts that I am surprised and wish I could help being proud of myself for them. I have older thoughts than Janie or Mildred, or even Roberta. Roberta sounds older, but her thoughts are tied with strings while mine are not.”

This sketch of hers is an accurate picture of the conversations between young girls that are going on forever and ever when three or four long-legged youngsters are together. Their talk leads inevitably, as did ours, toward their business in life. To the lads we were adventures—not to be confused with the real business they had to do in the world; to us they were life itself.

Like all young girls, we lived in a close little world of our own. No one entered it, nor could we come out toward others’. We were passionate spectators at the feast of life, picking up the crumbs of experience which came our way; for in our civilization we are treated as children at an age when Juliet ran away for love, and Beatrice set Dante’s heart to beating. And yet our hearts beat, and we were tragic and ineffectual Juliets, appearing on our balconies to youths who saw only the shortness of our skirts. We knew without knowing that our little lean arms were to be the cradles of the unborn generation. Forever and ever we tried to tell those whom we met, “I am Eve,” and couldn’t, not knowing the way past the angel with the flaming sword of self-consciousness.

It was the great adventure of Janie Acres which made us conscious of our absorption in boys. There had been a merry-making which took place in a barn, and in talking it over afterwards, we recounted the conversation of each boy who had spoken to us, giving the impression of having snubbed them one and all; which, indeed, we often did, but against our wills, because embarrassment made us gruff.

Janie had the adventure of hiding in the same corn-bin with a lad, and what occurred in the corn-bin she was coy of telling. When pressed, she flushed and looked the other way. It was Ellen who brought the utter innocence and lack of romance to light with her merciless truthfulness.

“Did he kiss you?” asked she.

We were shocked at her frankness. We never spoke of such things as kisses directly. The delicacy of our little souls was deeply wounded.

And Janie replied:—

“Well, not exactly. But,” she faltered, “he would have if I had stayed there.”

“How do you know?” asked Ellen coldly.

Thus it was she pricked the bubble of sentiment. We were all rather horrified, immensely interested and rather envious. We now perceived our sentimentality. We ourselves were shocked a little by some of our temerities, for in the wide conspiracy of silence around us we imagined we were the only adventurous ones in the world. Characteristically, it was I who suggested that momentous association, the “Zinias,” or “Old Maid Club.”

Ellen wrote:—

“We made up our minds that we were always to be true friends of men and lift their minds up as women should. We are going to think only of our studies, our homes, and of religion. Roberta says we may as well begin now, for we are getting older every minute, and one of us is already fourteen. And before we know it we will be thinking of nothing but boys. We have only to look around us to see what such things lead to. Patty Newcomb and Elizabeth Taylor and all those big girls are both forward and bold. When I said, ‘Roberta, isn’t noticing everything they do and talking about it just the same as talking about boys?’ she said at once, ‘It is not the same at all,’ in the tone that I know she doesn’t want me to say anything more. And when I said, ‘Oh, Roberta, aren’t we rather young yet to think about being old maids?’ she replied sternly, ‘It is never too young to begin.’”

I feel rather sorry now for the stern, little Roberta. I feel sorry, too, for Janie Acres and her kiss that never was. She would have been so proud of it; it would have been her proof that she was a young lady.

CHAPTER V

No sooner had Ellen covenanted “Thou shalt not!” than off she went on her first adventure,—a trifling one but bleeding. She walked one day to the academy with Arthur McLain. He wore long trousers. Of this fatal occurrence Ellen remarks touchingly: “I tried very hard to be interesting, but I chose the wrong thing.” It is a mistake frequently made by grown men and women. Alas! capricious fate that governs these things turned my sweet, unconscious Ellen to one forever on the alert for the appearance of this long-legged quidnunc.

I will give three or four paragraphs from her journal:—

“I asked Aunt Sarah if she wanted me to get her some more yarn when hers ran short. She answered, ‘Yes, you may, though I wish, Ellen, my dear child, that you were as eager to do your work as you are to wait on others.’ But I knew all the time that I offered to go because I hoped that I should see him, and I should have told my aunt that that was why I offered.”

A few days later comes the touching little expression of the desire of the eyes:—

“Last week I walked all over town to catch glimpses of him. I went to the post-office, and he wasn’t there; I went down past the school-house and past his house, and whenever I saw a boy coming toward me, it was hard to breathe. The whole day was empty and I thought it would never be night.”

Again:—

“To-day I saw him; he passed by me and just said, ‘Hulloa, Ellen.’ When I stopped for a moment, I thought he would speak to me. In school this morning he stopped and talked, but all my words went away and I seemed so stupid. At night I make up things I would like to say to him, and when he stops for a moment,—oh, he stops so seldom,—I forget them all.”

Throughout all this, not once does she use the word love. From that terrible and impersonal longing, unaware of itself and unrecognized, Ellen walked out toward the long-trousered boy. She spread before him as much as she could of her little shy sweetnesses. She walked up and down the silent streets waiting for him. Later she writes: “I had no single reason in the world for liking him.”

I was with Ellen at the moment of her disillusion. We were out walking together when Arthur McLain came toward us. Ahead of us, tail wagging, ran the beloved mongrel Faro. He stopped to sniff at Arthur. Arthur shooed him away. He was a lad timid about dogs, it seems. Faro saw his nervousness, and, for deviltry, barked. Arthur kicked at him with the savageness of fear.

I can see Ellen now gathering her dog to her with one regal sweep of the hand and walking past the boy, her head erect, her cheeks scarlet.

“I hate a coward,” she said to me in a low, tense voice; and later with a flaming look, “I would have killed him with my hands if he had hurt Faro,” she cried.

So humiliated was she that she says no word in her journal for her reason for her change of heart. She could not forgive him for having made a fool of herself about him—about one so unworthy. For of all things in the world hard to forgive, this is the hardest.

“I would be glad if he were dead. Oh, I know I am awful, but it is like that. Think of him walking around this town day by day, and I will have to meet him; when I go uptown, when I go to school, I will be avoiding him exactly the way I used to look for him. Oh, if he would only go away.”

It is not only Ellen who would like to slay the dead ghosts of unworthy loves.

“He walks up and down, and doesn’t know I have looked at him. Oh, if he knew that, I think I should die [her journal goes on]. He walks up and down and doesn’t know that I so hate the sight of him. I don’t hate him, but just the sight of him—so awfully I hate it. Everything he does seems to me so tiresome; his loud laugh makes me feel sick, and he doesn’t know anything. I make-believe to myself that he walked all over town after me and got in my way and annoyed me until I said, ‘I will be very glad, Arthur, if you would cease these undesired attentions.’ How could he cease anything he had never begun, for it wasn’t at all like that it happened. I should feel so much happier if I only could have hurt him, too.”

This experience, so phantasmal and yet so poignant, led to the Zinias’ premature death. Conscience invaded Ellen now that disillusion had done its blighting work. There came a day when she could no longer keep to herself her deviation from the precise morals demanded by the Zinias.

It was after a walk toward evening up the mountain, full of pregnant silences, that she confessed:—

“You would despise me, if you really knew me. I’m not the kind of a girl we are trying to be.”

I HATE YOUR SOCIETY ANYWAY! I NEVER DID WANT TO BE AN OLD MAID

It shocked me and thrilled me at the same time.

“What have you been doing?” I asked her.

“I can’t tell you,” she told me. “You would despise me too much.”

“Why, Ellen!” I cried. “Tell me about it.”

“No! No!” she said; and she buried her face in the moss in a very agony of shame. “I can’t tell a human soul.”

And she still left me with a feeling of having had an interesting sentimental experience. Thus may we, when young, rifle sweetness from the blossom of despair.

It was communicated to the other two Zinias that Ellen’s conduct had been unbecoming a sincere old maid, and when they turned on her, instead of shame, she had for them: “I hate your society, anyway! I never did want to be an old maid!”

As I look back, this adventure closes for us a certain phase of life as definitely as though we had shut the door. We all realized, though we were not honest enough to say it aloud, that we too didn’t wish to be old maids. And all this happened because an unlovable boy had made Ellen like him. So much at the mercy of men are women! Just a shadow of the Cyprian over us and we blossomed. It was the shadow of a shadow; it had not one little objective event to give it substance, yet the Zinias withered.

CHAPTER VI

With a deep revulsion of feeling, Ellen gave up girls, sewing, and Zinias, and made a dash into childhood with Alec Yorke. Alec at this time was a strong lad of thirteen, a head shorter than Ellen. I remember even then he seemed more a person than the other boys, though at the monkey-shining age.

They egged one another on until the ordinary obstacles that stand in people’s way did not exist. They became together drunken with the joy of life. In this mood, they disappeared together one day, to the scandal of Miss Sarah. She was particularly annoyed because Mrs. Payne refused to be disturbed by the event.

“While he and Ellen are off together, they are somewhere having a good time. Why should I worry?” said she. They had come together to find out if Ellen was at my house.

“If I had known Ellen was gone with Alec, Sarah, I should never have gone to look for her. I wasn’t worried about her, anyway; I only wanted company,” said she, with more asperity than usual.

The two returned at sunset, the glamour of a glorious day about them. They merely told vaguely: “They had been off on the mountain.”

It leaked out that they had been as far as the village, ten miles away, and that the peddler had given them a lift back. This last was a scandal.

An Irish peddler lived on the outskirts of our village, and this was before the day when foreigners were plenty. He lived contrary to our American customs,—the pig roamed at will, in friendly fashion, through his cabin. He sang in Gaelic as he drove his cart with its moth-eaten, calico horse,—songs that were now wildly sad, now wildly gay. He was alien, so we disapproved of him.

I remonstrated with Ellen on this.

“I like him,” was her only answer.

This had not been all the adventure, nor was this the end of it. To tell the story in Ellen’s own words:—

“Alec and I were picking currants at Aunt Sarah’s when I heard a voice behind me, and I never knew before what it meant when I read in books, that ‘their hearts were in their mouths.’ I thought mine would beat its way right out of me and lie thumping at my feet when I heard a voice say: ‘Oh, here are my little friends from Erin’s Isle.’ I suppose it is because I am very bad that it never occurred to me until that minute that fooling a minister, by pretending to be the peddler’s children, was not right, especially when it was Alec’s and my singing songs in what we made him believe was Gaelic that made him buy so many more things. I wonder if all people who do wrong only feel badly when they are found out? I turned around and I thought I should fall, for my mother was with him, and Aunt Sarah and uncle and our own minister. Uncle Ephraim had not heard what he said, and now, ‘Permit me, Mr. Sweetser,’ he said, ‘to present my little niece, Ellen, Mrs. Payne’s little daughter, and our neighbor, Master Alec Yorke.’ I saw him wondering if we really could be the same children, because, while we were playing that we were the peddler’s children, we had taken off our shoes and stockings to make ourselves look like wild Irish children, and had succeeded very well, indeed. I thought for a moment that perhaps he wouldn’t say anything, but Aunt Sarah’s ears were open. ‘What was that? Did I hear you say “your little friends from Erin”? Have you seen these children before?’ This was an awful moment. ‘These are the same children that came with the Irish peddler to my house.’ ‘Ha! Ha! I knew that those children were gone for no good, Emily, and that they were strangely silent about their exploits,’ Aunt Sarah said. ‘Do you mean,’ said Uncle Ephraim, ‘that my niece and Horace Yorke’s son made believe to be the children of a drunken, Irish peddler, and thus appeared before you?’ ‘Not only that,’ said Mr. Sweetser sadly, ‘but they sang to us in Gaelic.’ ‘Gaelic,’ snorted Aunt Sarah; ‘never a word does she know of Gaelic. I have heard her making up gibberish to the tunes that that peddler sings on his way.’ Here Alec acted extremely noble, though it annoyed me very much, and I am sure that I am a very ungrateful girl that it did annoy me. He spoke right up and said: ‘Mr. Grant, it is all my fault. It was I who thought of being children of the Irish peddler and I who suggested that we hop on his cart. I should take all the blame.’ There was not one word of truth in this, for we had often ridden with the peddler before, and the idea of playing that we were his children was my own, and without thinking I told them so. ‘Let us say no more about this childish prank,’ said Mr. Sweetser. ‘These children have shown real nobility, the little lad in desiring to shield Miss Ellen and Miss Ellen in not permitting herself to be shielded.’ Well, I knew that we should have more of it and plenty later, and we did when Aunt Sarah came ravening—there is no other word to use for it, though I know it is not polite—down to our house. It all oppressed me very much, even though Alec whispered: ‘We can make-believe we are being persecuted by the Philistines.’ I know I have disgraced the family, but I shall never understand why riding with the peddler should do this. If our family is any good, it should take more than this. Uncle Ephraim and Aunt Sarah have said that I am really too old to act as I do. When I answer, ‘But if I act so, doesn’t it show that I am not too old, Aunt Sarah?’ she says: ‘Mercy, my child, as tall as any flagpole and with legs like a beanstalk, you’ve got to be acting like a young lady. We can’t have young women of our family getting a ridiculous name.’ This means that I must give up Alec. ‘Why you want that child around all the time is incomprehensible to me,’ said my aunt. ‘You are a good head higher than he is.’ People are always measuring things in length and breadth. How can one measure one’s friends by the pound? Roberta agrees with them. She thinks I am giddy, and feels that she must be good for me. I love Roberta more than any other earthly being beside mamma, but when Roberta tries to be good for me, I am so wicked that I try to be bad for Roberta, and can very easily be so.”

This episode stopped the free skylarking with Alec. As you have seen, it was explained to Ellen that since she was fourteen and nearly a young lady, she must behave as such. When I think how many lovely spontaneities have been offered on the sad and drab altar of young ladyhood, I could weep, as Ellen did. Alec’s suggestion that they were being persecuted by the Philistines did not comfort her, and little Mrs. Payne said sadly:—

“Your aunt and uncle are right, Ellen, and I suppose I’ll have to punish you to satisfy them, but I can’t help knowing that you must have had a perfectly wonderful day, and they are few in this world. Don’t let your punishment cloud your memory.”

CHAPTER VII

Look back and see if you can remember when it was you drifted from that part of the river of life that is little girlhood to that time when you recognized that you were grown up, and the eyes of men rested on you speculatively, interestedly, and your parents foreshadowed these things by an irritating watchfulness that you did not understand. The picture of Ellen that comes to me oftenest is one of her progress through the streets, her hair in an anguished neatness, from her desire to escape Miss Sarah’s critical censure, her skirts longer now, and behind her perpetually screeled the three motherless babes of our not long widowed minister. He was a middle-aged man, ineffectual except for some occasional Gottbetrunkener moments. From my present vantage-point I now recognize him to be one of the brothers of St. Francis by temperament. He had a true poetic sense, and Ellen would go to his house for the purpose of washing dishes and helping about, performing her labors with the precision which she had only for the work of other people, her own room, to my anguish, being a whited sepulcher of disorder, outwardly fair to the glance of her Aunt Sarah, while dust lay thick in every unobservable spot. It was I who kept her bureau drawers in order.

She writes:—

“I just can’t waste a minute indoors. I don’t know why grown people have so many things to do. When I get married I am going to live in a tent and have just one cupboard where I keep everything, with doors that can’t be seen through. Roberta wrings her hands, but she would wring them more if she knew that I have from earliest childhood learned to sleep quietly in my bed as it takes less time to make it when I get up. And mother doesn’t care one bit more than I. I am so glad. She so frequently says: ‘Ellen, this is too sweet a day to cook’; and we eat bread and milk all day, and don’t even light the stove, though there have been moments when I have been glad that there is a big kitchen in which they are always cooking, up at my Aunt Sarah’s. We would get things done much better if it were not for reading aloud, but so frequently mother finds things she wants to read, and then we go on, but not on and on like Mr. Sylvester and I. We began reading poetry the other day—how shall I tell it? And he read and I read, and he read and I read, until we understood everything we were reading, the very heart. We felt as if we had made the poetry—just knowing it for ourselves, and it was us. By pretending I am Mr. Sylvester’s second wife sent by the Lord to take care of his motherless children, I find I can do housework very well, for me, though I feel rather guilty when I look at him, for I know that even he might be exasperated at the thought of me as his second wife. But one has to do something.”

Some weeks later this occurs:—

“Now I have learned to work so beautifully and have done so well, besides taking care of the children and then baking, I feel it isn’t fair not to do it at home. Oh, how hard it is to do work for one’s self. I know I should think I am doing it for my mother, and when I was very little I used to pretend that I was a poor child who supported her mother; but the little silly pretenses of childhood are now impossible for me since I am so much over fifteen.”

It was at this time that we began to be allowed to go to the young people’s parties, because with us there was no fixed and rigid time when girls come out. They went when their legs were long enough and when they had learned to fold their hands properly in their laps and sit with decorum, which with Ellen and myself occurred somewhere toward sixteen. Ellen writes of one of these parties:—

“I am sitting waiting to go. I have a new pale-blue dress with little ruffles—little, tiny ruffles. Aunt Sarah is disgusted that mother put so much work into my dress because it isn’t practical, when we need so many things, for her to waste her eyes. And it is true, but oh, how much more fun it is to work on ornaments than useful things, and parties are like ornaments. I think they are like jewels, and a great, big, enormous party, with lights and flowers, like one reads about in books, must be like having strings of pearls. All I hope is that I will act politely, and not show how pleased I am, because if I did I should shout and sing. My Aunt Sarah said: ‘Ellen, please, my child, don’t make me feel as if you were going to burst into flame or perhaps slide down the banisters.’ And, indeed, I often look in the glass and wonder that I can look so quiet and unshining.”

It was in this high mood that Ellen met Edward Graham. I know now that he must have been an honest lad, square-cornered, solid, with an awkward, bearish, honest walk, nice, kind eyes, and a short mop of wiry, glinting curls as his only beauty, which fitted his head like a close-clinging cap, stopping abruptly instead of straggling down unkemptwise, as hair is apt to do, on the back of his neck and temples. It was Ellen who noticed this and wrote about it. He must have been not over one-and-twenty, but he was instructor at the academy in chemistry and mathematics.

Well do I remember hearing this conversation at the other side of a vine-trellis at this party. In her low, pensive voice Ellen was saying: “I lived by the sea; it was in my veins. The noise of its beating is in my heart. One cannot live inland when one has been a lighthouse-keeper’s daughter.”

Rage and anger surged in me, for Ellen had made but three visits to the sea in all her days, and one of which occurred when she was too small to remember it. As you may gather from this, her father had not been a lighthouse-keeper. I stamped my foot; a little-girl mad feeling came over me. I took my saucer of goodies and my cake firmly in my hand and went to confront her then and there. She had talked so beautifully about truth and life that very afternoon.

I couldn’t do it. The little sarcastic remark that anger had invented for me died still-born. She was too lovely; something almost mystically beautiful radiated from her whole little personality. “I am so happy,” she seemed to say. “Let me stay happy one moment more.” There was always about her this heart-rending quality. It was not until I could draw her by herself that I spoke to her, and then my remonstrance was gentle.

“You must tell him the truth,” I insisted kindly.

And Ellen wrung her hands and said:—

“Oh, Roberta! you make my heart feel like a shriveled-up little leaf; you make me feel like a bad dream, like when you find yourself in company without your clothes.”

But I repeated inexorably:—

“You must tell him.”

I can see her now drooping up to him and the appealing glance of her large eyes. Presently I saw him take both her hands in his, and then she came toward me, her feet dancing, a glad, naughty look in her eyes. She answered my glance of inquiry with:—

“He asked me why I told him what I did, and, since I was telling the whole truth, I answered, ‘I wanted awfully to have you like me.’”

That, you see, is what I got for interfering with my friend and torturing her.

CHAPTER VIII

The next few weeks there were very few entries.

Ellen was very bad at mathematics, and her uncle, who rarely left his seclusion to interest himself in her affairs and who merely enjoyed her personality, thought it would be a fine plan if this responsible young man should give his Ellen lessons. Mr. Grant was advanced in his theories concerning the female brain, which, he said, lost its vagueness and inexactnesses through a mathematical training. Ellen merely makes a note of this.

There are very few entries in her journal at this time, for she was playing with the great forces of life. God help us all! We didn’t know passion when it came to us, nor how should we? It was the warp on which were woven all our generous impulses, all our high idealisms, making in all the shimmering garments in which we clothed our fragile, newborn spirits.

Ellen walked in a magic circle of her own ignorance, never dreaming of love or of being in love. So absorbed was she that it seemed like some one walking down a road that leads directly into a swift-flowing river, and not knowing that the river was there until one had walked directly into it. So close is the so-called silly moment of girlhood to the moment of full development, that when the change comes it sometimes takes only overnight. It was only a few pages, after all, that separated Ellen, who managed to do the minister’s dishes by pretending that she was his second wife, from the Ellen who wrote:—

“I don’t know how to begin what I am going to say. I thought everybody in the world must know what had happened to me. I thought my face must shine with it. I thought I must look like some one very different from myself,—like a woman, perhaps. I came home through Lincoln Field and squeezed myself through a hole in the fence so no one could see me. I came up the back way to my room and locked the door. My heart beat both ways at once when I looked in the glass, but I looked just the same as before I went out—as before he kissed me. I went downstairs and my hand seemed too heavy to open the door and go in where I heard their voices. I was afraid to go because I felt: ‘They will know, they will know!’ Mr. Sylvester and mamma and Aunt Sarah were there. ‘Where have you been?’ said mamma. And I could not answer. I felt I had been gone so long and so far. I could hear the blood beating in my ears, and when my aunt said: ‘I wish, Ellen, you would stand up straighter,’ I could hardly lift my head.”

Next day there is an entry: “I didn’t know we were engaged until he told me, ‘Why, of course, we are.’”

Thus simply does youth plight its troth. They had been together and he had kissed her, and so, of course, they were engaged. Of course, they were ready to fight the long battle of life side by side, and she who had given so much in her kiss had walked out past the doors of girlhood; through that one light touch she felt that her whole life must be then surrendered to the boy who had had the magic word for her. They decided to tell no one on account of their youth.

No sooner did this honest lad have my rainbow Ellen in his hands than he started in trying to make some one else of her. I read her journal that follows with a certain heartache because I was not blameless in this matter. I, too, wanted to take this gay and shimmering child and turn her into something else; trim her generosities and check her impulses.

Another thing that makes me rage is the fact that my knowledge of the lives of men teaches me that, had Ellen had one little affectation in which to clothe herself, her young lover would have been on his knees before her instead of being the pedantic young master. Ellen’s journal at this time varies from a thing glittering with life, from being drunk with the heady wine of being beloved for the first time, to a book of copy-book maxims, beginning with: “Edward says I must read—or do—or act—or mustn’t.”

Poor young man! He wrote her decalogues by the dozen, and yet the tragedy of him is that he tasted her special quality and loved her while trying to kill it. The youth of Ellen and her high joy of living carried him along in spite of himself, though he always made Ellen pay for his happiness by lectures on the seriousness of life.

It was here that Alec began to perceive the place he had in her life. They had a game they played that they called “Two Years Ago,” in which they outdid their own childish pranks. Ellen remarks ingenuously:—

“I suppose that I ought to tell Edward how Alec and I rest ourselves from growing up, but there is no place in him to tell this to. I tried it with Roberta, and she just understood what it was about, but doesn’t see why I want to do it; and I don’t know myself exactly, except that I just have to.”

Then from one day to another Alec was sent West to an uncle and two weeks later, as had been planned, Edward left. He was to go away for a year and a half, and then come back and formally ask for Ellen’s hand. It shocked Ellen terribly that she missed Alec most.

Through all the year and a half that followed, Ellen never told me anything of what was in her mind, nor did she tell her mother, and here is the characteristic of their young girlhood that people seem to forget—this nameless reticence. So, alone, she went through the crucial thing that falling out of love always is. Another girl in her situation might have deceived herself, the idea of a grown-up lover was such a pleasant one to a girl of Ellen’s age. Ellen was unaware of the disillusion she was preparing for herself. She writes, appalled:—

“I don’t know what has happened to me, I can only describe it by saying I have waked up. I know now that I am not in love with Edward and I just understood this from one day to another. He has not done anything at all. He writes me just the way he always has. He hasn’t changed, so I suppose I am fickle and bad, and that I can’t trust myself, for if this wasn’t real, I don’t know what can be real, and yet I feel as though I had never loved him at all. I sometimes wonder if I should have become engaged to some other person if it had happened that some other person had kissed me.”

Write him of her change of heart she could not, for as time went on apparently the memory of her became dearer to the boy. Good and slow and pedantic, he yet realized what a lovely thing life had put into his hands, and he longed to keep it, and he communicated this ever-growing longing to Ellen. She so wanted to keep faith with herself and to live up to all the things about “one love and only one love” that books from all time have taught young girls they ought to feel. She felt a great need of talking about it with some one and could not bring herself to do it.

“If I could only tell some one and ask what to do, but it seems disloyal. Roberta wouldn’t understand and some way I don’t want to worry my little mother. Sometimes I feel as if I did tell her without saying any words, when I sit beside her and hold her hand and feel afraid. The other night we sat alone in the dark. The smell of honeysuckle vines was so sweet that I shall never smell it again without thinking how soft her hand felt in the dark. She said: ‘When I was your age, I used often to want to tell my mother things and didn’t dare. My mother was more like your Aunt Sarah.’ My heart beat so when she said this that it seemed as if she could hear it, but I only pressed her hand and kissed it. Then she said to me: ‘You have seemed a little absent-minded lately, my darling child; have you anything on your mind, Ellen?’ And I said in a low voice, and blushing,—and I took my face off her hand for fear she would feel me blush against it,—‘What should I have?’”

As I read her cramped little handwriting a sudden wave of shame creeps over me as though I had gone back; I remember her so well; I was so on the outside; I loved her so truly. Meantime, as every day shortened the distance that separated them, a certain dread encompassed Ellen; she visualized their approach one to another in this way:—

“It was as if I was standing still and he was standing still, and that the space between us was being shortened by little jerks, and each jerk was as a day that makes us come nearer and nearer. I don’t want to see him—oh, I don’t want to see him. I don’t know what I’m going to say to him—perhaps nothing. He will look at me kindly—oh, kindly and critically,—and then I shall be afraid; afraid of hurting him—afraid of him.”

A little later she writes again:—

“If I go on feeling undecided as to what I shall do, something will snap inside my head. I can’t feel so uncertain. He wrote to me lately, ‘Ellen, my life would be utterly worthless without you.’ I cannot ruin any one’s life, and my life is pretty worthless, anyway, so I am going to stand by my first promise, which is the only brave thing to do. Now that I have decided that, I feel at peace. I loved him once and my love will come back.”

She adds touchingly, “I have two weeks before he comes”; but these two weeks of respite were denied her. I was going down to Ellen’s when I met Edward Graham on his way there also.

“I’ve come to surprise Ellen,” he said. So it happened that it was I who went to her with the words, “Edward Graham’s waiting for you downstairs,” and wondered at the sudden ebb of color from her face.

CHAPTER IX

It was with her mind utterly made up as to what course to take that she went to her ordeal. She was going to offer herself a little, white offering before the altar of the fetish which decrees that we shall keep our promises. Herding her to this doom were all the cruel things which we teach our young girls. In New England in my day we did not joke about engagements. In her innocence, having given her lover her mouth to be kissed and her hand to be held, and having promised to be his, she had definitely decided that in the sight of God she was his, and so she dressed herself in her best that she might please him.

I suppose that had I made up my mind to do what Ellen did at that age, I should have gone through to the iniquitous end, shut my eyes and quieted my rebellious spirit with sophistries. I should have done according to whichever part of the strange anomalous teaching which we give young girls that I believed in most. Had I believed most that it is the crime of crimes to marry without love, I should have frankly made up my mind to break the engagement, but had I believed that one may love but once, and that an engagement is a marriage of the spirit, and that in giving this I had given so much to one man that I had nothing left for any other,—it is strange, but this is still taught to girls to-day,—I should have traveled that terrible road. For girls as young as Ellen have to find their way around through a world that is hung with a cobweb of lies, which is put there to screen us from the real world. The suffering that the unlearning of these lies has given to girls of our class from all time is greater than the suffering through which we must pass to come to a wider religious belief.

Ellen might make up her mind as to what to do, but she lived by instincts. She writes about it:—

“I couldn’t. All day I pretended to myself that I was glad he was coming, and that as soon as I saw him everything would be all right, but it is a terrible, awful thing. He cares. He put his arms out toward me and said: ‘Ellen, oh, Ellen!’ All I could say—I was so cruel, so stupid—was, ‘Don’t, don’t’; and I meant I didn’t want him to touch me. And then he said, and it was worse because he has grown much older looking, ‘I don’t understand. What’s the matter, Ellen?’ I said, ‘I can’t marry you; I don’t love you.’ He said: ‘Why, what have I done?’ What could I tell him? It was just that he was he and I was I, and that’s no reason, and yet it is the only reason in the world that you can’t change, and that’s why you love people and that’s why you don’t love them. We both stood and just stared at each other. While I looked at him all the color went out of his face and it grew gray. ‘When did it happen, Ellen?’ he said. ‘I don’t know,’ I told him; ‘it just went out.’ ‘You might have told me.’ ‘I meant never to tell you,’ I said; and then his color all came back to his face and this was worse than before. ‘You meant to marry me just the same? Then you do care for me; it’s just an idea you’ve gotten; it’s just because we have been apart so long. Let’s just go on just as you meant to, Ellen, if there is no one else.’ He opened his arms as if he wanted to hide me from myself in them, but I don’t know what happened to me. I just said, ‘No-no-no-no,’ and ran out of the room, and out of the house up into the orchard. I didn’t notice, but threw myself down under the tree and cried and cried. I don’t know how long I was there, but I heard my mother saying: ‘Ellen, Ellen,’ and the sound of her footsteps coming toward me, but I couldn’t stop sobbing so that she wouldn’t find me like that. She heard me and came to me and said, ‘Why, Ellen darling! Child, it is as wet as a river here.’ She felt my dress and at first it seemed to me that it must be wet with my tears, but it was just the grass. ‘What is it, Ellen?’ she said to me, and I told her that we had been engaged and that I had just seen Edward, and told him that I didn’t want to marry him; and she just folded me in her arms and said, ‘Why, darling, you needn’t’; and she comforted me, and I felt all safe from everything and just like a very little girl. Not many people can feel like that with their mothers, but I don’t think unless you can that your mother’s a mother to you really. I couldn’t go on feeling safe and rested forever. I’ve broken faith with myself. I can’t count on myself any more. It’s a terrible thing not to be able to count on people you love, but it’s worse not to be able to count on yourself. I couldn’t do what I thought was right; how do I know I will be able to keep from doing what’s wrong? I think I will try and give up being good, because most of the things people think are good I don’t understand why. I might have saved myself all that suffering and been happy and low-minded, comfortable and contented, and I think I will be from now on.”

I well remember this epoch in Ellen’s life; she must have been between eighteen and nineteen when she gave up hope of herself and went out to be comfortable, low-minded, and happy, for she told me about this spiritual change in her. It was a crisis with Ellen, a spiritual crisis as important as the time in a boy’s life when he makes a breach in the “Thou Shalt Nots” that have guarded him around, and surrenders himself to the heady wine of living and says to himself: “I am a sinner; now let’s see what there is in sin.”

Just about the time Ellen broke her engagement, a boy named Landry lay heavily on my conscience. At this time, also, Ellen was engaged and yet was unhappy, and yet all I knew about Ellen was that there was something weighing heavily on her mind, and all she knew about me was my outward principles in this matter and none of my inward storm and stress. I can remember very well the never-ending conversations we had at this time. I suppose all young girls who are not on terms of familiarity with their own souls thus cloak their real feelings from each other. For there is happily nothing more usual than that shivering, shrinking, spiritual modesty which can tell of no event in life that implicates another human being. Later the weaker women outgrow it shamefully, or the finer ones among us replace it with a beautiful frankness. There are some happy girls who have been so simply brought up that they have never felt the need for the ambiguities of life as Ellen and myself did. The facts of the case were these: Released from the torturing thought of Edward Graham, the breath of life blew through Ellen in a storm, while I was being discreetly courted by George Landry. I had never had a tumultuous suitor, on account of my being matter-of-fact in my attitude toward the boys I knew or instinctively withdrawing myself from any sentimental approach. But now this sentimentally inclined youth had called on me and shown a recurring disposition to try and hold my hand when we were alone together. We read a great deal of poetry also and with deep emphasis. Thus does Satan trick the unwary. I, Roberta, the straightforward; I, the hater of philandering, and who sincerely felt that a self-respecting woman should be proposed to only by a man she would willingly accept as her husband, read verses far-gazing at distant horizons and with gentle underscorings whose audacity set my heart to beating. That I had gone into this slow-moving and decorous little flight of sentiment seemed so contrary to my ideals that I felt I must give up my friend and his poetry-reading and forego the heart-throbbing performance of having my hand gently captured and as gently withdrawing it again, both of us apparently blankly unaware of the actions of our respective hands. Ellen and I would discuss our affairs in ambiguities like this:—

“There’s a doom threatening me,” Ellen would confess.

“A doom?” asked I, impressed by the sinister darkness of the word.

“Fate has tangled up my life,” Ellen averred. “I have been deceived in myself, and now that I know what I am, I don’t care.”

“What sort of fate?” I then made bold to ask.

“One that will influence my whole life because it has made me glad I’m not good like I tried to be. I love the feeling of having gotten rid of goodness, Roberta”; and Ellen flashed me the smile of a naughty angel, and turned from me to wipe the nose of the youngest Sylvester baby, Prudentia, who accompanied us on our woodsy rambles. “Can you always decide everything in your life?”

“Indeed I cannot,” I answered quickly. “I must give up a thing that’s sweetest and dearest in life to me, and I can’t decide to do it—I am not strong.”

“Oh, Roberta!” Ellen cried out. “You are so much stronger than I, for I decided and did the opposite thing.”

“What did you want to do?”

“The thing I did do,” poor Ellen cried, tears welling up to her sweet eyes. “I wanted to do what I wanted to do, and yet before I so wanted to do what was right.” Then, with her little fists pounding on the moss on which we were sitting, she said: “And mighty often, Roberta Hathaway, what people want to do seems to me the really right thing to do.”

As I grow older, it seems to me so very often that what people want is really the right thing. There are so many needless sacrifices made in life,—sacrifices that do good to no one and cripple and maim one.

I might have saved myself the worry of giving up the “sweetest and dearest thing in life,” for I had an experience which showed me what a solemn young fool I was.

If Ellen and I had this intense spiritual modesty, Janie Acres was not so afflicted. She was always prolific in detail of any sentimental adventure which she had, and was generally only quiet when she had nothing to tell. Ellen summed this characteristic up in her observation on Janie’s character:—

“When Roberta and I don’t say anything it is because we have too much to say, but when Janie acts as if she knew how God made the world, it is a sure sign she has nothing to tell.”

Poor Janie Acres! Through all this long stretch of years I can see her perpetually heart-hungry, wishing for experiences her very eagerness denied her; longing for sympathy, companionship, and love, and when such things came her way, killing them. She had a curious jealousy which was kept from its full bloom by her confidence in herself. When Janie hadn’t sufficient sentimental experiences she would invent them. And it was because of her inventions that my little experience which I was taking so seriously was turned to ashes before me.

This trait of Janie’s was an incredible one to me. I, who so diligently hid all trace of any sentiment in my life, could never comprehend a temperament that would not only share all its secrets with its friends, but who also invented them; and it was only when Janie had repeatedly emphasized George Landry’s attentions to her at moments when I had been reading poetry with him that I realized this. I listened with the gravest feeling of superiority to Janie’s artless prattle. If George Landry walked up the street with her, it was an event. I think if she had refused to have him accompany her to a Sunday-School picnic she would have recounted it to us as the refusal of a proposal of marriage.

In some obscure way Janie’s interest in George Landry quickened my own feeling and gave me emotions of vast superiority which were very bad for me. All this is brought vividly back to me by this page of Ellen’s journal which recounts the final dénouement:—

“We have been having an awful time this afternoon, and I don’t think that any of us will feel the same ever again. Roberta has been crying in my arms and says she feels soiled, but she has acted so nobly that it will be a comfort to her, because being noble is always a comfort to Roberta—and to almost anybody else. George Landry has been a friend of Roberta’s for some time, and when the other girls have joked her about it she has been very stern, and I’ve believed everything Roberta has said because I think it is horrid to do anything else. But Janie has been talking about George, too, in the way she goes on about anybody that notices her, only who could tell that Janie would talk about those who don’t notice her in the least? This afternoon we were all talking together, and she began: ‘Last night George Landry came past my house and I pretended not to notice him, and he stopped and said, “Can I come in?” And I said, “No, it was too late.”’ ‘What time was it?’ asked Mildred Dilloway. ‘Oh, it was about eight o’clock, and he stayed and talked and talked and leaned clear over the gate, and I kept backing away, and if mother hadn’t called me from the house,—’ Here Mildred broke in and said: ‘Janie Acres! I don’t see how you can tell things like that! George Landry was at my house all yesterday evening.’ ‘Well, it was the evening before that,’ said Janie. ‘Well, it wasn’t the evening before that,’ said Mildred, ‘because he was at my house all the evening before, too.’ ‘I thought your mother was so particular,’ began Janie; but Mildred wouldn’t let her change the subject the way Janie knows how to do, and she said: ‘The way you have gone on about George Landry has almost made trouble between George and myself. It has made me feel quite suspicious at times. But now I have caught you at it.’ Janie blushed very hard and said: ‘You are very spiteful, Mildred, about it. George Landry does like me and I haven’t told you anything that wasn’t so. Perhaps it wasn’t so late when he leaned over my gate.’ ‘He wasn’t anywhere near your old gate,’ said Mildred, ‘and I might just as well tell you—’ And here Mildred, who is very soft when she loses her temper, and begins to cry, did all these and made us all very much embarrassed. ‘And I might as well tell you—and you can see how much you have hurt me—he kissed me good-night. So you can see whether it’s nice of you to pretend that George Landry is interested in you or not.’ We were all perfectly quiet for a minute, and then it was that Roberta made her great sacrifice. Mildred was still crying from excitement and Janie was at a loss for something to say for once, and looking very frowning-browed and jealous. ‘Girls,’ Roberta said, ‘I have something to tell you. And you, Mildred,—whether George has been attentive to Janie I don’t know, but—’ ‘He walked home with me yesterday afternoon,’ said Janie. ‘He did not,’ replied Roberta firmly; ‘he did not. He was at my house all yesterday afternoon, and we were reading poetry and he held my hand.’ If Roberta had been the least like Mildred, she would have cried, too, but she stood there straight and held her head up as beautiful as an avenging fate. What she said stopped Mildred’s tears, and she sprang to her feet and stamped her foot, and said: ‘Well, if he did that and then came to my house and did what he did in the evening, he’s a pig!’ And she stamped her foot again. ‘I said the truth anyway’; and she glared at Janie who now said, ‘I was just trying to tease both of you.’ But Mildred snapped, ‘You were trying to lie to both of us.’ And Janie stuck her head on one side in the most provoking way and said, ‘I don’t want your horrid beau anyway.’ It was all very painful, especially to Roberta. She said: ‘We must never any of us speak to him again. He is unworthy of our notice. Except to spare you more pain, Mildred, I would not have told you about this at all, and I am very much ashamed of myself, and it serves me right. I shall never let any one hold my hand again as long as I live.’ None of us knew that any boy could be so double-faced, and we all have agreed, and Janie Acres, too, that we shall act as though he did not exist at all, which will save our dignity and we hope will teach him something.”

When other people write our lives, they tell the dates of our births, marriages, and deaths; they note the year we went to college and when we left, and all the other irrelevant things; no one says that it was at such and such a moment that his soul was born, or that the baptism of fire that turned away the selfishness of this woman came at such a time. We keep these great and obscure birthdays and many minor ones to ourselves, and this droll little episode was the definite ending for us of little-girlhood. In our town we dawdled along in what the Germans call the “back fish” age until some such thing has happened, for we had no custom of girls coming out all of a sudden full-blown young ladies; we had to win our spurs in a way.

We thought of ourselves as grown up, to be sure. Mildred Dilloway had had a very melodramatic love-affair with one of the lads in the seminary who had gotten into some sort of a scrape and was expelled from school. He had urged Mildred to fly with him. Alas! that women should be so practical. Even young as she was, she asked, “Where?” and when he had no special place to propose beyond his parents’ house, to which he was then repairing, she had laughed at him, but in spite of all our experiments in sentiment we had remained immature in spirit. Now, suddenly, through the actions of this soft youth, George Landry, we found ourselves in an absurd position. The grown woman in us came to life; we wanted to vindicate ourselves in our own eyes; and it was during the next few months that we found ourselves suddenly grown up and the world’s attitude toward us suddenly changed. From being the little girls who accepted the casual kindnesses of older men in a panic of gratitude, suddenly our position was of those who are sought out.

CHAPTER X

Ellen’s formal renouncing of goodness helped us find our place in the grown-up world. Her gayety had always made her overstep the bounds of perfect decorum demanded of young women in my generation, and she set about carrying out her resolution which she told me about. I remember well the shocked sort of quiver with which I recognized myself, even staid Roberta, in her question:—

“Roberta, when you’re in company, don’t you ever want to do foolish things? When you see a lot of solemn people saying good-bye downstairs, don’t you want to slide down the banister into their midst? When Edward Graham used to lecture me, again and again I’ve wanted to take his hand and skip down the street singing, ‘Hippity Hop to the Barber Shop,’ and see what he’d do. I’ve always wanted to do all the foolish things I’ve thought of when I was in company, and now, Roberta, I’m going to!”

I had had these erring impulses. Who has not? In each of us there is a hinterland where thoughts as fantastic as anything that happens in dreams gambol around with the irresponsibility of monkeys. Ellen translated a certain amount of these into action—and see what happened.

This is what makes virtue so discouraging in an imperfect world. It was her naughtiness which advertised to the world of men, “I am a sweet and adorable person; I can make you laugh, and I can make you dream, and I have no fear.” Ellen now acted before strangers with the inspired foolishness which most of us keep for those best known to us. Even for them this mad spirit is not at our beck and call, but must wait for the time and place to bring it out. Youth, empty of such lovely, high-spirited, and drunken moments, must be very sad.

The divine folly of such mirth is only for the partaker; one must feel the wine of life coursing through one to understand its spiritual significance. Joy-drunken young people seem to outsiders silly, if they don’t seem wanton; and while the things that we did would seem mild enough if I told them, they set our little New England town by the ears during the year that followed.

Our little coterie gradually acquired the reputation of giddiness among the older people, while we steadily became leaders among those of our own age, and Ellen the central flame around which we revolved. I myself thought her too audacious, and even when carried away by her I used to remonstrate seriously with her. This accomplished nothing, but it eased my own conscience.

Edward Graham, who had come back to teach in the academy, also lectured Ellen continually. He was one of those tenacious men who desire a thing all the more when they have lost it, and I think the full flowering of his affection for Ellen only came after he knew he couldn’t have her. I think it might never have come otherwise. His love for her was deep and fundamental, and the sort of love men treat like the air they breathe; but had she married him and been the docile wife she would have been, he might never even have known himself to what extent he cared, and still less have shown it to her. They continued to see much of each other, because he had put to her the plausible story that they could still be friends, and she, of course, eagerly assented, wishing to make what little reparation she could, and not realizing that at the back of his mind was a determination to win her at whatever cost.

Now her growing popularity and light-mindedness caused him anguish. Her growing popularity aroused in him a leaden jealousy. He alternated from mad blame to pleading affection. His devotion to her was a continual pain, and yet in her gentleness she didn’t know how to escape it, and his criticisms bred in her a certain defiance of the world and of conventions and made her more extravagant. I suppose it was because it came as a climax of a number of smaller follies that the town took so much notice of the famous “Young People’s Party,” given by the gentle Mr. Sylvester. I well remember the next day. I see myself demure in my grandmother’s kitchen, demure and gingham-aproned, my hands in dough, my hair sleek under its net. I see Ellen, a blue ribbon around her hair, a sparkle in her eye, her little feet crossed, with all the look of the cat which has swallowed the canary, and is glad of it. This is what sin had brought her to, you see. Mrs. Payne sat, sweet and helpless-looking, in one chair, and my grandmother creaked portentously back and forth, her hands folded on the place she called her waist-line, saying to Sarah Grant:—

“It couldn’t have been hens, Sarah.”

“It was hens,” said Miss Sarah accusingly. “They went out to the hen-yard and brought each hen into the house, and they flew around and broke two vases.” Her eyes meantime had not quitted Ellen, who at this inopportune moment snickered with happy recollection. “Ellen,” her aunt broke off accusingly, “did you think of bringing those hens into the house?”

“We were hawking,” explained Ellen. “I brought mine in on my wrist and it flew across and perched on John Seymore’s shoulder. That’s how we told off partners for ‘Authors’; everybody got a hen, and on whichever boy’s shoulder it perched,—and often it wouldn’t perch,—that’s what really happened.” She laughed; her mother laughed; I laughed.

Whoever reads this will sympathize with Aunt Sarah, because it doesn’t seem witty for a grown company of young men and young girls to have behaved that way in the house of their minister. It had been a golden moment, I assure you,—a party that stood out;—and if ever the laughter of the Greeks was heard in that staid, old New England town it was when Ellen Payne stood aloft on the hassock, a squawking hen trembling indignantly on her wrist; and she at that moment looked both beautiful and absurd. Miss Sarah Grant saw nothing of all this.

“I am chagrined,” she said. “Have you no respect for life?” And she walked away heavily.

Ellen spent the afternoon gathering expiatory pond-lilies of which her aunt was as a rule fond. She waded in the pond during the whole afternoon, her skirts trussed up scandalously, emerging with a stocking of black mud on either foot. She was sunburned, she was mosquito-bitten, she was happy, she sung aloud for joy on her way home; and when she left the offering at her aunt’s door, this lady said: “These are very pretty, Ellen, and I thank you, but I wish, my dear, that you had made me some little gift that is a testimony of your industry.”

It was on our way home that we were stopped by some women from the other church, who asked me:—

“Roberta, is it really true that you and Ellen started to bring in hens to the minister’s house at the Young People’s Party?”

“Roberta never started it,” said Ellen, who was easily drawn in ways like this.

“We thought they were joking when they told us,” said Mrs. Mary Snow, who was a widow and very precise.

“Well,” said Miss Amelia Barton, “I should think Mr. Sylvester would have prevented it.”

“Mr. Sylvester enjoyed it, the fowls enhanced the party,” said Ellen. I pulled her along. “Hateful gossips,” she said. As we passed the house where Edward Graham was living, this illustrious young man joined us for the purpose of saying:—

“You remember, Ellen, I told you at the party, when I first saw you coming in with the hen, that you had far better leave it outside. The whole town is talking and buzzing.”

“The whole town disgusts me deeply,” cried Ellen, “and so does any one who lets the buzzing reach my ears.”

“You ought to want to know the reaction of the things you do,” retorted Graham, whose belief in his moralities made him irritable when attacked. “You are criticizing Mr. Sylvester for permitting it and I think you went much too far.”

When Edward Graham moralized on the subject Ellen replied flippantly:—

“It is that you and everybody else criticize anything you’re not used to. What’s the harm in hens; what evil does bringing a hen into the minister’s house lead to? Does it make you want to go and take the amber beads off a baby’s neck just because I brought in a hen and it perched on John Seymore’s shoulder? John Seymore didn’t mind it, and he’s studying for the ministry. It is people like you, who talk about an innocent thing like a hen, and fuss over it as if it was something bad, who do harm,” cried Ellen; and she swept me along with her. She comments in this fashion about the episode:—

“At the party we were all very happy, and there’s no rule that says that a thing must be of a worthy sort before we may laugh at it. That’s one of the nice things about laughing, there’s no rhyme or reason to it. It was not among those things that mother talks of that undermine our fineness of perception. But Mr. Sylvester didn’t realize how people were going to feel about it, and now they are all talking and tongue-wagging as though something terrible had happened. Am I wrong, or are they? I think they are, and I hate them for it, and I feel as though that was the worst thing I had done, because I hate poor Edward Graham and I hate Mrs. Snow and Miss Barton because of their smallness and injustice; and aren’t they more wicked to talk about innocent things and gossip about young people and make those who are happy feel uncomfortable and sinful? It makes me want to break a window when I think how virtuous they feel.”

We hadn’t heard the last of the talk concerning the “Hen Party.” Rumors of it reached our ears from all sides. I suppose our elders exaggerated the talk, that we might learn decorum. Personally I could not imagine, any more than Ellen could, just what harm the hens had been supposed to have done us. One of the hardest things for me now to understand is the annoyance so many people feel at the sweet, noisy fun of young people. It seems to me the very laughter of fairyland, but older people have a way of turning the fairy coach of mirth into a pumpkin drawn by mice, and are proud of themselves for doing this.

It is strange that the ages of men have rolled on one after the other without this being a basic principle laid down to all parents—you can’t disapprove a child into the paths of virtue any more than you can scold a man into loving his wife.

There are a great many young people who are made reckless and sullen by such disapproval, though Ellen was saved from the harm that Edward Graham and the public opinion of which he was the voice might have done her by the utter sympathy of her little mother. She joined in all our little gayeties; she laughed with us. So did Mr. Sylvester. He attended the next two or three young people’s parties, explaining to Ellen with his gentleness: “They say, my dear, that I’m not a fit guide for youth, so I am going to try and learn to be so by being more with you.”

Of course, for their pains, these two grown-up children of God were called overindulgent; it was prophesied that they would spoil us; yet it was this that kept Ellen’s audacities always sweet.

However, even so, Ellen’s future destiny was despaired of by Edward Graham.

“Ellen is in danger of becoming a jilt,” he told me.

“She can’t help it if people like her,” said I; for I, myself, had changed a great deal from that rigorous opinion that one should be proposed to only by the man one intends to marry.

“Ellen has altered very much in the three years I have known her,” said Edward.

“She has grown up,” said I.

“She has not grown up in the way I hoped to see her.”

“Then, why don’t you turn away your eyes from the offensive spectacle?” I asked him cruelly, not knowing that this—poor fellow—was just what he couldn’t do. But even I was inclined to agree with Edward Graham.

CHAPTER XI

The old Scudder place in those days was full of laughter and young people. We were happier there than any place else, and I have never known any parties gayer than those, where the only refreshments were weak lemonade and occasionally a batch of cookies. I remember once or twice on great occasions Miss Sarah Grant provided “refreshments.”

There came a time when I agreed with Edward Graham that Ellen was going too far. This night I remember we were playing hide-and-seek all through the house—and you may be sure it was only in little Mrs. Payne’s house that such a thing would be allowed; for, oh! how sacred the guest-room in my day and how solemn and suggestive of a funeral the parlors in all the rigor of their horsehair. The Scudder house was a magnificent place for hide-and-seek,—the ell connected with the front of the house by what was known in my day as a “scoot hole,”—sort of a half-sized door,—and more doors opened from downstairs to the outside air than any house I have ever seen. I was hiding in one of the rooms when I heard the sound of running, and Ellen dashed in, John Seymore in hot pursuit, Ellen’s laughter trailing out gay-hearted, careless, and irresistible.

“Now, I’ve got you,” cried John Seymore’s voice; and to my horror and scandal, he kissed her and Ellen merely laughed, laughed as she might have had she been ten instead of twenty, having run away breathless from a kiss that she expected to get in the end, and over which she was only making a mock panic. It was a romping sort of a performance, because Ellen had slipped away from him without any sentiment, but I was shocked and pained—and, besides, I liked John Seymore and he liked me, and I didn’t think such levity was becoming in one who was to become a minister. I sought Ellen out.

“I saw you,” said I.

“I heard you under the bed,” said Ellen.

“That’s why you went out?”

“I didn’t want to embarrass you,” said she, grinning a naughty little-girl grin at me.

“You ought to be ashamed,” I admonished.

“Do I look it?” asked Ellen.

Suddenly there rushed over me most poignantly the memory of all our immature aspirations for the uplifting of those we knew. In a great wave of sadness I felt that we were wasting our lives—and the boy that liked me most of all had kissed Ellen in a romp. Twelve o’clock had struck for me. I was little Cinderella.

I suppose I must have shown Ellen all I felt, for she had seen the new look in my eyes and all her impishness vanished, and she cried out: “Oh, Roberta dear!”—when we both heard voices shouting:—

“It’s Alec! It’s Alec Yorke!” And in strolled a grown-up youth with wide shoulders, and a fine, open-air, swinging way with him, and on top of it was perched the head of Alec Yorke, only Alec made over with that incredible change that comes between fifteen and eighteen years. He was a man grown, but from this face, so masculine in its youthful quality, looked the touching young eyes of Alec, blue and sweet, and fearless, angry blue. He was seized with a dumb shyness and shook Ellen’s hand over and over again, while his eyes rested on her as if the sight of her fed the soul of him. After a while they drifted off together. Ellen wrote about this meeting:—

“I can’t tell how strange this meeting with Alec has been. It was as though my dearest friend had been changed over and I had to find my Alec in this new grown-up boy, who was the same and so different; even his voice was different. And then all at once he began to tell me how much he cared for me, and I feel so ashamed. I feel ashamed just because he says that the memory of what I am like has kept him from doing things that he shouldn’t; he said I’ve always seemed to him like a white light burning in his life. I seemed to myself so very silly. I have never had any one talk to me as he did. Every one else who has cared for me has wanted something for themselves and he wanted nothing. I know now that I’ve never cared for any one in my life, for the way I care means nothing compared to the way he cares for me. What little bit of love I had for Edward was nothing. I feel ashamed because I know so little beside this boy who is so sweet and knows so much. He doesn’t even expect I shall care for him. He only wants to make me proud that he should have ever cared for me, and to be something just for that. The things he said were all very young and very quixotic, perhaps, but how much more beautiful than the things that older spirits think of saying, and if I ever care for any one, I pray to God that I shall only think of what I can give. We sat there for a long time, and he held my hand in his and told me again and again about myself, and it was as if I had seen a reflection of the me that I might be and that I ought to be in the dear things he said; and when I said: ‘Oh, Alec, you don’t know me; you have forgotten me,’ he said, ‘I look at you, Ellen; you’re sweeter than you were, sweeter than even I remember you.’ But everything he said he said in just a few words that were hard for him to say, but each little, difficult sentence had his true self in it, as though he had distilled his soul for me, and I am so light-minded and have been so careless and I have tried so little, but if any one can feel about me as Alec does, I can try, even though I can’t care for him, to be a little bit more the person he thinks I am. I have found the only reason I’ve ever yet found for acting the way people want you to act, and that is to please the ones you love. Some of the foolish things you do may hurt some one you really care for. Roberta was shocked because John Seymore kissed me; but I know we were just romping, and at most, perhaps, I was a little bold. It is funny that just a little boy should open my heart so. Mother and Mr. Sylvester love the me I am, or rather a younger me—the naughty little girl whose naughtiness they know don’t make much difference; but somehow he has seen the sweetest person I ever am. I feel I have been a long way off from her, just being trivial and playing the same game over again and not going on. I haven’t felt before for very long that Life was a glorious battle, and that every day, and all one’s days, one must fight an obscure and ever-encroaching enemy. I’ve got to go back to the mountain. I have been seeing things close to and putting the emphasis on little things. I wish I could write a letter to everyone I am fond of. I think it would go like this: ‘Dear People: I am going to make you a present of all the small things I do that you don’t like. It will be the things I do, not the way I feel, but when I feel so happy that I want to run down Main Street, I won’t run any more. I don’t think these little things matter, but as I haven’t many things to give, I give you my foolish impulses.’”

I can’t say that I remember any marked change of action in Ellen because of her change of heart, and I still had that rather breathless feeling when I perceived that she was what she called “happy in her feet,” by which she meant that then it was she was so happy that she must go romping through our staid, little town, a graceful harlequin.

It was just now, however, that she learned something about Miss Sarah Grant that touched her and made her wish to put her newborn feelings toward life into immediate action. Miss Grant, who had always lectured us severely, it now seemed had defended Ellen against all comments.

“I enjoy the child’s high spirits,” we found her to have said. “This town should not expect conventional actions from the Grants in inessentials.”

Finding this out, Ellen said to me:—

“She wants a sign of my industry; I’m going to buy her something beautiful.”

“What with?” I asked, because actual money was scarce in the Payne household, and their tiny income was eked out by trading eggs and other things at the store; for in a day when most people raised everything themselves it was desperately hard for two ladies to make actual money.

“Well,” considered Ellen, “Mrs. Salesby has gone away.”

Mrs. Salesby was a gentlewoman who copied Mr. Sylvester’s sermons, his handwriting being quite illegible. The sum paid for this work was trifling, the work demanded, long and laborious, and Ellen’s handwriting I might call temperamental. Mr. Sylvester was at this time having a book of his sermons, which he called “Thoughts on Life,” copied. So for long hours Ellen shut herself in Mr. Sylvester’s dust-covered study and copied the inspired wanderings of his spirit which was what his sermons really were.

Living in such intimacy with his thoughts had a further effect on her mind. They were the musings of a mystic who was not too acquainted with the infantile tongue which mysticism must perforce employ since it forever and ever has tried to impress the emotions for which the spoken language has not yet coined exact phrases. Something of his inner meaning came to Ellen. She worked on with a serene joy.

At this time also Edward Graham ceased to be a disturbing presence in her life; for feeling the need of showing Alec the sort of a girl she was she told him her whole little story and he had applied to it the youth’s rule-of-thumb logic and saw the thing as it really was. He gave Ellen the first sensible talk she had ever had on her relations with men.

As for Ellen’s calm acceptance of Alec’s devotion, she used the sophistries with which women from all time have accepted the sweet, undimmed love of those whom they consider boys. “He would, of course,”—writes the candid Ellen,—“have cared for some one anyway at this time, and it is better that he should care for me because I place real value on his affection and try myself to be good so that I shall never hurt them.”

Through months of toil she had at last acquired the few dollars necessary to buy the present, and something “boughten” at that moment had a tremendous value. Gifts were much fewer, and such gifts as there were were of course made at home.

The first afternoon after her long task was over, Ellen went up the mountain to reflect. Our mountain and our river were two things which moulded the souls of us. The austere mountain drew my eyes toward God, and how often I lost my personal grievances as I mingled my bemused little spirit in the swirling river, which, after one looked at it long enough and steadily enough, seemed at last to absorb one in itself and float one down seaward. I knew that Ellen was on the mountain and Alec and I walked up to meet her. She was on what we call “Oscar’s Leap,” a place where the mountain seemed cleft away above the river, as though with some giant’s knife, and just above there was a clear platform, surrounded by trees and bushes. Our tradition had it that Oscar, one of the chiefs, leaped his horse into the river below to escape from his enemies.

This night the river was turned to a mighty sheet of burnished crimson, as the sun set just beyond the black bulk of the mountain. Our peaceful town took on an apocalyptical aspect. One felt that among the serene silence of departing day, the end of the world had come, and in some way the very silence of its coming made it more awesome, for its color demanded cataclysmal sounds. Ellen said once: “It tears one through like the noise of trumpets.”

Presently Ellen came down the road toward us, the last slanting rays of the sun outlining her in the light. She didn’t see us as she came toward us, as we stood in the shadow. As I look back at that time it seems to me that she forever moved in a pool of light that came from the radiance of her own spirit. There was a little hush over both Alec and myself.

He said: “She is very lovely.”

And I answered: “She has been on the mountain.”

I felt, indeed, as if Ellen had gone there to commune with God.

“When I came from the mountain to-day,” she writes, “the world had a new look, as if I had never seen it before. I wish the river had a face so I could kiss it. I had to hold my hands tight so that I shouldn’t fling them around the necks of Alec and Roberta; I took it for a good omen that the two that I love most should be waiting there for me. I have made a wonderful friend. Though I have never seen him before, yet I have known him always. I was sitting above Oscar’s Leap, thinking hard, meditating on the beautiful things in life, which if you think hard enough about, Mr. Sylvester says, you will become like, but to do this you must feel like a little child, very small and humble and believing. I think I was nearer feeling this than I have since I was really little, when I looked up and saw him standing there. I had been thinking so hard I hadn’t heard him come even; he was just there as if I had thought him into life, and I was no more afraid of him than as though I had always known him, although a stranger frightens me as a rule, unless I’m feeling foolish. He said: ‘I have been watching you a long time; I’ve been watching you think’; and I just smiled at him and he sat down there beside me, and then it was as if all the things I had never been able to say to any one came to me, crowding to my lips. I don’t know if I said them or not, because I don’t remember exactly what we talked about. We made friends the way children make friends. I felt that if I knew him a little more only, he would know me more as I am than any one in the world, because the me, that my own people know, is so mixed up with that gone-forever person that used to be myself. I wish I could remember more what we said to each other, but the meaning of them is like Mr. Sylvester’s sermons—we haven’t got words for them yet; but I remember one thing that seems to me like the truth of truths. He said to me, ‘Ellen, I am coming back to find you; it was more than chance that led me here this afternoon.’”