The Smart Set/Volume 32/Issue 3/Half-gods

by Helen R. Martin

 

HALF-GODS

By HELEN R. MARTIN

From young Mrs. Newbold, of Williamsburg, Pa., to Miss Margaret Harding, of Boston.

Wise beyond your years and experience as you usually are, dear Margaret, your prophecies this time are not going to prove true, for I can assure you now, after two months of wedded life, that my marriage is not going to mar the closeness and confidence of our friendship. Perhaps it is strange that the new relation has not built up reserves between you and me. It may mean that I am a very shallow person—does it, Margaret?—or does it mean, perhaps, that our friendship is of the rare sort like a perfect marriage? (“If there is such a thing!” I hear you cynically remarking.) Anyway, why should I be reserved with you about my happiness, save in the fear of boring you? To be sure, I suppose if I were finding myself disappointed (a supposition so far from the reality that it looks almost immoral as I write it), I can imagine then that pride might close my heart even to you! But no, I doubt if it could; it seems to be an absolute necessity to me to “discharge the fulness and swellings of my heart” to you, poor victim!

I do not find, as you are always warning me, you sceptic, that “having a high ideal of anyone is incompatible with very close intimacy.” My ideal of Robert seems to grow bigger every day of our life together. You will say that two months of marriage is too short a time to have proven this. But I feel that I couldn't know him more completely. Wait till your time comes (as come it will, invincible as you think you are to what you so loftily label “the weakness of so-called love,” for you are too good-looking on the one hand and too much of a woman on the other not to be sought and won eventually), and then you'll see a whole lot of your untried theories “fade into thin air,” indeed you will!

Oh, my dear, what a lot of apologies you owe me! Don't you remember the things you used to say about Robert when you and I first met him?—that he was “superficial,” that his character was “not deeply rooted,” that he was “not always quite sincere,” that, “like most artists,' he was “a creature of passing moods and enthusiasms.” You see, I remember them all. But I forgive you freely, in case you've now changed your mind.

To turn to a less {congenial theme, my present environment. Living with one's in-laws, I am ready to admit in the light of two weeks' experience, leaves some things to be desired, though I suppose I ought to 'think on my mercies” and be thankful that there are only two of them, two in-laws, not two mercies, for one of them is anything but a mercy! They are Robert's mother, who is lovely, and his elder brother Eliot, who isn't so lovely. You know I never would have consented to such an arrangement as this (especially in view of the strange opposition to it which Eliot set up, he never having seen me!) if circumstances had not made it seem unavoidable. And of course we all hope it is only temporary, a matter of a few years, until Robert can afford to bear the expenses of two households, his mother's and our own. It is so fine of him to consider his mother's welfare before his own happiness, for naturally he and I would love to be by ourselves. But he feels he must not leave the whole burden of her support to Eliot, whose salary at the bank isn't any larger than Robert's own income from the Conservatory; and an old lady like Mrs. Newbold, in delicate health, accustomed to every refinement of living, and with tastes quite as fastidious as Robert's, is no small expense in an economical establishment like this, for of course they try to give her everything she needs and wants, and that means pinching in many other places. Except this attractive old stone house on a pretty, shaded street filled with other old romantic looking houses, the Newbolds haven't a thing in the world but what Eliot and Robert earn. So I am puzzled to understand Eliot's having so bitterly opposed Robert's bringing me here to live with them and insisting that if he must marry he must set up a home of his own, since, you see, it is solely for Eliot's sake that we are here. I confess he is the one and only blight upon my happiness, he is such a kill-joy about the house, such an irritable, disagreeable, stern presence. He certainly does not welcome me with enthusiasm! If it were not for Mrs. Newbold's sweetness and kindness, I should feel rather uncomfortable.

But she adores Robert, so I'm sure she loves me for his sake. Eliot, on the contrary, treats me as if I were an intruder. Pleasant, isn't it? Robert and I call him “Merry Sunshine.” Not to his face, understand—people don't take liberties with Eliot! As for me, he doesn't admit me to the slightest acquaintance, though living in the same house and sitting at table together three times a day.

“Don't mind poor old Eliot,” Robert tells me. “He always goes out of his way to get himself disliked.”

This city of Williamsburg, an overgrown manufacturing town of fifty thousand souls, interests me. It is such a new experience to me, who have always lived in a big city where one is known only to one's own small circle, to find myself now recognized on the street by every passer-by as Robert Newbold's bride; to overhear shopgirls, as I pass through a department store, remark, “That's the wife of that swell baritone of Trinity,” or “There goes the girl that's just married the Conservatory principal.” You see, the Newbolds have lived here for several generations and have always been an influential family, in spite of the loss of all their former wealth.

I like the social life of the place; it is staid, substantial and quaint, and makes up in dignity and real refinement what it lacks in originality and modernness. And it warms my heart to have everyone take such an extraordinary interest in me because I'm a Newbold. You know, Margaret, how susceptible I am to kindness, having had so little of it in my past! And so it is almost bewildering to me to find myself dined and feted and visited, and taken into the arms of dear old ladies in black silk and old lace and kissed because I'm the new daughter of their lifelong friend, Adelaide Newbold.

“There is such a remarkable sameness about the people,” I tell Robert, marveling. “I don't believe there are two women in this town, at least among these 'select' individuals I am meeting, who hold differing views on any subject whatever.”

“Don't let out our radical 'views,' dear,” he solemnly warns me. “They'd think we were anarchists.”

Everyone who calls asks what church we shall attend.

“The Newbolds have always been Episcopalians,” they tell me, “but perhaps as Robert sings in the Presbyterian choir—”

“I shall go with him,” I say, evading a confession of faith, though to one woman who pressed me, I don't know what devil made me reply experimentally, “I am a Mohammedan.”

She looked alarmed and hastened to change the subject.

“If they find out,” says Robert, “that you're intellectual, you'll be cut. They'll be afraid of you. They're elegant, but dull. Damned dull, dearest.”

“They'll never find it out, for the simple reason that I'm not. What should I be intellectual for?”

“What for, indeed, seeing you're so pretty!” (Don't laugh, Margaret.) “You don't have to be clever if you don't want to.”

Of course, these social doings won't keep up indefinitely. They must not, for Robert and I both have our work to do. I am to teach piano and harmony at the Conservatory, afternoons, and oversee the housekeeping in the mornings, relieving Mrs. Newbold of that burden which she is very glad to be rid of, as it was really too much for her age and feebleness. A busy, delightful life, I call it.

Robert has, of course, all the pipe-organ and voice-culture pupils. Then we have a teacher of violin and another of the history of music. Robert lectures once a week, and we have monthly recitals given by the Faculty, which are social events in Williamsburg.

Margaret, I don't believe there ever were two brothers more unlike than Robert and Eliot. Robert, as you know, is nothing if not polished. Eliot, on the other hand, prides himself, I think, on his brusqueness, his unpleasant defying of conventions. He seems to have a contempt for Robert's fastidiousness.

“Eliot thinks if a fellow isn't a boor he's effeminate,” says Robert. “He probably thinks there's nothing worth while in you, Edith, since you were fool enough to fall in love with his polite but futile brother.”

While Robert is amiable, considerate, courteous, Eliot is simply disagreeable to everyone but his mother; I admit he's lovely to her. Robert is generous, open-hearted; Eliot is saving almost to meanness (never, however, where his mother is concerned; I've found that out even in two weeks, and one must give the devil his due); Robert is pernickety-nice about his dress; Eliot is careless about his, though he's a good-looking chap rather, awfully dark, with thick, coal black hair, black eyes, pale, clean shaven face and well shaped hands. Interesting looking, on the whole.

There are points at which these two brothers do touch; they are both men of attainments and ability, in our sense of those attributes, Margaret, not the ability to make money, but to live. Both of them have the sort of knowledge and the quality of tastes, which make life rich and worth while. Indeed, Eliot impresses me as having one of the keenest minds I’ve ever met.

But while, as you know, people are universally attracted to Robert, hardly anyone likes Eliot, though he is not wanting in personal magnetism—I realize that. I also realize that if Robert were not very level-headed, he would be half ruined with the flattery people give him. Only yesterday a sentimental girl, one of his pupils, had the audacity to ask him for a lock of his hair!

“Certainly,” he told her, “I'll ask my wife to cut it off for you.”

Wasn't that like him?

Here's a sample of Eliot's amiability toward his neighbors. An elderly woman, a very vigorous spinster, was having tea yesterday with his mother, and she happened to ask Eliot: “Didn't I see you passing my house this afternoon?”

“No; I always avoid going up that block, there are so many old maids sitting at the windows!”

“And if there were more men like you in the world,” retorted the spinster, “there would be more old maids sitting!”

He professes to be a woman hater. Did you ever hear of anything more silly?

“Did someone jilt him?” I asked Robert.

“No; it's a pose, acquired from reading Bernard Shaw probably,” says Robert.

“It seems too earnest to be a pose, Robert.”

“Eliot's conceit dulls his sense of humor.”

“The only notice he ever takes of me,” I said, “is strenuously to ignore me.” (Robert finds the Irish streak in me so diverting that I am studiously cultivating it.) “And when not ignoring me, he is delivering himself of epigrammatic remarks, à la Bernard Shaw, on the general idiocy of my sex, which I do not flatter him by noticing, Robert.”

“Your attitude toward the old boy is just right, dear,” Robert assures me. “You are perfectly nice to him because he is my brother and lives with us. Otherwise he is to you a quite negligible quantity.”

“Didn't he ever care for girls as other young men do? He seems to shun them so.”

“He declares that if he so much as notices a girl she throws herself at him; à la Shaw again, you see.”

“If he were not your brother, I'd call him a cad, Robert.”

“Don't let that stop you, dear.”

“I long to show him my disdain!”

“That would flatter him too much, for you couldn't possibly convince him that you meant it.”

“Wait and see,” I nodded.

And now, dear, I must stop rambling on to you and correct a pile of harmony papers. But in my next, I hope to be able to give you an entertaining account of how I did convince Eliot that I meant it.”

Always with a heart full of love for you, dear Margaret,

Edith.

II

A whole month since I've written to you, dear Margaret! But I have been so busy at the Conservatory; and running a house with only one domestic, the spoiled old black family retainer who does not like dictation from the newcomer and whom I have to handle most judiciously (repressing, the while, a savage yearning to inflict medieval tortures upon her!); this, too, consumes time. Let me say, however, that this old black Abigail is sometimes a source of real joy to me, as, for instance, today when she indignantly told me apropos of the boycott on meat, “Thank Gawd, I's always been a straight woman—I's never taken up with any of the new religions, Christian Science, Woman's Suffrage, Spiritualism or the Beef Trust!”

Another thing that has kept me so long from writing to you is that I've been off on a flying visit with Robert to Philadelphia to hear the Orchestra. From Philadelphia we couldn't resist the temptation to run on to New York to hear Grand Opera. I felt guilty in so much extravagant self-indulgence, for I happened to know that Eliot had refused to go with a friend of his to hear the Orchestra (he, too, is passionately fond of music) because the doctor had ordered champagne for his mother and he couldn't afford both. But we have been so prosperous at the Conservatory that Robert thought we could afford a bit of fun. I'm proud to tell you that the number of piano pupils has actually doubled since I came! My “methods,” or my clothes or something seems to take with the pupils, and I have the joyful satisfaction of knowing that I'm helping to make Robert's Conservatory a success.

Robert says, poor deluded man, that it's my “womanly charm,” but I tell him it's my New York trousseau. Am I awfully flat, dear, to repeat Robert's pleasing remarks to you? But the temptation is so great, you must bear with my weakness. It's so grand to be treated like a heroine in a novel! I wonder, now, how I ever got along without it.

But I was going to tell you about our jaunt to the city. Robert thought I was overdoing—he told Eliot so—and needed a few days' vacation. In New York we did a thing I'm ashamed of; we stopped for three days at that wickedly luxurious St. Regis. You see, Robert, like most artistic people, will spend money if he has it in his pocket, whether he can afford it or not, and in spite of my protests, he would go to the St. Regis.

“Because I think the very best not too good for you,” he argued.

A very creditable sentiment, to be sure, though I protested that I really hated big expensive hotels. But he declared he would engage the famous Royal Suite if it were not already occupied!

His next piece of reckless extravagance was to buy me a sealskin coat; for the pleasure, he said, of seeing that soft rich brown against my fairness, and so forth (don't laugh, you who know what an absolutely commonplace looking thing I am!)

Well, Robert has a task on his hands now, trying to train me to act as if I were used to a sealskin coat; for instance, to fling it carelessly over the back of a chair when I take it off.

“Oh, Robert,” I protest, “don't ask the impossible of me! I can't be so underhanded as to pretend to treat that sealskin coat carelessly!”

“Practice,” he insists. “Practice makes perfect, you know.”

But I've not worn the coat once since we came back, I have such a cowardly dread of Eliot's seeing it—because—well, for sundry reasons. You see, he doesn't care what he says to anybody, nor how hard he “sits on” people whom he doesn't like or approve of. Why, for example, today at luncheon he related to us how he had “squelched” the Y. M. C. A. secretary, a sentimentally pious young man who has been trying to get both Eliot and Robert to join him in taking a lot of equally pious young boys on early morning walks every Monday. I believe they are supposed to carry their Bibles with them and start in time to see the sunrise! It seems that this estimable secretary came into Eliot's bank today to urge his case, and Eliot, to get rid of him once for all, said: “You see, Mr. Atwater, I'm always out so late Sunday night, carousing, that I wouldn't be able to get up in time on Monday to go with you and your boys. And I haven't any Bible anyway.”

Poor Mr. Atwater went away, Eliot says, “looking white about the gills.”

“And I don't think, Rob,” added Eliot, “that you and I will be bothered soon again with that sleek and oily man of God.”

As for me, all my most proper and creditable opinions he treats with perfectly ruthless sarcasm. When, one day, I harmlessly remarked that I thought all art should be wrought with a high moral purpose or ideal—he hooted!

“That shows that you haven't the first instinct of an artist!” he leered at me. “A true artist has no conscious purpose in his work but to express, in forms of beauty, life as he sees it. To be sure, all great Art lifts us 'i' the scale.' But your point of view is that of the middle class British matron whose god is Propriety; it is bourgeois!”

He was simply abusive, Margaret. I am learning to conceal my feeble opinions from him, as I'm sure they are hardly robust enough to survive such rigorous treatment. Yesterday when Robert, at dinner, asked me what I thought about some philosophical theory under discussion, I promptly answered (for Eliot's benefit), “You'll be shocked to hear it, Robert, but I never think.”

This evening I had my long awaited opportunity to show this brother-in-law of mine how much, in my opinion, he over-estimates himself and what “a negligible quantity” I consider him.

Robert had gone out to choir rehearsal; I had helped Mrs. Newbold to bed and had then gone to the piano in the parlor, where I was sitting in the dark, playing for my own amusement, and I never saw or heard Eliot come into the room, until, after a considerable time when I stopped, he suddenly loomed up in the dark and came across the room to the piano.

“I never heard you play before,” he remarked, not in the cold, half irritable tone he has always used to me, but gently, as he speaks to his mother.

“But you have heard me play Robert's accompaniments.”

“That—yes. Tonight you played! I'd no idea it was in you.”

“Indeed!” I smiled ironically, then turned away indifferently and began to play in a rambling fashion. “You do have a way of paying 'back-handed' compliments, don't you?” I flung at him as I tripped about over the keys. “You'd no idea it was in me! I did not look it! Thank you!”

“Yes, you do look it. It's all there in your eyes. I thought your eyes lied.”

“A gratuitous assumption! Why do you prefer to think the worst of people until you've proved it?”

“What more convincing proof would a man want than the fact that you'd married my exquisite brother?”

“That fact proved me a nonentity, did it?” I inquired, vastly amused.

“It proved, or seemed to, that you had no more discernment than the rest of the herd who invariably fall in love with him, ask for locks of his hair and are ready to kiss his shoes!”

“You are not bothered with any such infatuated damsels, I presume?”

“Don't 'presume.' When a woman 'presumes' she should begin to wear black silk frocks and neat white aprons. And such a garb wouldn't go with your eyes or your playing. How does it happen, by the way, that a woman capable of such an expression of herself as you've betrayed to me this evening should be so mentally cloudy as to be taken in by a fellow like Rob?”

“I'm not 'so mentally cloudy as to be taken in by a fellow' like you, though, my dear,” I laughed. “Come, come; you take yourself so seriously, you know.”

“The mystery is,” he went on, not at all crushed by my amused contempt, which I thought not only withering but dreadfully audacious, “that you seem infatuated with him yet. Oh, he has his points of course. Rob's not a bad fellow of his kind. But his kind isn't your kind. That's my point.”

“Rather an unbrotherly point, don't you think?”

“If there's anything in you, you're bound to find Rob out sometime. So I'm not hurting him.”

“What is there to find out?” I asked with airy indifference, still playing.

“Oh, only that he isn't a little tin god on wheels, that's all. Now play me that Chopin Nocturne again, will you?”

He flung himself into a big lounging chair, and I played to him there in the dark for a long time, until Robert came in.

He is a peculiar fellow, don't you think so, Margaret? I wonder whether it can be that he is jealous of Robert. Mrs. Newbold tells me that from their childhood up people have always preferred Robert to Eliot. She herself shows such a marked preference that I am sometimes half sorry for Eliot, for he is so good to her and so self-denying for her. Here is an instance: when, two weeks ago, Robert bought a new baby grand piano for his private use here at home, Eliot, who plays the piano a bit himself, was eager to move their old upright piano into his bedroom.

“For,” said he, “with two professional musicians in the house, I can never get a whack at the piano in the parlor.”

But Mrs. Newbold objected. “The evening is the only time you have to play, Eliot, and as I go to bed directly after dinner and your room is so close by, it would disturb my rest quite too much, I am afraid, my dear.”

Eliot, who is always perfectly meek with her, though such a hyena with other people, gave it up without a word; but I could see that he was keenly disappointed.

Now I am sure that had it been Robert who wanted that piano in his room, his mother would never have told him he could not have it, no matter what distress it would have cost her.

Last week, as four new piano pupils came in and we needed another piano, we moved that upright one over to the Conservatory. And then, the other day, Robert let drop that it had been bought by Eliot with his first year's savings out of his bank salary.

“Aren't we paying him for it, then?” I asked.

“It isn't a piano I'd buy,” said Robert. “And I hardly think he'd accept rent for it from us.”

“Don't you think we ought at least to speak to him about it, Robert? We just coolly appropriated it without even a 'by your leave!'”

“I'll say something to him about it,” Robert promised.

If he forgets it, I'll try to get up courage to broach it myself.

 

I had to drop this letter last Monday to go to the Conservatory and, since then, we've been going through a little ordeal here which has made it impossible for me to take up a pen again until now.

Robert got it into his head a few days ago that we could save expense by turning his mother's house into our Conservatory; it is a very large house with lots of unoccupied rooms. Our Conservatory rent is a big item. At first the idea commended itself to me and we decided to talk it over with his mother at dinner.

“With your mother and Eliot,” I said.

“Eliot hasn't anything to do with it, dearie.”

“But, Robert, hasn't he something to do with any change that might be made in the home which he helps to keep up?” I suggested.

“He doesn't do much more than pay his board, dear, and mother owns the house.”

But when the matter was mentioned, I saw at once how distasteful it was to Mrs. Newbold.

As for Eliot, he turned white with anger. But he said nothing at first. He looked as though he couldn't trust himself to speak.

“It would take away all our privacy, I'm afraid, dear,” Mrs. Newbold said to Robert, distressed as she always is when she has to refuse him the slightest thing he wants.

“But I'd have a separate entrance made to the Conservatory side of the house, mother. Our home privacy should not be trespassed upon in the east.”

“The heating of the whole house would take so much coal and would necessitate our hiring a man to keep the furnace. Abigail could not do it. You see, your Conservatory fires and cleaning were all attended to by the janitor of your building. Abigail couldn't clean the whole—”

“I know, I know, dear,” Robert soothingly assured her, for she looked terribly worried. “I'd take care of all that, of course. You shouldn't be worried with it. The wages of a man and the extra coal would not amount to a third of what our present rent comes to.”

“May I ask,” Eliot broke in sarcastically, “whether you are proposing to pay your mother any rent?”

“Nonsense, Eliot!” Mrs. Newbold gently chid her first born, for in any contention between the two boys she invariably sides with Robert, no matter where lies the justice in the case. Feminine, isn't it? “As if I would let Robbie pay me rent!” she went on. “I'll be only too glad to save him expense if it can be done without—without too much tearing up and changing!” she faltered, looking fairly ill at the prospect. “You do so much for me, dear,” she turned to Robert, “I must not be selfish and stand in your way when you work so hard,” and so forth. Her sympathy fairly overflowed.

Eliot's breaking in had just turned the scale for Robert. I really believe that all Robert has to do to get his mother to concede anything he wants is to broach it before Eliot and let him oppose it.

Eliot probably realizes this, for he said no more, evidently considering that the matter was settled. So it was left to me to remind Mrs. Newbold of her objections to hearing a piano at night, which she would have to do constantly if we brought the Conservatory here.

“I'm afraid, Robert,” I spoke up at once, “that we didn't consider this thing very much before we suggested it. It seems out of the question to me now. Your mother could never get away from the sound of pianos day or night, and you know she felt she could not stand even one on the second floor when Eliot wanted his own piano in his room.” (I saw Eliot's lips twitch as I spoke, though he did not look at me.) “I see now,” I went on, “as I didn't when we talked of it, that it would be asking altogether too much of your mother.”

Perhaps I was tactless and too impulsive, for, for the first time since I've known him, Robert looked annoyed with me.

“That's for me to judge, dear,” he said, and his tone made me drop the discussion at once.

Since then, Robert and I—well, if we were not both extraordinarily amiable (as you know) and very much in love, probably we should have had our first quarrel. For I have held my ground, gently but firmly, against moving the Conservatory.

“It seems to me, Robert, that we haven't the least right to use your mother's house for our purposes and not pay rent for it. It isn't as though she did not need money.”

“Then we'll pay rent for it.”

“But what, then, would we save by moving?” I wondered at him.

You see, Margaret, like most artists, he is boyish and wants what he wants, and can't see anything but that one thing. I had to be really obstinate and tell him that my conscience would never let me teach here in this house where his invalid mother would be made to suffer by it. And as I have more than half of all the pupils of our school, of course poor Robert had to give it up.

“'Here's the hitch in Jane's character,'” he quoted at me as he met my invincible front, which made our dispute end in a laugh, and all was peace and pleasantness. For there never was a more good-natured boy than Robert. If he had not the amiable, winning disposition he has he could not get on, without quarreling, with such a “grouchy” brother as Eliot, could he?

“My heart leaps up as I behold” that tomorrow being Wednesday, I shall get your weekly letter. If you knew what those letters mean to me! No indeed, my life is not too full to need you, Margaret. I am convinced that if perchance on some Wednesday morning I should fail to receive your “biscuit,” as Robert calls the thick envelope that he hands to me at breakfast once a week, so much would I miss the stimulus that I'd flop, morally, mentally and physically.

Your
Edith.

III

Let me try, dear, to clear up some of the things that you say are a bit hazy to you, the personality of my mother-in-law; my relation to her; my everyday life; the home atmosphere of this house.

Well, I am sure Robert and Eliot must get their talents from their father, for Mrs. Newbold, while intelligent and appreciative, is not brilliant enough to account for her sons. She is womanly and motherly, dainty and pretty. All day long she sits or lies in a combination couch and chair which stands in the bay window of our cosy, sunny library on the second floor front, a table beside her holding flowers, sewing basket, magazines, books and her medicines. Here she receives her friends, and here her devoted children always come the moment they enter the house. As she goes to bed directly after dinner, it is here in this pleasant room that Robert and I can be alone together the few evenings that we are both at home and unoccupied. Eliot, fortunately, prefers his own society in his own room.

Yes, indeed, Mrs. Newbold does “create a home atmosphere,” which I am sure is as essential to my well-being as you say it is to yours.

As for my relation with her, it is altogether a pleasant and comfortable one, though neither deep nor vital; for her personality, though attractive, is slight. But never having known my own mother, I delight in her gentle mothering of me as a cat likes to be stroked. I delight equally in daughtering her, in seeing after her little dainty needs, waiting upon her, petting her. So you see, except for Eliot's standoffishness, we have the happiest, most peaceful home life possible.

We are invited to more social doings than either of us cares about, yet we enjoy it when we do go. We make it a rule to decline all bridge whist invitations; the game is too fatally fascinating, and Robert says: “I can't run two professions and do justice to either one of them, so I'll stick to music.”

I opened my eyes at your getting the impression from my letters that I take “an undue interest” in my brother-in-law! But I don't think anyone could live in the house with Eliot Newbold and not find him “interesting,” whatever else one might find him.

He has not been so curt and disagreeable to me since that night I played for him, and since I averted the catastrophe of having this dear old home turned into a public conservatory. Still, he doesn't at all believe in me and he lets me know it. He simply can't believe in a woman who believes in Robert. Not that he actually hates his brother. I am sure that even he cannot wholly resist Robert's charm and lovableness, and that he has a certain sort of brotherly affection for him.

“I rub him the wrong way,” Robert amiably explains to me, “which, as you've observed, Edith, isn't hard to do. I excite his derision (also a quite easy feat, as you've experienced). You, being a vital part of me, naturally come in for your share of this wholesale disapprobation.”

Of late it has seemed to me as though Eliot were watchful of me, like a cat ready to spring if the mouse protrude so much as its nose. I think, for instance, that he would be gratified by my attention to his mother's comfort if he were not half suspicious of it. At least so it appears to me.

But don't worry; I'm not taking an undue interest in anyone. I'm too busy being interested in the problem of husbands. I'm beginning to discover a lot of things about them, how they have to be handled with care because breakable as crystal; or, like dogs, stroked the right way lest they snap; must not be questioned about business or anything else which they consider their own private prerogative lest they snub you for being meddlesome. These peculiarities of the species do cause me occasional anxiety. For Robert is dreadfully unpractical and unbusinesslike, which you know I am not. I wish he would let me manage the business end of our Conservatory; but far from consenting to that, I'm not even told anything about it, so I never feel sure how we are faring financially.

This business carelessness of Robert's is one of the things that tries Eliot so much, for he is all method, as of course a banker has to be. And Robert's heedlessness about the expenses they are supposed to bear in common is really a heavy cross to Eliot, and I confess it isn't a light one to me. But I seem helpless to deal with it, for Robert is either bored or irritated when I try to get him to talk business, and as I don't like making myself unpleasant, I've about washed my hands of responsibility in it, though it is inconvenient never to know whether or not one can afford a thing.

(Two days later.)

I have been having rather a harrowing experience, which probably accounts for the fact that I've been home from the Conservatory all day today, in bed with a nervous headache. Robert has just carried away the tray from which we had our dinner together in our room; it was so cosy, and so dear of him to insist upon dining with me up here.

He is out at choir rehearsal now; so, as I'm feeling much better since I've eaten something, I'll finish this letter which I began two days ago.

The thing happened last night. Robert had an engagement which kept him out late, and I had gone to bed early. But finding that I could not sleep, I had slipped into bathrobe and slippers and gone down to the piano. When I got there, however, I realized that my playing might bring Eliot downstairs from his room and I could not be seen with my hair down my back, with stockingless, albeit slippered feet, and with my robe de nuit trailing below my kimono. Sol was about to go back to my room, either to read, or to write to you, until Robert should come home, when suddenly I realized that Robert and Eliot were talking together in the hall just outside the parlor door. There was no way of escape for me and I heard all that they said.

If it were not that you are to me only like another consciousness, of course I could not write you of these things. I wonder whether the time will come when I shall have to call a halt. Well, I shall forge ahead now, if only for my own relief.

“Look here, Rob,” I heard Eliot say authoritatively, “it's got to be one thing or the other, you pay up or I quit.”

“I'll pay up when it suits me. I can't now. I had to pay fifty dollars on my new piano or they'd have taken it back.”

“You had no right to buy it until you could first see your way clear to paying your board and your wife's.”

“It's certainly not your affair, Eliot, to determine for me what I have a right to buy.”

“It's my affair, I think you will have to admit, not to let myself be 'done' even by you. When you don't pay your board and your wife's, I pay it.”

“I'll pay it when I can, I told you.”

“You told me, yes, frequently if not oftener. I foresaw and foretold just how it would be if you married and lived here. You'd leave me to foot all the bills as you always had done, while you bought pianos, sealskin coats, took trips to New York to hear Grand Opera, indulged—”

“O rats! I'm too dog-tired to stand here and wrangle at this time of night about a thing I can't help anyway. Postpone it till morning if you must talk. I've been teaching since eight o'clock this morning.”

“That's always your answer, I always choose an inconvenient time. When is it ever convenient to you to discuss with me your obligations to me, or to meet them?”

“I tell you I'll give you some money when I have some. You talk as though I never paid anything toward the expenses. You know perfectly well that I make payments when I can.”

“Look here, Robert, I stood your delinquencies pretty patiently before your marriage. But you know how I warned you, that if you persisted in your determination to bring your wife here, you would at least have to do what you never had done—be a man, pay your own way and do it regularly and promptly, and not sponge on me. You promised, and have not (as I foresaw) kept your promise. In fact, the reason you insisted upon coming here, instead of setting up for yourself, was because you thought you could impose on me as you couldn't on other creditors!”

“Thanks, thanks,” said Robert pleasantly.

“And you even thought to foist on me the expenses of the Conservatory here in this house! You thought I'd be fool enough, as usual, to pay your coal and janitor bills when it suited you better to use your money for other things! You'd have carried it out, too, if your wife had not put her foot down.”

“Tut, tut!” Robert laughed. “My wife doesn't 'run' me, you know.”

“Well, Robert,” Eliot said conclusively, “you had your warning in plenty of time, that if you failed me, I'd quit.”

“Then quit, in Heaven's name.”

“Which will leave you in the extraordinary position of being obliged to pay for the food you eat. You aren't used to it, Robbie!”

With that I heard Eliot's step (I can always distinguish his tread from Robert's stroll, so to speak) go down the hall and up the stairs, followed, presently, by Robert's.

I stood still, too frozen with horror to move, for in that moment it seemed to me, Margaret, as though the most dreadful tragedy had happened to me. Shame and misery seemed to cover and crush me.

When presently I began to thaw out a bit, it was even worse. Such a conflict of torments! At one moment indignant with Robert; the next resentful toward Eliot; then pitying both of them with all my soul, while suffering agonies of mortification in realizing that Eliot regarded my board here as an imposition upon him.

I could see now why Eliot had treated me as he did when I first came. No wonder! Who could blame him?

And yet, Margaret, I couldn't be wholly indignant with Robert. In my soul I know (and it's not the blindness of love) he is as honorable as Eliot. He is simply heedless, irresponsible, self-indulgent. They are the faults of his lovable temperament. In one sense he has never grown up.

After a while I crept miserably upstairs to our room. I did not tell Robert I had heard. What was the use?

But it was this episode that laid me up with the worst nervous headache I ever had.

Being laid up, however, sometimes has its compensations, in this case it brought out unexpectedly the friendliness of our old Abigail to me. She waited on me so nicely all day, and when she brought me a most dainty luncheon which I could not touch, I was so pleased with the attention that I promised to give her fifty cents for her trouble as soon as I could get up.

“Oh, don't let that worry you, Miss; I ain't even studyin' about it,” said she.

And now I dread to think of the ordeal before me tomorrow, for I must talk over this matter of our expenses with Eliot.

Tell me, Margaret, how you would meet such a snarled-up place as this in your career?

Yours in the blues,
Edith.

IV

Your letter was such a comfort and strengthening to my weak spirit, Margaret. Your kindly view of Robert is the true view. What might appear at first sight to be glaring faults, are really only rather unfortunate idiosyncrasies of temperament, for which he is to be pitied and borne with, rather than censured

How astonished he would be, by the way, to know that I found him in any least sense an object of “pity”! He thinks himself altogether enviable, because, forsooth, he has me for his life's mate! He declares he finds himself commiserating all other men of his acquaintance because they aren't in his shoes!

Now, to get it off my mind, I'll tell you about my interview with Eliot.

Robert and I are together so constantly that you've no idea how difficult I found it to see Eliot alone, unknown to Robert. But last evening, Robert being deep in a book in the library, I decided to go downstairs to the piano and do the Lorelei act (with, unavoidably, some radical departures from the original rôle—I didn't, for instance, dress for the part, or rather undress, and let down my “golden hair”). I knew that if I played a melody “potent and strange,” Eliot, from his room above the parlor would hear, be “seized with a wild delight” and be lured thither. Well planned, wasn't it?

Sure enough, it wasn't long before he strolled into the dimly lighted parlor, his hands in his pockets, his black hair rumpled up as it always is when he's been reading—I've no doubt he had left an interesting book to come and listen to me. It's pretty complimentary, for he says he never listens to “amateurish playing” when he can help it.

I gave him at least a half hour of “the harmony of sweet sounds.” Then, my heart thumping miserably, I went and sat down before him to open up the horrid discussion I had to have with him.

But before I could begin, he spoke.

“Do you know your playing is unique? It has distinction, a quality all its own. It seems to express the very essence of feminineness.”

“Is it so 'sex-limited' as that?” I asked, rather appalled.

“I don't mean that as disparagement, though perhaps from the standpoint of Art it is such. But your playing so absolutely expresses the feminine that it's almost weirdly alluring to the male, my dear!”

I sighed as I realized that such agreeable conversation as this had to be set aside for so unattractive a theme as the price of one's daily bread.

“I wanted to speak to you,” I plunged in, my voice actually “about our expenses here. I am so troubled to know that we are not meeting them. There is no reason why we should not; the Conservatory is prospering, as you know. I have tried often to talk with Robert, but he is so impossible when it comes to a business proposition. What shall I do? Can you suggest anything? We can't—I can't—go on in this irresponsible way.”

“That is a matter that lies between Robert and me. You have nothing to do with it.”

I knew at once from his tone that he never dreamed I had heard him and Robert the night before. And of course he knew well enough that Robert had not repeated their talk to me. So he did not realize the extent of my knowledge as to how matters stood.

“I do have something to do with the fact that I am living here at your expense,” I faltered.

“Oh, no you are not. Robert pays something now and then. In a haphazard way of course, but that's his way always, you know. Don't distress yourself about it.”

“I know that we are in your debt and that we are getting deeper in all the time.”

“That's for Robert and me to settle,” he repeated. “Dismiss it from your mind.”

“How can I?” I demanded, catching my lower lip to check a sob.

“But what's the use of this?'” he asked kindly. “Distressing yourself about it isn't going to alter anything. Robert has taken your happiness into his keeping, let him do the worrying.”

“And meantime, I live here on sufferance, a burden to you.”

“Hercules holding up the globe!” he mocked me. “There, there—play to me now and then, as you did tonight, and I'll never call you a burden on my back or any other bad names, except a fool for falling in love with Rob when you might have—”

He hesitated, and I sweetly inquired, “When I might have waited until I met you, were you going to say? It was thoughtless of me.”

“Very. Only that isn't what I was going to say.”

“How embarrassing! What, then?”

“When, with your talents, you might have done so much better than kill yourself by 'taking a boy to raise,' as a husband.”

“Robert is older than I.”

“That's a mere detail. Robert is and always will be a cherub.”

“Your opinion of Robert as a topic of conversation between you and me is, to put it mildly, uninteresting. To return to the pleasant subject we were discussing, I wish you would take me seriously. What I want is to know whether you and I can't come to some arrangement. I myself have one half of all the pupils of the Conservatory. I earn at least a hundred dollars a month, reckoning from the fact that the other teachers being men and therefore paid at a higher rate, each get about a hundred dollars. But the trouble is, while Robert is the very soul of generosity to me, I am not, like his other teachers, paid a salary—and so I-—I don't know what—”

“Yes, yes, there, there! I understand—don't inflict it upon yourself to try to tell me. Believe me,” he said, coming and standing beside my chair, “that, while for Robert's own sake I'd be glad to see him as fastidious about his debts as he is about his comforts, I am by no means being imposed upon; that I am quite capable of taking care of my own rights—without your help, thank you, my dear—and that there is not a thing in the world for you to bother about. Believe me. Good night!”

With that he walked out.

Chivalrous, wasn't it?

Tell me what you think of it. And now I find I can't write another word tonight.

Your loving
Edith.

V

I've been in a state bordering on delirium, Margaret, ever since the news reached me that your book had been accepted. I've always known you'd be great some day. And now you'll also be rich—in your own right, I mean.

“She'll be investing and 'opening a Plant,' or whatever it is that people do who have capital,” I said to Robert when I told him your wonderful news. “It's well I have no Shares (aren't they called?) for I don't know what they are and should be sadly confused if suddenly called upon to 'claim' one of those things which, while non-existent, yet are Property. How I wish, Robert, I'd been educated in all those mysteries, stocks, bonds, shares, almanacs, time tables, levers and ground plans—gracious! How much is black darkness to my feather brain!”

“I don't wish you'd been 'caught young and trained' to one iota's difference from just what you are—You!”

At all events, Margaret, you'll be investing—and then we'll grow apart, for I shall not speak the same language.

I've been wondering much of late, my dear, how you, a maiden, ever came by some of the knowledge of married life that you have so often poured into my interested, though I confess unbelieving, ears. Do you remember how you used to tell me that you were firmly convinced a woman could not follow a large vocation, one that taxed her powers of soul, mind and body, and at the same time fulfill her specific function of wife, mother and home maker?

Fine talk, I thought it, really eloquent; but oratory and nothing more. But, Margaret, life is teaching me some things heretofore undreamed of. Love, instead of developing one's talents, is so satisfying that one forgets one has any talents. What will you think of the fact that I find the baby clothes I am making so absorbing, so fascinating, that to lay them by a few hours to pursue my “large vocation” at the piano, bores me to extinction. I am finding out, you see, that the largest vocation in the world does not satisfy the soul as love does.

But, here's the complication: it was our common vocation that drew Robert and me together, and now if I grow indifferent to and slight that vocation, am I not in danger of weakening “the tie that binds”?

“But, Robert,” I told him one day when he was protesting against my letting my music slide as I've been doing, “it is only that the music in me is going out in a fuller, a more beautiful expression than I ever knew before!”

I'm afraid, however, that he does not see it so; that he is fretted, even a bit disappointed, by what seems to him my apathy, my absolute commonplaceness. I fancy his saying to himself these days: “Is this what I'm tied to—a domestic little housewife, without fire, imagination, or aspiration—I, an artist!” Tragic for him, isn't it?

Lest you, too, be moved to censure me, dear, for letting myself “sink i' the scale,” let me tell you that I find myself just now unable to bear any least strain upon brain or nerves. If I force myself beyond a certain point, I go to pieces nervously.

“Fight it,” Robert says, “or you'll have a stupid child!”

The doctor and my own intuitions say, “Let Nature be your guide.”

I still do my work at the Conservatory, though Robert has engaged a substitute for me, whom I shall simply assist, doing only what I feel able to do.

(Two days later.)

The substitute has arrived and oh, what a creature! She is only twenty-three years old and she has the seriousness and maturity of forty!

Her playing is so satisfying, somehow, it seems to come from the deeps in her and to reach the deeps in her hearers. She impresses me as being a most unusual personality, beautiful, brilliant and strangely magnetic.

“You are wonderful!” I found my astonished self saying straight to her the very first evening I knew her.

“It is Henry James, isn't it,” she smiled, “whose characters are telling each other on every page that they are 'wonderful'?”

“And you never thought to meet it in 'real life'? Neither did I—it's been surprised out of me. I always thought it such an impertinence in Henry James's people.” Her laugh is so delicious, so lovable. Yet, if she has a fault, it is that she could not be light if she tried. That really is a serious fault, you know. It's not one of my conspicuous ones.

Her manner, sweet and grave, and her voice, low-pitched and rich, are both significant of her character, which is, in a word, large. One simply could not associate anything petty with the thought of her, and yet she's so preëminently womanly. She dined with us last night, and we were so fascinated with her that we kept her until midnight; we just could not let her go.

It happened that Eliot was not home to dinner. I wish he had been. I wish he could have heard her talk, he who has such a contempt for feminine intelligence. She's “broad” enough to satisfy even his radicalism, I think. She said last night that the Bible is no longer an “authority” even to “so-called Christians.” For those of its precepts that we have not outgrown, we have not yet grown up to—such as, “Sell all that thou hast and give it to the poor.” We are only just beginning faintly to sense Jesus's radical theory of the “brotherhood of man.”

But in spite of her own radicalism, she is, unlike Eliot, so reasonably charitable toward the conservative. When I remarked that I found it a bit difficult to adjust myself to the circumscribed ideas of a place like Williamsburg, she said at once:

“But I think if we delve below the surface we can always find a common meeting ground with any fellow being, of whatever station, of whatever mental development. That is why I have absolutely no patience with snobbishness of any kind. A snob seems to me to be just one who is not sure of himself. Let one be deeply rooted in life, and he must lose sight of mere external discrepancies!”

Yet my instinctive feeling about her is that she would be incapable of coming down from her own altitude to meet any one an inch below her. Her theory does her credit, however.

“Wait until Eliot meets her!” I said to Robert when he returned from taking her to her apartment. “She'll put his cynical theories to the test, and thaw his icy stoicism to our feeble sex, won't she, dear?”

“He's certainly never had them tested as they'll be when he meets her,” laughed Robert, who I could see was fairly excited about her.

“When he hears her talk, Robert! Isn't she wonderful when she lets herself go? She looks at life from such a pinnacle, she made me feel the size of a nut!”

“She uplifted me; carried me with her to the pinnacle! Edith, she's a great woman.”

“So great,” I agreed, “that while I know I'm going to adore her, it will be from a respectful distance. She's too awe inspiring to be intimate with.”

“Oh, I don't know about that,” he protested, walking about the room feverishly as he undressed (I was already in bed); “I hope you will be intimate with her, dearest.”

“Yes, dear, in my serious moods. When I feel light-minded, I shall have to avoid her. To be sportive in her presence would be irreverent. She'd think I didn't 'live by a high ideal.' And not to live by a high ideal is, in her opinion, to be 'outside with dogs and sorcerers.'”

“Dearie, you talk as though she were a prig, instead of the most magnificent woman I ever saw!”

I reflected that in this case there was no odious comparison, since there was nothing “magnificent” about me, so I decided not to mind.

“Of course, Robert,” I said, “anything so petty as priggishness is unthinkable in connection with her. The one overpowering impression she makes upon me is of her sublimity. I feel obliged to conceal from her that I am not sublime.”

“But, Edith, she is not a bit austere. Why, she's actually motherly, she's so humanly tender and sweet. Did you ever hear a richer speaking voice?”

“Never. It thrilled me every time she spoke. Her playing, her voice, her manner, her big ideas—everything is in keeping.”

“Exactly. If she weren't very young we never would have got her here.”

Margaret, I'm going to admit to you that there was just one little episode of our delightful evening with Miss Worthington (Dorothea Worthington is her distinguished sounding name—it, too, expresses her) that rankles a bit, as it would not do if I, also, were “sublime.” It was a remark Robert made to her. Tell me whether I was foolish to mind it.

It was just as she was taking leave of me, looking tall and beautiful in her long cloak and furs; Robert was standing by in his overcoat, hat in hand; she was holding my hand and looking down into my face; her every least act seems spontaneously characteristic of her and you can't imagine what a charm there is in that.

“We shall want you to regard our home as your own, Miss Worthington,” I remarked.

“Yes,” added Robert, “we need you, Miss Worthington. We are 'old married folks' now and are getting awfully prosaic, I'm afraid. We need stirring up, we need a change. We need it badly. At least I do. Come to us often.”

“When we realize we need stirring up, there is hope for us,” she smiled. “It's when we are satisfied with the groove (into which it is so easy to jog-trot, isn't it?) that we are in danger. But I am afraid I'm giving you too big a dose of my philosophizing tonight. You are both so responsive that I can't resist it. Mrs. Newbold,” she added gently, “this has been a full evening to me.

I, too, at the end of that evening, would have felt “uplifted,” as Robert says he was, had it not been for that little thing that rankled. It isn't so infinitesimal, is it, that you can't see what it is? Perhaps it's my state of health that makes me so sensitive. Am I morbid?

Your ever loving
Edith.

VI

Your dear letter came on Wednesday as usual, you unfailing friend, and I'm again lost in amazement at your precocious knowledge of what I should think only an old married woman like me would know. So you think that when a man and wife are in the same profession, it is far safer, for the preservation of the marriage tie, that the wife should grow commonplace rather than that she should go ahead of her husband in his own line of work. How do you know such things? It is perfectly true, Margaret. I don't believe any normal man can stand having his wife excel him in his line of work, however proud he might be of her accomplishments in other lines. Not that I was in any danger of excelling my husband, though there were a few weeks when I did feel a little sensitive for Robert because my department kept growing so out of all proportion to the growth of the rest of the school.

Yes, I still work at the Conservatory afternoons. Of course, since Miss Worthington is here, I shall be able to stop teaching whenever I feel I can't go on.

Two days this week I had to stay at home, not on account of my health, but Mrs. Newbold's. She was so ill that one whole day I never left her room; heart trouble, you know, and of course dangerous. Eliot sat up with her at night. I wanted to divide the night with him, but he very arbitrarily forbade it.

Yesterday she was so much better that Robert thought I might safely go to the Conservatory. Miss Worthington, he said, was rather overworked without me.

“You're looking so pale, dear, you ought to get outdoors anyway.”

“The doctor doesn't want your mother to be left alone yet, Robert.”

“Let Abigail stay with her.”

“My dear,” I explained, “Abigail would have to leave the sick room to answer the doorbell and the telephone and to see after the furnace, not to mention the dinner—”

But details like that never fail to bring to Robert's eyes a far-away look that warns me I'm talking to myself, not to him.

He submitted, however, to my staying at home.

It does seem as though I were failing him at all points, for that very evening I had to refuse him again when he wanted me so very much to go with him to call on Miss Worthington at her apartments. I had gone upstairs after dinner and had just finished making Mrs. Newbold comfortable for the night, when Robert softly called me from her room into the unlighted library, to put his request.

“But your mother can't yet be left alone in the house at night, dear,” I objected, as, standing together in the bay window of the dark library, his arm about me, we tried to thresh the thing out. “Eliot says,” I went on, “that he has an absolutely unavoidable business engagement this evening. And Abigail is going to a church rally (whatever, in Heaven's name, that form of religious gaiety is!).”

“But mother is in bed asleep and won't wake up until tomorrow morning. She's perfectly safe.”

“If you'll call up Dr. West and get his consent to her being left entirely alone, of course I'll go with you, dear

“That's not necessary,” he answered irritably, for he was annoyed at my persistence. “Come, come; you need to get out; you need rousing; you need just what contact with Miss Worthington can give you—a bigger view of life, a higher plane of thought; you let the petty details of daily life absorb you too much, dearest. It's spoiling you.”

Margaret, I was horribly hurt. I couldn't answer him for the beating in my throat.

“So do get on your coat and hat and come, Edith.”

“If anything happened to your mother while I was gone, I would never get over it. Anyway, she might wake and want a glass of water or something. It isn't to be thought of, our leaving her here alone.”

“How do you suppose we managed these circumstances when you were not here?” he asked in a tone which betrayed that he thought I took a great deal on myself.

“I suppose Eliot managed them, with your help,” I hastily added.

“I've been counting all day on this little visit this evening,” he said, looking so keenly disappointed that, hurt as I was, I felt almost sorry for him. “Miss Worthington expects us. I told her we'd be 'round.”

“Then you go, Robert, without me.”

“And leave you to mope at home alone, feeling yourself ill used!”

“I'd feel myself much more ill used if you stayed with me, dear,in your present frame of mind.”

“Oh, all right, then! If you'd rather be alone than have me 'round, I will go!”

With which he turned away and walked out of the room.

I stood there, feeling in a numb, sick way how incredible it was that this thing had passed between us, when a slight movement behind me in the room made me start and turn to see Eliot rise up from a dark corner at the other side of the library and come forward. He had been there all the time and had overheard!

He came up to me, took my hand in his, pressed it for an instant—and without a word, turned and left the room.

Margaret! I felt as if that silent hand-clasp, with all that it said to me of his appreciation of my care of his mother, had saved my soul! Instead of sitting in my room all evening, brooding over what I so bitterly felt to be Robert's disappointment in me, I was soothed and comforted by this first real expression of friendliness Eliot has ever vouchsafed me.

Now what I have written must not mislead you into thinking badly of Robert. I pity a man when his wife is pregnant, for he certainly has a lot to bear. How can he realize the fearful draining of her body, mind and soul to succor the new being that is growing under her heart? He only knows she has ceased to interest or charm him.

When Robert came in, at about eleven o'clock, he was in a very exalted frame of mind. I was in bed, but not asleep, so he talked to me with great animation as he undressed, expressing many noble sentiments about Art and Life (with a reverence which requires that they be written with capitals), also about the Infinite, the Absolute, the Universal Consciousness, his True Self, until my poor, puny intellect seemed to be dancing a jig in my skull. I recognized Miss Worthington's phraseology. But when she uses such language it really seems to mean something. On Robert's lips it was so funny, Margaret, that I had to draw the covers over my head to conceal my hysterical laughter, not of amusement at all, for I was in torment lest the poor boy see me. But—well, I think a sort of madness possessed me, I had lost my grip on myself.

No more this time.

Good night.
Edith.

VII

Dear Margaret:

You ask me how Miss Worthington “wears.” Let me tell you of an episode which may enable you to judge for yourself.

I called on her yesterday afternoon after Conservatory hours to discover her giving a piano lesson, at her apartment, to a young lady of well-known family in Williamsburg. Now every teacher in Robert's employ signs a contract to do no remunerative work outside the Conservatory; so, naturally, I was very much astonished.

Miss Worthington, however, was not at all disturbed. She asked me to excuse her until she should be free, provided me with a volume of Essays by Elbert Hubbard, and then serenely proceeded to finish the lesson.

I didn't read the essays, but spent the time trying to find an explanation for her apparent breach, though I was distracted in my speculations by the charm of her voice, as she taught, and by the admiration she compelled from me of her gift in teaching.

The pupil was finally dismissed and Miss Worthington sat down to visit with me. Now, I thought, I should hear her explanation of the compromising circumstance upon which I had happened.

I closed the Hubbard volume and laid it on the table beside which we sat.

“What do you think of Hubbard?” she asked, as she smiled upon me with a friendliness that seemed to embrace me and which warmed my heart to her.

“I am such a back number as to still prefer the Star of Bethlehem to the Star of East Aurora,” I answered, as I thought, very cleverly. One feels obliged to be as clever as one can be with Miss Worthington.

“Hubbard is a superficial poseur,” she granted. “No man can be truly great who is an egotist.”

I tucked this epigram (wasn't it an epigram?) back in my memory to repeat to Robert, and perhaps to Eliot, at dinner; and Miss Worthington proceeded:

“Too much of our education makes for a shallow egotism. A pupil works for class rank, not for culture; studies to pass examinations, not to gain knowledge. Especially is that true of girls. Don't you find that with the class of girls we have at the Conservatory the whole aim of their parents is to fit them to shine socially? The result is that their lives never strike rock bottom and are therefore never satisfying or truly happy. To merely skim the top of life is never to know the deep contentment that work and service bring. To say nothing of the want of dignity, the vulgarity, of an aimless, useless life.”

She spoke so earnestly and looked so sad over it. “But don't take it so to heart,” I ventured to say soothingly.

“Well,” she admitted, “I suppose, in spite of their frivolous parents, the girls who have anything worth while in them will work out their own problem. The others don't really matter.”

“In these days,” I said conversationally, “when fortunes are so easily made and lost in a day, it is really an economic safeguard to equip a girl for a career, so that she may be able to take care of herself in case she's stranded.”

“I was thinking of it not so much from the economic as from the spiritual plane,” she gently corrected me, and I at once felt small and commonplace.

“By the way,” I said, to get back to the subject of her pupil, “Elsie Natchez seems to be rather talented, musically, doesn't she?”

“Unusually.”

“What an odd looking girl she is!” I persisted, determined to force her to an explanation if possible.

“No wonder. Her mother is a Russian, her father a Scotch Presbyterian.”

“Dear me! That would make a Turk, wouldn't it? It sounds as though it might.”

“It makes a curiously interesting personality,” she smiled.

“I had not known she was musical at all; she has never come near the Conservatory. To be sure,” I hastily continued, embarrassed at the “situation” I was evoking, “I'm glad she isn't a pupil of mine, she's so tall I'd have a stiff neck looking up at her. Eliot calls her 'Nearer-My-God-to-Thee'!”

She laughed, and added composedly: “I am very much interested in her, for she really works. And she is so receptive of a suggested new outlook.”

I said nothing to this and there was a slight pause. Evidently she was not going to account for herself. Perhaps there was no explanation and she was simply breaking her contract.

I turned our talk into another channel.

On my way home from this call upon Miss Worthington, I met her pupil, Elsie Natchez. I thought Miss Natchez looked very much embarrassed as she bowed to me.

A moment after she had passed me, to my surprise she turned back and overtook me.

“May I walk with you, Mrs. Newbold?” she asked. “I want to speak with you about—about what must have looked very queer to you this afternoon, finding me taking lessons from Miss Worthington.”

“Miss Worthington will explain it of course to Mr. Newbold,” I answered.

“Then she did not explain to you? I knew she wouldn't!”

I said nothing.

“That's because she assumes everyone to be as large-minded in the judgments of others as she is herself. She would not stoop to explain her questionable position.”

“I am sure there is a satisfactory explanation,” I assured the girl.

“But you will never hear it from her, Mrs. Newbold. So you must hear it from me. One day, two weeks ago, Miss Worthington happened to hear me play in an apartment adjoining hers; she inquired about me, came to see me and offered to teach me. I told her I could not afford to study, and she begged me to let her teach me without any remuneration. I allowed myself to be persuaded, and I have no words to tell you what it is to me. I have longed so to go on with my music, it has been such a real tragedy to me to have had to give it up in our financial break-up! And now to have such teaching—and such constant stimulus and inspiration to the highest ideals in my work—” She choked up and could not go on.

“You give as much as you get,” I gently insisted. “She so loves her work with you and you are so responsive to her ideas.”

Now, Margaret, of course the significant thing in this tale is not the free music lessons, but the fact of Miss Worthington's willingness to appear dishonorable rather than be so by disclosing Miss Natchez's delicate relation to her. Also, her taking it for granted that her integrity could not be doubted under any appearances. To me, there was something rather heroic in her silence. Robert quite glowed over it when I recounted it to him. I am sure this fine and noble woman does give him the “stirring up” and the “change” which he told her he “needed badly.”

With love,
Edith.

VIII

Six weeks since you have had anything but picture post cards from me! It seems like six years to me, dear, so much has been crowded into the time.

For one thing, Robert and Dorothea (as we now call Miss Worthington) have “found each other.” Now, don't mock! I assure you it's a most serious business. Robert has explained it all to me. It seems that the “Universe” has united his soul to the soul of Dorothea even as it united him and me; that love is not exclusive, but inclusive, which means (if you don't know) that his loving me need not bar him from loving every other soul whom his soul “meets and finds”; that we must refuse no experience which the Universe vouchsafes us, even though to the limited vision of commonplace and conventional minds the new experiences may seem like disloyalty to former sacred experiences.

“Gain today is toppling loss tomorrow,” says Browning.

You see how such a broad theory of life does away with the petty passions of jealousy, selfishness, narrowness in one's sympathies. So, at least, say Robert and Dorothea.

But since this thing began, Robert and I have gone through fire, water and bloody seas in wrestling with it—or at least I have—dragging him after me through the blackness as far as the radiance of Dorothea in his soul could let him be dragged. She to his rescue whenever I would get him too far into the depths to which I've ignominiously sunk.

“But where,” I one day asked him in my bewilderment and, I confess Margaret, my pain, “do you draw the line?”

“That's just it! We draw no lines. We put up no barriers! We open our souls to the whole universe, to the Infinite—and let it give us what it will!”

“Does it sound to you like free love?” I prosaically suggested.

“Don't drag it down to that low plane, dear—our beautiful relation!” (referring, of course, to his and Dorothea's) “When I speak of barriers, I mean spiritual ones.”

“To be logical, it would seem to me you would have to advocate physical as well as spiritual freedom.”

“So we would, but that the sanctity of the family must not be violated, the ideal of the family being the foundation of civilization.”

The theory originated, not with Robert, but with Dorothea. So I asked her once when I was alone with her at the Conservatory: “Did you ever prove this doctrine of yours on anyone but Robert? I mean were you ever so intimate with any other married man?”

She looked pained. “To speak of our beautiful relation as my being 'intimate with a married man' is to put it on so low a plane, Edith!”

“Well, then, did you ever have this 'beautiful relation' with any other—eh, soul who had already found his life's mate?” I asked poetically, willing to oblige.

“No; it is through Robert”—she speaks his name reverently—“through the Truth that he and I have found together, that I have come to realize the universality of love. I had always blindly assumed with the unthinking masses that marriage excluded love with other kindred spirits. Now I know that it includes all love! Each new, vital and true relation with another soul which a husband and wife may form, only enriches their relation. It does not, as the conventional belief goes, mar and weaken it.”

“Doesn't it,” I said musingly, “when it takes from the wife her husband's companionship, the enthusiasm of his devotion, the glamour and romance of their relation—these being transferred—”

“*Glamour and romance!” she repeated disapprovingly. “Cheap, transitory things that you'd better be rid of!”

“They are cheap and transitory,” I admitted. “I know that now. I had supposed them eternal.”

“Love that is founded in the Absolute is eternal, Edith. But 'glamour and romance'—” She dismissed them with a queenly disdain that never for an instant suspected herself to be the very embodiment of these elements she scorned. She is very young.

“If your beautiful relation is altogether spiritual,” I wondered; “if there is nothing sexual in it, why can't you and I have such a relation?”

“But we can!” she responded glowing. “I hope we shall! Only keep your soul open to the Infinite, Edith, and sacred experiences like Robert's and mine must come to you.”

I suppose you are wondering, Margaret, why I don't scratch her. Dear, you would have to know her to understand. She is so sincere in it all. She is so maidenly unconscious of such a big side of this 'universal love'? which she thinks she's discovered. She's so magnetic, so gifted, so womanly and lovable; so noble and so good, in short—that, to tell the truth, I'd have a poor opinion of Robert if he didn't fairly worship her, though his doing so has seemed to maim my very soul!

If I were not so listless these days, no doubt I should be madly jealous. But, Margaret, I think my heart is dead within me. I wonder sometimes whether I shall ever again feel my old zest in life.

I am sure Dorothea is the first woman that Eliot ever treated with a profound respect, except his mother. The first time he met her, which was the second time she dined here, I noted his immediate admiration and interest and the instinctive deference of his manner toward her.

But she is so absorbed in Robert that she doesn't notice Eliot much, or any of us for that matter, though she is always sweet to everyone, and Mrs. Newbold thinks her perfect. Indeed, one of Dorothea's dominating characteristics is an absolute self-absorption—a self-absorption which makes her overlook a good many things that an all-round observant person would see very big. It has, however, the appearance of a virtue that rises above petty details. And yet, when the details involve the wounding or suffering of another, then doesn't such ignoring of them become selfishness?

Last night Dorothea dined with us again. She comes to us several times a week; Robert's mother loves her visits.

Always after dinner I help Mrs. Newbold to get comfortably to bed before joining Robert over in the library or down in the parlor. But every time Dorothea has been here, I've found myself, on joining her and Robert, so obviously unnecessary, even superfluous, that once or twice I've crept away and left them to themselves for a few hours, only appearing when Dorothea was about to leave. I could see how grateful they both were to me for giving them this chance to commune with the Infinite. You see, if I try to commune along, I'm apt to sound a false note. Last night they were trying over some verses by R. W. Gilder, that Robert has set to music. Dorothea did not at all approve of the sentiment of the poem, which goes:

I am a woman, therefore
I may not call to him, fly to him—

“A primitive, even a barbarous idea of love!” she said. “The Oriental idea that the woman must go draped, must be sought, even hunted as prey! Why should the soul's freedom be limited by sex? Why should she not 'call to him, fly to him, cry to him'? Why must she 'crush and defy' her heart? I believe, rather, with the poet Sill,

Faith, or a doubt,
I will speak out,
And hide not my heart!

That is the truer, higher attitude toward every experience of life that may come either to man or woman.”

“For you, Dorothea, yes,” I spoke in. “A girl less good-looking, less fascinating, wouldn't dare. 'The fruit that falls without picking is rather too mellow for me,' is the sentiment of most men.”

Robert and Dorothea exchanged a glance, pitying and amused, at my commonplace and materialistic “plane of thought.”

“One might as well recognize facts,” I suggested tamely. “Beauty and charm can take liberties with conventions (if a woman's waiting to be sought is a convention, not an instinct), liberties which, if a girl lack charm, would simply make her ridiculous.”

“Try to see it, Edith, from a spiritual plane,” Dorothea earnestly besought me; “from the plane of the Absolute.”

“But as we are not yet disembodied spirits, the material media through which our souls communicate are not wholly unimportant to us, do you think they are?”

“We make them altogether too important; we forget that they are only media,” she answered.

I did not pursue it further, it wearied me so. Whenever I do join in their talk, I always speedily collapse and am extinguished, so much so that Robert presently begs for “signs of life,” which I take as a hint that I'd perhaps better leave them alone to search for truth, hand-in-hand and heart-to-heart, as they cannot do when I am by.

I feel so strangely outside of it all, Margaret, like a looker-on at a—well, a tragedy or a comedy, as you will.

I did ask Robert the other day in a vague way whether he did not think he was perhaps going too far with Dorothea. But, you see, he is like a convert to a new faith: he thinks everyone outside that faith benighted, and himself so illumined that he can only smile tolerantly at the folly of those “lower down in the scale.”

“'Going too far?'” he repeated. “If only you had a higher ideal of love, Edith, you and I might meet much more vitally than we do. How could one be 'going too far' in one's growth in the Divine Life?”

“One couldn't,” I admitted. “But one could go too far in one's intimacy with a maiden when one has a wife—so, at least, it seems to my entirely finite mind; too far, I mean, for one's own good and for the maiden's. I'm not speaking for the wife. She, of course, poor worm, must not be taken into account.”

“As I've demonstrated to you before, dear, my having a wife must not, must not,” he repeated with gentle firmness, “interfere in any least degree with my freedom to open my soul to the universe in whatever form it may reveal itself to me.”

“Let the form be even a comely maiden. I see. But the world does not see, and you and Dorothea are being criticized. I merely mention the fact in case you are not aware of it, so that you may guard against further criticism.”

“But we don't wish to guard against criticism to the extent of forswearing the Truth that together we have delved out. Our Friendship is too fundamental, too divine, to be weakened in the least because of the carping of Philistines who are stone deaf to the summons of the Higher Life.”

Taking this to mean that he considered me one of the Philistines, I dropped the subject.

There are not many things, these days, Margaret, in which I am interested, but I shall be curious to hear how you view a “Friendship” like this.

Ever yours,
Edith.

IX

You say, dear Margaret, that my letters leave so much unexplained. Now, I have really written you a continuous chronicle of my life ever since I came here from my wedding trip, but nearly every other letter I write I lack courage to send, so of course some links are missing. Margaret, if in my coming trial of the flesh I should go under (and I have absolutely no desire to live), the letters I have not sent you will be found in my desk, tied up and addressed to you; and so, when it can no longer matter to me, you will be able to read my story complete. You and I have been so close that I wish you to understand. That is, when I'm dead. If I live—well, then, probably those letters, and some others with the writing of which I shall ease my heart, will after a while be burned up. It is just possible this letter will never be sent you.

The “Friendship” grows apace, as does also the gossip in the town concerning it, I regret to say. But Robert and Dorothea are on a plane so far above that, that, in spite of warnings from several sources, they are not judicious. They are seen together on the street so often, and pupils, coming to the Conservatory and going to Dorothea's music room, or to Robert's, as the case may be, are so apt (I hear) to find these two alone together, looking “uplifted”—as they always do when, in communing with each other, they've been “reaching out after the Absolute”!

Sometimes I wonder, however, whether even Dorothea does live up to her own high standards. For instance, one evening recently when she dined with us, she actually noticed Eliot enough to ask him to advise her (from his knowledge of finances as a banker) about an investment of hers, for, it seems, she has considerable means of her own. She had brought some documents with her which, after dinner, she submitted to him.

Having looked over her papers, he returned them to her with the pronouncement, “An excellent investment. You are fortunate to have such an opportunity. You will nearly double your capital inside of a year.”

“But what I meant to ask, Mr. Newbold, is whether this concern, with its very large profits, is entirely 'straight.' Is it ethically justifiable?”

“Ha!” Eliot guffawed. “'Ethically justifiable'?” he repeated quizzically. “Well, is the gaining of money for which we have rendered no service ever 'ethically justifiable'?”

“I don't think it is, Mr. Newbold.”

“Then you are answered.”

“Apart from that general principle, is this concern still dishonest, unethical, what you will?”

“The higher the rate of profit on your investment, the greater the robbery of some other poor devils the exploiting of whom yield you your profit. Wealth can't be created out of nothing. If you did not work for it someone else did. So I hold that from any ethical standpoint (if you insist upon talking about ethics) the taking of interest is robbery.”

“Unequivocally?”

“Unequivocally—from the standpoint of ethics, you understand.”

She heaved a little sigh as she slowly, thoughtfully folded her papers and tucked them away in her gown somewhere; and nothing more was said about the matter.

Her silence signified to all of us, I think, that however much she might regret the low standards of the financial world, she did not mean to miss her chance to double her capital.

(A week later.)

Recently I made a discovery—a discovery, Margaret, which has—reasonably or unreasonably, I don't know—blackened the sun in the heavens for me.

Robert, by the way, is frequently seized at any hour of the night with an inspiration to talk to his goddess, so he gets out of bed and writes to her. In fact, they exchange letters almost daily. That is one of the things the students have noticed, their passing notes to each other. Now, before Dorothea came into our lives, Robert never so much as wrote a note to anyone without reading it to me. But about this very flourishing correspondence with her, he has always been extremely secretive; so much so that one day when he came into our room and saw that he had left one of her letters lying loose there, he actually turned white.

“But why,” I instantly spoke to him, “should you look so alarmed? Why should there be anything in this world, Robert, that you wish to conceal from me?”

“Dearest, you are such a little Philistine!” he smiled, coming up to me and putting his arm about me. “Can't you try to see that this Friendship of mine is infinitely above the pettiness of the conventional idea of love, in which, when a man is married, his relations with all other women must end, lest his wife grow jealous? Edith, dear, I can't tell you how grotesque my old attitude toward these things seems to me now.”

“If your relation with Dorothea is so justifiable—”

“'Justifiable!'” he repeated with a groan. 'Was the relation of the Apostles to Jesus justifiable?”

“I was going to say, if your relation with her is so—'divine,' why is it necessary so carefully to exclude me from it as to make you look frightened when you thought I might have seen one of her letters to you?”

“Frightened, dear?” he smiled, though he looked annoyed. “You misunderstood. I will say, however, Edith, that my relation with Dorothea is a sacred one, upon which not even you can trespass, even as she cannot trespass upon my relation with you.”

“Your relation with me? Such a negligible quantity as that has become, Robert, is not to be mentioned as over against your 'vital' relation with her.”

“Don't be jealous, dearie,” he said, drawing me close, kissing me and—but I was relieved when the ringing of the telephone made him let me go.

Well, when a few days ago, I happened accidentally to find under my eyes a letter of Dorothea's, lying open on our bureau (unexampled heedlessness on Robert's part), the few words which I saw before I knew at what I was looking (for I'm not even familiar with her handwriting) gave me a shock, Margaret, from which I have not recovered. I don't know why it should have been so. Over and over again I tell myself that those words revealed to me nothing I had not really known. But, somehow, they brought the thing home to me, as nothing had yet done.

This is what I read:

“My own Beloved! You and I so vitally near to each other that we are really alone in this wonderful universe—”

That was all I saw when I caught myself up. My face in the glass was deathly white, my eyes startled, horrified. “My own Beloved!” How did she dare? They two “alone together”—I excluded!

Robert must have missed the letter and remembered that he had left it lying out; for an hour after he had gone to the Conservatory, he came home. I was still sitting on the side of the bed, staring at the floor, as I'd been doing ever since my shocked gaze had caught those extraordinary words.

“Robert,” I said to him with lips that would hardly obey my will, “I accidentally saw the first three lines of that letter—no more—the first three lines,” I repeated mechanically. 'She calls you 'Beloved'! You—”

What else I said I don't know, for it seems I fell to the floor in unconsciousness.

Later, I found myself in bed, the doctor sitting with me. The rest of that day and all the next I suffered hideously.

Robert was horribly upset. He never left me for a moment while I was in pain and jeopardy. I felt sorry for his distress, for it didn't, somehow, seem worth while that he should make himself so wretched over me when another woman filled his life.

I told him so the next evening when, white and weak but safe, and free from agony, I lay in my bed and tried to meet and face our mournful situation.

“But, dearest,” he earnestly protested, “my love for you is only purified, more beautiful, through my uplifting relation with her. There is no detail of my life which is not made divine through her.”

I repressed my impulse to ask him at this point whether he had squared with Eliot. He might not have seen the relevancy of the question.

“Did it need her, Robert, to purify and ennoble our love?”

“Dear, every great experience that comes to you or me must enrich our relation to each other.”

“Granted that we may have many, or at least several, inspiring and 'divine' relations in life, one among them must be supreme over the others. Now the 'soul' who is supreme in your life is the one to whom you are really wedded. So, if you and Dorothea feel it necessary to be so 'true to yourselves' that you cannot, for a mere conventionality, turn your backs upon each other, but must welcome each other into your inmost holy of holies—I would humbly inquire, where do I come in?”

“Where you always came in, darling,” he tenderly assured me, “in a very real and vital place in my life.”

“But not the supreme place? Then which one of us is more truly your spiritual wife, I or Dorothea?”

“It is not a difference of degree, dear, but of kind.”

I felt too weak, physically, to hold out in such subtleties of argument as this, so I gave it up and, literally and spiritually, turned my face to the wall.

Let me assure you for your relief that I am entirely recovered from the illness of last week and am now going about my work as usual, both at home and at the Conservatory.

I do a lot of wondering these days as to how Eliot regards this Friendship between Robert and Dorothea. He is a terribly keen observer. Yet even he, I am sure, does not realize the lengths to which it has gone. I have been quite unable to read any signs in his face as to what he thinks of it. He still treats Dorothea with deference. He respects anyone whom he believes in, and no one could be so stupid as not to believe in her. Perhaps he, too, holds to this theory of free spiritual love. But even if he does, I know now that Eliot would always be too unselfish (gruff as he is outwardly) to take any happiness for himself at the expense of another's suffering.

His habitual manner to me, of late, has been grave and kind—even gentle. His keen eyes are on me often, as though he were trying to penetrate my attitude toward the Friendship. But before him and his mother my bearing is a mask.

The other day he happened to join me coming home from the Conservatory, and he took the occasion to tell me a curious thing.

“Do you remember, Edith, my talk with Miss Worthington one evening about an investment of hers, and her inquiry as to whether the concern was 'ethically justifiable'?” and again he guffawed at the bare recollection.

“I remember.”

“Well, the lady is heroic! I think I never really appreciated her until, in a report that came to our bank today, I found that she had taken all of her stock out of that company, thereby losing a little fortune.”

“Then she didn't tell you she had withdrawn?” I asked.

“Not a word from her. She doesn't know that I know.”

“That's the wonder of her,” I said. “I'm afraid if I ever did anything so commendable as that I'd insist upon having credit for it! That's how small-minded I am, Eliot!”

“Are you 'small-minded,' Edith? I hadn't noticed it. You see there is more than one kind of heroism and—anyway,” he broke off abruptly, “Miss Worthington is so wealthy that she can afford to be rather honest. Some poor devils really can't afford to be honest, you know. For myself, if I were starving, I'd steal food.”

I thought that a chance to inquire whether we were “back very much with our board.”

“Robert paid up in full the first of the month,” Eliot cheerfully assured me.

Which information did not give me the comfort it might have done if I had not once heard Eliot affirm that however abhorrent a lie may be it is sometimes the lesser of two evils. Such being his theory, I conclude that he considers his lie the lesser evil, when it is a choice between that and a woman's worrying over debts, who is so near the Valley of the Shadow.

Good night, Margaret, dearest friend.
Edith.

X

Dear Margaret:

At last, after my long, long silence, I am up and about once more and able to write to you. It is “borne in upon me” how differently I would be writing if my darling baby had lived—the mother yearning in me was at such a height of expectancy, my arms ached so to hold that lovely little head on my breast! If you had ever seen me, Margaret, handling those little baby clothes—I can't write of it. I can only tell you that this disappointment is the blackest experience my life has ever known. Oh, Margaret, Robert and I needed the baby! We needed him to save our love, to save our life together. I will admit to you, now, that our child was my last and only hope.

Your faithful letters all the time I was ill were a comfort. They, as nothing else could do, took me out of myself for the time being—made me unconscious, for the moment at least, of the black gloom of my heart.

I suppose you wondered at hearing the news of our loss and my illness from Eliot instead of Robert. I would have asked Robert to write, but he is so procrastinating about such things, and I knew Eliot would attend to it at once, so I asked him to let you know.

No wonder his letter impressed you! What subtle intuition led you to let me see it? It helped me, when I was in dire need of help! How strong, how kind it showed him! How little did I dream, in my first acquaintance with him, that he was capable of such fineness, such unselfishness, such exquisite sympathy! When I read it—for the first time, I could have cried, Margaret.

I'm not yet in a normal physical condition, though I've resumed the housekeeping and my work at the Conservatory. Dorothea had been overdoing in my long absence, so as soon as I was well enough to take her place, she went to her home in Boston for a three weeks' vacation. She's there now.

Robert had suffered so keenly from the strain of my illness, the shock of our loss, and (I must add) my upset nerves that he, too, felt the need of a vacation. It is dreadfully injudicious for them both to be away at the same time; naturally, it occasions more gossip.

When I am stronger, no doubt I shall be less nervous, and less sensitive. The least thing, now, brings tears, and men do hate a weepy woman, don't they? For three days before Robert left, while he was making his preparations, I must confess that I was crying just about all the time. I did not want him to go—I wanted him by me—I did not feel able to bear my grief and disappointment alone—I needed him. When he came to kiss me good-bye, I behaved like a hysterical child, threw myself upon my bed, sobbing! So he stalked out with a stony heart.

Afterwards I felt so ashamed that I had been so uncontrolled. I wrote him that I was sorry he had had the misery of leaving home with rain both indoors and out, for he left in a driving storm.

He had bought a week's ticket to Boston and had assured me that he would be back inside of a week, so I spent the time moping and marking off the seven days on the calendar as they went, heartsick at the slowness of their passing, and longing almost wildly for the Saturday night of his return. Three times during that interminable week I wrote to him. But he must have been too busy to write, or thought it not worth while when he would be back so soon.

Saturday night came at last, and with it a telegram announcing that he would extend his absence another week. It is now nearing the end of the second week. No letter has come, and I have not written again. Perhaps he will stay all the time Dorothea is away, which will be all next week. His work at the Conservatory is needing him.

Last night, for the first time in many months, I touched the piano here in the house. Of course, as always, it presently brought Eliot down from his room.

The silent sympathy of his presence, sitting there near me in the dark, was too much for me in my present state of mind and body. I suddenly broke down and sobbed.

He was at my side in an instant.

“Don't—don't, you poor child!” he plead with me, and the helpless pain of his voice made me try hard to get control of myself, for why should he be made a victim, in any least degree, of this situation of mine and Robert's? So I choked back my sobs and lifted my head.

“My dear,” he said, with a kindness in his grave voice that nearly started me up again, “let me give you a bit of philosophy to tone you up—will you?”

“Oh! Philosophy!” I groaned. “It seems to me to be the root of all evil!”

“Many crimes are committed in its name, I'll admit. If the word 'philosophy' nauseates you—and I don't wonder if it does—let me then give you a fact or two. Little girl, you think you are playing a losing game. But it is they, those two, who are on a wide sea in a leaky craft! You'll see! They're bound to come to grief, as everyone must who dares to steer his course as though no other vessels ploughed the main! Individualism is not the law of life, even of self-preservation. Self-absorbed people, who consider only their own best interests at the expense of another's, make fools of themselves inevitably, simply because life can't be lived in absolute selfishness.”

“But,” I said, wondering, “they think they live by an ideal so much higher than that of most people!”

“But, you know, the highest ground is sometimes a bluff, if you'll let me make a wretched pun. That's their danger. So far 'above the common plane' they aspire, that they can't hear the voices of those 'below.' Isolation is neither wholesome nor safe. We never really learn common sense until we learn self-forgetfulness. Egotists are fools.”

“You call Dorothea, that glorious woman, selfish, an egotist, a fool?”

“She is a glorious woman. Robert himself doesn't admire her more than I do. But she's so insanely self-absorbed that she does not see what is right under her very nose. She searches the heavens with a telescope to find God and blindly walks over another woman's heart in order to do it! But God is not found in that way. Does the conscious search after Him ever reveal Him, I wonder? You, little girl, with your spontaneous giving of yourself, your self-obliteration, self-unconsciousness, if I may coin a word which is the very keynote to your charm—you are nearer 'truth' and God than our lovely Dorothea will ever be until she gets down from her stilts and stops 'aspiring above the common plane.' Here's the difference between you two girls—”

He paused to lay it off on his fingers, and I waited breathlessly. I had always longed to know what he thought of Dorothea.

“She, with her extraordinarily clear and vigorous brain, her really lofty character, true as heaven, womanly and lovable, is introspective to the point of being entirely without interest in anyone else except as that someone else may be a receptacle for her burning outpourings of herself. You, on the other hand, are wide-eyed with interest and sympathy for everyone but yourself. Who that knows you, little woman, isn't moved to make a confidante of you? But who would venture to try it on Dorothea? She'd be bored horribly and show it. Yet her one consuming passion is to pour out herself to an appreciative and responsive listener.”

“You can't mean she isn't deeply 'interested' in Robert?”

“She is not in the least interested in Robert. She doesn't know Robert, has never taken the trouble to know him. Whom does she take the trouble to know except herself? To be sure, she knows herself least of all, for that matter. But has she ever shown the least interest in knowing you, or me, or mother, or the teachers at the Conservatory, or anyone in Williamsburg? As to Robert, he is merely her safety valve. He 'meets and responds' to her, she thinks, poor female! She's made him drunk with the charm of her personality, and he, young fool, thinks he's in love with her philosophy! Her 'philosophy' would be unbearable priggishness in anyone but her. What makes it go down is that the dear girl believes in herself so absolutely that she convinces others. Sincerity like hers would win converts to a belief in anything! And for that matter, she really has got hold of something worth while, or rather, of what will be worth while when she's sifted it down to where it's usable, which it certainly is not in its present form. It's not human! So, child, don't you think for one moment that your life is wrecked. It's you who are safe in port. Let them look out for bumps ahead! If civilization has developed any one truth, if it's not an utter farce (and God knows it's farce enough) the truth it has evolved is that altruism, not individualism, is the law of happiness, of life itself!”

And with that he turned away, with strange abruptness, I thought, and left me. Do you know, sometimes I half imagine that Eliot avoids me.

I fell to pondering his words when he had gone, marveling much at his keenness and insight; for while I could readily understand the shocked minds of conventional people before the carryings on of Robert and Dorothea, I had almost come to believe, as they themselves believe, that they were “soaring above earth's common plane.” Eliot's words certainly gave me food for thought; took me, for a time at least, out of the groove of miserable brooding in which my mind had been moving, almost insanely, ever since the loss of my baby. I think I am getting to look upon Eliot as my salvation!

I have given Robert your address. I do hope he will have time to call to see you.

If you care to call on Dorothea, she is at No. —— Mt. Vernon Street. You couldn't help being immensely impressed with her.

Your loving
Edith.

XI

Dearest Margaret:

I am sorry Robert did not get round to see you while he was in Boston.

I hardly thought you would care to call on Dorothea, though indeed, dear, you would not feel a bit like denouncing her if you knew her. No one does, not even the prim people here who look so askance on her undisguised intimacy with Robert. His patronage at the Conservatory, by the way, has suffered lamentably from his absence, largely, I fear, because he was away while Dorothea was gone.

On the eve of his return, I had a long, loving letter from him, to make his peace with me, he said, for his three weeks' absence, and to make up for his not once before having written to me.

He was not greeted, as his manner seemed to expect, with tears and reproaches. He found me hard at work at my post, outwardly passive, indifferent, while inwardly I was trembling and sick and burning.

To turn from my miserable self a moment—here's exciting news for you! Such a reputation you've gained through your book, Margaret, that our Woman's Club of Williamsburg is going to invite you to come here and address them on, I think, “The Onward and Upward Movement of Woman—Long May She Wave!”—something like that. Of course I've had nothing to do with this, scarcely anyone here knows of my intimacy with you. Since you are so famous, I refrain from speaking of you, it would sound so like bragging!

I'm wild with eagerness at the thought of your coming here, and at least I may have the reflected glory of being your hostess. Let me warn you, dear, they rate you so high, that if you do “address” them, they'll certainly expect you to speak in epigrams! Be warned in time!

I'm wondering what you will think, if you do come, of the great change in me. The face that looks at me out of the glass seems all eyes—albeit, eyes without any light in them. I do look like “War, Pestilence and Famine!”

Oh, Margaret, Margaret! All the suffering of those three weeks of Robert's absence fade into insignificance before the thing that happened to me one night a week ago, a thing so trifling to relate, but scorching my heart with red hot flames.

Mrs. Thurston, president of the large musical club of Williamsburg and an old family friend of the Newbolds, gave a charming dinner last Thursday, and Dorothea, Robert and I were among the guests. I am sure Mrs. Thurston's idea was to put a check to the gossip which is rife, by lending the sanction of her ultra respectability to the friendship of Dorothea and Robert. Not that she herself doesn't violently disapprove of it. She even had the temerity to presume upon long and close intimacy and remonstrate with Robert one day, but his transcendental talk about it so confounded her, I think, that she hasn't recovered yet. And so, like a true friend, what she can't understand or prevent, she tries to cover up or make the best of.

The other guests at that dinner were manifestly astonished, even excited, at finding Dorothea and Robert there—it lent a spice to the “viands,” I assure you!

But the cool greetings, the looks askance which met them at first did not long hold out. You see, Dorothea is so uncommon, so 'way above ordinary people, that merely to meet her and hear her speak is to disarm prejudice and excite admiration and even awe. It was interesting to watch the impression her wonderful personality made.

I could see how proud Robert was of her talk at the table, though he must have known that no one there really grasped her big ideas.

They got to discussing imperialism and patriotism over the salad course, and Dorothea's views were listened to amid a hush that was fairly palpitating.

“The old sentiment of patriotism,” she told them, “necessary when self-defense was the whole life of a nation; when the absence of all the modern means of communication isolated a country so completely that foreigners were always enemies; that old, all-powerful sentiment being no longer a necessity, is therefore no longer possible. In these days of electricity, airships, wireless telegraphy, rapid and easy means of travel, and all the other discoveries and inventions which make of the kingdoms of this earth one nation, the foreigner is now our next door neighbor; our friend, not our foe. Not merely America, but the Universe is my country! Not this king or that, but the Eternal is my Sovereign! Not Imperialism, but universal brotherhood should be the expression of the new, the deeper and truer patriotism that must replace the old narrow provincial sentiment which thrived behind stone walls and fortresses.”

No one spoke for an instant; then Miss Pollock, President of the Minerva Literary Club, quoted impressively:

“Breathes there a man with soul so dead
Who never to himself bath said,
'This is my own, my native land!'

Are we, then, Miss Worthington, no longer to teach our boys and girls that to love their America is a noble sentiment?”

“Let us love our America by all means,” answered Dorothea, “but let us love the Universal Country first—the country which includes all mankind as our brothers.”

“Nations can't be run on such principles!” spoke up our local congressman.

“Then let us do away with nations; their usefulness seems to be spent anyway. Can't you see,” she bent forward in her earnestness to plead her case, her countenance glowing, beautiful, her voice thrilling, “how much more divine our life may be under this higher conception of patriotism? No more wars, no more bickerings about tariffs (the world would be our market and every man free to buy in the cheapest market), no more rivalries, jealousies, suspicions or fears! How much more broadly and fully we should live! This is the expansion we should strive for, an Imperialism of thought, of ideals!”

If silence gave consent, she had been convincing, for no one ventured to refute her, she spoke too like a prophetess and looked too like a goddess!

After dinner a new relay of guests arrived for the evening musical which followed, the music being furnished by Robert, who sang, and our Conservatory violin teacher, who played delightfully. I accompanied some of Robert's songs, Dorothea some, and finally Mrs. Thurston brought forth a song which she herself played for him.

It happened to be that exquisite thing he used to sing to me in those strangely happy days which now seem so to me. It used to be a very Sacrament to both of us when he would sing that song to me!

I think you know the song I mean—that translation of Emil Ritterhauss', “What is Love?”

He sang it that night as of old, with such passion, such deep meaning in his beautiful tones, I was thrilled through and through; hope surged up in my numbed heart. This song, this song could never mean anything to Robert apart from me, else Love were indeed “a trifling jest!”

I thought: “He is telling me in this way that he is mine, that we are not parted, that he does love me!”

I leaned forward, my eyes burning to catch his, when at the line,

“Then God gave thee to me,”

he lifted his eyes to meet—not mine, his shining glance moved past me to Dorothea's rapt gaze and there, during his ecstatic singing of that line, it rested. There it rested, Margaret.

I left this open last night. I'll add a word before mailing it on my way to the Conservatory.

As I remember the rest of that evening at Mrs. Thurston's it seemed like a nightmare to me. I had been so subdued during the dinner, and now I suddenly became so hysterically gay that I could see how the other guests wondered at me.

Even Dorothea and Robert noticed my superfluous vivacity and were perplexed.

When we were leaving, Robert said that we would take Dorothea home, as she had come alone.

But when the three of us started out together, it was in the direction of our house that we turned. I was taken home first, Dorothea walking with us to our door, where I was deposited. Then she and Robert wandered off under the starry night while I went upstairs alone to our room. Alone forevermore, Margaret. It's all over. I see that and bow my head to it. Our love, our life together has all been “a trifling jest,” so grotesque that at moments I could shriek with laughter at the humor of it all!

I've let it all go now—absolutely. I struggle no longer. When one reaches the point of utter hopelessness, one begins to be resigned, you know.

I only knew what a numbing blow I had received when two mornings after that dinner I was able, with scarcely an extra heartbeat, to tell Robert that after serious consideration I had come to a decision to which I knew he would not readily agree, but that his choice lay between that and my going away to earn my own living by teaching music in a Western college where a position was open to me whenever I would take it.

“And this momentous decision?” he inquired with a lift of his brows, his face turning pale at my significantly quiet tone and manner.

“That I be allowed to collect the tuition fees of my department myself, paying my assistant first, then taking an equal salary for myself and turning over to you the rest.”

“And what is this for, may I ask?”

“I must be independent of you, Robert—I am no longer your wife.”

“Nonsense! This is a most unworthy attitude, Edith! You—”

“I will not discuss it, Robert,” I quietly answered. “You can let me have your reply by this evening.”

“Look here, Edith,” he said with white lips, “don't act in such a way that you make our union even more of a dreary failure than it need be!”

“I act in a way to make our union a failure?”

“By vulgarly getting on a high horse about your earnings. If that element has to come in to mar our life together—”

“Our life together, Robert?”

“It certainly will not be together if you keep on like this!”

“Like what?”

“Making 'conditions,' driving bargains and the like. You run the risk of making yourself obnoxious.”

“You have an easy means of ridding yourself of me if I am obnoxious. Refuse my 'conditions,' and I leave at once.”

With that I left the room, afraid to hear what further he might say to me.

So I wait to hear his decision tonight. Perhaps my next letter, Margaret, will be written from Davidson College. It seems probable. But I hope, at least, that I shall still be here when you come to address our Club.

Your loving
Edith.

XII

You see, dear, I did not go away. I think Robert is beginning to be alarmed at the attitude of cold disapproval of many of our friends and patrons. My leaving at this time would simply ruin him. And he knows it. Does it seem strange to you that even at the sacrifice of my pride, yes, of my self-respect, I remain here because I am unwilling to lift a finger to hurt him? And this not from any principles I hold as to my wifely duty. It's my heart that won't let me, Margaret.

I am so relieved that you have declined the invitation to address the Club here, greatly as I long to see you. I'd be so incapable of addressing an audience myself that if you “took to the platform,” I'd feel we hadn't a thing in common.

You ask me how Mrs. Newbold takes all this.

Well, she doesn't, of course, realize the extent of it, shut up as she is in her room. Whatever Robert does is so right in her fond eyes that she would be slow to recognize a relation which, according to her standards, would be so wrong as that existing between him and Dorothea. And she admires Dorothea so much, it's quite impossible for her to associate anything unworthy with her. Why, everyone, even I—yes, even Eliot, I do believe—all of us are moved to show our best before Dorothea and would be ashamed to show anything less than our best. She may be self-deceived; but isn't it often the finest natures that are the easiest prey to self-deception?

Now, I have an extraordinary, a bewildering thing to tell you. Yesterday being Sunday and Robert having gone to his church choir, I had a quiet morning at home and was going to devote it to a letter to you when I had a call, so to speak, at my room, from Eliot. He, by the way, never goes to church, though I have a feeling that inherently he is really very religious.

However, I'm digressing as usual. I was going to say that he came to sit with me for an hour this morning in the bay window of my room, to have a talk with me—a queer talk, as you'll admit.

“I've decided,” he began, coming characteristically straight to his point, “to put a stop, Edith, to this 'divine Friendship,' the spectacle of which has been edifying all of us this winter.”

“Put a stop to it, Eliot?” I questioned in astonishment, my breath coming short. “But how is it possible to interfere?”

“You couldn't, but I can and shall. You've been a wonderful little woman all through this fiery test! You've been—”

He cut himself off sharply, flushing red as he did so, to my puzzled wonder.

“They're making fools of themselves,” he added, “and breaking your heart. The thing must stop.”

“Your separating them,” I answered, my dull voice sounding lifeless to my own ears, as I turned my face away from him to the window, “can't restore anything I've lost, you know. If I had not all along been sure of that, sure of the uselessness of fighting against such a thing—don't you suppose I would have fought for my happiness?”

“You are not the sort of woman, Edith, that a man, even a fellow like Rob, could love lightly. You have a way of getting into one's vitals—well”—he again broke off—“it took a Dorothea to woo him from you! No lesser woman could have done it! When she's out of his reach, he'll turn back to you inevitably.”

I shook my head. “External adjustments can't alter or mend anything essential, Eliot. I'm grateful to you, but I'm sure,” I said hopelessly, “that interference would be both useless and unwise.”

“But I propose to attack internal adjustments. In short, to prove to Dorothea the hollowness of her theory that love is not exclusive; that Robert's loving you, need not exclude her from a place in his heart. We'll put it to the test and prove it false!”

“How? How can you ever convince them?”

“I tell you I'll make her forswear the whole blamed doctrine! Spew it out of her mouth and turn her back on it! When the 'truth' she now holds begins to pinch her (its pinching other people didn't count) she'll 'discover' a higher truth. You'll see!”

“But when and how will you perform this miracle?” I asked, sceptical but interested.

“I begin today,” he promptly replied. “She's not to suspect my hand; you see, I'll take her unawares. In six weeks' time you will see her denying every 'truth' that she and Robert have 'delved out.'”

“Impossible!” I cried. “Why, you don't take her seriously, Eliot!”

Not to take Dorothea seriously seemed to me to ignore facts.

“Do you suppose for one moment,” he demanded, “that I think she's in love with Robert? She's in love with being loved! She adores, not him, but his adoration of her. Oh, she has a lot to discover about herself before she'll have her proper bearings. I'll help her on. You watch me do it! I begin tonight. To make love to her, Edith!”

I stared. “Then you, too, are in love with her?” I asked, dazed. “To be sure, I don't see how you could help being!”

“What I'm going to teach her is that she can't properly love two men at once. You see, I hold that love is exclusive.”

“You are going to try to make her love you?”

“It won't be hard. I've had such opportunities to look on and see how it's done. One must only assume the attitude of an adoring disciple of her philosophy, drink it in thirstily, gratefully—'This, this is what my waiting soul has hungered and thirsted for!' Then to be sure, one must worship the Expounder of the Truth—'It is you, you that have lifted me up—to your own great level! Henceforth I may be godlike—and through you!' It's an easy stunt, Edith!”

“But, Eliot,” I breathed, incredulous that anyone, even he, could think of dealing with Dorothea flippantly, “if, according to her theory, she is free to love you and Robert and every other 'true soul' who 'finds' her, then how your making love to her can change anything—”

“If I don't accept her theory?”

“You mean she will have to choose between you and her theory?”

“Exactly. And what woman ever gave up a live man for a dead, cold theory?”

“Dorothea would go to the stake for her beliefs, Eliot!”

“That she would. But she wouldn't give up a lover for them.”

“A lover? You would not speak so of her if you loved her, or even respected her, I think. And if you don't love her, then you run the risk of hurting her in this experiment of yours!”

“Has she hesitated to hurt you?” he demanded, a sudden flash in his eyes, a thrill in his voice.

“She has not done it ruthlessly, Eliot. For the love of Truth, of a great principle. So she thinks, anyway.”

“For the love of herself! But I shall not hurt her—more than is for her good. Anyway, the very point in her philosophy that she's most insistent about is, that for the sake of Truth we must joyfully meet any suffering the gods may send to us. Stoically has she applied this philosophy to you. Let us see how she will apply it to herself! You question whether I respect her? I solemnly swear to you, Edith, I never respected or admired any woman more. She is splendid! But a more self-deceived young creature never trod our planet.”

“And you really think she will so readily give up Robert and her theory for you?”

“I have the advantage on my side of being marriageable.”

“Dorothea is not vulgarly husband-hunting!”

“There is nothing in this world Dorothea so craves as the experience of love and marriage.”

“She and Robert say that marriage is not essential to love like theirs, though they admit that marriage does make love more complete.”

“Huh!” he scoffed. “'More complete'! Oh, thunder! Look here, Edith, there is no expression of herself that Dorothea does not crave.”

“Eliot,” I protested gravely, “I am almost tempted to tell you that you do not look at their relation from a high plane.”

“It's the plane from which Dorothea will be looking at it six weeks from now.”

“But, then, if she should accept your love, you are prepared to marry her? Or hadn't you faced that contingency?”

“Time enough to settle that when I've shown her the falseness of her theory, the wrong she's doing—you.”

There was something in his tone that gripped my heart and brought a lump to my throat. I could not answer.

But presently, not looking at him, I put a question to him. “And Robert? Where does he come out in all this?”

“At your side, I hope, dear child.”

Again I shook my head without speaking.

“If you think it so hopeless,” he gently asked, “why do you stay on here, Edith? I have wondered at your forbearance!”

“You know,” I answered in a low voice, “what, up to last month, hindered my going. And now, in the midst of this ferment of gossip in the town, if I should go—”

“Robert would be mobbed!” he nodded. “And you'd care so much?”

“As much as I ever could have.”

“And he,” said Eliot bitterly, “would repudiate his own mother if she ceased to be of use to him!”

To me, the cruelty of these words of his was such that I could neither deny nor resent them.

He rose then to leave me. “I wanted you to understand, Edith, before I entered upon my rôle.”

“It all seems very chimerical to me, Eliot. I can't think anything will come of it. Dorothea is too steadfast—”

“We'll see, we'll see.”

“She is nothing if not steadfast,” I maintained. “I'd as lief doubt the Angel Gabriel! And Robert is too deeply—enamored, to let himself be interfered with.”

“We'll try it at least. It's worth trying. It will be immensely interesting, too, psychologically, to see Dorothea's theories, for which she's ready to die the death of a martyr, 'fade into thin air' as soon as they pinch her.”

That's all, Margaret. Tonight he begins, he says, to pay his court to her. I almost envy her the experience. He'll be a strong and a compelling lover, I'm sure. The whole thing is absurd, of course. Eliot will find himself snubbed for his pains. What say you to all this?

Yours always
Edith.

XIII

It's been going on for two weeks, now, Margaret, and is growing exciting! Eliot and I seldom see each other alone, and if we do, we never refer to it by so much as a look. He certainly is doing it as if he meant it. And if he started out only experimentally, he will surely end in earnest, and get himself burnt, so it looks to me.

As for Dorothea! You say you are consumed with curiosity to know how she responds to his advances. I can tell you in a word—she comes straight up to the bait! She couldn't come straighter! I sit and look on, or stare on, rather, as though I were witnessing a weird drama—a Miracle Play!

That very Sunday night after he had talked to me, he took the bull by the horns, as it were, by deliberately going to call on Dorothea while Robert was at church, Eliot's only chance of finding her alone. Robert, of course, as his custom is, arrived at her apartment as soon as church was out, and I can see his astonishment at finding Eliot there! I had an account of it (in substance) from Robert when he came home. Of course I read a lot into what he let drop, and I gathered that Eliot, having “got in his innings,” felt perfectly complacent in staying on after Robert got there, until it grew so late that he and Robert had to leave together.

Robert was in a glow of triumph when he told me about it. “Even cynical old Eliot,” he said, “has been so impressed with the truth that Dorothea and I have found, so uplifted by her ideals, that he actually went to call on her tonight.

“And you ought to have heard them!” he went on enthusiastically. “It was genuinely stimulating, dear. Dorothea was at her best, I never saw her so inspired. Eliot's really vital response to her is so encouraging to her, to us both it so confirms what we feel we have proven in our friendship.”

Two nights later, when Eliot again “sat him out,” here in our own parlor, Robert was a trifle less enthusiastic, but still much “stimulated.”

“You see, dear,” he demonstrated to me that night when we were alone, “how true what I have told you, that marriage, or any other relation of love, need not, must not, shut out for us other vital relations with our fellow men of either sex. If, for example, Eliot and Dorothea should, as seems possible, find each other, how could it in the least degree affect my deep relation with her?”

“What she has to give would be spread out thinner, wouldn't it? It wouldn't be so concentrated.”

“It would be deepened and enriched, Edith,” he protested.

“You couldn't see her alone so often.”

“Our spirits are always together, and shall be to all eternity!”

“How weird!” I said idiotically.

“When two souls have really met, my dear, bodily separation cannot affect their communion. In a room full of people any two who are at one are actually alone together, in vital touch; if even the ocean separated them, they would yet clasp hands spiritually.”

“A sort of wireless,” I suggested facetiously, causing Robert to shrug his shoulders in despair of me and walk out of the room.

Last night Dorothea again dined here; and after dinner, or rather after I had helped Mrs. Newbold to bed, I sat like a figurehead and listened to our guest and Eliot, Robert, meantime, restlessly pacing the floor, a little impatient, manifestly, for his hour alone with her; she, not at all impatient, but absorbed, flushed, radiant in her evidently deeply satisfying intercourse with Eliot.

Eliot's “receptive attitude,” his sitting there before her, rapt, silent, adoring, was certainly not a characteristic “attitude,” as she would have known were she as keen as she is deep, for he is nothing if not positive, aggressive. Her faith, however, in the possibilities of her own special “truth” to work transformations in life and character is supreme. Hence her unbounded, her pathetic credulity. It made me almost indignant with Eliot, though I declare a doubt did assail me as to whether her truth had not really transformed him, in such a deadly solemnity does he, in these days, “move and walk and have his being.”

“A work of art,” Dorothea was saying, “unless it express something universal, if it is a mere bit of local color with no infinite significance, is worthless.”

“I used to feel,” said Eliot humbly, “that even 'a bit of local color' might be grounded in the Absolute, even as the pink hollow of a tiny sea shell or the passing violet cloud at sunset are expressions of the infinite and universal Beauty.”

“Of course, but often our 'local color' stories or pictures are mere photographs, impressed with no spark of imagination, no germ of an uplifting ideal.”

“Yes,” Eliot granted, “too much of our literature is mere photography. And though good photography is useful in its place, it is not, as you say, imaginative art.”

“And the art that does not speak to us with high purpose from the very heavens,” said Dorothea, “is unworthy, even as the life is unworthy that is not built upon absolute ideals.”

“It seemed to me when I first knew you,” said Eliot musingly, “that your standards were too high 'for human nature's daily food.' But now—well, you've inspired me to meet your high challenge, Dorothea. I accept it.”

He leaned forward, holding out his firm, well shaped hand, and Dorothea, glowing, laid her own in his, and their eyes met for an instant solemnly.

I looked on in wonder, incredulous that he could be acting a part. I am not sure, now, that he didn't mean it.

“The daily food that human nature needs is just that,” she said; “nothing less than the infinite! Our souls starve on any other daily food. It alone gives life meaning and value. I wish,” she went on, leaning back again in her chair and wearing her most prophetlike countenance, “that I might give you each day, my friend, just a word that could illumine that day for you so that you might live it with the stimulating consciousness that whatever you have known of spiritual heroism in the most exalted lives may be in your life—and in mine!”

Eliot rose impetuously and moved to her side.

“Let us go out—into the open! Come and walk with me under the stars! I must have infinite space about me when I talk with you!”

She rose at once, a flash of joy in the eyes she lifted to his. Instinctively, Robert's hand went out to stay her as in his restless walking about the room he reached her side.

“Dorothea! Our hour alone together?” he asked in a low tone. “What becomes of it?”

“You are always with me, Robert—always,” she answered with gentle earnestness, laying her hand on his and looking up at him with a gaze that he returned adoringly, but with eager protest against her withdrawal.

“Robert,” I heard her answer his look, unmindful of me, no doubt entirely forgetful of my presence, “if you would live up to the truth we know—you and I—you must gladly see me go forth to the spiritual refreshment of communion with another true soul.”

“Yes, Dorothea—I know—I do.”

But I watched his white, pained face as Eliot followed her out of the room to the hall, and, Margaret, his suffering smote me miserably. I knew what he was feeling—had I not drunk full deep of this cup? I could not bear to see it at his lips! Yes, I know that by all that has been writ in prose or line of a woman's jealous love, I should have triumphed in this just retribution of his; exulted in his pain, who had so ruthlessly dealt just such pangs to me! Did I, then, not truly love him, if all that I felt now was a fierce motherly pity at sight of his suffering, a passionate indignation against those who selfishly inflicted it?

With sudden resolution, I rose and followed them out to the hall, where Eliot was helping Dorothea on with her long fur cloak. I stepped in front of her and spoke.

“Robert will be so bitterly disappointed, Dorothea, if he loses his evening with you.”

“That would be an unworthy attitude, Edith, dear, for Robert to take toward our Friendship,” she gravely, sweetly replied.

I looked into the face of this woman who professed to love my husband so much more “divinely” and deeply than I did, searching in vain for the compassion which wrung the heart of his rejected and slighted wife. Her radiant, uplifted countenance betrayed only her ecstasy in the absorbing, satisfying new interest that had come to her through Eliot's full and wonderful “response” to her.

I turned to Eliot. “Don't!” I said wretchedly. “Don't hurt Robert like this! How can you be so pitiless, Eliot?”

“Pity the man whom I leave with you?” he retorted almost roughly, and turning away from me, opened the door for Dorothea.

They went out together.

Now, Margaret, what do you make of this anomaly of a man?

Edith.

XIV

The atmosphere of our small circle is electric, dear Margaret! I nearly go mad trying to read the signs. Eliot's grave mien is a mask that I cannot penetrate. Robert's suffering is so real that even Eliot is touched by it, and his mother tries to make him take pills. Dorothea seems to be the only happy one among us, but she is so happy, so triumphant (what greater glory hath a woman than the knowledge that she is loved by a strong man?) that she makes up for the gravity of all the rest of us.

 

The above I wrote a week ago and meantime—Oh, meantime! For seven days Eliot has gone about with the pallor and the solemnity of a Hamlet; Robert with a ray of hope in his lifeless eyes; and Dorothea! Well, Margaret, if ever a soul was in hell, Dorothea has been there in this past week. Never have I seen so sudden, so shocking a change in the whole aspect and bearing of anyone. She looks like a martyr before the Inquisition. I could never wish a hated enemy to suffer what she is evidently suffering.

Robert, before going out to choir rehearsal tonight, was so overcharged with his mingled triumph and anxiety that he could not repress himself, but let out to me what it is that is making him take heart, while at the same time it is torturing Dorothea and blanching Eliot's somber countenance.

“It did seem to me from the first, Edith,” he began, “quite incredible that a brusque, conceited fellow like Eliot should have so 'lost himself' as really to have found and met a soul like Dorothea. I always felt that his was a nature not fine enough to meet hers vitally. Still, he did seem so receptive, so responsive, that he deceived not only Dorothea and me, but even himself. He thought that he and Dorothea were at one. He even went so far as to agree with her that the Universe had united them in the love that leads to marriage—”

“Agree with her?” I questioned. “She proposed, then?”

“'Proposed'!” he repeated with scorn for my persistently prosaic way of looking at high things. “It was she who first suggested—well, marriage, yes—and Eliot, after going so far as to admit that he thought the Universe had united him and her so vitally as to justify marriage—indeed, as to make marriage, as she said, imperative—turns about and queers himself—eh, I mean denies, virtually, the great truth he thought he held in common with her, by insisting that he, by the way, considered love to be exclusive; that he could not dream of marrying a woman who 'loved another man' and that man married; that she must of course make her choice between him and me. Poor Dorothea! It has been a frightful shock to her to learn that after all his seeming devotion to the loftiest ideals in thought and life, he should be so hopelessly commonplace! She has, of course, tried to make him see the falsity of his attitude, and what an impossible condition he makes to their union. But would you believe it? He is perfectly obdurate! He sticks right to it that he will share her love with none; that she must make her choice, or he will go out of her life forever. I have tried to show her, in her deep disappointment in him, how unworthy he is of her, if, after having all this time basked under her influence, he can still hold to and insist upon such crude ideas and principles! But she clings to a raft of hope that she may yet bring him to a more fundamental understanding of what love really is to those who ground it in the Absolute. He never will see, though, I know him too well! His ideal of love!” he repeated scornfully. “It's that of the vaudeville stage!”

I wondered whether poor Robert was speaking the truth more nearly than he dreamed!

“If it is only 'union in the Absolute' that constitutes love,” I humbly inquired, “why, then, when Dorothea sees that Eliot is so hopelessly far from her in that which alone unites two souls, does she not cease to love? Why does she suffer just as we 'commonplace' people do when 'disappointed in love,' as they say on the vaudeville stage?”

“Who would not suffer in such a shock as she has undergone, having believed her own high truth confirmed by another soul's vision of the same light, only to find that that other soul was all the time immersed in dense materialism?”

“When you suffered—and when I suffered,” I added in a low voice, “Dorothea said that suffering was not possible on the plane of the gods; that we suffered because we were 'unworthy,' 'blind,' 'living on a low plane.' I'm beginning to think, Robert, that she isn't consistent.”

“For the time being, her serenity is disturbed,” he gravely admitted. “She will of course quickly recover herself. You see, Edith, Dorothea had found such happiness in her supposed love for Eliot that she cannot give it up without a struggle to keep it! But,” he added confidently, “she will conquer, and soon. And then—”

He checked his exuberant hopefulness, came to my side and kissed me tenderly.

“Dear little girl, this talk with you has comforted me a lot! You are a good child—even if you are a little Philistine!”

With another kiss he left me, and went away to his evening's work.

And now—will she yield to Eliot's condition, or “stand by her guns”? Robert, I can see, hasn't an instant's doubt of her. It seems impossible to doubt Dorothea's strength and loyalty. If the lover were a lesser man than Eliot, I should have all Robert's confidence. But to give up the love of a man like Eliot for a theory—well, that, too, seems impossible. So there you are.

Your loving
Edith.

XV

Dearest Margaret:

Four more days we had of Dorothea's distraught aspect of woe, and then one afternoon Robert, looking more like a dead man than himself, came to me in my room and handed me a letter.

“Read it!” he hoarsely commanded me; and while he sat huddled in an armchair before the fire, I read. The letter was addressed to him and it was from Dorothea.

Here it is:

 

“I write to you tonight, the last time I shall ever write to you, to repudiate you; to deny the 'truth' we thought we had found together; to tell you that at last my eyes are open to the horrible wrong I have been doing. My love for Eliot has revealed to me many things to which I was blind and deaf. I cannot forgive myself for the bitter mistakes which I made in my blindness, but neither can I forgive you, who, being a man and married, must have known in your heart all along what Eliot has made me see—how wholly wrong our relation of closest intimacy was—what a wrong to your wife; what a menace to me, an unsuspicious, inexperienced maiden; what a danger to you. All this you must have known, yet you led me on. When I think how you have dared to kiss me; how you persuaded me of the absolute rightness and purity and spirituality of that expression (which none but your wife should have received from you) my indignation burns me! Almost had you made it impossible for me ever to know this great happiness which I am about to realize in my marriage. What right had you to deceive me so, in my youth and inexperience?

“I must do you the justice to admit that you, too, were self-deceived. But you had less excuse for being so, and it is only the miserable weakness of your character that made such self-deception possible in your case.

“All my life long I must carry with me the memory of my most unjustifiable relation with you. It is only by absolutely repudiating it that I can convince Eliot of my deep and earnest realization of its wrong, and atone to him for the blot on the soul of the woman to whom he gives his strong and manly love.

“If you were not his brother, I should wish never again to see your face. As it is, I shall hope, after a time, to feel more tolerant toward the great wrong you have done me.

“Dorothea Worthington.”

 

Twice, Margaret, I read it over—this unbelievable epistle—before I ventured to lift my eyes to Robert huddled in the chair before the fire. If Dorothea could at that moment have looked upon her work. But no, it would only have met her scorn. “Miserable weakness” she would have called his abject misery, impatient as she always is with anything that makes for her own discomfort. Robert did look the wreck of himself, all his manhood gone out of him in his utter humiliation and anguish.

“Ruthless, cruel, selfish woman!” I gasped when I could find speech. “You led her on, she tells you, when every glance of her eyes, every tone of her voice invites, entices, enthralls both men and women! when nothing is sacred enough to be safe from her pitiless selfishness! No sacrifice too great for others to make for her! Oh,” I cried out, “she leads everyone by the nose whom she cares to, and she talks of your leading her on! Why,” I exclaimed, walking about the room in my excitement, “it is even possible that she does love Eliot, since for the first time in her life she's been led instead of leading—for the first time found a master. Maybe she actually does love him! No,” I changed my mind, “she is incapable of loving anyone more than she loves herself—incapable of it!”

I went to Robert and put my hands on his shoulders. He looked so strange, I was frightened.

“Robert! Don't take it like this! You must not; you will be ill! Rouse yourself, be a man and meet it—make her ashamed of this letter!”

“Edith,” he whispered hoarsely, “get on your hat and coat and come with me. I can't go alone! Come with me to her. You tell her how mistaken she is, how wrongly Eliot (curse him!) has persuaded her to forswear all that was so sacred to her and me. Tell her of your acquiescence, then she cannot think of our relation in the gross way that Eliot has led her to think, poisoning her pure mind with his base materialism! How could she be so misled?” he cried out in his misery. “Will you come, Edith? Will you do this for me?”

I would have done any fool thing to quiet him, so wild he looked.

“At least we will go out for a walk, Robert,” I answered soothingly, feeling as though I were dealing with a demented person that must be humored.

It was four o'clock, and the afternoon, though cold even for February, was so fair that about everyone we knew was on the street. I saw how curiously people stared at us. We are not often seen anywhere together these days, and Robert looked so strange.

To my distress, I found I could not dissuade him from his purpose to go to Dorothea. There was something so abnormal about him that I dared not leave him, and impossible as it seemed to me to do it, I just had to go with him. And indeed, by the time we reached her apartment, I was actually glad of a shelter from curious eyes.

Dorothea herself opened the door to us.

I expected to find, now that her struggle was over and her choice made, that her distraught and pallid aspect of the past two weeks would have changed to her old radiance; that she would be ecstatic, triumphant in the prospect of her marriage with the man she now thought she loved.

But to my bewilderment, Robert himself did not appear more grief-stricken than did she with her white, drawn lips and wild, haggard eyes.

As her glance fell upon Robert, she reared like a spirited horse. “You—you dare to come here—after my letter?”

Robert, his eyes fixed upon hers, staggered past her into the room.

“I think he doesn't quite know what he is doing,” I whispered fearfully to her. “I had to come with him, I was afraid to let him be alone.”

She stepped aside to let me come in, then closed the door. I turned around—to find myself face to face with Eliot standing in the middle of the floor!

He was white to the lips, yet I could see that he only, among us all, had himself in hand.

There we stood, the four of us—Robert panting as though he had been running a race, and glaring at his brother with such a look of hate that my very soul turned sick to see it; Dorothea leaning against the closed door, her hands hanging clasped in front of her; I a few feet from her at Robert's side; and Eliot in the middle of the room.

It was to Eliot that the rest of us looked, who had wrought all this havoc!

“See, Eliot, what you have done!” I cried as I laid my hand on Robert's.

“The fate of the meddler always!” he admitted bitterly. “And the road to hell is paved with good intentions! Try to save another from the mire and you only push him deeper in and fall in yourself! You can't live another's life for him! Not philanthropy, but mind-your-own-business, shall be my rôle hereafter!”

“Shut up your canting moralizing!” cried Robert, his voice hoarse and unnatural. “This devilish work of yours you'll undo, or by God, I'll shoot you! You marry her! You're not fit to touch her beautiful hands! Dorothea!” he turned beseechingly to her, “you are mistaken, you are blinded! Edith herself acquiesces in our—”

“Edith would agree to anything, Robert, when she sees you in misery like this.” Eliot's tone was all compassion. “Because she never thinks of herself. It was for that reason that I had to think for her, to protect her from your cruel selfishness, Rob, yours and”—he added gravely, reluctantly—“Dorothea's! I've made a horrible mess of it. I'd better have let things take their course! But I could not look on and see Edith wronged, so unhappy, while you two flaunted your ecstasy. Just try to realize—both of you—that all you are suffering now, she suffered; and your unhappiness, unlike hers, comes from your own wrongdoing, your absorption in yourselves at the expense of another whom you had no right to sacrifice!'

“What do you mean?” demanded Robert. “You speak in that schoolmaster tone to her—to Dorothea—to the woman you are going to marry!”

Eliot turned white; Dorothea's lips twitched, and for a moment there was silence. Then at last Dorothea spoke.

“He is not going to marry me.”

“Why? Why?” demanded Robert, a gleam of hope in his wild eyes. “You do not love him, then, Dorothea? You realize his unworthiness, his—”

“I love him. He sought, or I thought he sought, my love, and he won it—and now—he forswears it all!”

Robert looked from her to his brother, bewildered, dazed. “He forswears it!”

“My whole purpose,” Eliot tried to explain, “was to show to both of you how hollow were your professions and theories. I have accomplished it, but I took an inexcusable means of doing it. I see that now—for, Dorothea,” he turned to her, his voice deep with feeling, “the man doesn't live who wouldn't prefer to make you happy rather than cause you pain.”

“Did you expect to accomplish it without causing me pain, and by such means?” she bitterly inquired.

“No, I did not. But I knew how strong you were, and life's lessons are learned only through travail. What I did not foresee was that you would care like this, as you do,” he said miserably; “and that Robert would be reduced to this pass. But let both of you bear in mind, you are only suffering what you made Edith suffer.”

“But what in Heaven's name!” cried Robert. “You to refuse the gift of the gods—Dorothea's love!”

“I do not refuse her love. I have always cared for her. So has my mother. So do all her pupils. So does everyone who knows her. Even Edith doesn't hate her—such grace is Dorothea's to win all hearts. But—the gods forgive me—I've never been in love with her!”

“And you had the presumption,” demanded Robert, “to deceive her into thinking you were?”

“As she deceived you and herself. In my case, to be sure, the deception was with deliberate intent.”

“And was therefore brutal!” breathed Dorothea.

“Not quite so brutal,” he gently protested, “as your own ruthless infliction of pain upon Edith, for I did it for the sake of truth and right (which you and Robert value so highly), while you did it in an abandoned self-seeking. You have admitted as much to me, Dorothea, to me and to Robert.”

“I admit it. But couldn't you have brought me to see the truth and the right without humiliating me like this—without bringing me to the very dust?”

“I attacked your one vulnerable, albeit lovable, spot, Dorothea, your love of being loved. There was no other approach open, I knew that. If I had tried convincing you through any other avenue than your—your self-love, Dorothea (forgive me!), you would only have pitied my 'low plane of thought,' and gone on in your own way.”

“What wonderful insight into my character!” she said, her lips scornful, but her eyes anguished.

“Is this present ordeal too great a price to pay, Dorothea, for redemption from such grave errors?” he earnestly asked her.

Her face dropped into her hands and her shoulders shook. Eliot made a movement to her side, but Robert, flinging off my hand, was there before him, his arm about her, imploring her to turn to him in her strait, who was wholly and forever hers, but she broke from him with a shudder of repulsion which even he, frenzied as he was, could not fail to understand. He staggered back under it, his face ashen.

“You will answer to me for this!” he turned upon Eliot; “for your injury to her and to me! If it were not for your damnable interference—”

“Stop!” Dorothea commanded him. “Eliot is right—I never loved you—I only loved your devotion and what I thought it gave me of the highest and noblest in life. I was pitiably deluded. Perhaps some day I may feel thankful to Eliot for this bitter lesson—but now—”

Then she stopped—her bosom heaving. She turned her white face to me, and coming to me, took my hands in hers, gazing at me with such a look of heartache and despair that my own heart seemed filled with her woe.

“I can't ask or expect you to forgive me, Edith. I have wronged you too deeply. And yet—you, the wronged one, are not the one to be pitied. You have no cause for shame and bitter regret. It is you who have lived in the heights, while I, a selfish fool, have been half scorning your commonplaceness! Oh, Edith, it is you who are favored of the gods! If you only knew—”

“Dorothea!” Eliot spoke her name in a low warning voice.

She stopped; her head drooped, her lips quivered and noiseless sobs seemed fairly to rend her.

Then suddenly, with one quick movement, she had gone from the room.

With a cry like an animal's, Robert sprang toward Eliot. But I was between them and, white with terror, I clung to my husband to hold him back. He tried to thrust me off, but I clung with all my strength and almost screamed to Eliot to go.

“Robert is not responsible! Go, go! I have known all afternoon that he was beside himself!”

“Leave you here alone with a madman?”

Before I could think, he had seized Robert's arms and had pinioned them at his back.

“Telephone for a taxicab,” he ordered me. “In the hall!”

I heard them wrestling while in agony I stood at the telephone. When, after a minute, I returned to the room, Robert was lying back, white and weak, in a big chair, and Eliot was at his side, his hand on his shoulder.

In a few moments we were all three on our way home.

All this occurred this afternoon, Margaret. It is now eleven o'clock. Robert is in bed, ill and prostrated. Heaven knows what strange tidings I may soon be sending to you!

Edith.

XVI

Dear Margaret:

We are in deep trouble. Robert was taken last Thursday to the Lansdale Sanitarium to be treated for a complete nervous breakdown.

Dorothea has resigned. I have the sole management of the Conservatory, Eliot helping me wherever my knowledge of business is wanting.

Mrs. Newbold's anxiety and distress about Robert have greatly prostrated her. In this state of affairs you will understand my not writing often or at length. My hands are full.

Eliot is dreadfully cast down because of Robert, yet he cannot justly reproach himself.

As for Dorothea, Eliot himself says he knows that she will soon rally and find consolation for herself; that she can't stand being long without the stimulus of a love affair in her life.

“To be sure, I shall sleep more peacefully when I hear of her betrothal,” he admits.

One day before poor Robert was taken away, he said to me: “If you, Edith, had ever really loved me, you would have killed Dorothea! You couldn't have cared for me!”

“I never felt inclined to kill Dorothea, if that's any proof that I couldn't have loved you.”

“But you certainly did love me,” he affirmed perversely. “So why did you bear it so quietly when she came between us? You see, now, that she did come between us, Edith? I see many things now!” He was looking at me furtively, curiously. “You did love me, you know, Edith.”

“Yes, Robert.”

“And now?”

“When you are breaking your heart for another woman?”

“What fools men are!” he said bitterly. “You did love me—with all your soul, and she does not care what I bear for her sake, or what becomes of me. And for her I have lost you.”

I went to him. “You have not lost me. I am with you.”

“And your heart—is that with me?”

“When yours belongs to her, Robert?”

He sighed and gave it up.

Just now, my daily letters to him at the Sanitarium, my care of his poor mother, the housekeeping and the Conservatory, together with my anxiety, even dread, about Robert, for he is in a very abnormal state of mind and nerves—all this takes so much out of me that by the end of each day I'm limp with fatigue. If I do not write, you'll know there is no change in present conditions.

Your loving
Edith.

XVII

Dear Margaret:

Your letters have comforted me—to the extent, at least, that it is sweet to know you are feeling with me in this terrible time of horror and blackness. Oh, Margaret, that my happy marriage should end in such a tragedy as this!

We have succeeded in concealing from Mrs. Newbold that Robert took his own life. It would kill her to know that.

I am staying on here because I cannot leave her, she clings to me so pitifully. I keep right on with the Conservatory and it prospers.

Eliot seems turned to stone with the shock and horror of Robert's death.

In the face of this awful thing that has come to us, I ask myself why do women want to bring children into the world? No mother could have had greater pride and satisfaction in a son than Mrs. Newbold had in Robert—and it has ended like this!

I find I can't write yet, Margaret. Give me time.

Edith.

XVIII

(Five months later.)

The gloom of this house is so dreadful that I must take refuge from it in an occasional talk with you, dear, though I fear I only communicate our sadness, and I would be loth to do that—very loth indeed to cast any least shadow upon the great happiness that has come to you, my dear, in your betrothal to that splendid man, one of the rare men of this planet, to whose keeping I, who love you so, can commit you with such perfect trust and confidence! I am so deeply glad for you, Margaret. In spite of my own tragic experiences, I am not cynical, but only hopeful of all good for you. Eliot says the gods give us all the happiness we are capable of and ready for. If that be true, what blessedness should be yours!

Mrs. Newbold is failing rapidly. Eliot's affection for her is so strong, it is pathetic to see how desperately he tries to hold her back.

When her end comes (and we all know her time is short) of course I shall have to go away, at least from this house if not from the town.

My future looks even more blank and dreary to me than the present.

But I must not write in this vein to you, at this most precious time of all your life.

With my blessing, Margaret,

Your faithful and loving
Edith.

XIX

(Four months later.)

Dear Margaret:

I am thankful to tell you that Mrs. Newbold's end was without a struggle and altogether peaceful. For Eliot's sake I was so thankful for that.

Eliot is very sad, very subdued, for his love for his mother was not only filial, her dependence upon him through so many years of her widowhood has made him feel almost a paternal care for her. And one who has been cared for in that way leaves such an empty place.

His mother's sister is still here and will remain indefinitely. Meantime, as I shall keep on with the Conservatory, I am preparing to go to a boarding-house at once.

I wrote so far last night. It is now five o'clock in the morning, the household is asleep and I, too wakeful to lie in bed, am sitting up in bathrobe and slippers writing to you—to tell you, dear, that since writing the above, my world has, all in a few hours, become transformed for me; that no longer is my future a dead blank; my days a frenzied rush of work to induce forgetfulness; my heart almost broken with loneliness!

Last night, as I sat writing to you in the sitting room, Eliot came to me there and sat with me before the cosy open fire.

I felt in every nerve of me how this room was haunted for him; what pain it was to him to come into it at all, and I wondered what had brought him to me here. For, Margaret, in all these days since Robert's death, my relations with him have been so formal, more so than when Robert lived, that I knew it was not a mere offhand desire to sit and talk with me, but some definite purpose that had brought him.

“You are packing up to leave, are you?” he began, and I thought: his tone so cold and brusque that I would have been a bit hurt but that I felt there was no room in his heart, just now in his grief, for me and my affairs, and that his coming to me to speak of my going was merely a perfunctory kindness. So I was not prepared for the breaking of the flood in such a torrent as it came upon me.

“To leave me?” he went on. “And you thought that I would let you go without making the fight of my life to keep you by me!”

He turned suddenly and clasped my hands, and his eyes held mine with a look which made me realize that he was, all at once after months of self-restraint, letting himself go in a headlong tide of emotion, passion, what you will.

I had long known that if love ever did come to Eliot, it would be a life and death issue; but it had not seemed possible that so slight a creature as I could call forth the sort of love I felt he was capable of.

“To keep you by me, Edith, for the rest of your life! God knows I've been patient waiting for the time to ripen when I might hope for you; determined not to destroy my one chance of a satisfying happiness by prematurely thrusting upon you an unwelcome and undesired love! God knows what it has cost me to hold myself in check all these months, when every drop of blood in me has cried out for you! You—the only woman to whom I ever gave a serious thought. Now—have I been so hard with myself for nothing? Or”—he asked, or rather demanded of me, his suddenly unrestrained feeling fairly leaping out to me from his shining countenance—“have I earned you, Edith?”

I felt dazed with the suddenness, the dazzling brightness of the light he had so unexpectedly turned upon my gloom.

“You love me, Eliot?” I stupidly inquired. “And have loved me for a long time?”

“Edith, haven't you known it? Can it be possible that the rein I've kept upon myself has concealed from you what you are to me?”

“I have known you were fond of me, because you have been so good to me. But that you loved me—”

“From the first hour, Edith, that I knew you, I think you held me in the hollow of your hand. From the day you entered this house, little as you dreamed of it, I felt your charm utterly—yes, as absolutely as I feel it now!”

“Oh, not from the first—you forget. Don't you know what a bear you were to me at first?”

“Of course I didn't believe in you at first, and I thought the almost uncanny fascination you had for me was only a skin-deep attraction, which would depart as soon as I had proved you to be like all other girls, shallow, selfish, vain and self-conscious. But, as from day to day I came to know you here in our home, I realized more and more the reality of that charm of yours, the deep, the fundamental attraction you had for me! Do you remember I once told you your playing had distinction; a unique quality all its own; that it seemed to me to express the very essence of womanliness? That's because, Edith, it expresses yourself—and you are wholly womanly! Your presence here in our home transformed it into a real home for my soul, Edith. All day long at my work, my heart was singing a Te Deum of thankfulness for you, though you were not mine and I never dreamed you ever could be. 'This weary old planet isn't half bad after all,' I used to say to myself, when every now and then in the midst of my work it would suddenly flash upon me that this world in which I lived held Edith—Edith—that in a few hours I would be in the same house with her; in the same room; seated at table with her; hear her voice; her droll talk; her sweet laugh; look, once in a while, into her wide, dark eyes! It was enough happiness—since I could not have all— And now the time has come when I may hope for all?”

If this were a novel instead of a letter, or if it were about anyone but myself, I might describe for you here a very thrilling love scene, my friend. But seeing that I myself am the heroine of the episode I am recording, decency requires that I shall conclude as you and I used to end up the stories we wrote in our first teens, “Suffice it to say that they—and so forth.”

But seriously, and to return, suffice it to say that such wooing as Eliot's would, I think, have quickly won a less susceptible heart than mine, even if I had not already, as I think you must long ago have guessed, found in him all that my first love left unsatisfied and disappointed. “When half-gods go, the gods arrive,” you know, and that stands for these two loves of my life. Such a rock of strength Eliot is to my weakness, Margaret! Such a haven after the storms I have weathered! It is true, as he says, that I am the only woman to whom he ever gave a thought, and I trust his constancy as I know of my own. I am happy, dear—so deeply happy! I who had thought, through so many dark months, that all joy was over forever for me! I know how glad you will be for me, how this news will add a ray of brightness to the glory of your own great love!

Your transformed
Edith.