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Title: Wind of destiny
Author: Sara Lindsay Coleman
Release date: November 7, 2024 [eBook #74696]
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Doubleday, Page & Company
Credits: Mary Glenn Krause, Branka P and the Online Distributed
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WIND OF
DESTINY ***
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.
THIS EDITION IS LIMITED TO ONE HUNDRED AND
TWENTY-FIVE COPIES, OF WHICH THIS IS

NO.——
WIND OF DESTINY
WIND OF DESTINY
BY
SARA LINDSAY COLEMAN

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1916
 Copyright, 1916, by
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
All rights reserved, including that of
translation into foreign languages,
including the Scandinavian
 FOREWORD
The letters in this story are real letters. I know this because they were
written to me by the man the world knows as O. Henry, author, and only as
the author. Not half a dozen people knew the real Sydney Porter, and the
man was greater than the author.
There are other letters which are mine own, and no other eyes shall see
them. But the letters in this book were not written to me as a woman, but
rather to the little girl of his memory who lived next door to him in the
street of Yesterday.
The background for the letters is pure fiction. Maybe I have let more of
myself creep into this tale than I had planned. If this be true, the reason is
that my whole thought centred upon revealing Sydney Porter to the lovers
of O. HENRY.
SARA LINDSAY COLEMAN.
WIND OF DESTINY
 WIND OF DESTINY
August 5th.
Saturday Morning.
I think from the day Dicky left us I have been waiting with bated breath
for this letter. Ghost of our great, great, great-grandfather who lies in the old
cemetery at Lexington, Virginia! Dicky has been answering a “Personal” in
the New York Herald.
“Of course you won’t understand, Caroline,” she writes me. “There never
was a day in your life when you would have understood. Books are people
to you. You live placidly in that dull little mountain town, and when your
time comes you’ll die there placidly. Had you been Eve the angel with the
flaming sword would never have had the unpleasant duty of driving you
out. You to tempt a man! You’re like that coldly beautiful statue Pygmalion
fashioned. She waked to life, but you never will. I wonder why I tell you,
Caroline. The probationers in this hospital—probably in all big city
hospitals—are made to feel like the dirt under foot—if there was under foot
any good honest earth-dirt. Every time her betters pass her she’s got to paste
herself against the wall, and all the inmates of the hospital are her betters.
There are some nice young doctors—but it is against discipline for her to
speak to them. If she does the older nurses punish her with extra work. Last
night, after a hard day, I walked on the Avenue—we are just a block away
—and one of the beautiful doors opened just like enchantment, thrown back
by a liveried servant. An old, old man came out. Perhaps it would have been
different if youth and beauty had floated out. All that was his seemed so
wasted. It was just the youth in me, I suppose, that was so fierce at life and
its injustices. The lights down the Avenue beckoned and beckoned. I wanted
to follow them. The distance was swallowing the old man in his car. Just for
once in my life I wanted a taste of the city at night; I wanted to forget the
groans of the sick and dying. You’ve never been a prune, and a potato, and
a slice of bread. Try it, Caroline. I, who used to be Henrietta Dickenson, am
now one thousand four hundred prunes. I am one thousand and ninety-five
potatoes. I spare you the slices of bread. If you think I exaggerate make the
count yourself. Prunes four times a week—five of them to a saucer.
Potatoes each meal—meals three per day. Potatoes, prunes, and bread—
plain, common food—maybe that’s why I have done such a common thing.
 “I turned off the Avenue. At a news stand I picked up the Herald. ‘You
don’t want that. You want an evening paper,’ the boy said. Fate or the boy, I
know not which, I took the Herald. The ‘ad’ I answered says the man is
lonely; that he wants an attractive woman friend. The ‘ad’ was signed
Telemachus. His letter fairly scintillated. I answered. He wrote again. Now
he asks for a meeting. But the letter is oh, so chivalrous, so witty, so
wonderful, Caroline. And there’s a reticence, an impersonal note in it that
piques a woman’s fancy, stirs her imagination——
“I am leaving the hospital now. It is dusk—the time to meet the hero of
one’s adventure. The place of meeting is not far away. It is only a few
blocks down Madison from the hospital. I have stolen out in a gypsy dress
that I wore at the hospital dance. I have thrown a long dark cloak about me.
In the twilight I shall escape—not be snatched up and sent to Bellevue.
Don’t worry, Caroline.”
Don’t worry! Since the day Dicky became our child (mother’s sister’s
only child, a little wailing thing three days old and orphaned of her own
mother) I have worried. Now my heart clutches with fear as it clutched the
day, now a year past, when Dicky threw into our quiet midst the bomb of
her determination to go away from us. Nineteen-year-old Dicky alone in the
great city of New York. Our guarded and treasured lambkin thrown into the
mouths of wolves. A trained nurse! Under discipline! Dicky, the free, gypsy
child of our hearts.
We, poor dear old mammy and I, register Dicky’s emotions as faithfully
as a trusted thermometer. That Dicky should have to rise with the sun, and,
having risen, have to put her own room in order. That Dicky must be silent
in the presence of her superiors. It sounds like the court of King James,
anyway, and not free America—not that the court of any king would awe
Dicky.
Once, before we came to live in the mountains, when Dicky was six, we
paid a visit to grandmother. Dicky left a saucer of cottage cheese untasted at
her plate. Next morning at breakfast it was there, at dinner, at tea. I saw
when we went in to tea that the child’s endurance of the saucer of cheese
had been reached, and my coward teeth chattered in terror—grandmother
had attempted to discipline the child before—the result being that for three
interminable days Dicky had appeared at meals, brought down in the arms
of grandmother’s old coloured butler, robbed of her clothes and dressed in a
royal defiance and a flannel nightgown. Dicky lifted the offending cheese
daintily. She didn’t look at me or at grandmother. She spoke to old
Benjamin, and she was as perfectly poised and dignified as a little duchess.
“Take it away, please,” she said; “it’s spoiled.”
“Her mar’s dead, an’ yore mar’s dead,” mammy said one morning as I
hurried away to my school teaching; “if you an’ Mr. John can’t an’ won’t
do nothin’ to save the child from ruin, mammy will.”
I came home the day of mammy’s disciplining of Dicky to find the child
digging up the lawn. If we do live in the heart of the Blue Ridge hills I cling
to a remembered civilization—the front yard is the lawn. Gypsy curls
blowing, gypsy eyes flashing, Dicky with each tiny upflung spade of dirt
was shrieking (she couldn’t have been more than seven), “Mr. Devil, Mr.
Devil, can you hear? I’m going to keep on digging till I get close enough
and you can hear. I want you to shovel mammy into your hot fire and burn
her up.”
I picked Dicky up that day and kissed the anger out of her flaming little
face, and a few minutes later I heard her say in the voice that makes us wax
in Dicky’s hands, “I was just a little angry with you, Mammy, and I asked
Mr. Devil to burn you up—but I’m not mad now, and I hope he won’t.”
Dicky went to New York. We knew that she would. That’s why John and
I, dear faithful old mammy, too, were so helpless, our hearts contracting in
fear.

August 13th.
Sunday Night.
Scientists tell us that a change that is slow but complete takes place in the
human body every seven years. They are wrong about the process. It
happens in the twinkling of an eye—like that change in the far-off judgment
day of which the Bible tells. I know. This very day it happened to me. This
Sabbath morning I waked a healthy, happy, normal spinster behind whom
lay, except for this anxiety Dicky gives, almost thirty barren-of-emotion
years.
Breakfast was not ready when I came down, so I rushed up the lane. If
we lived more pretentiously it would be the drive. Beyond lay the white
road that leads up to Marsville and trails round the mountain and out to a
wider life.
The hills that neighbour with the blue ether were shaking night-caps of
trailing mist from their heads. The mountain world breathed deep of August
—proclaimed it exultantly in its vivid summer green as yet untouched by
change; in its full-eared, ripening corn, massed on the hills like troops of
soldiers. The insect shrills were August noises as were the lazy little chirps
of the birds that have forgotten their joyous outpourings of spring. I loved it
all—even the crow circling majestically about the distant hills so far away
that his raucous cry came musically—and all of it contented me. Quite
forgetting my approaching thirtieth birthday I threw a kiss to that mountain
on the skyline that is so like a camel with a humpy back. There’s always
been a secret understanding between that mountain and me, I suppose it is
left over from my young girlhood, I was only eighteen the first time I saw
Camel Back, that some day he would dump all his treasures into my lap—
treasures from all the lands of the East. Yesterday I got another editor’s
check—Camel Back has always held me steady under my rejections, hence
the salute. Down through the ages how the world would have laughed if the
Egyptians had made their Sphinx a man—wise Egyptians. As I threw the
kiss to my mountain the shadow of no man was on my heart, or had ever
been, but I felt the thrill of life’s infinite mystery and promise—felt it and
called it an editor’s check. At thirty a spinster woman may begin to run to
fat, or she may show tendencies to shrivel, but I boldly declare, my
knowledge dating back some dozen hours, that her heart is unwrinkled,
ridiculously young, and scanning the horizon for Eastern treasures that the
camels that hang in the skyline are to pour into her lap.
Back home, breakfast over, as John left the table he tossed a letter to me.
It was Dicky’s letter for which I have waited a whole week. It is in answer
to the dozen I have sent out to her—like wireless messages of distress.
In the yard, out beyond the shadow of the big white pines, drying my hair
—the women of Marsville have no beauty parlour in which to ruin it with
dry air—lying full length in the sun, my head pillowed on a cushion,
pondering Dicky’s letter, reading it over and over, I was jarred out of my
reverie by a poke in the ribs and the mountaineer’s, “Howdy.” I failed to
respond, was poked in the ribs a second time, sprang up indignantly and
glared into the dirty, smiling landscape that is the face of old Sallie
Singleton. “I thought I knowed that old back,” her harsh voice said amiably.
Old back, indeed. Unmindful of my lack of cordiality the floodgates opened
and harsh verbal oceans submerged me. I tried to shut it out, but I could not.
“Mis Golightly hadn’t let the fire go out on her hearth for nigh forty year,
but she went over the mountain to visit her daughter that had her first baby.
In hearing of the train she took homesick and hiked it back. Savannah Lou
was old-like, as I knowed, and, as I knowed, her beau died. He was full of
debts as a dog is full of fleas, and the Lord knowed what he was doing
when He took him. She had a picter left stid o’ a man, and she was a sight
happier with the picter then she’d a ben with the man. When he was
courtin’ they’d set and set, and talk and talk. He never took her nowhere—
not even as far as her nose. She set store by the picter. She’d had a picter
man put whiskers on it. She’d allus knowed whiskers’d become him, but he
was stubborn and wouldn’t grow ’em. She——”
But I had fled, running for my life—or was it to save the life of old Sallie
that I ran? In the twinkling of an eye the mysterious change had come.
Sallie had poked in the back, the old back that she knowed, a contented
spinster teacher. A horse whisked about in the shafts and made to go in a
direction contrary to the one he was travelling might understand the
bewilderment of the woman who fled from Sallie Singleton. I did not. We
are strange creatures, blown upon by winds from the Invisible. We dwell
forever in a little fenced-about cleared plot of ground that is our daily life
and we are frightened if we but glimpse beyond the cleared land. I had
looked over the fence, and I had seen a trackless region. In sudden panic I
hated placid spinster teachers content to trudge their sober path through all
the days allotted to them; in sudden terror age with its hideous potentialities
of loneliness fell upon me. Age and old Sallie grown gray and dirtier but
always with the Puck-like knowledge of the psychologic moment at which
to torture me with the neighbourhood gossip. Age and John, dear, good
John on one side of the fireplace winter nights roaring at me the
advancement of his rheumatism and I on the other side roaring back the
increasing feebleness of my digestion.
All day this spectre, this fear of the future, has held me by the throat. All
day I have stumbled along in a maze of distorted thought—swept from all
moorings of common sense. Now I have come into the night, the big, silent,
star-filled night to ask peace of it. Here under the giant pines that stand like
sentinels to guard the peace of the old house I sit on the bench. How still
and warm and sweet—a white, white August night, for the coming moon
lights the sky. Above all nights I have loved these August nights—the
clematis dropping from the upper porch airy and diaphanous as a bride’s
veil, and there in the border, running parallel with the low, long, rambling,
gray, gray old house the white phlox in masses neighbouring with the
August lilies. Looking at the lilies I catch my breath in pain. In their faint,
sweet breathings they say to me, “We live but for a day. Take warning.
Youth flees, dies as we die.”
John comes to the hall door and peers out into the dimness of the
shadowy pines. “Honey,” he calls, “are you out there? Good-night. I’m
turning in.” I call back, “Good-night.”
Big and red the moon that is only a little past full pushes over the hill.
The desire to taste the night, to drown my tumult in its peace seizes me. Out
on the hilltop, alone face to face with the night, and unafraid, I am indeed
swept from my moorings. There to the east, where the skyline is so sharply
irregular, just where Camel Back marches eternally on the horizon, he
makes me think of a city I have never seen. I want to use his back as a
stepping stone to the moon and look down on a play I have just been
reading about. When the curtain lifts I want to see those real camels
marching past, their background a sunrise in the desert.
The mountains I love, my beautiful, misty mountains, are a giant wall of
earth to-night. I want to get over the wall. I want to sit in that theatre, and
after the play I want to be swept along in the street with the surging crowd
and go into a gorgeous, glittery place and eat delicious things I have never
tasted, wearing the sort of dress I have never seen. I want to live. If but for
one hour of life I want my youth. I could be part of that pulsing, beating
life, part of that splendid friction—man’s mind stimulating man’s mind.
Back in my room, ready for bed, the light blown out, sitting at the
window, I acknowledge to myself that the cause of all the day’s emotional
upheaval has been Dicky’s letter. Dicky’s letter that reads:
“In my brave attire I went to meet the hero of my ‘Personal.’ He got cold
feet, Caroline. He did not come. He sent a messenger boy. I had written my
foolish heart out to him. I had told him the things I tell you. Yes, I know it is
reckless to write like that to a man one never saw. Try being a prune and a
potato and a slice of bread, though, before you condemn me.
“His letter is the dearest ever, Caroline. I have read it over and over.
‘Little gypsy child of nineteen, will you be just a little disappointed that the
messenger boy is there and not I? Will you believe that I am going against
my desire when I stay away? It isn’t fair to you that I meet you. It is not fair
to the nice little girl homesick for her southland who has never as yet
spoken to a man to whom she has not been introduced. The “ad” was just a
wager between a man and me. My name will mean nothing to you, but I
sign it.’
“The name was Robert Haralson, Caroline. And who can say why things
happen as they do? Who can really tell why that door flung open on the
Avenue to let an old man out should have stirred me to such rebellion that I
who have been well raised by you and dear old mammy should have done
such a madcap thing. The name did mean something to me—it brought
vague memories—where had I known a Robert Haralson? And—queer
world that it is—I got back to my room to find the answer to my question
on the table. Mary Tate answered it. When you and good old John squeezed
all the money you could out of the thin acres of land that we call home and
sent me to school I met Mary. Perhaps you remember. But she was not a
special chum. Soon she is coming on to New York for her first visit. She has
just left Roseboro and there everybody is talking about Robert Haralson,
known at home still as Bobby. Everybody is saying that he was the
cleverest and the most popular lad that the town ever raised. A brilliant
future was prophesied for him, but he got a wanderlust and went trailing off
to the ends of the earth. Roseboro has just discovered that America’s most
brilliant writer and playwright, to quote the papers, is none other than the
man who as a little lad spilled the family wash—not the clean wash—in
front of the Methodist Church as the congregation filed out from a revival
service, and almost died of shyness. Roseboro, of course, is shaking
congratulatory hands with itself that its prophecy has come true.
Everywhere you go they talk of Bobby. Now he seems permanently to have
settled in New York and to have found himself. Mary asks me if I have
read, ‘Heart of the World.’ It came out anonymously, as did no end of
brilliant stories. But as a playwright he can no longer hide behind his
anonymity. Mary is coming to New York soon. She wants to meet him. She
begs for my assistance. Her letter closes like this: ‘It can be done, Dicky.
Gossip says further that shy Bobby Haralson loved one girl like mad. That
girl was Caroline Howard.’
“Dear Caroline, I’ve fallen in love with Bobby’s fascinating letters. I’ve
fallen in love with his chivalrous protection of me, with his, ‘Little gypsy
girl of nineteen.’ Right this minute his card, name, and address lie on my
table—and I am lonesomer than I was before I answered the ‘ad’ but—I
won’t do what it is in my mind to do. It is your Bobby Haralson.”
The clipping Dicky sent says that Mr. Haralson, who is just beginning to
be known as Mr. Haralson, is at present one of the most interesting men in
American literature. That he has achieved distinction both in fiction and in
drama. That it is difficult to say in which he holds the more prominent
position, that when so many writers seem to have written themselves out, he
never seems to write up to the full extent of his powers, that always there is
that sense of power held in reserve.
Dicky sent a clipping from a Roseboro newspaper that tells the story of
Bobby’s heroism on shipboard coming from one of the lands of the Far
East. I remember that story. It was some years ago. In mid-sea the engines
broke down, the boat sprung a leak, and the men were forced to bail the
water from the boat. No ship came near, and one night a frightful storm
swept the sea. With the boat at the mercy of the waves the firemen deserted
the boilers. It was then that the blood of Bobby’s ancestors spoke in him;
Old Governor Haralson, Bobby’s grandfather, was a leader of men, could
sway them. And father told me that Bobby’s young father in a charge at the
battle of Shilo was a figure he never forgot. He said the young Colonel as
he swept into battle at the head of his men wore a beautiful, uplifted,
unearthly sort of expression and that he, my father, had often heard him say
he had never felt the sensation of fear on a battlefield. So I know just how
Bobby Haralson loomed above the discouraged men that night, just how
steady his voice was when he told them that the firemen had deserted their
posts saying it was death to go down into the hold, but that he was going,
and if they were men they would follow him. Wet and naked and blistered
in the water that was waist-deep in the ship’s hold, death within and death
without, with no hope of saving the ship, with no help possible had help
been near, struggling to hold their places along the rope line they hauled the
buckets of water up, gaining perceptibly then losing again, but sending a
song up whether there was the gain of an inch of water or that much loss—a
song that rose above the roar of the sea, hungry for what surely seemed its
prey, and the hiss of the great boilers.
When we left Roseboro I was fourteen. Bobby must have been eighteen.
A fence divided his house from ours. There was a side gate, for the families
were intimate, but, mostly, he leaped it. Do I remember Bobby? I have not
thought of him in years, but to-night some little door of the brain long
closed opens and out of it comes my almost forgotten boy friend Bobby,
like a ghost. Why, just that minute I saw his little flashing smile. It came
right through the moonlit window as a friendly hand reaches out to one on
the street of a strange city.
It must be very late, but how wide awake I am. And how sweet the
tuberoses there in the border under my window are. They seem to float in
still pools of moonlight. As they pour their heavy fragrance over me the
fancy comes, born of the silver, moon-flooded night, I suppose, that they
are trying to tell me something.
Maybe they are. The tuberose has a personality, strong friends and stout
enemies, like some people. There is nothing negative about it. The fancy
persists. Ah, I have it! Another little brain door swings wide. But it wasn’t a
tuberose. Bobby and the big boys, his friends, have been on a tramp, they
are again standing under my window, they have waked me with the old
familiar whistle. Mother has said I may have the magnolias Bobby wants to
send up at midnight if I won’t speak to the boys, if the boys won’t speak to
me, and she has let Bobby suspend a cord from my second-story window. I
am fourteen years old again, and through the half-closed shutters I am
tugging desperately at those magnolias. Suppressed giggles from the boys,
suppressed giggles from me, too, and they ascend with slow majesty. Inside
the window the secret of their heaviness is revealed. Candy—tons of it. The
devil gets every inhabitant of Marsville who dances, but in spite of the devil
I waltz merrily to my bed.

September 24th.
Sunday.
Yesterday one of those seemingly unimportant happenings that change
the current of a life came to me. I look up from the garden seat here among
my flowers and my eyes journey from one accustomed sight to another. The
long, low, rambling, gray old house drowsing in the mellow, low-lying
sunshine, beyond it the path past the honeysuckle arbour that leads straight
to the old-fashioned spring house, the colts in the pasture, the cattle at the
bars—it is all so familiar that I smile at the words I have written. I am
changed, not my life.
Yesterday I walked up to Marsville, a mile away, for the mail, as I mostly
do Saturday mornings, and Ellinor Baxter joined me. Ellinor is not a native
Marsvillian either. Back in the dim past she came for the health of one of
her family. Ellinor has always had musical yearnings, quite a little talent,
too. She is the village musician and music teacher, and this year she has an
assistant. The assistant is fresh from a bigger life: last winter she studied in
Boston, and she has a friend who is doing wonderful things in Grand Opera
abroad. It makes Ellinor quite tragic. Yesterday when we reached the edge
of the wood, and the mountain world lay about us like a vast picture, Ellinor
flung out her arms as if to embrace all the several hundred peaks in sight
and cried out: “Oh, how I hate that wall of mountains! If we could sweep it
away we’d get a view, Caroline. We’d see what the world is doing. It’s a
prison wall. I can’t escape. It seems that some hand of iron holds me here. If
I had only gone eight years ago when mother’s death gave me the freedom
to go! Now I haven’t the youth to make a new life for myself. Why don’t
you go? What holds you here?”
“John, dear, good old John, I suppose,” I answered slowly.
Ellinor Baxter laughed scornfully. “John would be a less spoiled citizen
without you. You are wasting the best years of your life. Soon you will be
thirty.”
“I am thirty. This is my birthday.” I said it defiantly, because, uttered, it
sounded so very, very ancient.
Ellinor suddenly softened. “You look a young twenty-five. Some women
begin to fade at twenty-five. Some mornings when you rush past to school
you look eighteen——

“And her eyes are dark and humid, like the depth on depth of
lustre.
Hid i’ the harebell, while her tresses, sunnier than the wildgrape
 cluster,
Gush in golden-tinted plenty——”

“Ellinor!”
But Ellinor was in deadly earnest. Her eyes were full of tears. “Child,”
she said, “get away from here. Love, marry, fulfil your destiny.”
For just a moment I stopped and shut my eyes, pretending that a brier had
caught my skirt. With shut eyes I knew that deep in the emerald world about
me the black gum flaunted its crimson leaves—emblem of change; that the
corn in long, straight rows stood hardening in the ear; that the mountains,
glistening chain on glistening chain, were shimmering in the morning light.
Standing there, I saw more: October’s pageant; November’s dull, soft tones;
the desolation and the grayness that is December mountains’ dim forms
seen through curtains of rain; January’s white, white world—and then the
surprise of a snowdrop, the warm, fragrant spring breath of the south wind
shepherding flocks of snowy clouds.
“I love it all,” I said. And I spoke the truth. Since that August Sunday
now a month past, since that earthquake upheaval, I have basked in peace.
“I am busy. Most of the year I wake with just the thought of scrambling into
my clothes, swallowing my breakfast, and getting to the schoolroom in
time. When it is winter it is almost dark when I get home; when it is spring
I have my flowers. And there’s always John’s clothes to mend and my own
to make and——”
But with a gesture that was passionate Ellinor Baxter stopped me. “All
this may satisfy at thirty, but it won’t feed a woman’s heart at forty. Then
she feels the need of love—contact with a man’s broader life. The
monotony, the emptiness of life as she lives it alone tortures at forty. I
know, for I am thirty-eight. And if she finds this out at forty it is mostly too
late. Men pass us by for fresher faces.”
I did not know this new Ellinor Baxter who had lifted her mask and given
me a peep at the real woman behind it, but for the first time in my life I
loved her.
 As we turned into Main Street a big automobile was leaving the post-
office. Mr. Black and his nice little wife—new people who are summering
here—were in the tonneau. I hardly know how it came about, but in what
seemed the twinkling of an eye Ellinor and I were in it, too. I did not
understand where it was we were going, and when I tried to find out I
swallowed so many buckets of air that I gave it up. But it was not of the
slightest importance. All that had ever happened to me was of slight
importance. I was having my first automobile ride. We seemed to winnow
the air like birds: to dip and dart down and around the curves, to soar up the
hills with the flash and swiftness of wings. A dozen miles from our village
we raced up a stately avenue and ran under a porte-cochère—our flight at
end.
The lady who came out to greet us was surrounded by dogs, big and
little, aristocratic and plebeian, handsome and hideous. After greeting her,
Mrs. Black drew me forward and said: “Edna, this is Caroline Howard, who
adores every word you write. Edna is my sister, Miss Howard.”
I draw a long breath of happiness at thought of yesterday. I live it all over
again. I feel sure it was no ordinary spark of liking that leaped between
Edna Kennedy and me instantaneously and spontaneously. We had
luncheon yesterday on a big wide veranda that overlooks a winding ribbon
of a river from the view we had of it as calm and still as if frozen. After
luncheon there was music: Geraldine Farrar in “Madam Butterfly”—and the
story unfolded before me. I felt the anguish of that poor little waiting and
trusting and praying wife. Tetrazzini in the mad scene from “Lucia,” and the
flutelike voice going high and high and higher, till I bent forward in
breathless suspense to drop back in my chair in content at that last
marvellously dizzyingly high sweet bird note. Moved by a little burst of
confidence I could not control, I told Edna Kennedy that I had never heard
grand opera; that I had never been anywhere or seen anything. And then I
told her of the thrilly little waves running up and down me that were fairly
shouting it was the beginning and not the end of beautiful happenings to me
—just as though I had walked through a wood and come to a beautiful
palace, and only stepped up on the portico with my hand still on the
doorknob. I told her about Robert Haralson, too: what friends we were
when I was little, before we came to live in the mountains. I was dreadfully
disappointed that she does not know him. She says few people know him.
She says he is shy; that he lives in his work—that the first night of the big
play that is making him so rich and famous he ran away from the theatre
afraid of the call that authors get to come before the curtain. As we were
leaving, Edna Kennedy gathered some magazines from the library table and
gave them to me. “He is in them all,” she said. “Nobody in the literary and
dramatic world is more in the public eye.”
I was very quiet coming home, and everything seemed little and mean
and isolated and countrified when I got here. I went to my room
immediately after supper. I said I was tired, but I was never less tired in my
life. I read all the things the magazines said about Robert Haralson, and I
looked long at the picture I found in one of them of my old-time boy friend.
I have not treasured any sentimental memories of Bobby. I was little more
than a child when I last saw him. It is true that the whole town teased
Bobby about me—they called me his little sweetheart and accused him of
robbing the cradle—but I have no treasured memories of him or of any
man.
I am indifferent to men, as Dicky says. Always I have turned with
distaste from the thought of marriage. In that I think I am different from
most women. There have been two—such nice splendid fellows I knew in
my college life—who have penetrated my wilderness more times than one.
And I? I like them. Life with either would seem to hold much that it
withholds now. I have tried to yield, but I cannot; the thought of the
nearness of what should be sweet and sacred to a woman brings a wave of
physical nausea. For that reason I don’t in the least understand what came
over me last night as I gazed at a picture only dimly familiar to me.
Ellinor’s words came back throbbing with their loneliness and hunger. I
knew them to be true. I saw myself at forty rushing through breakfast and
running the mile to school, pottering about the flowers, mending the clothes
—day after day, month after month, year after year spent in dull monotony
—and my youth rolled away—my life.
I did a strange thing—I, trained to chain my emotions as we chain wild
beasts, in frantic haste I wrote to Bobby. It was not much of a letter—just:
“Bobby, I wonder if the years have swept from your brain cells all
memory of the little girl who used to live next door? She’ll never get to
New York, never! There’s a wall of mountains that she can’t scale. But if
ever you come to Marsville, whistle across the fence, won’t you? The little
girl’s got one of your stories treasured in her desk without knowing until
some one’s letter gave away the secret of its authorship. Big
congratulations, Bobby!”
I went down to the yard and waked old Harris and paid him to walk to
the railroad station, three miles across the gap, and mail it. Now it is late
Sunday afternoon and it has been gone almost a whole day. But of course I
will never have an answer to it. I am sure Mr. Robert Haralson keeps a
female secretary who will scan it coldly and throw it in the waste basket.

September 27th.
Wednesday.
I can’t see how it got here in this marvellously short time, but I have
Bobby’s answer:

80 Waverly Place,
September 25th.
MY DEAR “MISS CARRIE”:
Just once, if I may—and then I will try to think of you as
Caroline.
I was gladder to get your little note than the biggest editor’s
check I ever saw. Seems to me (after trying very hard) I do
remember a small “sassy” girl that used to live next door.
When you ask if I remember you, it reminds me of a story
told of Congressman John Allen of Mississipi—(never could
spell Mississip)—is that right? A lady approached him in
Washington one day and held out her hand. “Now confess, Mr.
Allen,” she said, “that you’ve forgotten all about me.”
He had; he knew her face, but his memory wouldn’t serve
him any further. But, with a low bow, he replied: “Madam, I’ve
made it the business of my life to try to forget you.”
See?—as we New Yorkers say.
 Well, well, how time does fly! as the little boy said when his
teacher told him Rome was founded in 684 B. C. I never
expected anything so nice and jolly as to hear from you. It’s like
finding a five-dollar bill in an old vest pocket.
Isn’t it funny that I was thinking of you a little while last
week? I had a map, looking all about on it trying to decide on
somewhere to go for a few weeks to get away from the city.
Mountains for me always! So my eye naturally ran down the
Blue Ridge chain. Here’s the latest picture of the distinguished
Mr. Haralson. Does it look anything like the moonstruck little
shrimp that used to hang around and bother you so much? I can
remember what an awkward, bashful, sentimental, ugly,
uninteresting nuisance I was then. No wonder I couldn’t make
any impression on you! I’ve improved a good deal since. In fact,
it seems to me that the older I grow the better looking and more
fascinating I become. Of course it doesn’t seem just right for me
to say so, but if I didn’t tell you you mightn’t ever find it out.
In those days I took life mighty seriously and sentimentally:
that’s why I always went about looking like a monkey with the
toothache; but in after years I learned that life is only a jolly
good comedy for the most part, and I began to enjoy it. I believe
I’m about five years younger than I was the last time you saw
me—when you left the depot in Roseboro for Marsville. Ernest
Cold rode up with you on the train; and I haven’t forgiven him
for it yet.
It’s mighty nice of you to say you would be able to stand
seeing me again if I should come to Marsville. I shore would
love to ride up and holler “Hello!” over the fence. Lemme see!
Trip to Europe—automobiles—steam yacht—Rockefeller’s
money—no, none of those things sound half as good. But lawsy
me! I don’t know when I shall ever drap down your way.
I’ve about decided to go up along the Maine coast fishing
with an editor man. I live in a room or two as big as a barn on
Waverly Place. I’m so lazy and cool and contented there all by
 myself with my books and things that I haven’t been away from
town in two summers.
Now, I’m not going to talk about myself any more. I’ve been
in New York about four years, and I guess I’ve “made good,” for
everything I write is engaged long before it is written.
I’ve been puzzling over your signature. It’s the same old
name you had when you wore your hair in a plait; and I have
two very good reasons for thinking it ought to be different. One
is that somebody wrote me several years ago that you had
married; and the other is that it isn’t possible—it isn’t possible
—that the young men of our old state could be so unappreciative
as to have let you escape. But if you are married, please, oh,
please get a divorce at once, so you can be “Miss Carrie” again.
I am trusting to your good nature to accept a little book of
mine that came out last winter. You don’t have to read it, you
know. It’s just the thing to prop the kitchen door when the wind
is in the east.
And, Miss Carrie, some day when you ain’t real busy won’t
you sit at your desk where you keep those antiquated stories,
and write to me? I’d be so pleased to hear something about what
the years have done for you, and what you think about when the
tree frogs begin to holler in the evenings. Got any tree frogs up
there?
Do this, and I’ll promise to say “Caroline” next time.
Let me say once more how good it was to hear from you, and
that I am, yours sincerely,
ROBERT HARALSON.

September 28th.
The picture and the book have come. The picture is splendid. It
dominates my room.
 Bobby was awfully fond of me. Lots of things I had forgotten come back
as I look at the picture—the night he was allowed by mother after some
hours of hard begging to take me to Commencement at the Female
Seminary in old Roseboro and sat with his arm stretched on the back of the
bench. I did not think it would be nice of me to ask him to remove it, and
my back aches right now again at thought of the rigidity of my spine
through the long hours of that female evening. You would not be guilty of
such a ruralism now, Mr. Cosmopolite.
I have written him. It is only polite to let him know that I appreciate the
picture and the book.

October 2d.
Monday Afternoon.
Bobby’s letter was here this afternoon when I got in from school. Wasn’t
it marvellous that it could get here? My eyes went straight to the table and I
felt kind of queer and quivery all over when I saw the big square envelope
with the bold handwriting that looked as familiar as if I had been getting his
letters all my life. Here is his letter:

New York, September 30th.

MY DEAR MISS CARRIE:

Never thought you were going to stir up so much trouble
when you did me that big favour of writing a “hello” to me
across the mountains, did you? Well, please let me write this
time, and if it’s too much, give me the teeny-weenyest bit of a
hint, and I’ll turn my pen into a sword and cut it all out.
Was it cheeky of you to write to me? My dear Miss Carrie, I
don’t know exactly what the unpardonable sin is, but if you
hadn’t written, I’d feel awfully anxious about your future.
Right here let me assure you that I’m not one of these
confirmed correspondents. Hand on my heart! I vow I haven’t
written two pages at a time to anybody in years and years. My
closest friends complain that I don’t even answer letters. But
when I hear from—oh, you forbade that, didn’t you.
Don’t chain up your impulses, dear friend; let ’em skallyhoot
around. We don’t live more than nine times; and bottles and
chains weren’t made for people to confine and tie up their good
impulses with.
So you shook your head when you read that I was thinking of
you last week? All right. Couldn’t expect you to believe. But
please turn to page 78 and page 131 of the book I sent you, and
try to think whose eyes I attempted to describe. Since I saw you
last I’ve seen only one pair of eyes like that; and they—well,
they only resembled.
Think I’m foolish? Oh, no, I’m not. One can have an ideal if
one wants to. I’ve had one for—years. All I’ve had since have
busted and gone up the flume. Please, Miss Carrie, lemme keep
that one. I ain’t going to bother you about it. You say those old
days are laid away between lavender scented sheets. I can
understand that for you. Mine are not. They are fresh and
fragrant, dewy and everlasting. I’m not going to insist upon your
believing it—shake your head if you want to and give the sun a
chance to brighten his rays. I’m superior to luck, fate, history,
and time. If I choose to stand under a certain window yet in
Roseboro and sigh for the unattainable, no one shall balk me.
So, don’t you try to bulldoze me, Miss Caroline Howard. If my
spirit elects to wander there, please you let it alone.
Do you know that over there in the Ridge of blue and gold
you are the most splendidly endowed of all the daughters of the
gods? Why? Because my memory tells me that you have (to my
memorial eye and mind) all that can be conferred of loveliness;
and, according to your boast, you have a new and delectable
way of fixing tomatoes. Now, I adore tomatters. I could die for
’em, I nearly have several times. You can’t imagine how
interested I was in your tomato garden. In your tomato garden.
Say—I believe you promulgated some nonsense in your letter
about whether I stood under Fifth Avenue girls’ windows about
midnight and sent up flowers and candies. Why, lemme tell you,
Miss Carrie, I’ve seen ’em and talked to ’em, and had tea with
’em—and lemme tell you—I’d rather set (not sit) across a little
table with you and have a tomatter between us with ice and——
Say—I don’t agree with you about the nuts. Why, I never saw
a tomatter in my life stuffed with nuts. Air they good? The ice
sounds all right. And lemme tell you—I think you’re wrong
about the Mayonnaise dressing. I have such a respect for
tomatters that I must challenge you. French dressing, with green
peppers—so say I.
And yet it is no more than Cosmic and Natural Justice that
you should be woozy about the proper way to fix tomatters.
Perfection has never been attained by mortals. (Now my
memory is at work again.) If you could be as I remember you
and an expert in tomatters, too, why there would be double
perfection, and that’s an unknown quantity in mathematics. I
prefer to retain my ideal; therefore the deduction is: your
tomatters are off their trolley. Still, I’d like to try one. That’s
constancy and faith. Will you keep one on ice for me, on the
chance that good Fortune may allow me to drift down that way?
I sent up yesterday and got the Christmas Leslies. Why, I
remembered that story, though I didn’t recognize the name. It
was very sweet and tender. I can see that you like kids. I
congratulate you heartily on your work; I hope you will find it
profitable and a blessing. You have unquestioned sympathy and
a deep and true “humanness.” You ought to come to New York,
where you will be in medias res. There’s nothing like being on
the ground. You get artistic ideas and associations here that
would be invaluable to you. Writing is a bully game. You want
to know the dealers. I studied that fact out, and came here. To-
day I get five times more per word than when I came. Sister of
the pen and stamped-envelope-for-return, I speak wisdom to
you. And here is life. Beautiful are the mountains and the moon
silvering their tops; but here one learns the value of each upon
each. And the moonlight of the mind is the most beautiful. Here
art teaches Nature to conform. You could expand and rise here. I
do not advise you, but I speak with wisdom of the markets and
the heart. Pardon me if I am scornful of the Mayonnaise, and am
dubious about the nuts. I could overlook a stab at my heart with
a poniard, but—the tomatter and I have been friends. Yet I could
—may I try one the way you fix ’em?
Wish I could have accepted your invitation to sail down on
the big golden bubble of a moon, and drap under the cherry tree.
Bet a dollar I’d have lit on the rake and the hoe you left there in
the grass. Can’t you ever remember to put ’em behind the door
in the woodhouse when you are scratching around in the
garden? I haven’t ridden on the moon in a long time. It’s on the
full now, and I’m afraid I’d slide off. When it gets to look like a
slice of canteloupe again, so I can hold on to the ends, I’ll try to
make that trip. Please spread an armful of hay and an old piece
of carpet under the cherry tree so I won’t come down with such
a jolt when I jump off. Then I’d say something like this:
“Miss Howard, please excuse my intrusion into your section
of real estate devoted to domestic agriculture; but the object of
my somewhat precipitous descent is to ascertain the identity of a
certain youthful and pulchritudinous being with whom at a
considerably earlier period I sustained cognizance, and whose
identification is relatively dependent upon a tonsorial
arrangement in which her tresses retain the perpendicularity
peculiar to juvenility at the time referred to.”
And you would answer:
“Sir, regretting the futility of your rather incomprehensible
errand—which, had you been better versed in the more recent
dictates of fashion, might have been advantageously and
indefinitely postponed—I must inform you that none of the
coiffures that are worn this summer allow any such primitive
and adolescent arrangement of the capillary filaments as you
refer to in your preamble; and therefore, as far as the little girl
whose hair was in a plait is concerned, there is nothing doing.”
I’ll bet that’s what’d happen to me. And then I’d have to go
down to the road and sit on the fence and wait a month to catch
 the moon back.
Miss Carrie, please, please send me that picture of yourself
that you mentioned, or another one. If your heart hadn’t been so
hard and cruel you’d have enclosed it before instead of talking
about it. How can you write those tender and kind little stories
when really you are so unfeeling and stony hearted? You knew I
wanted that picture. I’m going to tell all the editors I know that
your work is a fraud—that you don’t feel it at all.
No doubt there isn’t a single tear in your eye or the slightest
thawing of your heart when I remind you that in another two
weeks I shall be treading the pathless wilds of Maine. There in
the dense tropical forest an infuriated porcupine may spring
upon me from some lofty iceberg, or, becoming lost, I might
perish in the snow of sunstroke. Think, Miss Carrie, what an ad
it would be for you when the papers printed the news of a tourist
found in the woods—an unknown man wearing tennis shoes and
a woollen comforter, with 30 cents in his pocket, a frozen
tomato in one hand, and a picture of the well-known and
beautiful authoress C. H. in the other. It is no less than your duty
to your publishers to try and get that ad. So, please send on the
picture, will you?
Sincerely yours,
ROBERT HARALSON.

Is it because I live here on the edge of the world, outside of its activity,
that I read Bobby’s letter over and over? Is that the reason I search page 78
and page 131 of the book? The eyes of Bobby’s heroine are beautiful, and
he says they are like mine. It was dear of him to remember the colour of my
eyes through all these years. I couldn’t have told the colour of his eyes. And
I fibbed when I said those old memories were laid away in lavender scented
sheets. That’s the trouble with a spinster. She can be counted on to run to
sentiment with or without encouragement.
Oh, dear, I’m so tired. I want life different—not just to go in and eat
supper and look over the lessons for to-morrow and read something and go
to bed, as I have done all the nights of the past twelve Octobers and am
likely to continue for the next several dozen of them. I fibbed when I wrote
Bobby I had memories. I haven’t. And I don’t want memories—memories
that sigh of age. I want joys that dance with youth. I want to sit at a little
table and look across—not at John.

October 6th.
Friday.
When I came home this afternoon there was my letter. I could have told
Bobby that Marsville young women were hopelessly ancient at twenty-five,
that nobody ever looked at them after they were thirty. Instead, I told him
about the drummer who tried to flirt with me on the train. In my effort to
get rid of him I moved all over the coach and finally took the last seat, to
have him take the last seat opposite. I wrote Bobby that I thought of moving
into the Pullman, but that the trip was short and my economic soul balked at
the suggestion.
Bobby answers:
 New York, October 4th.

DEAR LADY OF THE UNLAVENDER SCENTED MEMORIES:

Please send that picture. You have moved to the very last seat
in the car and I have picked up my traps and followed you. Will
you send it, or are you going to move into the Pullman?
Yours as ever,
B.H.

October 7th.
Saturday. In the Garden. Sunset.
I was up with the day this morning. At sunrise I had breakfasted and was
in the lumbering old hack bumping over the miles that end with the trolley
that carries us these days into our mountain city and metropolis twenty
miles away from this little town. I went in to do my fall shopping, hat and
coat suit and some other needed little things. There’s a new woman’s
outfitter that has stimulated shopping marvellously. I saw some stunning
things, and I bought—a white silk evening gown, very modern, very
clinging, very beautiful. There’s a cunning little fringe of crystal beads on
the short sleeves. The dear little skimpy sash-ends have the crystal fringe,
too. When I moved about in it and tried it on, the funny little waves of
happiness ran up and down my spine and thrilled my knees just as if I really
had my hand on the doorknob of that Magic Palace I first divined that day
at Edna Kennedy’s. Something pagan stirred in me with the tinkle of my
barbaric finery. I bought white silk stockings and white satin slippers, too. I
spent every penny of three months’ hard work, and I borrowed my fare on
the trolley from our butcher. If he had not been on I suppose I would have
asked the conductor for a loan. The Bible says take no thought of the
morrow. I did not. But to-morrow, when icy winds blow, with what shall I
be clothed? I shan’t worry now. It is too warm and lovely. If I should spend
my winter in the state asylum, and I do seem headed that way, my old suit
will be quite stylish enough.
There are some La France roses blooming, as lovely ones as I have ever
had. I get up from the garden seat and catch their pink satin faces to me and
bury my face in their fragrant hearts. I whisper to them: “My poor foolish
darlings, why do you bloom so late? Do you not know that all this
wonderfulness of warmth, this semblance of summer, is a deception? Do
you not know that winter is at hand? What is this absurd thing blooming in
my heart as satiny pink and perfumed as they? The amethyst light has gone
from the hills; gray and quiet they wrap their night robes of mist about them
and wait for the morning. And the sky, still tender, waits for the stars. And I
—for what do I wait?”

October 8th.
Sunday. Garden. Sunset.
The day has been hot. It has rained somewhere and there is a superb
sunset display. It seems that all the golds and crimsons and purples in the
world have been pounded and mixed in a vast mortar and flung in one
magnificent wave of colour on the western sky. The mountains are wine
drenched. The garden riots in colour. Everywhere colour, warmth, perfume.
The glory fades, but the warmth remains. Oh, the moon! Big as a wagon
wheel it wavers on the hill, hesitating about its plunge into space. I must go
in. Mammy is calling me to supper. Yes, blessed old coloured lady, I am
coming! Her eyes are dim. She could not have seen that it was my bedroom
rug I put under the cherry tree.

Midnight.
Was it I who put the rug under the cherry tree? Was it I who crept down
the stairs in such delicious stealth? And did it all happen just two hours ago
when John’s light went out? I had dressed in my tinkling finery, with my
hair done like hers on page 131, and I went down to see myself full length
in the big old mirror brought from the childhood home. I did not mean to go
outside, but the moonlight lay in silver splashes on the portico, and as I
stepped into it it swept over me in one great delirious wave, not just
ordinary moonlight—sorcery. Standing there in my shimmering gown and
satin shoes, I lost all sense of the real me. Drawn by that compelling light
that lay on the world beyond the door in a still white flood, I stepped into
the fragrant night and sped to the big old cherry tree. No, not I—a red-
lipped, shining-eyed, radiant young creature that bore only a physical
resemblance to me. Not a leaf dropped to fret the stillness. Nothing stirred,
and yet the whole world seemed afloat. I heard the gate’s click as it opened.
The man’s soft felt hat was pulled down low on his brow, shading the
features, but I knew him—that is, I divined who it was. Just for a moment I
thought him a vision breathed into the night by its magic and my desire to
have him there. Just for a moment the solid earth, the misty hills lost
foundation. He did not see me so still in the shadow of the cherry tree.
Halfway up the walk he stopped, perhaps with the realization that the house
was dark, for I had blown out the lamp I carried down. He stood there very
still. When he turned he walked rapidly down the walk and out the gate. I
made a swift little rush from under the tree, a swift little rush that sent out a
myriad of tiny sounds—that pagan thing in me alive, clamouring for its
woman’s birthright. I think the gate’s sharp click drowned the tinkling call
of my finery. He did not glance back. After what seemed an æon of time I
heard voices—the faint roll of wheels.
Perhaps I would think the whole fantastic thing a dream were it not for
the wicked glitter of the baubles on my poor little frock that lies in a
neglected heap there in the moonlight where I stepped out of it.

October 26th.
Twenty days since I wrote those last words—twenty warm, still, sun-
drenched days as like one to another as peas in a pod. The oldest inhabitant
fails to remember such another October. But this morning, without the
warning of a frost, it has come. The sun floods my desolated and blackened
garden. It always hurts me to give up my flower children. I should hear only
the pleasantest things at breakfast the morning of a freeze, but this morning
after John had gone mammy brought my hot cakes in and told me that
Lucius Blake was the author of a story that was spreading over the village
like fire. Lucius said that he had driven the finest sort of a dude down to our
house Sunday night, October 8th. Lucius said he came inside the gate, stood
there like a stone, and that when he came back to the buggy he said: “I
should have warned my friends of my arrival. I suspect from the darkened
house that they are absent at Grand Opera.” He then offered Lucius ten
dollars to drive him to town, and they rode through the night in silence. I
should think the silence would have killed Lucius, but he has lived to tell
the tale. I am not in the least comforted that mammy, on the pretense that
we need sugar, has hurried up to the village to tell everybody that Lucius is
a liar—in the language of the mountains a master liar. I am not in the least
comforted with anything. Fate, you are a cruel jade to let me put the light
out, and I hate you. I have snatched the poor innocent-of-offence gown
from its hanger, if it is innocent—I remember that night it twinkled so
wickedly—and I have flung it into the fire. I feel wildly happy that Bobby’s
book smoulders on it. But I have turned my eyes away as a wicked,
yellowish-red, forked tongued flame leaps at the wavy lock of hair that
always I know escapes Bobby’s brushes because it likes to lie on his broad,
thoughtful brow.
How odd the room feels without the picture. I’ve got in the way of
looking for the greeting from those watchful eyes, in the way of seeing the
mocking smile on those pictured lips, the minute I open my door. No simple
maiden in her charm for you, Mr. Robert Haralson! Do I see you this
minute motoring down your brilliant Avenue? And do I see her, the pride of
your Avenue? Our uplands do not breed such exotics.

November 15th.
The days drift by like dull-hued birds. There’s not a song in the throat of
a single one. Dull-hued is the word, for the rains have washed the colour
from the hills. And like a giant graystone prison wall the mountains,
desolate, rattlesnaky things, stand against the sky. Jack the Giant Killer
himself couldn’t scale them. Mammy watches me anxiously. She says I am
sick. I am—sick for a bigger life. Teaching is routine after twelve years. I
haven’t any worry. Dicky since her “Personal” escapade is being good,
unless some mischief is brewing she has not yet got into trouble over. Some
day—not this dull-eyed day—I mean to put to myself the question, “Why
have you never said one word to Robert Haralson about Dicky—poor,
cooped-up, lonely little Dicky?” And I mean to get an honest answer.

Friday. December 21st.

The gods on Mount Olympus, if it be they that control gray, heavy-lidded
days like these, had compassion on me and let to-day be Friday. I’d have
killed all the children in another day, and now I have until Monday to get
back to something akin to normal. I must have looked my mood when I
came in, for poor old mammy had brought me hot toast and tea and
delicious peach jam. I received it with gratitude, but when she began the
recital of that well-known story in which she stood and received my great
aunt’s false teeth in her last hour, when she launched into my great uncle’s
handing them to her with the words, “Give these into the hands of this
faithful servant,” I leaped up so abruptly that I frightened her. I wonder if I
really meant to pitch the dear, faithful old soul out the window? I am
developing temperament, or is it temper? Perhaps it is all due to the outside
world. The snow sifts bleakly from a bleak sky. What am I to do with these
walled-round-by-winter days? What am I to do with this woman whose
outward appearance is mine? She terrifies me. For thirty years I’ve tended
my little garden plot of life in placid content; cheerfully I’ve hoed my bean
and cabbage rows. Now I want to dynamite these homely plants. Where the
cabbages stand in rows I want red roses; I can’t abide beans a minute
longer, and in their stead I would like purple orchids. And there’s something
else I want: I want to cry and cry on a broad man shoulder—not John’s
shoulder. Half timidly I glance over my own shoulder as I write it. My own
mother never kissed my father until after they were married, and my
grandmother all her life long dressed and undressed behind the shelter of
the door of the great wardrobe that is here in my room this very minute, but
no reproachful ghosts are gazing at me. And if all the spinsters in this broad
land with their battle cry of freedom and suffrage (I’ve got freedom and I’m
willing for suffrage) had had the sort of day I’ve had with the children—it’s
been a wild beast of a day and its sharp claws have drawn blood—when
twilight came they would do just what I am doing now. They would
whisper into the firelit gloom which invites reckless confidences, as I am
whispering, “Eve, Eve, you want your Paradise, don’t you?” I do solemnly
believe that soon or late this moment comes to every woman; I do solemnly
believe that she can no more escape this dominant reaching out of her heart,
this dominant yearning for that other one in the world of two outside of
which the rest of humanity is excluded. Since when have you believed this,
Caroline Howard? Honest now. Face Dicky’s letter—aren’t you the
daughter of a soldier?
This time it’s a big, blond young German—a baron. A slight accident to
his hand brought about the acquaintance. Always, Dicky “did” his hand for
him. The acquaintance progressed to the point that he knew her afternoon
off. “Of course,” Dicky writes, “it flattered me to find him waiting outside
the hospital—and with a taxi.”
 It seems they had the gayest of drives, but when they turned in at the
Pennsylvania Station Dicky demanded the meaning of it. The baron was
ready with an answer. He told her that they were going away to an ideal life
where they would always be together and always alone. Dicky objected.
Her protest was smothered in the depths of the baron’s hat, flung quick as
magic over her face.
“How I ever emerged from the embrace of that hat with a smiling face I
don’t know. I must thank a year’s training at the hospital for that. I came out
game—cool on the outside, at any rate. I said: ‘We can’t go away together
without baggage—think of the scandal of it.’ From the depths of the cab he
produced a big black bag. But I said, ‘That won’t help me.’ It didn’t work.
He said in Washington we would buy enough clothes to last me forever. I
fell in gayly with his plans. Inside the station he bought tickets to
Washington. I tried to get near the ticket window, but he flanked the move.
There seemed to be no people in the station. The few that were there were
miles apart in isolated little groups. Just before our train was called,
standing together as alone as if we were already on the desert to which he
said we would go when we left Washington, a stream of incoming people
surged up from the left wing of the station. I felt sure one of the men was
Bobby Haralson—he or his double. I asked the baron to let me say good-
bye to an old friend, as we were never coming back. He agreed.
“‘Aren’t you Mr. Haralson?’ I gasped. ‘If you are, don’t you remember
the little gypsy girl who answered your ad?’
“‘Sure Mike, I do,’ he said, and swung his bag into his left hand and gave
me a hearty right hand. My face must have shown that something was
wrong, for he drew me out of the crowd, put down his travelling bag, and
asked me, oh, so quietly, what was wrong. His quiet manner calmed me. As
briefly as I could I told him. He grasped the situation in a lightning-like
flash. ‘Go back to him,’ he said. ‘Keep cool. I’m on to the job.’ Had I been
on to my job I’d never have got in that cab. The morning paper says he’s a
baron all right. It says he’s a lunatic all right, too. And he has been sent to a
private asylum.
“He took his arrest quietly. It was so unexpected it dazed him. I was so
limp after it was all over that Bobby Haralson took me over to the Waldorf
and made me drink a milk punch. Then he brought me home. We had a
heavenly time, and I promised not to be naughty again.
“At the door, he didn’t come in; he said good-bye with that smile that
lights and warms up his face—you remember I told you how reticent and
sort of impersonal he is—and he said next time I wanted an adventure just
send out a wireless and he would answer. I didn’t tell him about you,
Caroline. You have tried so hard to make a hoyden into a lady that I did not
reveal my identity.”

December 8th.
What an odd, spoiled Bobby! I have a letter from him. Last fall—the
afternoon I went to town and came back with the ill-fated gown—I sent him
the picture. The P. M. (Particularly Mean) letter was the little note that
demanded its return after we failed to meet in our promenade down in our
yard. Bobby expects an answer by return mail—it is in every confident line
of his letter. Mr. Robert Haralson, spoiled darling of your town, once an old
lady of my acquaintance sent her husband across the mountain to get some
“camfire” for her. The gum was dissolved in whiskey. He drank it and was
very sick. I was present when, convalescent, he humbly asked for chicken
soup. The old lady, with uplifted forefinger said, “Nary a chicken will ye
git.”
See, Mr. Robert Haralson? as you New Yorkers say.
Bobby’s confident letter says:
As I write, at my left hand is a basket of letters. I have just
taken from the basket the last nice one you wrote me and the
awfully mean one you wrote afterward. The others run back a
month or two and none are answered yet. My right arm is
resting on a cushion, and I am writing with three fingers.
I have been away. In my accumulated mail there were a
couple of letters from you, and the photo you sent in the lot. The
next morning after I got back I had to send for a doctor. I had
got a knock on my blamed old elbow and she swelled up as big
as a prize beet at the Roseboro County Fair.
 Well, old doc said it was cellulitis, which didn’t sound very
reassuring. It comes from having the cellular tissues hurt. And
every day he done that arm up in plaster and eight miles of
bandages. And three or four times he brung along his knives and
lancets and was going to carving at it, but I wouldn’t let him. I
haven’t been able to write any more than a rabbit. I’m getting so
I can use a small quantity of my fingers now, and this is the first
answer to any letter in the basket.
And that is why I haven’t written to thank you for the photo,
which I appreciate highly, and shall not return as you suggest in
your P. M. (Particularly Mean) letter. What’s the matter with it?
It looks all right to me. I can’t suggest any improvement in it. It
has lots of your old expression in it, and although the fool
photographer did all he could to spoil it by making you turn
your head as if you were looking to see if your dress was
buttoned all down the back, it’s a ripping nice picture, and you
needn’t want to be “any better to look at than the picture.”
(Can’t you say the mean things when you want to!)
Now, I wish you’d behave, and take your finger out of your
mouth and stand right there—turn your toes out—and say you
are sorry.
Lemme see!—there was another dig—oh, yes—if I “had been
a pauper or a millionaire.”
You bet I’m a pauper now, Miss Carrie. Blowed all my money
in on my trip, and ain’t made any to speak of since except what
doc would carry away with him every day.
Getting along all right again, though, now. How’s your
writing coming on?
Now will you shake hands again, although it’s my left one
this time?
Yours as ever,
R. H.

December 20th.
 I have another letter from Bobby. And I didn’t answer his last letter. As I
read it a wicked little joy steals in on me and grows and grows.

New York, December 18th.

MY DEAR MISS CARRIE:
Now get mad if you want to, but couldn’t you agree to let
somebody call you that? (Bobby has scratched out the “Miss.”)
That’s the way I think of you, and if you insist on being called
by your golf and automobile name of Carrie, why, tear up this
letter and throw it out the kitchen window over the cliff.
Why didn’t you answer my last letter? Rowing on the lake, I
suppose, with the gent that comes to see you. I hope the lake
will freeze. And I hope the gent—won’t freeze. So, there!
I am looking over your last letter to-night, and it’s like the
breath of a spring wind through a laurel thicket. I’m going to
take it page by page and answer it.
The first page contains a quotation from a letter to you from
an insect known as a “literary agent.” Dear Carrie, listen to the
chirp of the crickets on the mountain, but don’t pay any
attention to the noise of that tribe. I am fortunate enough not to
know this particular duffer that has written such “piffle” (as they
say in Chicago), but I’ve heard about him—and you cut him out.
He’s an insufferable, measly kid, at the Sweet Caporal cigarette
age, and his graft is to stuff you provincial writers (I’m speaking
impersonally now) with his taffy so he can get your stuff to
peddle around. Don’t you believe his trick; and you quit sending
him your stuff. He’s trying to make you think you’ve got George
Eliot and Mrs. Humphry Ward beat to a batter, when you know
yourself it ain’t so. Isn’t that a sage, oh, what a wonderfully sage
remark when he says “you must write your best!”
Don’t you believe “that the editors are asking about you
constantly, and are more than anxious to see your work.” It’s not
so.
 Now get mad again, and when that old-time smile comes
back, read on further.
Mein Gott! what a recollection you have of me! “A tall,
slender lad with nice eyes—awfully quiet, and——Oh, I’ll
admit the exceedingly fond.” Was it a mystery why? Well, I
dunno, except because you were so sweet and devilish.
To-day I am as slender as anybody five feet eight and
weighing 175 pounds could be, and I’ve sharp, mean eyes. (I
told Bobby that he had nice eyes because I couldn’t remember
the colour.) I’ve been taken for a detective lots of times, but I
haven’t changed so much inside, and if you were on the
twentieth floor of the Waldorf-Astoria to-night, and had a string
long enough, I’ll bet I’d have a magnolia or two and a box of
candy to tie to the end of it.
You speak of meeting old Tom in your letter. Well, just a few
days afterward I got a letter from him talking about old days.
Said he’d been in New York often and might be back. Lordy! I’d
like to see him again. (Back in the old days at Roseboro Tom
was one of the whistlers under my window the night I got the
magnolias.)
Well, now, Carrie, what do you care if Tom pays attention to
somebody and likes her? Ain’t that the only thing there is that’s
worth two cents? Doesn’t the gentleman that takes you out
driving and boat riding ever—ever—talk about how nice the
moon looks? Oh, Carrie, never get so you feel like running
down such foolishness. After everything is added and
subtracted, that is the only remainder.
On the next page I find the very wise remark of your friend
Miss Baxter (whom I would be glad to consider mine—I mean
mein freund!) that you can’t write a love story because you
know nothing about it. Miss Baxter is altogether wrong but none
the less charming. That led me to inclose you a little story of
mine—a thing that is apparently egotistical to do—that settles
the question beyond all controversy. Read it some time when
you are up in the arbour about twilight when they are calling
you to supper—but don’t go.
On page three of your letter I observe a reference to your
picture. Sure, Mike! I asked you for your picture. And I’ve got
it, ain’t I? I’d like to see you get it back!
Oh, Carrie, if you “knowed” how folks try to get letters from
me and can’t, you’d appreciate the delightful toil I take in
writing to you. Ordinarily it’s just like laying bricks for me to
write even a business letter, but when I write to you—lemme see
what to say—it’s like lifting the lightest feather from the breast
of an eider duck and watching it float through the
circumambient atmosphere. (That strike you hard enough?)
I’ll tell you what, Carrie—(now don’t get mad, Caroline) I
need a boss. For the last month I’ve been so no-account and lazy
that I haven’t turned out a line. And yet, I don’t think it’s exactly
my fault. I’ve felt kind of melancholy and dreamy and
lonesome, and I don’t sleep well of nights. Once I dreamed that
I had a magnolia for you and you turned up your nose at it and
went away with Jeff—you remember Jeff?
Everybody’s Magazine sent down the editor’s automobile and
took me uptown to a distinguished nerve specialist, who decided
that I had been working too hard, and advised me either to take a
trip to Europe or some tablets he had in a box. I took the tablets.
They didn’t taste bad, so I kept on taking ’em, and I ain’t a bit
worse to-day.
But none of ’em knew that what I needed was just somebody
to fix a cushion for me on the sofa, and tell the man with the gas
bill that I wasn’t in.
You asked me what I get for short stories. I get ten, fifteen,
sometimes twenty cents a word, and everything engaged long
before it’s written.
Now, I’ll tell you what to do: kick the mountains over and
hurry to New York. It’s 50 per cent. of the game to see the
editors in person. Right here is the only place on the American
 Continent where you can live. What are the mountains
compared to it? Dear Carrie, kick the mountains over and take
my advice. You are far enough advanced to make your way from
the start. And I assure you, as I said, being on the ground is 50
per cent of the game.
They call it a lonely city. Lonely! with every masterpiece of
art, music, and beautiful things within a block of you! Say,
Carrie, chop down the tomato vines and come on. I can get you
into every editorial office in town (where you are not already
appreciated), and you will make a success. Attend, oh, Princess
of the Bluest Ridge, these are not the words of one D. Hudson
the adolescent, but of Bob the Perspicacious, who has seen and
who knows. If I didn’t think you had the genius to win the game
I’d never advise you to try.
There’s a line in your letter—“I couldn’t know what the boy
had developed into.” I can only say into one surely no better,
unsatisfied, and always remembering the little girl next door.
Please, Carrie, write to me soon, and if you don’t like my
letter say you condone it, for there ain’t nobody up here like
you, and I’m awfully lonesome to-night. And so, may I sign
myself,
YOURS AS EVER,
Bob.
P.S. I’m awfully glad to see by the weather reports that there’s
a freeze coming. I hope the gent that rows you on the lake will
have to buy tacks to put in his oars.
P.P.S. I was in a thanksgiving party where we had a flashlight
photo taken. I’ll send you one when they are printed.

Do I condone Bobby’s letter? The wicked, contraband little joy grows

and grows.

Christmas Eve.
Midnight.
 It is snowing—a real snow. The night outside my windows is one soft
whirling blur. At dusk John came in from the twenty-mile-away town. He
shook the snow from his clothes like the traditional Santa Claus, and he was
just as full of bundles. Two express packages for me in the big, bold hand
grown so familiar set my heart to beating and my cheeks to blushing
furiously under John’s scalpel eyes.
Since nine o’clock, when John went to bed tired out with his hard day’s
journey, I have sat here in my bedroom, dim save for the light of the leaping
flames and silent save for the sift of the snow piling high and higher on the
window-panes. Luxuriously I dive again into the most wonderful box of
candy I ever dreamed of; luxuriously I sniff the perfume of the most
exquisite flowers I ever saw, across the snow-filled air the village bells ring
their faint, “Peace on earth, good-will to men.”
To-morrow when I wear my flowers to church, I’ll feel like a princess—
orchids and lilies of the valley—your princess, Bobby.

Christmas Day. Afternoon.

When my eyes opened this morning the flaming beauty of the east took
me to the window—such a marshalling of sunrise banners to do honour to
the day. Not waiting for my fire, judging from the sounds in that direction
that mammy was having a holiday nap, anyway, I dressed rapidly, high
shoes, short skirt, coat and cap, and sallied forth. The landscape stretched
before me like a vast white sea, its purity unbroken by footstep of man. It
seemed to belong solely to me and a few noisy crows. I marched straight to
the post-office. It was closed when John passed last night. I had a sneaking
little hope—but it wasn’t there. I got a little note from Dicky, though. She
writes that her gift is delayed. It is always. I could never teach Dicky
timeliness—always, like Bobby Haralson, she has been superior to time.
The day that I began joyously has been a restless one. I have climbed to
the hilltop. Below me the village lies, a crystal toy town in the lap of crystal
hills. My eyes travel down the chain of glistening hills to Camel Back. Wise
old comrade, I do believe he knows. Anyway, it is a relief to tell him.
“Camel Back,” she writes, “A chance encounter at the theatre with Bobby
Haralson in which I still conceal my identity.” Camel Back’s snowy hump
twinkles as though he laughs; above him the clouds that have seemed to
drift aimlessly form a fairy castle. Its turrets and dome glitter in the sunset’s
dying fire. I can trace a door—a vast, closed portal. How ridiculous that a
trick of the clouds could thrill me! Slowly the door has opened. I can’t
explain the lovely magic of it, but there in the white stillness some words
that Bobby wrote rolled over me in a great, mounting, singing wave.
“You have sympathy and a deep and true humanness.” If Bobby is not
mistaken! If it could be! Almost solemnly I turn from my mountain, with its
castle fading from the sky, and take my way home.

January 20th.
Every minute that I can spare from my school duties I work at my book
in a fury of enthusiasm. Just as the snow made the village so beautiful on
Christmas day, something within me no longer sees the frailties of the
mountain people with whom my lot is cast. Their kindness through all the
long years comes to me instead. So I call my little book “The Window.” I
look out and see beauties I never saw before, and the sun pours in and
warms me.

January 25th.
I am working at it night and day. It grows amazingly. “Child,” some one
said to me yesterday, “I heard ye was writin’ a book. Ain’t plenty o’ books
in the worl’, ’thout rackin’ yore pore brains to write anuther?”
Almost, I gave back indignant answer; but I have learned of my little
book—of my little book that flows in my veins and runs down through my
finger-tips, sometimes to laugh and exult, sometimes to sob and sigh.

February 15th.
My book is written. It was pure joy. It is very simple—just the hopes and
fears, the joys and sorrows of this spot isolated from the big world by its
wall of mountains. I owe much to my book. Winter still holds the world, but
flowers bloom inside me. Not the orchids and roses I demanded of life
when I wanted to dynamite my garden plot, it is true, but some old-
fashioned pinks that make these February days sweet and smelly ones.

March 1st.
 Did it ever happen to anybody before? I have knocked and knocked at
editors’ doors; I have waited months and got my stories back, too. Two
weeks, and I hold in my hand a telegram from Bobby’s publishers: “Your
little book is ours, and it’s love at first sight.”

April 1st.
It is advertised in the magazine section of the Times. How it flashes out to
meet my eyes: “The Window”—a certain simplicity of expression—a
realism that touches with delicacy and pathos things that we feel are the
actualities of life.
John comes in and brings Dicky’s letter: “Caroline Howard! And not to
tell me! Such a peach of a heroine, Caroline. How’d a sedate old thing like
you catch that spirit of youth? Your heroine flames like a red, red rose. And
what do you know of love’s sweetness and its fierceness?”
What do I know? I go indoors and gaze soberly at the sedate old thing
that is I. Then I go in search of mammy. “Mammy,” I call, “I must have
somebody to talk to. They say you can look right into the shadowy interiors
of the mountaineers’ cabins; that you can see the vague objects take shape
in them because I’ve got the atmosphere so well.” Mammy is feeding the
chickens. “What is atmosphere, honey?” she asks calmly. “Oh, feed your
chickens,” I say, disgustedly, and, calmly, she obeys.
By some queer trick our publishers, Bobby’s and mine, have put us
together—my little book by his big book. I have not heard from Bobby
since Christmas. No doubt all his fingers are now out of commission.
Just after Christmas I was in town and I saw a big splendid picture of
Bobby in a bookdealer’s window. I know the man, and, shamelessly, I told
him Bobby was my first cousin—my favourite cousin. He gave me the
picture. Bobby is in his old place on my mantel. And, as before, he
dominates the room. There are times when I almost feel his presence,
distinct, encompassing. My life has not many idle moments, but when these
little lazy let-down minutes do come, when I sit by the fire at night, the
school papers all corrected, just before I go to bed, I find awaiting me,
giving me the feeling that it is always there, patiently abiding its moment,
this nearness to Bobby. It draws near, not like an alien thing unsure of its
welcome, but it comes as if in answer to a call. How well I know Bobby
Haralson! Times spent together, when apart, how close they come. If
disaster overwhelmed him he’d hide his hurt under a froth of gayety, his
lips would mock with smiles. Once my mother laughingly called my father
to see the pretty picture a little sewing girl made as she slept—her beads of
prayer in her hands. Smilingly my father shook his head. My mother loved
my father for that chivalry to a little sleeping work girl. Bobby is like that—
human enough to advertise through a newspaper for a girl “pal” and then
too chivalrous to meet her. The subtle gradations that make a gentleman!

April 1st.
All the way from school this afternoon I kept telling myself there would
be a letter from Bobby on the hall table, and then I would tell myself it was
preposterous after this long silence that I should look for his letter. But there
it was. And he has been sick. I feel his nerves in the letter.
If Bobby has been reading my last two letters, which he hopes I won’t
make my two last, one was most certainly an old one. Of course I thanked
him for the Christmas flowers and candy. It’s a bad sign, Mr. Book-writer,
for a man to con over old letters. He’s either in his dotage, or he is in love.
Is Bobby in love?
Here’s his letter:

West 20th Street.

New York. April 1st.
DEAR, DEAR CARRIE:
(Dear, dear Carrie, indeed! And not a line from him since
Christmas.)
Here’s my right hand being held up:—Please listen!
To-day for the first time in six weeks I’ve had my trunks
unpacked and have sat down at my desk clothed in my
ordinarily sane mind, and been able to find pen ’n ink ’n paper
to write with and on. I’ve moved four times since I lived in
Waverly Place; and have been driven from post-office to pillow
by the—noise of elevated trains, waggons (notice the English
two g’s), trams (also English), and cries of hucksters (mostly
Dagoes). At last I have found a quiet haven; and the first thing I
do (of course) is to dig your last two (please don’t make it “two
last”) letters and read ’em some more.
I have answered your letters and written you dozens in the
spirit; but when it comes to spreading the ink, I know I’ve been
as the old darky song goes, “A liar and a conjurer, too.” There
are periods of time when the sight of a pen or an ink bottle
strikes me to stone. Will it be some slight excuse for not having
written to one of whom I have thought by every mail, if I assert
that not for months have I written a line for publication except
one little short 2,000-word rotten story? It be true.
Oh, some sort of nervous condition—can’t sleep nor nothin’!
Oh, yes, ma’am, thank you; feelin’ heaps better now. I live
within a few doors of Broadway, but on such a quiet street that
the little clock on my desk ticking sounds as loud as a cricket
chirping under the honeysuckle vine on your porch on a fall
night.
Don’t you think you might come up this way some time?
Ain’t there some of your folks that live around here? Seems to
me there was. I’d rather see you than to have a bushel of
diamonds. And if I can get a string on you I’ll tie more
magnolias and gumdrops to it than Roseboro ever saw. Say—
please come, won’t you? I do so long to see a human—a
Heaven-sent, home-bred, ideal-owning, scrumptious, sweet,
wholesome human with a heart such as I know you are—or, in
the words of the poet, “one of whom you are which.” The folks
up here are all right and lots of ’em are good to know, but—they
ain’t got tar on their heels, Miss Carrie, ma’am.
I’ve been thinking of running down to the Bluest Ridge for
two or three weeks as soon as it gets warmer here. I want to go
up somewhere in the mountings and have a quiet time with the
sunrises and the squirrels, and I want to see some morning
glories on a board fence. I’ve tried the dinky little hills they call
mountains up here, and they ain’t no good. You can’t take forty
steps in the wildwood without stumbling over a sardine box or a
salmon can; and the quantity of Ikeys and Rebeccas that you
scare up in the shady dells is sure something fierce.
If I happen down in your range of mountings may I drop in
and see you? I need to get away from town for a while, and I
certainly would rather be there than anywhere I know of.
Why don’t you cut loose and come to N. Y.? This is the only
place to live. You can choose the kind of life you want and live
it, and get all there is of existence. Come on and get in with the
bunch! You can get a studio in a top story and raise tomatters on
the roof if you must have ’em. I’ll help you tend to ’em. Come
on and learn the beauty of a quiet life. Get away from the
feverish round of gayeties that you’ve been accustomed to—
men taking you out rowing (wasn’t he tall and dark, with a
drooping moustache?) and men coming in the Pullman cars and
sitting close by your side—oh, I haven’t forgotten about it!
Often I’ve gotten out a couple of dozen sheets of paper and
started to write to you, when I’d think: oh, what’s the use—she
won’t want to hear from me—somebody’s ripping the
buttonholes out of his collar trying to pull up car windows for
her, or pulling on the wrong oar and rowing the boat into a mud
bank where they’ll sit for hours until some plowman plods along
and drags them out.
Please, dear Carrie, write to me some more. If you had saved
all the letters I’ve written to you in the spirit you’d have a stack
as high as the big sunflower by the garden gate. Write and tell
me exactly what you think about when you take your hair down
and sit on the rug at 11:30 P. M. before the fireplace. And I’ll tell
you what I think about when I set the bottle of Scotch on the
table and light the last cigar at 2 A. M., when the distant cars and
cabs sound like the ripples of your mountain streams on a still
summer night.
I send the ghost of a magnolia up to your window.
YOURS AS EVER,
Bob.
 April 4th.
I find a P.S. from Bobby this afternoon and the ghost of a magnolia that
failed to get in the other letter.

MA CHÉRIE MLLE. CARRIE:

Here’s a magnolia.
I know you believe I am “without the pale” and “N. G.,” but I
write again because I do not believe that I am.
If you come to N. Y. this spring I reckon as how you won’t
want to see me because you think I am short on etiquette. All
right for youse! I’ll watch all the rubberneck coaches, and when
I see a little pink-cheeked girl in a straw hat with daisies on it
and a white dress with a pink sash, chewing sweetgum—(for
shame, Bobby)—and making eyes at the Brooklyn Bridge, I’ll
know who it is, and look at you all I please.
So, au revoir, Miss Howard. I am still yours sincerely.
R. H.

April 5th.
This sweet spring afternoon I cannot stay indoors. In her joy the earth is
like the mother of a new-born child. A light, restless wind has piled snowy,
errant clouds above the mountain tops, the little green leaves are uncurling,
the sun shining as it shines only in the spring and on an awakened world—
and the birds——A lover bird, just the kind to capture a little lady bird’s
heart, has been pouring out a passionate mating song for two whole days.
He is in the cedar tree not far from my window. His little lady love answers
from the willow in the pasture. He is trying to make her come to him, I feel
sure. Will she?

April 6th.
Saturday Afternoon.
My lover bird is gone from the cedar tree. Down in the willow’s cool
depths, above the spring where the colts and cattle drink, there are such
flutterings, such joyous little outbursts of song that I smile in sympathy.
Wise, wise, little woman-bird. Since the coming of these last letters there’s
been a stealthy fear following at my heels—the fear that I might go to New
York. I could make my book an excuse, and I have some money. I have
spent very little since that extravagant outburst last fall. And I could make
Dicky an excuse. Dear little Dicky, who is as joyous over my book as if she
herself had written it.
I will not go! The fate that let me put the light out the night that Bobby
came here is a wicked, wicked jade, but I defy her! I’ll stay right here!
That Bobby should remember a little girl’s hat through all the years! That
day so far in the past, when I left Roseboro and Ernest Cold was on the train
—Bobby said he was; I don’t remember—Bobby put a real daisy in my hat
band when he came in the train to tell me good-bye, and he said——
That stealthy fear that I might go to New York is stealthy no longer.
Boldly it has stalked out in front of me and clutched me by the throat.

April 15th.
This morning when I pushed up the shade in my berth I was greeted by
the sun’s big, round, inquiring eye. “What are you doing here?” he seemed
to be asking. I hastened to explain that my going to New York was in no
way connected with Mr. Robert Haralson; that he is not to know I am there.
Somewhat shamefacedly I explain to that red, watchful eye that Dicky is
not to know I am there either. Dicky doesn’t need me now. Her last letter is
as joyous as the lilt of a lark.
My publishers (how fine it sounds) want some little changes made in the
book, and for that sole reason I am on a Pullman bound for New York.
So accustomed am I to space that I could not be boxed up in lower twelve
last night, so I took the whole section. This morning as I stood on my bed
reaching up for my skirt the train took a sharp curve that landed me in the
aisle of the car. Visions of a hospital danced with a million stars before my
eyes. A young, lovely girl helped me back into my berth. No one else, not
even the porter, had witnessed my humiliation. In a little while, in spite of
my aching head, I collected my senses sufficiently to get to the dressing-
room. Making myself presentable was a clutching sort of experience. I have
not spent the night in a train since I was eighteen, and I must have been
more agile then. When I emerged from dressing I felt as a mountaineer’s
baby must feel when it is being hushed to sleep. If you have ever seen one
being flung from side to side of its rude little cradle, threshed about like a
weaver’s shuttle, then you understand perfectly.
The girl was waiting for me; she proposed that we breakfast together. In
the dining car, under the stimulus of the coffee, which stopped my
headache, I told the girl about my little book and that I was going on for my
first trip. Back in the coach we were the only passengers and we sat
together; she told me about herself. She is going to New York, too. She is
going to join the great army of workers. She is so sweet and young, so
girlish and refined, so beautifully although simply dressed, that I think my
face must have shown my astonishment and regret. That she should be
adrift in a great city seemed too dreadful—one of its labourers, and on
small wages, in desolate lodgings, isolated from all social life with her kind.
I thought of the city’s temptations for a lonely, beautiful girl. And I said:
“Child, go back to your family. Haven’t you somebody?”
“I have my little baby that lies in the cemetery.” Her young laugh rang
bitter. “I am all alone. I left my husband—he didn’t love baby and me any
longer. I mean he didn’t love me. He adored baby. She adored him, too. She
used to say, ‘I’m des trazy ’bout my dear daddy.’” She looked from the
window; I could see her chin quiver. When she turned back to me her voice
was quite steady. “I want to be fair to him. When baby died it hurt him
cruelly, and always when I place flowers in the little urn at the head of
baby’s grave, I find beautiful ones in the urn at the foot. I know, although he
does not love me any longer, that it hurts him for me to be a wage-earner.
But I can’t take his money. You—you don’t believe in divorce?” Her voice
was half timid.
I was silent. It is something I am so ignorant of. The old Ducketts are the
nearest approach to divorce that we have in our mountain world. Recently,
without a word to any one, that poor old lady left her home and moved to a
little house across the street. Our village has wondered and gossiped about
this rupture after sixty years of life together. Poor old lady, she slips in the
back door of his house when he is sitting at the front door, and does up the
work she has done for sixty years; then she slips home again.
 “A woman can’t judge”—the girl’s voice with a defiant note in it brought
my thoughts with a start back from the Ducketts, and to her—“unless it is
her own problem. She, the other woman, wanted him to leave baby and me.
He dropped the letter on the floor and I picked it up and read it. I don’t
know why I did it. I had perfect faith in him. She said all her happiness was
at stake; she eliminated our happiness—baby’s and mine.”
“But, child”—my mind took a wider circle than it had ever had need of in
Marsville—“any woman might fall in love with another woman’s husband
and try to take him from her. I know a coloured woman whose husband
beats her, and when I try to make her leave him and live on a nice little
place we have and do our washing, she says she would leave her old man
but that she might not find another, that husbands is so ‘scase.’ They must
be from the way some women behave. Perhaps your husband was not at
fault.”
The lovely colour mounted to her face, it quivered as she told me that he
had acknowledged it. We were both silent then. But presently I asked if he
had gone to the other woman. She murmured no.
“He says that he is penitent.” Her eyes were stormy. “He begs me to take
him back. Upon what foundation would I build my faith in him again?”
I think my own answer surprised me. “Bodies sometimes sin when souls
are clean,” I said. “It could have been a passing sin of the body that did not
touch the spirit, which is still true to you. If the spirit sinned he would not
want to come back—he would not be sorry. Oh, child, don’t you see?”
“I never—did see—it like—that.” The girl’s words trailed like broken
winged birds, her face paled.
We were under the shed in Washington and a solitary passenger,
travelling bag in hand, was coming down the aisle of our coach. At sight of
her, for he did not know me, his face whitened, too. In one great throb of
my heart I took in the situation. I knew that he was her husband, and that he
loved her. I saw it in the flash of his face at sight of her—a blind man given
back his sight might look out on his restored world with a look like that.
In a lightning-like flash of time I had leaped to my feet, pushed him into
the seat where I had been, and, without in the least knowing what I was
saying, I heard myself say: “You foolish children. Go back to the little grave
and put the two urns for flowers together. Then start life all over again.”
I left them staring into each other’s eyes in a sort of mesmerized trance,
and went into the next coach. When my eyes cleared of tears I saw that the
bright sunlight world beyond the car window was filled with yellow
butterflies. In their circling they made a great golden wedding ring. The
sweet prophecy seemed mine—not belonging to the people I had left back
in the other coach. At lunch they asked me to come to their table, but I
smilingly refused. When two people have just been caught up in a golden
chariot and given passage direct to Paradise there is no room in the vehicle
for outsiders.
I could not grind under the river and get out in the heart of the city, as the
advertisements say. I had to see the skyline from the Jersey side. How
wonderful it is as it glitters in the soft spring light—a proud wonder city
that rests on great, tossing waters. And there lie the docks. I can read the
names of the different lines on the dark little houses. And far down the
stretch of moving water I see a gallant little tug assisting a great vessel out
to sea. A sort of trembling seized me. Like a vision that fades, all thought of
the life that lay behind me—John, mammy, the little mountain village—
slipped away. As the boat drifts near and nearer to that white wonder city I
want to fling the people huddled on the seats, apathetic as sheep, into the
water. I want to cry aloud, “City, city, I am coming!” But they wake up at
the dock. How alive they are! I am alive, too. I am over the mountain wall.
At last I am part of the big, alive, throbbing world.

April 16th. 12 P. M.
Late yesterday afternoon when I ran up the steps of 30 West Twentieth
Street and the door opened and closed on me, my one sensation was relief. I
had taken a cab at the ferry and I had marvelled at the dexterity with which
the cabby turned and twisted through the dingy streets. Safe, not kidnapped,
money still in my bag, the wonderful adventure of getting to my destination
without adventure accomplished, I stepped from that cab. The cabby took
my trunk from the top of his hansom, banged it on the sidewalk, accepted
the dollar we had agreed upon, and waited. I waited, too, politely. Suddenly
he turned very red and climbed to his perch, swearing roundly.
 As I followed Miss Jackson up the stairs to the third floor I asked her
why he did that. She answered vaguely that they were rude.
I came to Miss Jackson’s because her mother and my mother knew each
other, and because it is eminently respectable. As we climbed the dark stairs
my elation dropped from me. The hall needs the winds of heaven to blow
through it. Coming back to dinner, I fairly groped through the dimness. But
the dining-room was bright and cheerful. All the people seemed young.
They were very gay. At dinner the whole talk was of the theatre. As I have
not been to a play since I was eighteen, I sat stupidly quiet. Everybody went
out after dinner—most of them to the theatre. Miss Jackson went, too. Up in
my room I leaned from the window and tried to realize the wonderfulness
of being in New York. Below me the street was dark, but far away across
the housetops I saw a glow that I took to be the lights of Broadway. After a
long time I stole down the dim, depressing stairs. I opened the door, let in
the sweet, cool April air. I don’t know how long I stood there looking out at
the dark, deserted street. I thought of it as a siren of the sea, calling, luring
to it the youth of our wide, free land. My mind went to my little room up
two dark flights of stairs. I was paying ten dollars a week for a room just
about the size of the rug in front of my fireplace at home. What was the size
of the working girl’s room who paid five dollars a week? How many flights
of dark stairs did she have to climb? I seemed to feel the city—the city that
I have not yet seen. I seemed to feel its immensity—stretching away, street
after street, in overpowering sameness the length of the island. I thought of
the overcrowded East Side and the foreigners herded like cattle,
overflowing into the streets, and then I thought of Bobby—or had I been
thinking of him through all my thoughts?—jostling in the crowded streets,
loitering, listening, feeling the beat of the city’s great heart.
When I closed the door and came down the hall I saw the telephone in
spite of the dimness. Almost before I knew it I had found the number I
sought, my hand was on the receiver. But I did not take it down. The
memory of a bright-eyed little lady bird who waited for her lover to come to
her restrained me. I must be as wise as she.
I ran up to my room. A fog had crept in from the sea. The river must be
near. The calls of whistles and horns came shrill and often. They seemed to
give anxious warning. The city is a siren. It wrapped itself closer in this
white fog sheet of mystery and it called to me. Hastily I donned coat and
hat, ran down the stairs and out on the street. I did not hesitate—to hesitate
was to go back. In front of me, not far away, another street opened. I
reached it, stood still for a moment; a wraithlike little figure hurried past.
“What street is this?” I asked. Wraithlike he sped on without a reply. I
hurried after him, caught him by the arm. “What street is this?” I insisted.
“And which is up and which down?”
“Whut’s de matter wid y’nut?”
Humbly, I told him that I was a stranger; that I lived near and had just
walked out for a little glimpse of the city. He told me to keep straight ahead
until I came to Twenty-third Street, and stand there a while till the hayseeds
fell off me. I gave him a dime. He graciously allowed me to accompany
him. The city street widens beautifully at Twenty-third. It had seemed like
one of our narrow mountain gulches. I gave my little lad another dime. I
wanted to be told so much. The open space, vague in the fog, is Madison
Square; the street that rolled away into the gloom, the Avenue, and the
white, white foggy flare of light, Broadway.
Some weight of the city’s loneliness fell on me as I retraced my steps
alone. The fog seemed denser—it might have been because the light lay
behind. A few blocks down, as I turned into my own street, my own
audacious thoughts brought me to a standstill. If I kept straight on I would
come to Washington Square. An old schoolmate lived there.
I had no difficulty in recognizing the Arch, the cross on the church, the
light that burns always. I found the number. I would have thought I had
made a mistake, but I have written it so often. I went up the bare, worn
steps, rang a jangly bell. A slatternly woman came to the door. Back of her I
could see a dingy hall lighted by a blinking gas jet. She called my friend
loudly. There was no reply. She said her work was heavier in the spring,
that she was often very late.
I had pictured my artist friend in her studio home surrounded with
comfort. “Hasn’t she a studio?” I stammered. The woman laughed loudly.
“Her room, third floor back, ain’t no bigger ’n yo’ hand. She paints an’
sews an’ cooks, eats an’ lives an’ sleeps there, ’cept when she got jobs out.”
I turned and fled. I was trembling so I could hardly stand. Such a fragile,
lovely creature—my friend back in my school-girl days. A joyous young
creature, fashioned for joy. I did not want to see her; I knew instinctively
that she did not want to see me.
On the street again, out of the foggy darkness, a shadow lurched toward
me. I shrank against the building I was passing. It bent and looked into my
face, laughed drunkenly, and passed on. I tried to move. My limbs had
taken root. As I stood there flattened against that wall I heard cautious,
descending footsteps, whispering voices. Some people were coming down
nearby steps, and I was glad. I would follow close behind them. After what
was to me a very long time, as they did not pass, I went in the direction of
their voices, until I stumbled over a dark mass that lay in my path.
Something told me. The slow, cautious steps, the whispering voices—I
dropped to my knees on the pavement. The face I lifted and looked into was
a young girl’s. She was unconscious. I sprang up. There was movement in
my limbs now. I ran, breathless, into a man. I caught him by the arm,
pleading with him to hurry; I dragged him to the girl on the pavement. I
gasped out all I knew.
He took a flashlight from somewhere about him, knelt, looked at the girl,
and I—I looked at the pool of blood widening on the pavement. I had not
seen it before. She was dying. I dropped down by her, too. “Oh, poor little
girl,” I cried, “why did you come to this city of Gomorrha? Why didn’t you
stay at home?”
“See here”—the light flashed full in my own face, the low, cold voice bit
into my spirit as a bullet of steel might have burrowed in my flesh—“how
do I know that what you’ve told me is on the level?”
Stupidly I stared at him. Whose face was this—as familiar as my own
viewed in the looking-glass?
The eyes looking into mine were suddenly confused, the apology he gave
murmured. He stared as though I bewildered him. He pushed his hat back. I
hadn’t recognized Bobby Haralson, but I knew that lock of hair on his brow.
Had I not once watched a flame devour it? Head and heart awhirl, I smiled
at him. “Mr. Haralson,” I said, and I laughed outright. “I am on the level.”
There was the sound of approaching footsteps. He flashed the light out.
“So you know me?” he said.
“Who does not?” I answered. “But you do not know me, honest, now.”
 “I do—and I don’t,” he said.
Not far away a figure loomed; it brought us back to the poor little girl
that lay there so quietly between us.
“You must get away, quickly. Officer!” he called. His voice has a
carrying quality if it is so low, for soon an answering hail came through the
fog.
“Will you go? Go!” he commanded. “I’ll see this through.”
“I can’t,” I said, and I suddenly knew that I spoke out of a vast content.
“I’m lost. It’s no use to tell me west. I don’t know west.”
“West what?” Again his words bit into me like they were steel.
“Twenty.” The officer was only a few steps away and Bobby fairly forced
it from me.
“The Arch, the Avenue, Twentieth Street, then to your left.”
Obediently, I did it all. I am safe at Miss Jackson’s. But, oh, will I ever
sleep again? When I close my eyes I see the girl’s fair little face, that
widening pool of blood; and then I see Bobby’s eyes—the puzzled stir of
memory in them.

April 17th.
I fell asleep at daylight this morning. When I waked the breeze was
tossing the curtains, the sun shining, there was a sense of joyousness in the
morning. I shopped with an agent—I could not have shopped without one.
We lunched at a cunning tearoom just off the Avenue. I ordered just about
what mammy would have for a guest of ours: soup, broiled chicken, two
vegetables, a salad, a sweet, and coffee. I nearly fainted when I saw my bill.
And then the tip! I would not have given it, but I saw it offered at a nearby
table. I was confused to give it, but the pretty, refined looking girl did not
seem to mind accepting it.
This afternoon, by appointment, I met Mr. Elliott. Mr. Elliott is a member
of the firm. He is young, tall, slender. Somehow I thought all publishers
were middle-aged, stocky as to build, and with close-cut white moustaches.
 Mr. Elliott asked me if I had ever dined at Mouquin’s. His face was a
compliment when I told him that like a little mountain boy of my
acquaintance I had never “ben nowhar nur seen nothin’.” I do like Mr.
Elliott. My heart is almost leaping out of me! I drove straight to Mrs.
Christopher again. She told me all the literary people go to Mouquin’s. If
Bobby should be there to-night! If we should meet!
One A. M.
Out of gratitude to Mrs. Christopher I must acknowledge that the girl
who looked back at me from the mirror to-night was a stranger to me. Mr.
Elliott did not know her, either. As I came down the boarding-house stairs
—the parlours at present are occupied by people from the South and the
stuffy hall is the only reception-room—I flushed under his gaze. It is most
bewildering to emerge from a Marsville spinster to a New York belle.
Mouquin’s. A confused memory of a flight of steps, a clutter of tables, a
sea of faces.
“Aren’t you hungry? Don’t you like your oysters? It is a trifle late for
them.”
We were seated. I knew that. It was Mr. Elliott’s voice. I knew that, too. I
was glad, although he seemed so far away, that I had not lost him. The plate
that was rising, falling, lurchingly, drunkenly, held oysters——
“Drink your cocktail.” Out of the blur of things he pushed it toward me.
Obediently I drank it. I saw that the oysters numbered six, that their shells
were as pink and polished as a lady’s finger-nails. Obediently I ate them—
the oysters, not the shells.
“What makes you so quiet to-night? But maybe you aren’t having a good
time?”
With the help of the wine that sparkled and bubbled at my right hand,
blessed little helper in time of need, I did not have to give account of my
appetite again; I was making quite respectable headway with my chicken.
Feverishly I assured Mr. Elliott that I was having the loveliest time but one
I’d ever had in my life.
Mr. Elliott beamed. “Will you tell me about that time?” he asked.
 But women have their little reserves. The lovely time to which I had
reference was a mountain storm I once survived, on Craggy, six thousand
feet above sea level, separated from my party, having followed a cattle path
by mistake, and—alone. This time was just as lovely as that. Then, after a
terrified scurrying here and there, I had gone back to the mountain top to
wait. Out of what had seemed an innocent sky an electric storm broke.
Lashing his steeds with whips of fire, Apollo drove them across the boiling
heavens. At each ear-crashing report of thunder the earth threatened to
crumble, hurling me down through bottomless space. With the sharp
hissings of snakes the lightning fell about me. Rain-drenched, storm-torn,
but too terrified to brave the electric fires darting across the mountain’s top
to what seemed safety under the big rock where a flock of frightened sheep
huddled, I took the storm in the open. When it had rolled away the sheep no
longer huddled—I was indeed alone—they lay still.
“Does it meet your approval?” Mr. Elliott put the direct question to me,
and somehow I knew it had been asked before. I looked down at my plate
helplessly—we had reached the salad course—I tried to rouse my laggard
brain. Approval of what, and what was approval?
“It gets my goat!” The words came from my lips. My ears heard them.
And the fright of the foolish words cleared my brain.
“What!” There was astonishment, there was amusement, there was also a
puzzled intentness in the eyes that looked into mine, and I stammered that
the girl who sat at the next table—the girl who looked so cultured and
smartly got up—had just said it, and that it was new to me, but it sounded
like an idiom of the street.
With that careless, satiated New York glance Mr. Elliott’s eyes swept the
girl. “Beef to the heel,” he said heartlessly.
“Beef to the heel!” That puzzled me, too.
We had drained our coffee cups when two people who sat at a table
behind us passed—a man and a woman—Bobby Haralson and Dicky. I
recognized Bobby as I came in; the lovely droop of Dicky’s back is not
unfamiliar to me, either.
“That’s Bob Haralson—you’ve heard of him—one of our biggest men,
and his biggest work is still in him. He’s the nicest, most lovable, queerest
fellow you ever did see. He has hosts of friends, but mostly, he lives to
himself. He’d give his last dollar to a friend and go hungry himself; and
once I knew him to refuse to be introduced to a rich fellow of power in the
literary world because that man belonged soul and body to a corporation—
had been bought. That’s Bob Haralson! I often see him here, but I never
saw him here with a woman before. Come to think of it, I never saw him
anywhere before with a woman—not much in his line, women. But they
seemed to be having a corking time. I never saw him so animated. That
little witch—pretty, wasn’t she?—has got him going. I’d have asked him
over to be introduced had he been alone.”
As we left the restaurant Mr. Elliott asked me to go with him to a little
theatre where the one-act plays were all thrills. I couldn’t tell him that if I
had any more thrills he’d probably have to call an ambulance and send me
to a hospital; I couldn’t explain that as far as I was concerned the play was
done, curtain down, and lights out.
We went. We sat in darkness. The darkness was a great relief. Mr. Elliott
could not see me. I sat there with tightly shut eyes until, at a stir among the
people about me, I heard some one say a man had fainted. “It gets my
goat!” I murmured. Fortunately there was quite a little stir about us and Mr.
Elliott did not hear me.

April 18th.
Some hours ago, when I left New York, having decided to run up to
Plymouth and finish up the work on the book by the sea, Mr. Elliott put me
in the coach, having showered me with books, flowers, and magazines. I
opened the flowers in the cab, and I stared at them and at him.
“Don’t you like them?”
Did I like orchids and lilies of the valley? Bobby’s Christmas gift to me?
I pulled up. I wasn’t going to be beef to the heel. I joined the New York
procession—and I think I made good.
There’s a little slit of a mirror in the coach, right here by my chair, and I
take a peep at myself. Blessings on Mrs. Christopher, I don’t look like a
spinster, and from Marsville. And then—then I bury my face in nice Mr.
Elliott’s flowers, drinking in their perfume, and splashing them with some
very big and salty tears.
 April 25th.
I have spent the morning in Plymouth’s quaint old graveyard—such a
soft, sunny, springlike morning. I have looked at the dim old slabs that bear
testimony to the virtue of departed wives. I am sitting on the grave of a
virtuous wife now, looking past the stones, past the big rock the nimble
Pilgrims leaped on when they landed on free soil, far out to where sea and
sky meet. Had I been a Puritan maid I would have said to my lover when
we climbed to this hill soft days like this and looked to sea: “Dear boy, with
my heart I give you all that women who are like me give to one man—the
thoughts I have kept for you, the lips I have kept for you. If you had a great
searchlight and should throw it back over the road of my life there’s not a
single little bend that it would shame me for your eyes to see; but when I’m
dead, don’t put my virtue on a tombstone.”

April 26th.
This has been a heavenly day. Mr. Elliott came to Boston on business and
ran down to Duxbury to see some friends of his, and all of them motored
over to Plymouth and got me. I lunched at the loveliest home in Duxbury.
The sea was almost in the back porch. Mr. Elliott came back in the machine
with me and took the train for Boston. When he left he held my hands in a
mighty close friendly clasp, and he said—never mind what he said. It is
lovely of Mr. Elliott to be so good to me, and it’s comforting down to my
toes. For some idiotic reason I want to cry again. I won’t cry! And I won’t
sit here. (I have climbed to the old graveyard, and seated myself on the slab
of a virtuous spouse.) I need all my nerve force. It must sparkle in the
changes I’ve got to put in my book. And I know why I’m nervous, and I
know why I want to cry. It’s always satisfactory when you can chase an
emotion to its lair——I was taken to the graveyard when I was very little—
mammy used to take me with her when she went to put flowers on my
great-aunt’s grave, the lady whose false teeth fell into mammy’s care; and
she (mammy) was always so solemn on these occasions—it was before the
day of Christian Science—there was death then, and hell, and a devil. I feel
quite cheerful since I have analyzed the teary feeling.

April 26th.
Night.
 A letter from Dicky forwarded to New York and on here. It lilts like the
song of the happy little wren that was singing in the big cedar tree at the
garden gate the day I left home.
“Oh, Caroline,” Dicky says, “I want to go out under the stars to-night at
home and bury my face in the pansies that always riot in your April garden.
With their soft little faces close, close to mine, I want to tell them a secret. I
want to tell it to you, too, Caroline. But not yet—not yet.”
I go out under the stars, through the quiet streets, and down to the quiet
sea. The night is poignantly sweet and beautiful. Dicky, little sister, child of
my love, keep your secret. I could not bear to hear it yet—not yet.

April 27th.
A telegram from Bobby. He wants to come to Plymouth. He has
something to tell me. It is Bobby’s chivalry that makes him feel he should
go through the form of asking me for Dicky. I have wired no. There’s a little
kodak of him that I cut from a magazine and put in my little silver frame. I
can reach out my hand and touch it here where I sit, and, vaguely, it
comforts me.
I have faced it. I love Bobby. To love—it is to give. Bobby’s wife must
give. The hands that take into their keeping that precious thing—his genius
—what tender, comprehending hands they must be. There’ll be times, lots
of ’em, when Bobby’s wife will have to do all the loving for two. There’ll
be times when he will thrust her out, and if she sits whimpering on the
doorstep that it’s cold out there, heaven help her—how he’ll hate her.
There’ll be times when the work presses, when he’s distrait—knows she’s
there just as he knows the house furnishings are there, bed near centre of
room, bureau against west wall, light above——If she gets frightened at the
wilted leaves and jerks his love for her out of his body to look at the roots
too often, then heaven help you, Robert Haralson.
 Bobby, Bobby, I’d know at a glance—without a glance. When you
opened the door I’d feel, Bobby. Sometimes her tired-out man child
quivering with his day’s toil asks mother love of his wife. She’s got to be
counsellor, comforter, friend—comrade with whom to forget life’s cares.
Out of all the world she’s got to be the one woman that is his need. I am
your need! If disaster stripped you of all that the world has showered on
you, if it reduced you to the hurdy-gurdy man who grinds his organ under
your window—Bobby, Bobby, would Dicky love the gathering of the
pennies?

April 28th.
Morning.
Bobby wires again: “What are you up to, Caroline, that you didn’t let me
know you were here, that Dicky didn’t know; that Elliott wasn’t told it was
Dicky with me; that you were so naughty in the Square the other night as to
laugh at my confusion? Little girl with eyes like moonflowers, all right for
youse. And mum’s the word.”
“Her eyes, full and clear, with their white-encircled, gray irises, are like
moonflowers.” That’s what Bobby says on page 131 about his heroine. And
back in one of his first letters to me, “Please turn to page 131 of the book
and try to think whose eyes I tried to describe.”

April 28th.
Noon.
On the heels of Bobby’s telegram I have this letter from him.
To-day, Wednesday.

MY DEAR CAROLINE HOWARD:

Please hurry up and get all the sea air you want, and go up to
Boston and let them show you Milk Street and the Youth’s
Companion building (that’s all there is there). Oh, I forgot the
beautiful men. Look ’em over! I’ve seen ’em. They all carry a
black network bag with a MS. play, and Emerson, and two
watercress sandwiches for lunch in it. All right for youse. Do
you know I have an idea that you’ll meet your fate up there
among the Baked Beans. I’m told those Apollo “Belvidears”
always take to a girl that’s both intelligent and good looking.
Get that? Well, I won’t send you a wedding present—so, there!
But, speaking seriously, we’ve had rain here all day. It’s been
cold, too—kind of like late of an evening when you go down
barefoot in the ten-acre medder to drive the cow home, and your
mind is on whippoorwills and stone bruises and Cherokee roses
and hot corn-pone, and the little girl with the white sunbonnet
on the adjoining farm that you saw picking cherries in the lane,
and who you (I don’t mean you, I mean me) fondly imagine is
going to come over to your farm some day and scold you when
the cow doesn’t come home, but who really runs away with a
patent churn agent and winds up by keeping a shooting gallery
in South Bend, Indiana.
Oh, well, what’s the odds?
Hope you are feeling quite well after your long trip from the
soggy south.
Now while you are up “No’th” just turn yo’self a’ loose and
have a good time. Down in our country the old-time opinion is
that Liberty Jams everything into a bad shape, but it ain’t so. No
—the real and genuine liberty sets you Free; it doesn’t cramp
you or lower your ideals at All.
A great many wise people have learned that; you see Them
Everywhere in Greater New York. And I think you would like to
bring your cow up here and spend the remainder of your time.
You can live nicely on fifty cents a week; but a great deal better
on half a billion dollars.
Since I have discovered what a help printed matter is to me, I
simply love to write letters. I know a man who writes 1,900
letters a day to his Loved One. But don’t you think he is kind of
“crowdin’” the mourners?
Please ma’am write to me some more right away; I like to
hear from you.
 P.S. I’ve had a great time chopping up the papers and building
this letter. You’ll excuse my frivolousness, won’t you?

BOB.
Bobby, I condone your offense—time spent cutting up the papers, time
worth so many cents per word, to amuse me. Times spent together when
apart, how close they come.

April 29th.
Morning.
How the sea flashes, and the blue, blue sky flashes, too. There’s a boat
drifting this way. It looks like a white-winged gull afloat, a messenger of
joy. How the waves sing, and their swelling song is all about a little girl in a
white sunbonnet picking cherries in the lane. I remember that day, too,
Bobby. It was a picnic. You climbed the tree and I caught up my dress to
catch the big ripe cherries. When the picnic was over and we got home my
gentle mother scolded over the ruined dress. She gave it to the
washerwoman’s little girl.
How the waves sing, and their shouting song is—Bobby’s loved one.

Afternoon.
The day’s mood has changed. A cold wind blows in from the sea. If
mammy could see me out here on this deserted stretch of shore in the rain
and the spray that dashes on me from the stormy, inrushing waves she’d say
her prayers in thankfulness that she put the old storm coat and rubbers in,
for I’ve got them on.
How fierce the rush of the waves! Something as elementally savage as
their assault of the shore stirs in me, writhes in its travail—is born. Bobby is
mine.
Dicky, light-hearted, laughing child who would pluck the flower of love
as a baby gathers a posy, forgive me.
When the day is hot and the road is long, and the flower of love droops,
what then, Dicky?
 Night.
I have wired Bobby that I will be in New York Wednesday. It will take
me that long to finish the changes in the book. I wired him that my train
gets in about five-thirty, and that if he likes I will take dinner with him.

April 30th.
Bobby’s wire reads:
Sure, Mike, I’ll be on hand at 5:30 Wednesday to welcome
you on your retreat from Bosting. And don’t bother yourself
about the train getting in at six or later, for I’ll be on the job and
I’ll be there when you get there.
I have already ordered the lye hominy and turnip greens for
dinner, and you’ll be properly looked after by the committee of
one when you hit the town.
Hoping these few lines will find you the same, I remain,
Yours continuously,
B.

May 1st.
Bobby wasn’t at the train. If he was, we missed each other. I wasn’t
conscious of it on the train, but now I know I pictured him there at the
station, standing just a little in advance of the mass of people; vaguely, I
think my mind ran the gamut of earth’s meetings and thought of dim shores,
not of earth, where that one who goes first must surely await the other. To
the whir of the wheels as they ate up the miles that lie between Boston and
New York my heart sang, Bobby’s loved one, Bobby’s loved one. I was in a
maze of vague, happy thought—and he wasn’t there—he didn’t meet me.
It is 12 P. M. now. I went with Miss Jackson to a horrid little show, and
when we came in I could not believe there was not a message of some sort
for me.

May 2d.
 I stayed in all morning in such a tense state of expectancy that it has left
me limp. How glad I am that Dicky does not know I am here—I simply
can’t see Dicky yet. I am at sea as to Bobby’s reason for not meeting me, at
sea that no message from him comes to me, but one thing I know: I can
trust his, “Mum’s the word, Caroline.”
Mrs. Christopher and I shopped this afternoon. Afterward we had tea at
the Astor and went down to the Waldorf and sat in Peacock Alley. Such a
mix up of fine clothes and commonness. The women have hard faces,
painted, world-weary, they are too much of—oh, everything: too red as to
lips, too black as to eyebrows, too gold as to hair; they don’t walk—they
can’t, poor things—their general appearance as they mince along the
Avenue is that of a procession of mannikins done up in slit bolster cases.
Bah! It all makes me think of a big rock near Marsville. Once I passed it
with a mountaineer. “When I wuz a child,” he said, “that wuz a monster
rock—the masterest (biggest) rock I ever seed. Hit’s dwindled sence I wuz a
child.” Since I reached here New York’s dwindled.
“Caroline Howard,” I said to myself, sternly, out in the street again, “it
isn’t New York that has dwindled—it is you. Robert Haralson didn’t meet
you. Whatever his reason for a dime he could have ’phoned from his home;
a slot machine would have cost him a nickel, a note a two-cent stamp.”
My shoulders braced, my chin went up, my spirit caught the spirit of this
great wonder-town. Night fell. The magic of night on Broadway—the
flashing signs, the whizzing motors, the hurrying, surging throngs, the
snatches of speech that drift to one’s ears, there on the street where all
seems youth, laughter, joy—human documents, the snatches of speech one
hears. “How can I leave you here?” I heard the words spoken by a plain
anxious-faced woman, and the overdressed, under-dressed, doll-faced girl’s
answer: “You poor dear! How you worry! What have I to fear? New York’s
lovely, and my job’s lovely, and my boss is loveliest of all.”
I heard a man’s voice, such a cultured, hearty sort of a voice, but a note
of bitterness and discouragement rang through it. “That man—I gave him
his chance—brought him here. Look where he is now, and look where I am.
He is not an artist. His success is not based on a solid foundation. But look
at him—money—fame—what’s the use of holding to one’s ideals, of being
faithful to them. What’s the use of—anything?”
 My train goes out in an hour. City of laughter and of tears, of power that
can crush as a giant foot crushes an ant, marvel of the world—I bid you
adieu.

May 4th.
Sunday Night.
I’ve broken the Sabbath by travelling all day. In town I hired a buggy to
bring me home. Our hacks do not run on Sunday. It is raining. It has rained
all the way. I had a silent driver who never spoke to me, seldom to his
horses. I was glad that it was raining; glad that my driver was silent. My
thoughts were as vague, as blurred as the dim mountain forms seen through
the rain. We drove through Marsville without meeting a soul. As we passed
the Duckett houses that forever watch each other like antagonists, I saw that
poor old lady slipping home from doing up his work; I saw him rocking on
his front porch in placid content. A sudden rage against this man-made
world seized me.
I scrambled in my bag for the little gift to her, leaped out, and sent the
man on home with my baggage.
He greeted me jauntily. He was just sitting there counting his blessings.
He could eat three as hearty meals a day as he had ever et, and when night
come sleep sound as a mouse in a shuck pen—the Lord had been good to
the old man.
I wasn’t hypocrite enough to take the hand extended. I wanted to shake
the life out of his smiling old body.
“Has he been good to the old lady?” I asked. He only stared at me. “Do
you know you told me you swam your horse through swollen streams once
to get to a little log church because you knew your congregation would be
waiting for you there? You wanted to preach that sermon that day that some
soul might be saved that you might never reach again. You said you didn’t
want the devil to get anybody. Do you remember?”
“Yes,” he quavered, “I remember.”
“Well,” I stormed, “it’s my honest belief that he will get you. I wonder
what the God you have preached all these years means to do with men like
you who are mean to their wives and cloak their meanness to poor feeble
old women under smooth-sounding texts.”
He stood up, his faded blue eyes flashed, his pallid lips under the straggly
white moustache worked. When he dropped back in his chair, having
uttered no word, I thought maybe I had killed him. But I did not care. He
would have gone to his Maker with a little preparation he would otherwise
not have had. I stood over him silent, inexorable.
“She got mad because——”
“Never mind what she got mad about,” I said. “For fifty-nine years and
six months she didn’t get mad. And she’s not mad now. I saw her slipping
out of the back of your house just a minute ago. She’s been doing up your
night work. You ought to go over there and get down on your knees—the
knees you have worn out praying the Lord to make you the sort of a man
you have not desired to be—and ask her to forgive you, and bring her
home.”
Some good honest blood left in the old veins crept up and tinged the
pallid, sunken cheeks. And, suddenly, all my fierceness was gone. I was
pleading for the love that had betrayed them at the end of a lifetime. I had
his old, old hands in mine that looked so young and strong by contrast, and
I was leading him back to their courtship days, to the time when their one
little child was born and she almost lost her life. Some of the story I knew
from him, and some of it I knew from her. Before I finished the tears were
dropping down his cheeks. “The old man has some lonely hours,” he said.
Gayly I told him they were over; gayly I pressed my gift into his hand, and I
fairly pushed him into her gate.
As I hurried on I suddenly realized that the rain was over, that the eastern
hills were sparkling under a giant rainbow, and that Ellinor Baxter was
rushing toward me with outstretched hands. Ellinor threw as many of her
pupils as she could on her assistant, and, with the help of one of the older
girls, took my pupils in my absence.
“How radiant you look!” I said as I kissed her. “I was afraid you would
be all dragged out with the children.”
“The children,” she said, vaguely, and then flushing like a rosy girl she
plunged into stories of the children’s good behaviour. She turned and
walked homeward with me. Was it that fleeting brightness in the sky that
made her seem so young and bright and strangely changed?

May 15th.
School closed to-day. Commencement was quite a triumph. Monday
morning I went to work in the schoolroom, examinations and
commencement exercises on hand. Suddenly the play I had seen with Miss
Jackson and thought so bad came into my mind. The more I thought of it
the better it seemed. I decided on tableaux, my ideas got from that play.
There were just fourteen days in which to work it out, but the children
hailed it with joy. It was something new; it was something different.
Ellinor’s help was invaluable. Marsville was delighted with it. Ellinor is
changed. If there was anybody here to love I’d think she was in love. She
was running to angles, and now she’s got some pretty curves, the gray hairs
are quite hidden by the new way she is doing her lovely, heavy, red-brown
hair, and her soft brown eyes—they are looking out on the spring world
with a new, wistful expression in them. She smiles so easily and she hums
snatches of tender old songs.

May 22d.
Midnight.
This afternoon there was an unfamiliar knock at the door and I ran down
without waiting for mammy. It was Mr. Elliott. He looked so foreign to the
old place, so New Yorkish standing there, that quite without warning, in the
way I do things, while my lips were speaking a welcome and he was
following me into the sitting-room, something within me was singing:
“How could I know I should love thee afar, when I did not love thee
anear?” But that something within me was not singing about Mr. Elliott,
although I saw the glad light in his eyes. My own eyes saw the sun-shot
green May-mist of the trees in Madison Square, the clock’s big face above
the treetops, against the sky’s soft blue the radiant, triumphant Diana. My
ears heard the roll of wheels on the Avenue, the clang of cars on Broadway;
my veins felt the beat of the city’s hurrying, feverish life.
Out under the pines where mammy brought tea and helped me, with the
dignity of a departed day, I still felt alien to it all. Mr. Elliott praised the
beaten biscuit, and she told him as a mark of special favour the story of
receiving my great aunt’s teeth when she was dying. I could not seem to
belong to the scene—the big waving pine plumes against the spring sky, the
ancient house drowsing in peace, the soft sweep of the hills, the mountains
against the sky like a string of sapphires. But when Mr. Elliott said good-
bye, when he caught my hands and poured out a flood of eager words,
“Would I? Could I?” I came back to reality.
Did it mean that, this feel of the city? Could I go back and live there with
Mr. Elliott—dear, charming, nice Mr. Elliott. For one swift instant I was
swept by his belief in what we together might make of life, and it seemed so
infinitely more than I could make of life alone. For one swift instant that old
terror—the inevitableness of human change—pierced me like a sword.
Always I have felt a contemptuous sort of pity for Jane Joyner, who lives
near, toothless and untidy and incapable as she is, with the house running
over with dirty children. Was Jane to be pitied? Jane whose youth and
beauty were not dead but had passed into another form of life—lived in her
children. Was she out of harmony with life’s great laws? Big and fierce my
heart cried out, “No!” It was I who was outside of life, not Jane. Her man’s
arm went round her shoulders nights when she stood over the kitchen stove.
Her baby lifted its dirty, loving, laughing little face to hers as it clutched her
knees. Taking my lonely after-supper walk I had seen them through the
open kitchen door. What had I? A dream that was bodiless, life emptied of
the big, vital things. And if I sent Mr. Elliott away as I sent the others, the
boy lovers who came over the mountains to tell me what he is telling me
now? What have I left that is more than I refuse? In the bare, honest
moment I faced it. Bleak and stark in its honesty, the truth faced me. After
work hours when I walk in the twilight and look in Jane Joyner’s kitchen
the thing that comes close to my heart is a dream without a body—nothing
more.
“I thought I was happy until you came along,” Mr. Elliott was saying.
“Then I found out how lonely my gayety was.”
He is strong and fine, capable of making a woman happy, and I hold the
future of our two lives in my hands. And then he was drawing me to him.
Almost, his lips touched mine. The quick revolt, the wave of physical
nausea—it was as though an icy, sinister wind had swooped down on my
blooming flowers and shrivelled them.
 With a desolate little smile I drew back from him, an alien standing
outside of all that might have been mine. I bade him good-bye, and to-night,
when I walked by Jane’s kitchen, open to the soft night, I turned my eyes
away, afraid to look in on the sweet little home scene. In all my life I have
never felt so alone.

Wednesday Morning.
Mr. Elliott sent back a wonderful basket of fruit. It came over on the hack
and the whole village is agog over it. The gossip has disturbed dear old
mammy greatly. She suggests that we still the gossip and flatter our
neighbours by giving a party. Then they won’t know what to think. I have
consented. Mammy is a woman of action. The party comes off this
afternoon. The house hums with activity.

Wednesday Afternoon.
The party has passed into history. I got only the littlest taste of the
contents of that beautiful basket Mr. Elliott sent me. Everybody was here,
and they all seemed to have such a good time. Even the reconciled Ducketts
tottered over. What a success I seem to be at reuniting severed hearts. If my
book is a failure I may set up an establishment of the sort—go into a trance
and vision dazzling futures for people. Well, how do I like the idea? Seven
days ago had I put the question to myself my spirit would have flung back
in bitterness, “Physician, heal thyself.”
For seven nights, no matter which way I willed my feet to go, they have
led me past Jane’s kitchen door. Alone in the soft spring darkness, in the
soft wet darkness some of the nights, I have faced my life. I have looked in
that open door till the bitterness and the loneliness have gone out of me.
Last night when her man’s arms went about her as she dished their supper,
when her child’s arms reached up to her, I looked in, not in bitterness, not in
pity of self, not in aching loneliness, but in love. It is wonderful when you
can look in on untidy Janes at their kitchen tasks and feel close to their
happiness. Life’s supremest gift is hers. Almost, it was mine. Not a
makeshift, not a compromise—life’s supremest gift. Across sunlit waves a
boat like a white-winged gull set sail for me. Almost, it reached me. How
my heart went out to that white drifting boat of prophecy! How the waves
sang! Bobby’s loved one. Sunlit waves and flashing white-winged boat are
gone. But the singing soul of those words shall keep my heart young. It
shall be tender to the young and happy, pitiful to the old and alone,
compassionate to all untouched by love, whether they scoff in unbelief or
whether they would lay down their lives for love.
Oh, how tired I am! And how heavy the silence is here in the bridelike,
white loveliness of my May garden! And how this silence differs from its
fall silences! The silence holds resignation in the fall—this is tense with
expectancy. The snowballs that have come so late this year are swaying,
they seem to be beckoning to some one, but there is no wind. And the lilies
of the valley, late, too—my flower children delayed their blooming till I
came home—are swaying; they are pouring out their fragrance—it is
poignantly, deliciously sweet, but I feel no wind.
Something is the matter with this garden and with me. I am quivering all
over as if with intense excitement. The party has tired me out. Just then,
when John opened the gate, I almost leaped from this bench.
The letters John has brought me are from Mr. Elliott and Dicky. I open
Mr. Elliott’s first—a woman always opens a man’s letter first. It is a fine,
manly letter, and it ends:
“You said you once knew Bob Haralson. He has been at death’s door—
struck down without a moment’s warning—appendicitis—a knife quick or
death operation. It was the day you came down from Boston. I remember
date because you came down from Boston. Haralson is creeping about. I
saw him yesterday.”
The lines of mountains dance dizzily. I shut my eyes—shut out the spring
glory, my fingers making a pressing blackness against my eyeballs. I try to
imagine the world this spring day with Bobby gone out of it. Then my heart
leaps madly. It is explained—explained.
I can’t sit still, so I climb to the hilltop. I am calmer in motion. I can see
the village from the hilltop. It is being claimed by the twilight, the soft,
slow, lingering spring twilight. There must be a lot of moisture to make
such a brilliant aftermath. The heavens are so pink they have tinged the
eastern hills. League on league the cloud waves blush pink as the heart of a
seashell. The whole world glows. My mood catches the sky’s glowing
mood. It is explained. He has been ill unto death, but he is not dead—he is
alive—alive.
Something drops from my belt and I pick it up and stare at it stupidly. It
is Dicky’s little letter. Dicky will know about Bobby. She will explain their
presence together that night at Mouquin’s.
“Caroline, is your right hand paralyzed that I don’t hear from you? Do a
lot of little tow-headed mountaineers and a garden that I know is at its
loveliest now mean more to you than I do? I can’t understand your silence. I
am coming home. I am to have my vacation now, and I am to keep on
having it. Somebody’s with me. He is the secret of the prolonged vacation. I
guess it will be in June. That’s the loveliest time of all. He will be here only
a day or two, three at the longest, and I hate to think of him at that dinky
little Marsville hotel. Hotel! Ye gods! Come to New York and we will show
you some hotels. Dearest, won’t you, won’t you, have him home with us?
There are some such ducks of places to spoon these moonlit nights in that
heavenly rose garden of yours.”
Did I cry out in that sharp pain, or was it some wounded thing out there
in the shadow of the woods? Steadily I finish the letter. It is to-day—now, at
twilight—when the hack gets in, that Dicky and her lover are coming. She
apologizes that we do not know earlier, but mammy and I are equal to any
emergency. I do feel sorry for mammy, but I walk on straight into the sunset
glare, leaving mammy to her fate. That is my only sensation—I am sorry
for mammy. She does love to splurge when company comes.
Far down the road I see a buggy. It is coming this way. There are two
people in it, but it is too far away to recognize faces. It is two men. It stops.
One man gets out, the other turns the buggy around and drives back toward
the village. The man who got out of the buggy walks on in the rose-red haze
that wraps the world. The lilies of the valley that I thrust in my belt send out
a sudden fragrance—it is the trembling of my body that has shaken them. I
stop because I can’t walk on. I lean against a friendly tree-trunk.
The man comes on, moving slowly, feebly, I see as he gets nearer. I think
of trivial things, as we do in crisic moments. Bobby is taller than I thought.
The hat he is wearing adds distinction to one who is already distingué. The
crease in his trousers will be copied by the young men of Marsville. From
somewhere in me a faint satisfaction stirs that the party has left me wearing
my best new gown, my hair done in a New York way.
Almost at my side Bobby stops, panting a little. I speak first. Women
always do. I feel sure Eve opened the conversation when Adam waked from
the sleep that deprived him of a rib and supplied him with a wife.
“So you have come again—and not alone this time.” It is not in the least
what I meant to say.
“Did you know that I came?” Bobby’s low voice holds a note of surprise.
“How did you know? But I suppose the boy told you.”
“I was in the garden. I saw you. I know why you came, and why you
left.”
“Why did I leave?”
“You ran from a youthful ideal.”
“Men have done more foolish things,” Bobby’s answer comes gravely.
“And wiser.” I hate the mocking laughter that escapes my lips.
“I don’t understand you.” His face has grown whiter; it has changed
subtly. “Has Elliott been here? Is it Elliott?”
I sweetly assure him that Mr. Elliott has been here, and I manage to leave
the impression that he may be coming again.
This time Bobby’s face goes close to black. With a mocking little bow he
bids me good-bye, turns, goes down the road. He marches straight ahead. I
have never seen a lion stalk through an African jungle, but I think of one as
I look at him. Where is he going? Where is Dicky’s lover going? A dumb
sort of fright grips me. I spin down the road to where he marches breast
forward with never a backward look—if a woman can spin in these narrow-
not-made-to-overtake-anybody’s-lover New York frocks.
“Bobby,” I cry, hard upon him, “stop!”
He turns. Not the Bobby of my letters, not the Bobby of my dreams, not
the Bobby of Washington Square, a politely impatient-to-be-gone stranger.
Always, it is the unexpected that overtakes me. To my amazed surprise I
wet with salty tears my New York finery.
 “I’m tired, Bobby,” I gasp. “I’ve been having a party—and I’m not used
to having parties. That’s what makes me such a cat. And, oh, Bobby, you’ll
have to pardon things—Dicky just sprung your coming on us.”
“Dicky didn’t know that I was coming.” He speaks slowly, he takes my
face in his hands and looks down at me, a long, deep look. The hard, black
look on his own face has lifted.
As I try to tell him that Dicky didn’t tell me he was ill, that I have just
learned it from Mr. Elliott’s letter, as I try to tell him what the bright May
world would be to Dicky with him gone out of it, and as I flounder that I
hope they will be heavenly happy, I splash more tears on my pretty clothes.
Bobby’s face flashes—all that a woman could want or dream of comes
into it.
“Dicky didn’t know I was in the hospital. I went in under an assumed
name. When a fellow’s tied up with publishers and theatrical people like I
am——” Bobby drops the subject as one that holds no further interest. “If I
had died, would it have spoiled the May world for you, Caroline?” There is
a sharp note of anxiety in his voice.
“Bobby, Bobby!” I cry, wildly. “Don’t ask me! What have you done with
Dicky! Where is Dicky?”
“I am not Dicky’s keeper.” The light glows and glows in his face. “She’s
got one, though, and it was odd we should all three have left town together.
I smoked like a furnace all the way down as an excuse to keep away from
them. Caroline”—Bobby’s arms close about me—“I am not Dicky’s—I am
yours.”
Walking home in the twilight that is gray and tender as a dove’s breast,
Bobby tells me that he was afraid the night he ran away. He says he has
tried and tried not to love me—that men like him should never marry—that
they should live alone on the top of the Flat Iron. “But it is bigger than I,”
he says, gravely. “It has swept me to your feet.”
“To my heart,” I correct, happily.
The hack lumbers around the curve, descends upon us. At sight of us
Dicky and the strange young man who sits on the back seat with her—John
and Ellinor are on the middle seat—roar with laughter.
 “You sly fox!” Dicky cries. “How did you get here? We left him on the
train, Caroline, and he sent his regards to you—and he said he was on his
way to Colorado.”
“I am,” Bobby boldly declares. “I stopped by to see if Caroline would go
with me. As to my getting here first, I live in New York. As rapid transit as
is obtainable, say I.”
Dicky flings herself into my arms. “You owe it all to me,” she declares.
“I found him deadly tiresome.” She beamed on Bobby. “All his talk was
about you.
“You sly fox,” she whirled on him again. “You didn’t need to have me
tell you about Caroline. You were hearing from her all the time, now,
weren’t you? Why didn’t you tell me, Caroline?”
“I—I—I——” I stammered.
Bobby isn’t timid, he’s bold as a lion. “The reason is obvious,” he
declares. “I wouldn’t let her. Had you known that I heard, too, it would have
changed everything.”
The others descend from the hack. It goes on with Dicky’s baggage. I
realize that John has been an unnecessarily long time helping Ellinor out of
the carriage; but there are no surprises left in the world. I greet Dicky’s
lover. As we take our leisurely way home I don’t even wonder what
mammy will have for supper.

May 30th.

“Day’s at the morn

Morning’s at seven;
The hillside’s dew-pearled”——

I am just back from taking a look at old Camel Back. The morning’s like
an opal—it’s all a shifting mist shot through with sunshine. None of the
mountains have shaken off their last night’s mist-blankets but that brave old
blessed Camel Back. He knew I’d be up, and he gave me royal greeting.
“Well,” he seemed to say, “haven’t I poured all the treasures of the earth
perfumed with all the scents of Araby into your outstretched hands?”
 I meant to tell Bobby about Camel Back—for so long I have told my
fancies to a pictured Bobby—but when I thought of it last night, just before
he left for the “dinky” little hotel with Dicky’s doctor—he was busy fitting
a piece of cardboard in which he had cut a round hole on a certain finger of
my left hand, and, anyway, it is not easy to tell fancies to an eager man who
is murmuring realities in one’s ears—like this: “Dearest one, will you hurry,
oh, hurry, and get the gingham, and the barred muslin, and the bias
bombazine fixed up, and let’s get married quick.”
The morning’s at seven. At eight all of us, Bobby and Dicky’s doctor,
Ellinor, too, are going to breakfast in my rose garden. Mammy planned it
last night. She came to the sitting-room door and asked them all with the
manner of a duchess.
I go to the kitchen door—broiled chickens and waffles, strawberries and
cream. “Can I help you, mammy?”
“Mammy don’t need no help. This come while you was gallivantin’ up
the lane.” The big, bold, square envelope sets my heart to leaping:
DEAREST:
I looked into my thought reservoir last night after I left you
and discovered that if I hadn’t ever met you before I would have
loved you just the same. Is that disloyalty to Carrie with the gold
braids and the capricious moods? No, by my halidome, no! I
have two in my heart—two girls—one the ideal of romantic
youth, the other, the completer, sweeter, better beloved Caroline,
but no less an ideal. Am I not the richest man in the world? If
this be bigamy, give me bigamy or give me death.
P.S. I didn’t answer that question last night. Why did the
cabby swear at you? Cabbies always swear unless you tip them.
But never mind, hereafter I’ll be on hand to do the tipping for
you.
P.P.S. I want you, my honey.
P.P.P.S. I need you.
THE END
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been corrected after careful
comparison with other occurrences within the text and consultation of external sources.
Some hyphens in words have been silently removed, some added, when a predominant
preference was found in the original book.
Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text, and inconsistent or
archaic usage, have been retained.
p16-> ‘who is just begining’ amended to ‘beginning’
p36-> ‘Bobbie answers’ amended to ‘Bobby answers’
p50-> ‘when that oldtime’ amended to ‘old-time’
p63-> ‘Hs is trying’ amended to ‘he’
p80-> ‘Mr. Eliott’s eyes’ amended to ‘Elliott’
p86-> ‘he knows the housefurnishings’ amended to ‘house furnishings’
p98-> ‘the mounta ns against’ amended to ‘mountains’
p99-> ‘her shoulders n ghts’ amended to ‘nights’
p100-> ‘The goss p’ amended to ‘gossip’
p105-> ‘who is already distinguè’ amended to ‘distingué’
p108-> ‘the back seat w th’ amended to ‘with’
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