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 EDITH BONHAM. 
 
 THE VALLEY ROAD. 
 
 A PICKED COMPANY. 
 
 THE ROYAL AMERICANS. 
 
 A TOUCH OF SUN AND OTHER STORIES. 
 
 THE DESERT AND THE SOWN. 
 
 THE PRODIGAL. Illustrated by the Author. 
 
 THE CHOSEN VALLEY. 
 
 THE LED-HORSE CLAIM. Illustrated. 
 
 JOHN BODEV\/IN'S TESTIMONY. 
 
 THE LAST ASSEMBLY BALL, and THE FATE 
 
 OF A VOICE. 
 IN EXILE, AND OTHER STORIES. 
 CCEUR D'ALENE. A Novel. 
 THE CUP OF TREMBLING, AND OTHER 
 
 STORIES. 
 THE LITTLE FIG-TREE STORIES. With two 
 
 illustrations by Mrs. Footb, and a colored Cover 
 
 Design. 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 Boston and New York 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 BY 
 
 MARY HALLOCK FOOTE 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 1917 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY MARY HALLOCK FOOTB 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published March tqij 
 
■^- - 
 
 TO THE MEMORY OF MY FRIEND OF FIFTY YEARS 
 
 HERSELF THE PERFECT FRIEND 
 
 HELENA DE KAY 
 
 WIFE OF RICHARD WATSON GILDER 
 
 1866-1916 
 
 M 
 
 fi2a045 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PART I. THE STUDIO AND THE FARM ... I 
 
 PART II. AUNT EDITH . 73 
 
 PART III. THE WATCH ON THE MESA . . . .145 
 
 PART IV. TRYING TO KEEP SANE 1 89 
 
 PART V. THE TWO ESSIES 23I 
 
 PART VI. MRS. AYLESFORD . . . . . . 265 
 
 PART VII. OURSELVES 309 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 PART I 
 THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 My father shared a theory at one time that genius in 
 families takes the line of descent which crosses that 
 of sex : clever mothers, clever sons, and the same 
 with fathers and daughters. He had no sons. Of his 
 two daughters, marriage disposed of Essie so young 
 that her genius, except for enjoying life in spite of 
 frequent babies, had little chance to show itself. 
 Anything of the sort his youngest might be sup- 
 posed to have inherited through having him for a 
 parent, he did what he could to bring out in the fond 
 persuasion that I was meant to be an artist. 
 
 He gave me drawing-lessons himself, when other 
 things did not interfere. I was glad when they did. 
 He was an impatient, a witty, and often a hurtfully 
 sarcastic teacher. His feelings in my case were too 
 much involved, but so were mine ! There were few 
 things I would not have done to please him as his 
 daughter, or aside from that fact, in any direction 
 that did not strike me as hopeless. But I did resent 
 being reduced to tears in his presence over a 
 wretched cast-drawing, the work of my own hands 
 and of perhaps a week's misspent labor. 
 
 Before he gave me up finally, I was sent, in my 
 eighteenth year, as a professional pupil to the Cooper 
 
 3 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 School of Design for Women ; we lived in New 
 York. Four flights of stone stairs with high-ceiled 
 halls between go up to the floor where the day- 
 classes for women had their home in the old Cooper 
 Union Building on Eighth Street. Racing up the 
 last flight one Monday morning when we were both 
 late, I passed a girl whose face I knew by sight. She 
 had lagged a moment to recover breath. We smiled 
 at each other, and she took the stairs again just be- 
 hind me. I waited. 
 
 " I Ve noticed you so often," I gasped. 
 
 " And I you ! " she responded with a sigh to match. 
 
 " Can't we ask each other's names? Mine is Edith 
 Bonham." 
 
 " Oh, we all know who you are I They speak of 
 your father here with bated breath. But that has 
 nothing to do with my wanting to know you — ever 
 since I saw you." She fetched another sigh with the 
 end of her sentence. 
 
 We were going down the main hall towards the 
 row of coat-closets ; the winter morning and the stairs, 
 and some excitement she seemed to get out of our 
 meeting, had given her a color to gaze at. 
 
 " Then don't let 's waste any more time," said I, 
 — "or breath." 
 
 Anne Aylesford was her name, and her home, as I 
 somehow knew, perhaps from the neat but negligible 
 way she dressed, was in the country — not near New 
 York. She was spending the winter with friends who 
 lived in one of the suburbs, which meant getting up 
 early to take the business men's train. 
 
 4 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 " I We never missed it before ; and I don't suppose 
 you are often as late as this? It was luck — pure 
 luck, or fate I" she said, with that extraordinary look 
 of joy her face expressed. 
 
 " Don't you ever do anything about it when you 
 want to know a person ? Do you leave it all to fate ? " 
 
 " I should never have done anything about know- 
 ing you.'' She smiled and shook her head. " I didn't 
 want it to come that way I " 
 
 I asked her if she stayed to work in the afternoons 
 as many of the professional pupils did. 
 
 ** I stay till the scrub-women drive me out, but I 
 don't think I gain much by it. What alcove are you 
 in?" 
 
 I was in the life-class in painting, I told her, through 
 false hopes raised in my teachers, who generally 
 thought I might do better in almost any other me- 
 dium than the one I happened to be working in. " I 
 ought to be in the Antique, plugging along at cast- 
 drawing." 
 
 " Where I am," she said. ** I 'm drawing the Dis- 
 cobolus" (of Myron). *' He breaks my heart!" 
 
 I told her I knew him well, and all his kin, and I 
 should be around that afternoon to condole with her. 
 
 It was as much a case of love at first sight as if 
 one of us had belonged to the ** opposite sex." A 
 touch of enchantment akin to what is called first 
 love (as if there were no parents in the world and 
 brothers and sisters, to say nothing of one's first 
 doll) hovers over my memories of that winter ; some 
 subtle sweetness which as the days went by was in- 
 
 5 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 tensified for us both by the pang of unsuccess. We 
 knew that we were not making progress to warrant 
 our returning another year. In my case it was chiefly 
 a vicarious pain ; I hated to disappoint papa. With 
 her it was mixed with a nagging sense of dishonesty 
 in being there at all in the place of some one with 
 more talent to improve an opportunity which she re- 
 garded as wasted upon her. " Of course I shall not 
 let them " — her parents — ** send me next winter. 
 Manzoni leaves me alone in a way that shows he 's 
 given me up. He tells me I have qualities as a worker 
 that look as if I were meant for 'something,' but 
 he isn't at all sure it is Artl " We laughed at this 
 gloomily. 
 
 " Is there anything left in life for you?" I mocked. 
 
 And she answered seriously, "You are left. If I 
 may keep you I can manage without Art." 
 
 We arranged to sit together during anatomy lec- 
 tures and the Friday review with criticism of class- 
 compositions ; as she brought her lunch I now brought 
 mine and we had the noon hour for solid talks, 
 arms around each other, walking up and down the 
 cold halls past the colder Greeks and Romans on 
 their pedestals, or mounted on top of the row of coat- 
 closets with dust on their godlike curls. We did not 
 work to excess in the afternoons ; the combined joy 
 in each other and lassitude of failure took the heart 
 out of our efforts. We sought some deserted alcove 
 among empty chairs and easels hung with discarded 
 drawing-aprons that looked exactly like the girls who 
 wore them, and there we sat while the light failed 
 
 6 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 and talked a stream which never failed. Long before 
 the spring term came, with its languor and lengthen- 
 ing light and sounds from the street through open 
 windows, and other temptations to idleness and 
 more talk, I had explained to her most of the perplexi- 
 ties and incongruities of my own life, and she had 
 envied me, as she said, a life so crowded with people 
 interesting beyond any she had ever heard of as living 
 to-day, and a future full of possibilities, while hers 
 pointed straight ahead in the same old path her 
 forbears had trod for generations. She was not seeing 
 anything of New York : her morning and evening 
 trains, the ordinary New York busy crowd at the 
 busiest hours; her people were not in society, so 
 called ; but she felt the thrill of the city's life in her 
 veins. I think it was a secret anguish to her not to 
 come back. But she was inflexible. I asked her why 
 not try one winter more ? — we were all experiments, 
 most of us doomed to fail. 
 
 " I have tried," she answered. " I drew at school ; 
 I 've had lessons before. It was agreed that this win- 
 ter should decide. It rests with me to make the report. 
 I could persuade them at home that I 've been a suc- 
 cess, or I could ask father to send me back as a pay- 
 ing pupil ; then I should cheat no one but the family. 
 But, it 's like knowing you — art is too beautiful to 
 scuffle for ; one does that for bread and butter. Where 
 art is bread and butter, that 's another thing ; but it's 
 not quite that with me." 
 
 This was her little rigid way of seeing it. I liked 
 it so — the rigidity, the romance, the reins of home 
 
 7 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 discipline she worked under, and the fresh wild zest 
 for life itself. I thought it probable she was right; 
 that none of the obvious forms of expression were 
 quite meant for her. Life would take hold of her some 
 day through intensity of feeling (as / seemed to have 
 taken hold of her) and she would let it carry her to 
 great lengths. 
 
 We agreed that I was to visit her in June, at her 
 home at Lime Point on the Hudson ; and that at the 
 first opportunity when we were lucky enough to go, 
 her parents must be persuaded to spare her for 
 a trip abroad with us, papa and me. I feared there 
 might be subtle risks in the adventure, but it was, on 
 the whole, the safest form our hospitality could take, 
 for her. 
 
 We Bonhams, from the forties to the sixties, had 
 seen a good deal of the world in rather jolly ways, at 
 home socially and abroad as travelers of means. 
 Some of us — I speak of the Family, not my own 
 particular group — were navy and embassy people. 
 Most of them had been fortunate in the sense in 
 which my charming, sophisticated papa pretended to 
 hold them unfortunate. He was a painter of progres- 
 sive theories and a rather cynical — because im- 
 patient — temperament. Little art-students might 
 speak of him with bated breath, and his admiring 
 circle of friends did much to keep his spirits up, but 
 his family knew how seldom he sold a picture — he 
 held them at defiant prices. His studio was in our 
 own house, the only part of his patrimony he had not 
 spent in acquiring other things he valued more than 
 
 8 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 money before he suddenly found himself impelled 
 to marry. The entire top floor was given up to him 
 — a great beautifully lighted room with some rather 
 dark and crowded adjuncts, but it was out of the way 
 of visiting patrons. He escaped interruptions and 
 much idle chatter on reception days, when influential 
 ladies were making the rounds of the studios, but 
 no doubt he lost some purchasers. We were cramped 
 for bedrooms and our servants did not stay, the good 
 ones, because our hours were so extraordinary. Alto- 
 gether our domestic arrangements were the despair 
 of our rich kinsfolk in the city, but they were a great 
 convenience to our clever, impecunious friends — 
 those brilliant boys and women New York seemed 
 full of in those days. 
 
 Essie and I grew up in an atmosphere of irrever- 
 ence but of startling sincerity. Promising young art- 
 ists and some who had been promising for the last 
 twenty-five years, — all the literary and semi-literary 
 with views to impart, — used mamma's overcrowded 
 drawing-room at all hours as a sort of club. They 
 drifted in for midnight talks after the theater. They 
 sat around our hearth and discussed, most amusingly 
 and without any reference to bedtime, everything 
 that went on in the city, in the world, and whatever 
 worlds there be. We children heard it in our beds, 
 in murmurs and bursts of laughter through partition- 
 walls ; later we heard it — all this conglomerate talk 
 — with ears wide open and our faculties awake. 
 Language became as the air we breathed from hearing 
 so much of it and a good deal of it rather choice, and 
 
 9 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 many phrases that sank without meaning into our 
 young intelligences were quite unforgettable. 
 
 This was the chief if not the best part of our edu- 
 cation. Schools there were, of course, but when we 
 tried to study at home to keep up in our lessons, 
 there was never a quiet place where we could — the 
 whole house was at the mercy of papa's enchanting 
 but inconsiderate hospitality. He drew people by the 
 force of his charm, but it was mamma who had to 
 take care of them and defend her own brood in that 
 forcing atmosphere. I think she was literally con- 
 sumed by it — burned out, heart and brain and tire- 
 less little feet. How often I have heard papa call her 
 from the top of the studio-stairs : " Louise, will you 
 ask that female what she has done with all my paint- 
 rags I If she has burned them agaiuy could you find 
 me some more?" Our "females" were divided into 
 those who never cleaned the studio at all and those 
 who drove papa mad with descents upon his sacred 
 properties : either way, it was mamma who made up 
 the deficit and took upon herself the blame. He 
 adored her, — he was never the same after he lost 
 her, — but he never thought about her as a being 
 with a life and separate needs from his own. 
 
 Essie married, two years after her death, one of 
 the young literary "aspirants" who knew so well 
 how to woo and win a wife, but not so well how to 
 keep her, in the material sense we were brought up 
 to despise. Her life promised to be as difBcult as 
 mamma's, but she took it differently. I saw a good 
 deal of the detached style of housekeeping and the 
 
 lO 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 optimistic creed with babies, who throve, notwith- 
 standing, in a manner as sporting as all the rest 
 of their amusing menage. It scarcely amused me, 
 and it gave me a strong distaste for another studio- 
 marriage in the family. So, although I had my share 
 as I grew up of the extravagant personalities flung 
 at one as to one's looks, and more than my share, 
 and much too soon, of the incipient love-making al- 
 ways going on — or off — in our unmothered exist- 
 ence, not any of it touched me or vitally influenced 
 my future (except to make me feel older than I was) 
 — not nearly as much as did one particular visit to 
 the Aylesfords on the Hudson. 
 
 How different with them I They had stayed in one 
 place and cultivated character, and with it some of 
 the excrescences of character that go with old stand- 
 ard types like theirs. They were very earnest, obsti- 
 nate, dear people, of a great simplicity and kindness, 
 somewhat lacking in pliability and without humor in 
 the literary sense, but strong and sane and faithful 
 to their clear-cut opinions which were as immovable 
 as the limestone rock that underlay their family acres. 
 
 The name has clung to the East Shore of the Hud- 
 son since the first Aylesford built his house and the 
 lime kiln there, and the litde sloop-wharf below it, and 
 cleared the land acquired from the Indians (on a pat- 
 ent from Queen Anne) by the ardess methods of those 
 days. The family still lived on a small portion of it — 
 "my Aylesfords," as papa called them. I considered 
 their most valuable possession was a stretch of un- 
 touched woods, the slender, somber arbor-vitae which 
 
 II 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 chooses this spot for its habitat. You entered the twi- 
 light of their paths, at whatever hour of day, and were 
 wrapped in the spirit of the old-world past, of Italy 
 itself. Here, with steamboats passing below its banks 
 and trains hooting by, this lovely spot had kept its 
 silence and classic uniformity of line and color and 
 light and shade like a lesson, to the wash of the river- 
 tides on its gray-pebbled beach and the grinding of 
 ice packs in winter. Yet not one of the family who 
 owned all this beauty at their very door, ever walked 
 those paths, by moonlight (when they were magical), 
 — by any light, for sentiment or mere pleasure, — not 
 even Nanny in the heyday of her dreams! She must 
 have felt it subconsciously, but it was my privilege 
 to awaken in her an artistic realization of the riches 
 of her home. 
 
 "My Aylesfords" dined in the middle of the day 
 and had tea at six o'clock — the most perfectly broiled 
 shad in spring fresh from the river, or in hot weather 
 cottage cheese with lettuce dressed by some old Eng- 
 lish cookbook rule, and a course of "preserves" 
 or fresh fruit, and delicious home-made cake — such 
 sponge cake I the ten-egg variety, and such baked- 
 apples, jellied in their own sweetness and smothered 
 in thick cream ! I used to put on pounds on those 
 visits I The woods were closer to the shore than the 
 house ; they marched with it for a quarter of a mile 
 on the Aylesford land. They opened their dark, 
 cloaked files for glimpses of the river, or where a 
 road or a brook went down. The pent-road (I speak 
 of it by the name they used) ended at the old wharf 
 
 12 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 where fishing-boats were moored and shad-nets 
 spread to dry, and above it was the lime kiln which 
 had burned its own rock, they told me, for six gen- 
 erations. All these homely details made up their 
 peculiar treasure to me. I had never seen anything 
 like it in my country-house visiting, nor abroad in 
 places equally rich in local color and the indigenous 
 flavor that had gathered here : pure American it was, 
 of the Eastern States, and I was pure American of 
 New York and Europe, yet it was newer to me than 
 any part of Europe that artists visit. I longed for 
 papa to see it with 1 But I would not have brought 
 him there, for that or for anything I 
 
 Nanny I used to drag down for walks in the woods 
 after tea, and keep her there till moonlight sprinkled 
 their smooth, unlittered floors, and one felt as if any 
 moment the voice of a nightingale through the cedar 
 aisles might burst upon our silence and the river's 
 wash on the beach below. Often we could hear the 
 beat of oars or the sound of singing on the water, 
 and as these boating-parties on warm nights some- 
 times landed and picnicked in the cove, or even pene- 
 trated the wood paths in their freedom, and as they 
 might be "nobody knows who" from across the river, 
 Mrs. Aylesford had her doubts about these moonlight 
 strolls. I would have given much for permission to 
 go out in a boat by ourselves, for Nanny could row. 
 But that was unthinkable. There was no son of the 
 house to take us. The family, bred in an exclusive- 
 ness peculiar to our old Eastern farming aristocracy, 
 cultivated very little social intercourse with their 
 
 13 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 neighbors, with whom they had not even the bond 
 of church-going-, for they were Unitarians, "free- 
 thinkers" and not strict keepers of the Sabbath. They 
 were the largest landed family, but one of the smallest 
 in numbers, and everybody not an Aylesford or some 
 connection might as well be "across the river," to 
 them. 
 
 Nanny, when I first knew her, had never had a 
 lover, she had never been paid "attentions" by any 
 young man, never I think received so much as a 
 " call " from one, in all her rosy nineteen years. But 
 she was very deeply acquainted with Love as praised 
 by the Immortals. She was familiar with its appeals 
 in verse, from " Romeo and Juliet" to "Sonnets from 
 the Portuguese." Her reading had been limited to 
 the books in the house. There seemed to have been 
 fewer purchases of books in her father's time, but 
 they took the "Atlantic Monthly" and "Littell's Liv- 
 ing Age," and in the glazed bookcase in the back- 
 parlor, and on certain less orderly shelves in the 
 niche beside the sitting-room fireplace, was a collec- 
 tion of English classics that represented the family 
 reading for several generations. They had no idea 
 of the value of some of these books : the Burton's 
 " Anatomy of Melancholy " — a brown leather folio 
 much read ! Nanny herself had browsed in its pages 
 quite freely, but her mother thought it too " old " for 
 her. There was Croxall's "Fables" too, which papa 
 would have known more about than I who only saw 
 on the title-page 1722, and knew that its "Cutts" 
 must have been before Bewick and that school. And 
 
 14 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 there was an early edition of Burns with cuts by Be- 
 wick, borrowed, some of them, from other books, 
 perhaps, — it was an American reprint : does any one 
 remember the picture of a child in a field puUing 
 the colt's tail, and the mother flying to the rescue 
 down the steps of a sort of stile ? Odd breaks in the 
 list of poets and novelists, Mrs. Aylesford explained 
 as the result of dividing family collections after death. 
 There were no poets later than Young and Thomson 
 (and L. E. L.), no translations from the classics later 
 than Pope, nor from the French later than Lamar- 
 tine. Of the Germans nothing! No Carlyle, even, 
 to talk about them. There was Dana's ** Household 
 Book of Poetry" which Nanny knew from cover to 
 cover, but she had merely had a taste of each great 
 name. It was my joy, on her twentieth birthday, to 
 have given her the first copy of Emerson's " Poems'* 
 she had ever taken in her hand, a little brown book 
 in cloth with the imprint of Fields, Osgood & Co. 
 And in the dark winter afternoons in the empty class- 
 rooms at Cooper, I had read aloud to her, from my 
 own volume of Matthew Arnold, " Yes, in the sea of 
 life enisled," and the " Buried Life" ; and recited from 
 memory, verses from ** Proserpine" and the Chorus 
 in "Atalanta," just to convince her that she had 
 been prejudiced against Swinburne; but remember- 
 ing dear Mrs. Aylesford I did not give him to her, 
 nor even lend him. We shared him on our own 
 terms, which was enough. 
 
 She envied me my acquaintance with one or two 
 '* foreign " languages which had not been foreign to 
 
 15 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 me ; I had learned them on the spot at small cost 
 of application, while she had really worked over her 
 Latin. Her parents believed in everything solid, as 
 they called it. Why give a girl a "smattering" of 
 French who would in all probability never use it 
 abroad, and when all the books worth reading can be 
 read just as well in translations I To me — the younger 
 girl — there was something enchanting in the quaint- 
 ness of her mental preparation for these fresh draughts 
 of the gods it was my happiness to pour into her cup. 
 They as a family were land-poor as we were book- 
 poor. My father could no more resist buying books 
 he could not afford (I think myself he was intended 
 for a writer) than Mr. Aylesford could stay his hand 
 from digging up a few hundreds to straighten an old 
 boundary-line. Thus I could reinforce her lean and 
 hungry diet from our own, I may say, well-chosen 
 superabundance. When I told papa she had never 
 read a line of George Sand nor Daudet nor Maupas- 
 sant, — never had heard of Alfred de Musset, though 
 she had read Plutarch's " Morals," he shouted ! He 
 demanded that I bring home this " wonder of all days " 
 with me at once. I had not the least intention of it — 
 for one reason, I knew that he would probably call 
 her so to her face I — But of course it had to come. 
 
n 
 
 The Aylesfords owned an historic grist-mill that 
 had ground flour for the American army during the 
 Revolution. The story goes that a British officer had 
 been sent up from New York to burn the rebel mill, 
 but fell in love with the daughter of Gill, the owner 
 and miller, and compounded his errand for the prom- 
 ise of her hand in marriage after the war. It is certain 
 the mill was still there, and a daughter of my friend's 
 family did marry a British officer, a Major Aylesford, 
 who settled at Lime Point on his wife's property and 
 became to all intents and purposes an American him- 
 self. 
 
 I suppose there had been no spare capital to re- 
 place the old machinery when it fell out of date, or no 
 custom to warrant such use of it. The place was silent 
 when I knew it, both road and mill. Only a gurgle of 
 water in spring ran under the great overshot wheel 
 hanging idle in the wheel-pit, a cool, stone-lined cav- 
 ern all moss and shadows. It ran across the road be- 
 neath a wooden bridge and flashed out again through 
 the meadow, where it watered the cows and fed sheets 
 of blue violets in May, and buttercups later, and star- 
 grass and dog-toothed violets and rudbeckias. A 
 rough retaining-wall flanked the litde rise to the mill- 
 door, and three big capstones had fallen off and lay 
 beside the road below, in the shade of the old pollard 
 
 17 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 willows. Nanny and I used to linger here after a hot 
 morning walk, seated on these stones that we called 
 our talking-stones. The third stone we said waited 
 for Him, the improbable but not impossible He, who 
 might come some day and break up our talks, or add 
 an extraneous silence of his own. Whichever one of 
 us he came for must expect that the other would hate 
 him. I said it would never be me I And it was n't : 
 Nanny was the first to go. 
 
 She turned her back on us — courtship and mar- 
 riage and the long journey not to return — all in 
 one summer, while papa and I were loafing and 
 sketching in Normandy. We had begged to have 
 her with us, but her father said it was a ** bad year "; 
 he had lost his fruit crop or some other farming 
 tragedy. When we came home she was gone. 
 
 Her Young Lochinvar had come out of the West, 
 but he was Canadian born and bred and colleged — 
 McGill, I think Nanny said ; and he took her back 
 with him as a bride to some little unheard-of town 
 — I had forgotten in which territory — it was n't 
 even " admitted." And I had never seen this depre- 
 dator, only his photograph that she had sent me 
 with apologies for a certain expression it wore which 
 she averred was one quite unknown to her. It was a 
 lean, hard face of the executive type which often 
 goes with good drawing, regular features ; the great 
 soldiers have been handsome men. I could have ac- 
 cepted him as a member of the Mounted Police, but I 
 hated him as Nanny's husband. She had seen so few 
 of that sort of men ; I felt sure she would have been 
 
 i8 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 defenseless. The eye, and the jaw, and a hawk-lid 
 making a straight fold across the eye — he looked 
 quite capable of stealing her out of the Aylesford 
 nest if he could not have made her his wife in any 
 other way. In fact I believed he had stolen her, and 
 that if I could have been there when she met him 
 first — close to her all that summer — it might never 
 have happened. But then why should n't it 1 
 
 I gave papa his photograph to abuse knowing 
 how he could do it! But he guessed what it was 
 I wanted of him and went off on the other tack to 
 tease me. 
 
 "A good-looking fellow I One quite sees what lit- 
 tle Aylesford would be taken with. She 'd be an easy 
 mark for a chap like this." He added something 
 about a " lightsome eye, a soldier's mien," which I 
 considered offensive on Nanny's account — " But 
 how did she ever come across the rascal in that 
 bucolic place?" 
 
 I gave him the facts as I had them from Nanny : 
 how he swam ashore to their dock one pitch-black 
 night when his boat capsized — or perhaps a steam- 
 boat, one of the big night-boats, ran them down. 
 He was being ferried across to catch a late train 
 and a thunder-squall struck the river. The other man 
 was drowned. 
 
 '* Gracious Heavens I Can such things happen at 
 Lime Point on the Hudson ? " 
 
 "They can," I said. "He came into her life just 
 like that I ' 
 
 " Like a thunder-clap, or a flash of lightning at 
 
 19 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 night. And she into his like the morning after ? Well ; 
 I take it very ill of him to have snatched her before 
 we had our summer abroad together. What is his 
 name — what does she have to call him?" 
 
 " Douglas ; I suppose she calls him — his name is 
 Douglas Maclay." 
 
 " Shade of D. Maria Muloch I He may be * true/ 
 but he does n't look * tender.' That face has about as 
 much sensibility as a telegraph-pole." 
 
 I had got all I wanted now, his reading of the 
 face expressed with his usual immoderation. I was 
 mollified. *' Did you ever knock on a telegraph-pole 
 with a stone and listen ? " said I. " There 's a sort of 
 person you can jar sensibility out of." 
 
 " Let us hope she may jar something out of him." 
 Papa put down the picture and went off on the cold 
 scent of the name, Maclay. He had a fancy for trac- 
 ing descent and had lately established a link be- 
 tween us and the Aylesfords through Nanny's mother 
 whose family name was Gurney. Papa made a great 
 deal of his vanishing drop of Quaker blood which 
 came by way of the English Gurneys. He loved to 
 drag it in, declaring that if ever he " contracted the 
 habit of divine worship " — Quaker benches for him, 
 on the " men's side," and the peace of one's own 
 thoughts; or — he would wave his hand magnifi- 
 cently — ** * Mass and rolling music like a queen ' 1 " 
 
 Nanny had come home on her first visit. She had 
 been home two weeks before they asked me up to 
 Lime Point. I understood, of course, that she must 
 
 20 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 see her family alone for a while. But still she seemed 
 to me unrested. I could not keep my eyes ofi her 
 face — she often looked just the same, and again she 
 would seem so different. Thinner, of course, and the 
 pure, fresh coloring was gone; that was to be ex- 
 pected. She had brought home the worth of her girl- 
 ish complexion and roundness in that intenser bit of 
 self, a little year-old daughter, named, for Mrs. Ayles- 
 ford, Phcebe. And here, I thought, is where life at last 
 takes hold ! She had had the child in her sole care in a 
 region of no servant class (I remembered her speaking 
 of it in one of her letters as a place where the ladies 
 say "ma'am" and the servants don't). That would 
 have tired her and excited her too with the vigilance 
 required by such new and poignant responsibilities. 
 She must have felt in coming home that here she could 
 take a long breath in peace and lay her burdens down. 
 This was what her mother had looked forward to ; 
 this visit was to have been a complete and much- 
 needed rest. But I suppose the habit of apprehen- 
 siveness had fastened upon her highly wrought sensi- 
 bilities. Imagination, once her friend and playmate, 
 had turned taskmaster and could wield a veritable 
 scourge. Also, I set it down as a fact that men with 
 soldiers' jaws are not rocks in a desert land or even 
 the shadow of a rock, where a young baby is con- 
 cerned. And my poor Nan had been feeding her im- 
 agination, not on poetry, but germs ! — The new tech- 
 nique in the care of infants, applied with all the rigor 
 and thoroughness of her race. 
 
 It was the oddest, most unexpected yet character- 
 
 21 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 istic, tragic-comical change in Nanny Aylesford — 
 those blue ecstatic eyes fixed on sterilization I I could 
 have wept — I did laugh with horrid mirth — at the 
 discussions that went on, wasting precious moments 
 between mother and daughter, who had needed each 
 other so long and soon must part again. Those mo- 
 ments would rise in memory. I who had lost my 
 mother quaked to hear Nanny argue wretchedly with 
 hers and tease her with questions framed with too 
 much care to avoid offense where there could be 
 nothing but offense — if not to Mrs. Aylesford, to the 
 pride and susceptibilities of old, faithful servants in 
 the house. 
 
 " My dear Nanny," Mrs. Aylesford would cry with 
 a bored, half-querulous smile, ** milking-things that 
 have been washed and scoured and set in the sun do 
 not need to be scalded over again the minute before 
 they are used. And where is the boiling water to 
 come from at half-past five in the morning when 
 Jonas comes for the pails ? Do you expect Mary to 
 get up at four?" 
 
 " But, mother, dear I some milk-pails have covers. 
 Even our air holds dust, and flies — " 
 
 " Flies, Nanny I I *d like you to show me a fly in 
 Mary Martin's milk-cellar I I do hate to say it — but 
 Mary was so happy when she heard you were com- 
 ing home, and yesterday I found her crying — and 
 angry tool — because you insist that boiling water 
 must be poured over dishes she has washed herself 
 and taken out of the china-closet, before they are fit 
 to put the baby's food in. Mary I — who weaned you 
 
 22 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 when I had rheumatic fever. I don't know what would 
 have become of me — I guess I shouldn't be living 
 — if I had been as distrustful of everything and every- 
 body— " 
 
 '*Oh mother, mother I" Nanny did not weep — 
 she blushed as from a blow. No one could have 
 laughed now. Of course she knew the gracelessness 
 of her attitude, assuming to educate the house where 
 she was born, where she was now a guest, with the ex- 
 cruciating power to wound that love gives. But the 
 poor young hunted thing persevered with an inflexi- 
 bility that showed the stock she came from, and with 
 conviction equal to what she deemed she had at stake. 
 
 When I heard her say to Jonas on one of those fair 
 May evenings, ** I 'm coming up to see you milk to- 
 night, Jonas," I knew the old chore-man was flatter- 
 ing himself. He thought it was for old times' sake, 
 and his leathern features showed how deep his dumb 
 pleasure was in the conceit. As they rounded the 
 cow-barn by way of the lane to save Nanny's white 
 shoes from litter of the cow-yard, he glanced up smil- 
 ing at the long-backed roof which came down to 
 within a child's climb of the ground. He thought of 
 the times he had warned her off that steep slide with 
 a voice made stem on purpose. She had loved to 
 creep up on hands and knees to the high peak and 
 lie there with her chin over, thrilled to look down 
 into the cow-yard below. He fancied she was think- 
 ing of those days. Her next words undeceived him. 
 
 " Jonas, I know you always wash your hands be- 
 fore you milk," — she couldn't remember having 
 
 23 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 seen him do anything of the kind, — " but would you 
 mind if I give you a sort of smock — something hke 
 a coat, white drilling, so it can be washed — to wear 
 over your working-clothes? It's done, you know, 
 when people are particular as we are " (cunning 
 Nanny !). '* Of course I will see to the washing. And 
 I have got you some cheese-cloth towels — for the 
 cows, you know?" 
 
 "What am I to do with the cows? " drawled Jonas 
 dully and harshly. "Wash 'em and put night-gowns 
 on them, too ? " He had heard from Mary a disgusted 
 account of these new notions that were upsetting the 
 house, and now he saw it was his turn ; this evening 
 walk for old times' sake had been a visit of inspection. 
 It hurt very much and it came near ending Jonas's 
 long service in the family. He said if she was n't 
 satisfied with his way of milking, she had better bring 
 on some of her cowboys to do it, if that was the way 
 out West. He was too old to learn new tricks. 
 
 Nanny told me all this herself with perfect breadth 
 and humor and almost tears for Jonas, and she 
 laughed when she came to the sequel, her father's 
 request that she leave outside matters alone! She 
 could quite see his side, and her mother's ; but she 
 knew she was right, and it was her child I I wondered 
 how she could ever be rested. Even here, the safest 
 place on earth, it would seem, peace could not be 
 hers — never perhaps again. She was always just a 
 trifle not there^ when we talked and I would try to 
 revive the spirit of our old enthusiasms. And certain 
 little matters of my own that could not have been 
 
 24 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 written, but had waited for our first reunion, to con- 
 fide to her alone, were left unsaid. We could not even 
 read together as we used — but we could look at lit- 
 tle Phcebe. Here was the key to Nanny's concentra- 
 tion. Her mother-soul relaxed its fears, her whole 
 heart smiled when Phcebe lay sleeping in her carriage 
 out of doors and we two sat and gazed at her. It was 
 a new bond, but it was the strongest one now left 
 between us, and it did not have to be forced on my 
 side. I was never tired of looking in that little face 
 and studying its unfamiliar expressions ; — Nanny's 
 child with so little of Nanny that I could see in her. 
 An exquisite accident, was it? — or a combination 
 beyond the reach of accident? 
 
 Mrs. Aylesford had found a nurse-girl, such as the 
 neighborhood afforded, for Nanny, to save sheer moil- 
 ing and toiling. I was sure this little nursemaid was 
 being watched — not with the eye of a hawk nor a 
 hen, but a young mother's eye, wan and a trifle wild 
 at times. My Nanny, as I remember, had rather a 
 hunted look in those days. I had seen Essie with her 
 baby problems and now I saw Nanny who took hers 
 so differently, with such passionate submergence, and 
 so little of Essie's almost masculine humor and phi- 
 losophy. The babies, so far as I could see, were do- 
 ing about equally well, and I wondered which of the 
 mothers in the long run would pay the highest price 
 for her own experience. It was easy to see there must 
 be a price for anything as precious as that little 
 Phoebe. It was the most remarkable reproduction of 
 the hawk-eye with all the predatoriness left out, and 
 
 25 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 with a mouth so sweet that it set one guessing what, 
 as to a mouth, the Maclay mustache concealed under 
 its close-fitting curves. 
 
 The little side-road below the mill was now the 
 favorite baby-carriage promenade. Here on certain 
 mornings Nanny and I used to pace up and down, I 
 at her side silent or reading, while she wheeled the 
 baby slowly to sleep, sometimes softly singing as she 
 walked. The nursemaid would be doing her bits of 
 baby washing which her aunt, Mary Martin, said she 
 " had a right to do," a way of enforcing the idea that 
 it was part of her legitimate work. It was Mary's 
 pride that one of her own blood should not shirk in 
 this her first " situation " which Mary had procured 
 for her. When the baby slept we would seat our- 
 selves on our talking-stones under the willows by the 
 wall with the baby carriage near us, its back to the 
 breeze. Nanny would relax and a different look come 
 into her eyes, >and she would bring out, chapter by 
 chapter, passages of her life in absence which she had 
 glossed over or purposely omitted in writing to me. 
 Yet always with that slight veil between us — her 
 weariness, or wifely abstraction. I tried to make al- 
 lowance for a man in the back of her thoughts, a man 
 I had never seen. . . . And here we had the conver- 
 sation which made this visit memorable and begins 
 my story, or that part of Nanny's story which I call 
 mine. 
 
 Her husband I knew had business like any ordi- 
 nary mortal : he owned in part and managed wholly 
 certain mines near a mountain town called Silver 
 
 26 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 City, though the mines were gold mines. I had per- 
 sistently thought of Nanny among these mountains 
 in spite of the fact that Silver City was not the ad- 
 dress on her letters. But snow-capped distances be- 
 tween places " out West " mean nothing to a New 
 Yorker across the continent. I had ventured that 
 morning to tease her a little with my romantic theory 
 of her wooing and evanishment; I even called her 
 captor the Black Douglas, with whom they threat- 
 ened Lowland babies, as we read in ** Tales of a 
 Grandfather." She laughed a little ; she was not dis- 
 pleased. So, I thought, if any of it is true, it is true 
 in a way that does not hurt. 
 
 "He can't help his name, you know. It's his 
 mother's maiden name. There are hundreds of Doug- 
 lases in British Columbia where she came from. And 
 he 's not such a * black ' character — he 's quite a pro- 
 tector in his way. / feel safe with him 1 " 
 
 "Which also goes with the feudal idea," I said. 
 
 "Feudal!" she laughed. "You don't know the 
 country I " As we seemed to be talking at cross-pur- 
 poses, she presently changed the subject. 
 
 "You know we live — or / live — now, in a most 
 ordinary fashion. We have given up our dream of a 
 house on the mesa." 
 
 The "mesa?" Either I had missed one of her let- 
 ters or I had forgotten inexcusably. I was silent, wait* 
 ing for my cue. 
 
 " I must have written you about our land out on 
 the mesa? The 'Doldrums,' we called it, because we 
 were pretty much becalmed there, waiting for our 
 
 27 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 water. It was to have come from an irrigation scheme 
 that Douglas had great faith in, or of course he 
 would n't have spent so much money preparing our 
 land. We had a desert-claim and a timber-culture 
 and a homestead under it, and a house I To hold 
 down a homestead claim you have to swear to con- 
 tinued residence there for the time the law requires. 
 Where a man has his washing done is one definition, 
 I believe, of his home. Douglas left his washing when 
 he came down." 
 
 Nanny laughed; but I exclaimed: "Why Nanny, 
 I never heard of that I Did you live there, alone?" 
 
 " Oh, dear I I had plenty of people. The plough 
 teams had their camp below the bluff. There were 
 men building wire-fence and putting up the windmill. 
 There were others grading in front of the house for 
 our lawn — raising a horrible dust. Dick Grant was 
 there ofl and on ; he had charge of the work on all 
 the claims — carrying water to the trees we had 
 planted to be ready for the canal when it came; 
 otherwise we should have lost a year. We had fifty 
 acres of wheat in one field below the mesa. Oh, there 
 was a lot of work ! I have never seen so much work 
 done on land in so short a time — I used to wish 
 father could be there to watch it: not afterwards, 
 though. The canal was down to within two miles of 
 us; the dust from the scraper teams was in plain 
 sight from our house. Some of it occasionally blew 
 over us ! Then there was trouble with the financial 
 end of things ; nobody was paid — the contractors 
 took the work as far as it was done, on a * lien,' and 
 
 28 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 the company subsided for a time. It meant months 
 of waiting — perhaps years, and we couldn't wait. 
 We had shot our bolt. We were done. Everything 
 * died on us ' as Mary says when she has bad luck 
 with her young turkeys in wet weather. Nothing was 
 wet with us. Dry, dry ! — acres of baby trees ; the 
 little poplars we had planted by the house that had 
 come out in leaf, — our half-mile of them, between the 
 wheat-fields, to the gate. Such a lovely drive it would 
 have been, after the brown valley between us and 
 town I Then our house on the bluff with its spire of 
 poplars, and the land going back as you climbed, 
 and last of all the mountain-line — the Owyhees. 
 Such a home! ... It was not to be," she ended 
 quietly. "We saw our leaves turn yellow in April; 
 every tree died as soon as the May winds began to 
 blow. There was no rain that spring and even the 
 wheat that had sprouted, our faith crop, died." 
 
 " But that was tragedy I — no ; you never wrote me 
 anything of this." 
 
 "Well ; I was rather worn out with it : perhaps I 
 did n't write. One would have to be there to know 
 what it means — what it meant to the man who did 
 it all and saw it fail. He did it for me — because I 
 don't like to live in little towns. So you can imagine 
 I was n't very proud of it. And now he has to be bus- 
 ier than ever at the mines, and I live in a square white 
 house on a corner lot in Boise City. There is nothing 
 interesting about it except that it was built by a Cath- 
 olic priest who died there much loved, and it 's called 
 the * Father Lanfrey house.' " 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 "But tell me about this Boise City? How far is it 
 from your mesa and your mines ? '^ 
 
 Nanny answered categorically, " Three miles from 
 the mesa and sixty from the mines. That is rather 
 far for one's husband, but there is no place for me up 
 there — with a baby. I should n't feel safe. And Boise 
 is the purchasing center for the mines. So we live 
 — and move — and have our sort of being. You see 
 I thrive on it 1 " 
 
 Ah, do you ? I thought. 
 
 " It sounds surprisingly real even to me, as you tell 
 it. I see why your Protector of the Poor must need 
 that kind of an eye and that soldier's jaw I 've been 
 accusing him of, if that 's the sort of thing he 's out 
 there to put through." 
 
 *• I did n't say he 's a * Protector of the Poor,' he 's 
 a protector of me," Nanny laughed. " And his things 
 don't always go through. But he stands it: his *jaw, 
 does that much for him. When he comes home with 
 a certain fixed look of rather more than usual cheer- 
 fulness, I expect to hear after awhile that he 's had a 
 blow of some kind. He never tells me at once — not 
 till he 's shown me that it does n't matter. The one 
 thing I do need and that he can't give me," Nanny 
 went on rapidly forestalling my tacit sympathy, " is 
 an angel woman of some kind whom I could love a 
 litde and trust a good deal, who would love my litde 
 Phcebe and not spoil her and do crazy things to 
 her behind my back. Then I should be free to take 
 breath now and then. I could go with Douglas when 
 he wants me on his trips. Sometimes he goes to ex- 
 
 30 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 amine mines and I don't see him, and hardly hear 
 from him, in some of the places, for weeks. I could 
 go anywhere — but not if I have to leave Phoebe. I 
 see no prospect of any change — seeing any more 
 of each other — for years, unless this angel were 
 raised up for us. I suppose there are such persons as 
 highly recommended governesses. I have thought 
 of writing to Mrs. Young-Fulton. But it would bring 
 gray hairs choosing among a list of strangers, and 
 our life would be a severe test for an Eastern girl. 
 It might not be a relief — only an added strain." 
 
 Nanny's own voice sounded so strained as she 
 said this that involuntarily I turned to look at her. 
 She looked at me and blushed because I had seen 
 tears in her eyes. Neither of us spoke for a moment. 
 A vision of something which might happen in the 
 future — my own future that I had, for good reason, 
 begun to think about — flashed into my mind ; some- 
 thing rather calculating in one way, but it sank very 
 sweetly into my heart. A vision seen through Nanny's 
 tears could not be all of self. 
 
 " I 'm very much intrigued with your Boise City 
 and your mesa and your mines," I began rather 
 heavily approaching my scheme. " These are places 
 like none that I have ever seen or ever shall see, 
 unless you '11 let me come out there some day — if 
 it should turn out just right for both of us ? Do you 
 think you could * love me a litde ' and trust me a 
 little — after I had learned things ? I should have 
 to learn a good deal. But one thing I should n't have 
 to learn ■— to love this litde Phoebe 1 " I kept my face 
 
 31 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 away from Nanny, looking at the sleeping child. I 
 dared not meet her eyes after what I had said. But 
 when I did she gazed at me a moment — then her 
 head sank between her hands. 
 
 '* Edith, Edith ! Don't tempt me, dear, unless you 
 mean it!" 
 
 My heart gave an answering sob. Heaven knows 
 — I could not have told her — what a wrench it 
 meant in my own life, that proposal I She was quiet, 
 and then we were both laughing. 
 
 "You — in Boise City! You'd say anything to 
 make me happy." (She pronounced it " Bo5^-see.") 
 
 ** I don't mean now, of course." 
 
 "You simply mean you 'd like to? — only it can 
 never be." 
 
 " No ; I mean a good deal more than that. It 
 might surely be, so far as I *m concerned. But it 
 would have to be right for several other people — 
 and it 's long, sometimes, before every thing is all 
 right for everybody. A time might come — one has 
 to think of the future, with a dear father who never 
 thinks of anything but the present. And who is n't 
 very well." 
 
 " I know," Nanny sighed. " But your father is 
 years younger than mine; my father is seventy- 
 two." 
 
 " My father will never be an old man," I an- 
 swered. "There has been an examination — certain 
 rules must be kept from now on. They won't be. 
 That is all." 
 
 " Yes ; I can imagine ! " Nanny cried. " To sit by 
 
 32 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 helpless and watch a life you love being steadily mis- 
 treated — shortened — I I suppose it is diet?" 
 
 " Yes, it is diet, hang it 1 How I hate the human 
 liver !" 
 
 ** It behaves — if you take it young and give it a 
 chance. But even when you do, and it's your own 
 child absolutely in your own hands, you can hardly 
 keep the rules — and keep anything else I Look at 
 me with my dear family I How lovingly they fight 
 against me, how skeptical they are. And they are 
 rather above the average in this place, not excep- 
 tionally prejudiced. They bear with me because I am 
 their child. Then take a town like Boise and persons 
 who are not above the average even there, who 
 have never heard of you or your rules, and imagine 
 what they think of me when I try to make them — 
 not understand, but simply keep those rules I I don't 
 try. I trust no one — and yet I have to trust — all 
 the ones I cannot see. Sometimes I wish my eyes 
 had never been opened ! " 
 
 " Who opened them, dear ? " 
 
 " An army doctor at the Post — Boise Barracks. 
 They are very good — this one better than most, a real 
 student. When it 's done it 's done. You can't shut 
 your eyes to your own child. My fear is getting ill 
 myself and having no one to leave Phoebe to but those 
 women who go out to nurse ; I don't call them nurses." 
 
 " Ah, Nanny ; you have lived a great deal since 
 we sat here last — and talked of such different things I 
 Silly chits that we were." 
 
 " No, no ; it was the dearest time —the time of my 
 
 33 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 whole life I could not spare ! Out West, I 've gone 
 round and round like a straw in an eddy. That is n't 
 the West, though, — it's only me. But I'm learn- 
 ing. Phoebe has never had a sick day in her — oh, 
 I must not boast I Come ! let 's talk about you. 
 I 've been going to ask — do you leave marriage out 
 of your future altogether ? Who knows but you may 
 pop ofi some day as your sister did, before any one 
 can say *boo' I " 
 
 ** It will be * boo to a goose,' indeed, if ever I go 
 off as Essie did. Not that you could blame her if you 
 knew Jack. But she was in her * teens.' " 
 
 " Are the twenties so much safer ? " 
 
 " My twenties are. And I 'm rather a cynic about 
 genius in a husband. They're all about our path, 
 you know. Strong, simple men don't come my way 
 so much — nothing simple ever does I It would be 
 such a rest to have just one thing to do — a straight- 
 ahead job of that kind — " We were both gazing at 
 Nanny's child. 
 
 She put her arm around me. " If it could be you — 
 out there with us I I should n't be thinking only of 
 the times when I could run ofT and play." 
 
 ** That word * us ' holds the chief difficulty," I re- 
 minded her. ** Your husband might find a stranger 
 less of a nuisance on the whole." 
 
 ** No : you two would get on in your offish fashion. 
 If you like strong and simple men, there you are I 
 You would never like him less than you did at first — 
 which might not be much — and he would accept you 
 as if he had known you all his life. He might be a 
 
 34 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 little afraid of you till he saw you, but he would n't 
 miss the point — not one thing about you would es- 
 cape him. And with you around, he 'd see a side of 
 me — that he's never seen before!" She looked a 
 little startled after saying this. "You know," she 
 added, " I never talk to any one as I do to you I " 
 
 ** As you did," I corrected. 
 
 "As I shall again. But I should n't care for — well, 
 I don't much like talking men, though your father 
 would bowl any one over ! My man does n't talk 
 about what he 's going to do, and he does n't talk 
 about what he has done, and when he has tried and 
 failed, it 's not worth while to talk about that either. 
 Theories of life he leaves alone. Art he knows noth- 
 ing about. He reads a great deal, technical books — 
 he hardly has time for much else — and the papers. 
 So you see if silence is restful, I have a good deal of 
 it. You would rest me in another way. Did you 
 ever hear such egotism I " 
 
 " But if this is to be serious, we must be sound on 
 that very point — the three personalities in the case. 
 And one other point. I shall never leave papa — 
 while he is supposed to need me, however little I 
 can do. By that time Phoebe will be a big girl for 
 such lessons as I could give her." 
 
 " The very kind I want ! " said Nanny. " I don't 
 want one of Mrs. Young-Fulton's kind with a college 
 diploma. I want — what little royalties have, a — lady 
 of the realm. I shall reverse my dear parents' method 
 with me. I don't want to anchor my child : I want to 
 give her wings 1" 
 
 35 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 " Do you connect wings with * Tittle royalties '? " I 
 laughed at her. 
 
 " I connect you — with everything I want for my 
 Phoebe. If one could only have what one wants in 
 this world without making some one else pay the 
 price I" 
 
 ** Only children, and then you pay the price 1 " I 
 said. 
 
 And she added, ** I suppose that 's why they are 
 such blessed things to have." 
 
 How she had been dwelling oh and dreaming of 
 these futures, — the mother of little Phcebe, one year 
 old I " I 'm dying to have you see it all, to see how 
 you will take it. Just as you used to say you 'd love 
 to take me abroad." 
 
 " Suppose you had gone with us to Normandy that 
 summer when you did this ? It was the closest shave 
 you ever had in your life ! " 
 
 " I can't imagine it. I can't think of myself, see my- 
 self anywhere or anyhow but just as I am. My cares 
 look like tragedies, perhaps, when I pour them all 
 out like a baby this way, but I like my cares better 
 than I should like being careless now. I even long 
 sometimes to be back there — the place itself haunts 
 me, much as I have thought I hated it. You will see 1 
 If you ever see those desert plains, night and morn- 
 ing, day after day — you '11 know what I mean." 
 
 Nanny sat silent a while longer with her cheek on 
 her hand musing, I thought, rather happily, and I 
 was happy thinking I had had something to do with 
 her peaceful face. The baby began to stir in her car- 
 
 36 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 riage and Nanny jogged it a litde and looked at her 
 watch. 
 
 "Well, honey,'* she said, rising as we saw the 
 nursemaid coming towards us, " there is one thing I 
 think this will do for you. Give you a rest from all 
 the egotists except me, and all the Talk except Mine. 
 And it 's a great place for continuity. You can keep 
 on with one train of thought a very long time.'* 
 
 " How strange to say * can ' and * will ' instead of 
 * might ' — and not an hour ago we had neither of us 
 thought of such a thing I " said I. 
 
 " Oh, I had 1 " Nanny blushed. " But I do think I am 
 treating Phoebe as if she were a little crown princess, 
 asking you to be her governess I " 
 
 ** But you did n't I I asked first, remember. On my 
 own head be it." 
 
 We agreed for obvious reasons not to speak of our 
 plan in its present vagueness, even to Nanny's mother, 
 though Nanny was good enough to say it would make 
 her very happy. I could see it had made my dear 
 girl if not happier more rested — more let down. 
 Sometimes she would sigh sofdy to herself with a little 
 smile and look at me as if we had a very warm secret 
 between us. 
 
Ill 
 
 How should it ever have entered my calculations 
 that anything but death, his death or mine, would 
 have parted me from my father ? Yet we parted, and 
 he did it. It was done in a word — as he might have 
 kissed me good-night and gone to a play and left me 
 at home alone, for that evening only. That was his 
 way of treating a grave decision when it was forced 
 upon him. 
 
 Four years had passed since that May visit and 
 my talks with Nanny under the Aylesford willows. 
 She had not been home in the interval nor had I 
 gone up there again. My little pupil in the West 
 must be a ripe age, I thought, for such lessons as I 
 could give her. As time passed I had felt less sure 
 of myself as to that wild proposition, less able to 
 count on my nerves — but that was for reasons not 
 connected with time. I was only twenty-seven. 
 
 The picture-market was at a low ebb, even for us, 
 that winter. On the other hand, our family had in- 
 creased by one exigeant member. He was an old 
 political chum of papa's ; they had called each other 
 "brothers in Mazzini " in the great days of United 
 Italy. Papa was in England at the time — I forget 
 what the family were doing over there ; but he was 
 young — as the captain was. Some people are spoiled 
 by prosperity and some by adversity : Captain Nashe 
 
 38 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 had been spoiled by both, and still he was a rather 
 captivating person if you did not see too much of 
 him. He turned up most inopportunely (I had just 
 told our " general " that she must expect henceforth to 
 do the table-linen ; as she was a poor servant she sub- 
 mitted, but was feeling put upon) and his visits never 
 were short. 
 
 The captain was an Englishman, but he did not 
 claim to have held a commission in the British army ; 
 indeed his military title may have been a fiction, or 
 a bit of sentiment. He had been one of Garibaldi's 
 aides, and he used to boast of the kiss his hero chief 
 had knelt to give him when his comrades left him, 
 grievously wounded, on that desperate retreat through 
 Central Italy, where he lay hid for weeks nursed by 
 poor peasants while the Austrians were scouring the 
 forests of Ravenna. That would have been in '49. 
 He was out again with the Red Shirts in '59 and '60. 
 Papa had known him all those years and had been in 
 the habit of helping him out in his periods of scarcity 
 when one cannot live on gallant memories ; he said 
 he was a beautiful fellow in his youth, one of the 
 handsomest of Englishmen. No doubt he had suf- 
 fered and made sacrifices, and no doubt he did love 
 Italy. Tears would fill his eyes when he read aloud 
 to us : — 
 
 " ' Each of the heroes around us has fought for his land and line, 
 But thou hast fought for a stranger, in hate of a wrong not 
 thine!'" 
 
 We little girls, listening, thought it scarcely seemed 
 quite modest, but the captain did not pretend in that 
 
 39 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 way. He bragged of his adventures openly. What 
 was there better worth talking about in the trumpery 
 city of New York, in our studio-existence which he 
 patronized grandly I As for the poems he favored us 
 with, seldom waiting to be asked, he certainly could 
 read in his way magnificently. Also he could sing, 
 in a fine rolling barytone without much cultivation. 
 Sea-chanteys and soldier-choruses, and the wild 
 Hungarian folk-songs that were little known then 
 on this side, while papa, who played in a manner as 
 magnetic as the captain's singing, woke imaginary 
 drum-beats or hoof-beats as the song called for, in 
 big male chords on the piano. 
 
 The piano was upstairs in the studio and behind it 
 stood a life-sized lay-figure in Roman draperies with 
 perhaps a casual hat of papa's dropped on its bald 
 wooden pate. Whoever moved it often left it in gro- 
 tesque attitudes. Papa, who used it, never could see 
 how funny the lay-figure could be I We little girls 
 one evening disgraced ourselves, much as we loved 
 the music, by falling into smothered shrieks of giggles 
 over the tableau they three made : the captain singing 
 in great form, erect behind papa at the piano, neither 
 of them aware of the lay-figure in the corner, appar- 
 ently in contortions of agony, throwing up its hands 
 for help. 
 
 We had our own reasons for disliking the cap- 
 tain — reasons such as children do not tell. As young 
 girls we were quick to see the added look of care 
 his visits brought to our mother's face. It was unfor- 
 tunate that papa's clothes fitted him. If there were 
 
 40 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 any choice between two suits (of papa's) his brother 
 in Mazzini would presently be seen wearing the 
 smarter one. He gave up pipes when he came to us 
 and smoked papa's best cigars remarking plaintively 
 that he could n't afford " cheroots " of that brand him- 
 self. Neither could papa I We girls knew that we 
 could have no new frocks when the captain dropped 
 down on us. On this visit, the dishes he particularly 
 liked were those papa was now forbidden to touch ; 
 he asked for them at table, before papa, if they were 
 omitted from our necessarily restricted menus. He 
 criticized the wine which his host selected and was 
 forbidden to touch, but with the captain's rallying eye 
 upon him and the glass of friendship raised, too often 
 my dear daddy would give in. On these occasions I 
 may say that I hated the captain. 
 
 On his arrival that autumn, about the time we were 
 getting our coal in and groaning at the bill, Essie 
 came over promptly to hold an indignation meeting. 
 We scolded and vowed what should and must be 
 done, and then we fell a-laughing over the wild ab- 
 surdity of fleas as small financially as we were having 
 lesser fleas to bite them. The idea of papa support- 
 ing that magnificent and debonair figure of a man — 
 but the whole absurdity became tragic when it in- 
 volved papa's health and his defiance of all rules. 
 The captain was like a naughty boy who fears no 
 rod of discipline at home, seducing another along the 
 path that leads to a thrashing. He had no reason to 
 dread consequences, for he left them to others to take. 
 His own family, he complained, had turned him off 
 
 41 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 for nothing but his principles — his incorrigible ac- 
 tivities in shipping arms and men from England dur- 
 ing the glorious wars. In my opinion he cared no 
 more for the principle of Italian independence than 
 he did for the Pope's toe. 
 
 Our relatives in the city looked on with disgust at 
 papa's gullibility. I don't think he was wholly de- 
 ceived, but criticism of a guest and a penniless guest 
 he would not tolerate, and when he was. finally taken 
 aside by his sister, — the nicest aunt we had I — and 
 told that the captain was not a proper person to be 
 domesticated in the house with two unchaperoned 
 girls (this was before Essie's marriage), he took such 
 serious umbrage that it caused a definite breach. 
 And this, too, we laid to the captain. We needed 
 Aunt Essie — she had not always been very compre- 
 hending, but was invariably kind. We did not care 
 very much for the old ball-gowns she gave us, nor for 
 her state dinners, especially when she did not send 
 her carriage for us ; but we liked her tremendously. 
 Rich relatives, as Essie said, are needed in a family 
 like ours brought up to despite wealth. ... I shall 
 not go into the reasons why, as we grew older, Essie 
 and I knew that the relatives were right, and that the 
 captain ought to have been turned out of our studio- 
 nest without mercy and long before the winter when 
 he came and egregiously lived on us. 
 
 With no picture-sales worth mentioning and his 
 ancient comrade on his back, papa was forced to 
 stoop to black-and-white. He took orders for that 
 thing he ridiculed, a "gift-book," and he made illus- 
 
 42 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 trations for magazine-stories which he felt it an afflic- 
 tion to read. Sometimes he barely did read them and 
 drove the authors wild with the liberties he took in 
 his interpretations of their text. Once he drew a Brit- 
 ish naval officer with a mustache. When I laughed at 
 him, he said, " How should / know the fellow was in 
 the navy?" I pointed out that if he had read the 
 story he 'd have known, that fact being the crux of 
 the whole tale. He considered himself meanly paid 
 for all these botherations. The captain, with not very 
 convincing disinterestedness, supported the idea. 
 
 ** Pot-boilers are all right, my dear Bonny, if they 
 boil the pot I " And he would counsel me not to feed 
 my father's sacrifices to his family on such tough 
 corned-beef as we had had — say on Saturday. ** Give 
 it to the poor, my dear, give it to the poor ! I have 
 noticed the meat on your father's table is not what 
 it used to be in your mother's time, my dear Edith. 
 You should go to the stalls yourself with your maid, 
 and try the effect of your beaux yeux. Of course no 
 young lady nowadays can tell one cut from another. 
 You must either charm your tradesmen — " 
 
 ** Or pay them," I supplied. 
 
 He was seated as he said this, eating his eleven 
 o'clock breakfast alone by the studio-fire. It was 
 Monday morning ; he had declined to take it in the 
 dining-room which he said was cold and smelled of 
 wash-boilers. Papa was drawing me for one of his 
 illustrations, in my best ball-gown. Without the ball 
 I found it chilly, especially as the captain in a great 
 armchair kept all the fire to himself. He turned clean 
 
 43 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 round to say these things to me about the meat on 
 our table, his face flushed with the heat he was mo- 
 nopoHzing. 
 
 ** I shall give it to the poor, certainly," I retorted. 
 " We shall have it ourselves to-day for luncheon." 
 
 " Then pray spare us a few poached eggs on top ! " 
 the captain begged. "Do you know," — he gazed 
 pensively at his plate, — ** I believe this bacon has 
 been standing." 
 
 **I think it very likely," I laughed rudely. "On 
 Monday mornings — if we must go into details — it is 
 not an easy matter in this house to keep a broiling- 
 fire—" 
 
 " — It's not broiled, it's fried," the captain retorted. 
 
 Papa smiled at our bleak jesting, with a stern eye 
 on my pose. 
 
 " If you could be down at the breakfast-hour, cap- 
 tain, your bacon would suit you better. And your 
 cofTee — that's been standing too, I suppose?" 
 
 " It has," said the captain meekly, " but I refrained 
 from mentioning it knowing how sensitive my young 
 hostess is to the comfort of her father's guest." 
 
 " Come, that's too bad ! " Papa sprang up. " Stale 
 coffee is vile." He squeezed the water out of his 
 brush — he was laying in the shadows on my skirt 
 in sepia and the folds must not be stirred — and he 
 kept me there without moving while he set out the 
 Russian cofTee-pot and called downstairs for the can- 
 ister and settled the captain watching his own cofiee 
 boil. I boiled already I One of my arms was getting 
 stiff holding up a curtain which also had folds that 
 
 44 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 must not be changed. This was all in the day's work 
 for papa, but I saw no reason why I should ache and 
 freeze for the captain, if he chose to lie abed and 
 growl about his bacon. I had become as small as 
 that ! These were my nerves that winter. 
 
 I told the captain I hoped that his cup of coffee 
 might tantalize him in a place where he would n't re- 
 quire it hot. He had now got as much of the fire as 
 he could stand and he backed his chair away and 
 turned and stared at me deliberately. Not as the litde 
 artist-brethren stared and sighed and groaned when 
 Essie and I were posing ; we only laughed at them. 
 They saw not us, but their own unapproachable ideal 
 that we momentarily suggested. The captain's eye 
 was not impersonal. It was moist and foolish, as 
 when (as little girls) he used to try to make us kiss 
 him good-night and papa always supported our fierce 
 objections. '^-"" 
 
 "Ye gods. Bonny I What a mercy this child of 
 yours is a bit of a vixen. If she were kind, now I 
 Look at that eye over her shoulder — conceive if it 
 should melt ! Where would the poor wretch be she 
 cast it on!" And he quoted, still staring and speak- 
 ing under his breath, so that papa working diligently 
 on shadows did not hear him : — 
 
 "j " Not a drop of her blood was human, 
 
 Yet she was made like a soft, sweet woman." 
 
 He knew that I knew what the words were from : 
 not two nights before, the captain had picked up 
 Rossetti and offered to read " Eden Bower" to papa 
 
 45 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 and me, and I had taken my sewing and gone off 
 to a corner of my own. Whom you can and cannot 
 read certain poems with is as much a test of the per- 
 son as of the poem. Papa would have felt these dis- 
 tinctions in a different mood, or if the captain had 
 been a rich relative instead of a shabby old friend 
 going very fast downhill. 
 
 It seems paltry to speak of such low little incidents 
 now after all the softening years. I only wish to bring 
 out why my nerves were not in the best state, any 
 more than papa's were, for the decision close upon us 
 that winter, when circumstances pushed us so near 
 the edge. 
 
 The captain, I think, felt my contempt for his pres- 
 ence in the house and made it his excuse for these 
 insolences ; my manner to him was excuse enough 
 too, I dare say. He was getting ready to take his re- 
 venge w^henever an opportunity should present itself. 
 
IV 
 
 It came to our door, one evening, in the guise of 
 good-fortune and in the words of a friend, who 
 brought us the first news of papa's selection for a 
 magnificent order, and said he had had nothing to 
 do with it. But as he was one of the critics whom 
 new-made millionaires consulted on important art 
 purchases, we doubted his disclaimer. 
 
 A great palatial house was going up that winter 
 which had been the talk of the city. It was making 
 the opportunity of more than one of papa's artist- 
 friends. He had heard of their luck and perhaps 
 silently envied them — I know I had. And now papa 
 was to have the crowning chance of all : the wall- 
 frescoes for the great ballroom. The ceiling and doors 
 and cornices and the panels that held the magnifi- 
 cent sconces had been ordered from abroad ; many 
 famous names were combined for the setting of that 
 series which would be papa's highest bid for fame. 
 
 He took his good-fortune with calmness, almost 
 with condescension. Not so the captain who seemed 
 to visibly swell and burgeon in the light of vicarious 
 prosperity. He quite fawned on "Bonny," whose 
 replenished pockets he saw leaking into his own 
 which were fathomless. The unhappy illustrations 
 were cast aside. I myself had the presumption, and 
 perhaps the dishonesty, to finish a frontispiece which 
 
 47 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 a friendly House had been waiting for — but not in 
 silence — needed at once for the next issue of their 
 magazine. It was a case of bad faith either way. 
 Papa's drawing was singularly unequal and when he 
 felt lazy and indifferent, as in this case, it could be 
 extremely bad : though he would always have some 
 clever theory on the spur of the moment to account 
 for its vagaries. Fatuous as it sounds, it is a fact that 
 my patching-in was never noticed I Another drawing 
 I sent off without consulting him. He had done all 
 he ever would to it ; it was charming. He had got 
 just what he wanted and it behooved some one to 
 snatch it from him before he should spoil it with tired 
 fussing. 
 
 For two days he was lost to existence — going 
 back over his old sketches, laying them silently one 
 by one aside with a steadily gathering gloom. If the 
 captain interrupted him during this absorbed scru- 
 tiny he shut him up sharply or paid no attention. The 
 captain would smile serenely and stroll off content to 
 wait. The spring was heading up that was to fill the 
 distributary channels. I saw there would be a heavy 
 price to pay for this sudden rise in our prospects. If 
 it had not happened, our incubus would soon, I think, 
 have slipped from us. The captain was not over-com- 
 fortable, and he never liked to share short commons. 
 
 Suddenly, after a week of this intense saturation 
 with his subject, papa announced that he had got 
 it. // had come I But it wasn't here — and he had 
 nothing to fit it in any of his old stufT. He must go 
 where the vision called him. And then my heart 
 
 48 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 went down like lead ; for I saw in the captain's gloat- 
 ing eye, as papa unrolled his plan, that he meant to 
 get himself included in that search for the Ideal, and 
 to that pair I could not make a third. But there would 
 be something of a struggle first. 
 
 "It" was a memory going back to papa's young 
 days when he had been a wanderer with means and 
 health, and other things that he had not now. There 
 was a mountain, he said, that you saw across a la- 
 goon, palm-fringed, — the inner, land-locked harbor 
 of an island in the South Pacific. The breakers roared 
 outside, but all was still where you looked eastward 
 to the mountain, and the light must be the shadow- 
 less light after sunset with the " feeling " of a new 
 moon behind one in the west. And the people, in 
 that ballroom, circling down the floor would pause in 
 their dance in front of this scene filling the end-wall, 
 opening into another hemisphere, and giving the 
 color-key he wanted. Dancers then were not draped 
 like figures on a Greek vase, they did not sway and 
 side-step — they chased the hours on flying feet and 
 their wide silk skirts swirled out — rapturously, as we 
 thought ! But the spirit of papa's dream was far back 
 or far ahead of his time. The scenes on the walls 
 his dancers were to pass with over-shoulder glances, 
 or fan themselves in front of, were all in places with 
 soft-voweled names, between the lights ; loiterers on 
 forest-paths where you almost smelled the heavy- 
 scented flowers languid in the gloom, or dancers by 
 the light of beach-fires, in and out of the shadows, 
 flower-crowned dancers brown and bacchanal. . . . 
 
 49 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 To me it was sickening. I felt in it a sick man's fancy, 
 a desperate need to realize for the last time what for 
 him was over-past. With papa alone I could have fol- 
 lowed the fatuous but compelling dream. I knew how 
 he must have longed to get out of New York that 
 winter ; but with Captain Nashe of the party, Tahiti 
 would be another ** Eden Bower" to me. There was a 
 business side also in which papa needed his ''vixen." 
 He would work his idea over and over — changing 
 his scheme, and the days would drift that brought 
 him no nearer to keeping his contract with these 
 people who would be waiting for their ballroom. 
 He remembered those alluring places as they had 
 welcomed him long ago to their feasts and flower- 
 crowned dances, and the plunge from white beaches 
 into the moonlit surf it would give him a chill now to 
 think of. There would be nothing sane or comfort- 
 able or even safe for an elderly gentleman under a 
 doctor's orders. And he would draw on his price 
 in advance, a large bite out of the cake he had not 
 earned. 
 
 All papa's best friends tried to dissuade him from 
 this mad journey, but they handled him like the 
 fine porcelain he was — and becoming almost as frag- 
 ile. It was quite in vain. He was as feverish as a gam- 
 bler to get back to the tables, and the captain stood 
 always at his elbow urging him to put his money on 
 the game. Nothing could suit him better than to 
 leave for San Francisco and the tropics just as our 
 February rains begin. 
 
 I cannot endure the memories of those days that 
 
 50 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 preceded our parting ; they were so unworthy of what 
 was to come. Papa's excitability, his peremptoriness, 
 his peevishness with me. He actually quarreled with 
 me over the way I wore my hair, though I had worn 
 it so all winter. Girls then balled their hair up into a 
 chignon at the back and chopped it off in front into 
 bangs. Papa suddenly insisted that my chignon 
 looked "stuffed" (as they frequently were) or as if I 
 had bought it and pinned it on. It must show that it 
 was hand-made of my own hair, fresh that evening 
 — or morning, as the case might be. And he declared 
 I had been at my front hair with scissors. He was 
 really funny I It was impossible to discuss anything 
 with him, even necessary plans that concerned my- 
 self alone. Wretched as it was to have such plans, it 
 was worse with the captain standing by in secret glee 
 at our stupid wrangling. I dare say papa had me 
 somewhat on his conscience, besides feeling ill and 
 dreading the journey : no wonder I made him nerv- 
 ous. He would be constantly arguing, with no one 
 now to oppose him, that it was n't a woman's trip ; 
 no girl of my age could help him in the conditions 
 he would be amidst. A man who had knocked about 
 the world like the captain was the ideal companion 
 he needed. And all had been arranged for me in his 
 absence by simply depriving me of my home. He had 
 proposed to one of our artist-friends with a wife and 
 family to take the house, on very friendly terms as 
 to rent — they could not have done it otherwise. It 
 would just suit their circumstances, and I of course 
 would live with Essie I Thus he disposed of me for an 
 
 51 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 indefinite time, but with a perfectly definite sum to live 
 upon (if I could collect it), the rent of the house, after 
 certain repairs had been paid for and our two months' 
 bills in arrears. I saw myself going to brother-in-law 
 Jack for car-fares. 
 
Essie and I have always got on together. I shall 
 not deny that I am hasty at times, but Essie is cool 
 enough to make up. Whether her feelings are better 
 tempered than mine or not as strong, does not alter 
 the fact that she has them under more uniform con- 
 trol. She does not rise to a great occasion in a man- 
 ner to satisfy a demand for warm partisanship ; she 
 can be satirical but she is always civil, even to persons 
 she dislikes. Few things could surprise her after the 
 sensations her marriage with Jack Landreth must 
 have supplied, but I certainly surprised her that morn- 
 ing, when I walked in with the news that papa was 
 going to Tahiti with Captain Nashe, that our house 
 was let over my head, and that papa's sole inspiration 
 for me in his absence had been the assumption that 
 I could live with them indefinitely as a non-paying 
 guest. 
 
 Essie smiled, but without irony, bless her I It was 
 one of the moments which decide whether one's sis- 
 ter is a lady or is not. She met my eyes serenely and 
 with no apparent speculation in her own, though her 
 housewife's brain must have been busy behind the 
 sisterly smile. Sisterly I It was queenly ! It was like 
 the manner of a statesman at some diplomatic crisis. 
 Her mind was not revealed : her response was perfect. 
 
 " I know how you must feel," she said, " but we 
 
 53 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 always understand each other. If we don't under- 
 stand papa, that 's an old bond too. Of course he 
 gets more mysterious as he gets older. I hope he 
 is n't counting on storing any of his pictures here. 
 I have never been able to impress on him the size of 
 this flat. I don't need to tell you which your room is, 
 dear. Of course it is n't empty. I shall put my nurse 
 in the cook's room. The cook will probably leave — " 
 
 We burst into wild laughter, Essie perfectly im- 
 personal, and I arose and kissed her which discom- 
 posed us both a little. And then we talked with fewer 
 precautions, Essie frankly with a considering eye 
 upon future stowing ; a sister and sister's clothes and 
 possibly a wagon-load of papa's pictures, heaped upon 
 her in her cramped quarters. I believe she was a 
 good manager with what she had to manage with ; 
 she went through some masterly processes of elimina- 
 tion. Me she could not eliminate, but I proposed to 
 help a little towards that end myself. 
 
 " I '11 come to you till papa's back is turned. I '11 
 leave my clothes here, and my address: that will 
 satisfy papa. But I 'm going up to see Mrs. Ayles- 
 ford as soon as I know if she can have me." And I 
 told her my plan. I could not, of course, hurl myself 
 upon Nanny as I had been cast upon a sister's char- 
 ity, but Mrs. Aylesford would be able to advise me 
 from both points of view. I had not heard from 
 Nanny in some time; her mother though would be 
 in touch with the situation "out West." I said it 
 rather quakingly. 
 
 *'You know," Essie said, "it's horrid to have you 
 
 54 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 cut loose in this way ; really shoved off the raft 
 Let's keep afloat all together or sink together. The 
 captain has pushed you off. Jack knows things about 
 him that papa ought to know. He 's a perfectly un- 
 clubable person." 
 
 "Oh, for pity's sake, don't attack the captain to 
 papa! That's been done too much already. I'm 
 twenty-seven: it's high time I began to think for 
 myself a little. Going out to Nanny does n't call for 
 great mental effort, especially as she thought of the 
 plan first. I may feel yet that the captain has done 
 me a good turn." 
 
 " He has n't done me a good turn ! I shall miss 
 you dreadfully. And I'm jealous of Nanny — I've 
 always been a little so. Now she will take you from 
 me altogether." 
 
 " There are things I fear a good deal more than 
 that," I said. 
 
 Essie knew and shared my forebodings. 
 
 " I think you are wasting a last chance not to tell 
 papa, now. It might bring him to terms, you know. 
 I 'm sure it will give him a shock." 
 
 " Why should I want to give him a shock?" 
 
 "But I think you ought to tell him. It's not like 
 you not to. I'm not sure that I shall aid and abet 
 you in deceiving him at the last moment. Come, you 
 will tell him?" 
 
 I said that I would. And perhaps Essie's "last 
 chance " held some comfort for me too ; I had had 
 much the same idea, but had been afraid to trust it. 
 Now I began to count upon telling him. It did not 
 
 55 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 turn out as we had flattered ourselves. Papa inquired, 
 when I spoke of my visit, why the Aylesfords should 
 suddenly ask me up at this disagreeable season. I 
 told him I had asked myself, and, as I expected, he 
 demanded to know what induced me to do such an 
 unusual thing. But when I explained my ultimate 
 purpose in going up there and what I hoped it might 
 lead to, he merely sat in silence. His face turned 
 slightly red. He disliked having his plans upset 
 (though they were my plans), also his authority 
 called in question, to say nothing of his better judg- 
 ment. His irritation I saw occupied his mind just then 
 more than any pain I had counted on giving him. I 
 was asserting myself in a manner he had not expected 
 and would admit no reason for. He saw no room for 
 pride as to Jack and Essie. If I did, why I must be 
 over-proud. 
 
 "There is no room for ^^^^ything, with Jack and 
 Essie. There's no room for me, even if I left my 
 pride behind." 
 
 He did not hold out his hand and say, **Then 
 come with me 1 " and give me a chance to reply, 
 " Not with the captain 1 " There was no reaction of 
 this kind to the shock, if shock it were. Again he 
 was silent, and I saw in his mobile face, in one swift, 
 shirking glance of his eye that I knew every expres- 
 sion of, that he was glad to be rid of me — in this 
 way, in any way. 
 
 I was wrong even to have thought of it as an issue 
 between us I I, brought up in a studio, not to make 
 allowance for the mood of creation I And the creator 
 
 56 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 a sick man, his nervous strength passing from him. 
 He was like one in the embrace of a powerful drug 
 just beginning to sink into unconsciousness. Voices 
 were distant to his ear. The demands of Hfe came 
 back only to tease him. I was his last human respon- 
 sibility: he let me slip away and returned to his 
 dream. 
 
 We parted on a drizzling morning, at the door of 
 the carriage that waited to take him to his train. He 
 had motioned the captain to enter before him ; then 
 we stepped back a little and he took my hands. I 
 thought he looked ill and certainly sad. The face he 
 bent down to me was pinched and blue and streaked 
 with a color not of health. I think his eyes were 
 smarting as he kissed me. I expected a word or two 
 such as no one could say better — some little speech 
 to remember. All he said was : — 
 
 " I hope they won't freeze you up there on the 
 Hudson. Don't go skating on the river, alone, will 
 you ! February ice is not to be trusted." 
 
 That was all : he spoke as if my visit were the only 
 absence in question. He kissed the top of his cane to 
 me from the cab-window. The captain sat uncovered 
 and the last I saw of him he was bowing into his hat 
 and smiling, vastly contented with himself. 
 
VI 
 
 They put me in the northeast bedroom at the Ayles- 
 fords', and Mrs. Aylesford begged me in her eager 
 manner of suppressed sympathy to keep myself "well 
 wrapped up" while we made the passage of the cold 
 halls. My suit-case had been left in the lower hall by 
 Jonas with a glance at his muddy boots which might 
 have meant an apology for not carrying it upstairs. 
 There was no second maid and nothing was seen of 
 Mary Martin at this hour, nor did Mary carry bags 
 at any hour. It was their way to do things for them- 
 selves. Mrs. Aylesford and I had quite a tussle which 
 should get possession of my hand-satchel and mufE 
 and a box of candy I had brought — they both loved 
 it and denied themselves and each other the indul- 
 gence. I knew Mr. Aylesford would be up presently, 
 with his beaming *' Well, well!" — bringing my suit- 
 case, when I should waylay him with my sweets, 
 open at the top layer, all chocolates. 
 
 Dear Mrs. Aylesford ran ahead of me smiling — 
 literally ran — up the stairs, wrapped in a shawl and 
 bearing my muff and satchel both, having wrested 
 them from me. There was the same impression of 
 energy outlasting the demand for it, of a great good- 
 will confined in its manifestations, seeking to replace 
 the natural outlets that love gives, and which life 
 towards its close so often denies. They were not re- 
 
 58 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 formers or interested very deeply in any Movement 
 or Cause; and clubs, the resource of middle-aged 
 mothers nowadays whose children do not need them 
 actively, would not have been Mrs. Aylesford's ref- 
 uge, I think, at any age. 
 
 I went straight to the window to look at my hills 
 across the river. As I had seen them last, they, were 
 white with orchard-blooms and the dark points of 
 cedars climbing up the gorges showed against them 
 as if they were snow-banks. Now the orchards were 
 all a mist of bare boughs and there was real snow in 
 shrinking patches spoiling the soft purple outlines of 
 the hills. The fireplace had been closed with a fire- 
 board, a winter arrangement, and an air-tight stove 
 roared in front of it. I asked what had become of 
 the swallows' nests that used to line the big chim- 
 ney, plastered to its sides near the top. One could 
 not see them, but one knew they were there by the 
 muffled twitterings, and a hollow sound of wings 
 beating in the chimney as the parent birds flew in 
 and out. It was a great feature of the room to me. 
 
 Mrs. Aylesford said the swallows had flown away 
 last autumn, and she disposed of the matter practi- 
 cally by adding that the nests were burned out with 
 straw every fall when the chimney was cleaned. " But 
 the birds are all fledged and gone before summer is 
 over." 
 
 I felt that I should miss the swallows, though just 
 then a good hot fire might be more to the purpose. 
 The carpet struck cold through one's very boot-soles, 
 and the air beyond the stove's zone of heat was as 
 
 59 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 fresh and pure as outside air and as icy. One knew 
 that the room could not have been used all winter. 
 It made me realize what the winters meant in that 
 house since its spring-bird had flown. 
 
 "And now," said my hostess cozily, "will you 
 have a cup of tea up here or in half an hour down- 
 stairs with us ? " 
 
 " But you 're having it for me I You don't take tea 
 yourselves an hour before real tea I I have n't for- 
 gotten, you see, even if it is a good while." 
 
 " This afternoon we are going to have your kind of 
 tea and * real tea ' a little later. You need a good sub- 
 stantial meal after your cold journey " (of two hours I). 
 
 "I need nothing but just what is here, just as it 
 used to be. That 's what I came for." 
 
 " Well, you '11 have to give in to me a little this 
 first afternoon ; then we won't make company of you. 
 Mary has baked some of the tea-cakes she remem- 
 bered you liked ; she '11 want them eaten hot. And she 
 remembered that you called them * scones.' — In half 
 an hour, then." 
 
 In half an hour I went down. Tea was served in 
 the sitting-room next the dining-room. It had the 
 afternoon sun and was too warm in summer at this 
 hour. Now it was deliciously warm, and its stove- 
 heated air smelled of rose-geranium and heliotrope, 
 from blossoming plants brought in for the winter 
 that filled a new bay-window ; a change I deplored 
 as I would any other alteration in any part of the 
 old house, but Mrs. Aylesford, I could see, was very 
 pleased with it. 
 
 60 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 She seemed to me restless, though not disturbed 
 about any one thing apparently. It was more like a 
 chronic habit of waiting. She came up to my room 
 on insufficient errands when I sat there writing let- 
 ters of a morning — to see if Mary had brought 
 fresh towels, and if they were the right ones ; if I 
 had had bed-covers enough in the night and a glass 
 of milk on my tray in case I should not sleep. If it 
 were bedtime, it was to see if my fire had been prop- 
 erly laid ; and in the morning she knocked softly 
 and stole in to see if it burned I I think it was hav- 
 ing some one young in the house again that excited 
 her, some one who made her think of Nanny. Grad- 
 ually she became quieter, and especially when she 
 found we had something to talk about that con- 
 cerned Nanny herself. 
 
 My plan, or my hope, pleased her almost to tears. 
 It was, of course, a great surprise ; and she had a 
 surprise for me — a rather startling one at first. 
 Nanny was expecting a baby, very soon — " almost 
 any day now." My proposal would come as the 
 greatest possible relief just when her anxieties would 
 center on little Phoebe left with servants. She only 
 wished, she said, that Nanny could know it now. 
 She urged me to telegraph, not to wait for an ex- 
 change of letters. I felt so sure that Mrs. Aylesford 
 must know her ground that I did telegraph, being 
 myself impatient, but I asked for a letter in return 
 and said (in my telegram) that I should wait for 
 the letter. But Nanny sent me a return telegram 
 first. 
 
 6i 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 "You make me perfectly happy. Come soon. 
 Letter goes to-day." 
 
 And we were happy, waiting for that letter : for a 
 second telegram, signed " Douglas Maclay," had 
 followed Nanny's — within twenty-four hours. The 
 baby, "a fine little boy," had arrived and all was 
 well. Mrs. Aylesford's relief was touching to see ; it 
 was the measure of her previous anxiety. She went 
 back to her days of suspense and hugged the con- 
 trast. 
 
 I think she must have kept every letter Nanny had 
 ever written her, from the winter at Cooper in New 
 York, to the latest from Idaho. They were in the 
 desk in the sitting-room where she had sat for hours 
 writing her share of the weekly posts by which 
 they had created a separate life for themselves in 
 absence which spiritualizes our thoughts of those 
 we love, as death does, and lifts our image of them 
 above petty jars. I watched her sweet face and 
 worn, drooped eyelids beneath her spectacles as she 
 searched among her packets of letters, each clasped 
 by a rubber band and labeled for the year they re- 
 corded. From the smallest bundle, since only Janu- 
 ary, she took one letter — the last she had received, 
 but a few days before my arrival. 
 
 "I won't read it aloud," she said. ** There's noth- 
 ing in it Nanny would n't love to have you see. /like 
 to read a letter myself : there 's something in hand- 
 writing that shows you how the person felt at the 
 time it was written. This shows, I guess, that Nanny 
 was getting pretty tired of waiting. But you won't 
 
 62 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 mind that, now I It will tell you a little how they live 
 — and how much she needs you." 
 
 Nanny's hand had changed more in this letter than 
 in others I had had from her ; or not changed, ex- 
 actly, — loosened up. In a few swift, intimate strokes 
 I learned how those last days had passed ; how ** well" 
 she was, how far she could walk — as far as she 
 dared go with only little Phcebe. How good Hing 
 was (Hing had been with them on the mesa, Mrs. 
 Aylesford explained) washing up blankets and clean- 
 ing the whole house. How Noreen, a young Irish 
 housemaid, was learning to manage Phcebe, but was 
 n't very satisfactory ; rather dreamy and did n't un- 
 derstand about outer clothing to suit changeable 
 weather. Spring colds were what she dreaded. How 
 Dick Grant slept at the house and kept his horse at 
 their stable ready to ride with the summons to Silver 
 City. " Douglas is getting things in shape up there 
 so he will be able to stay awhile with us when he 
 comes down, and he can keep an eye on Phoebe. 
 He'll want one eye, I expect, for some one else — 
 some one I 'm so impatient to see ! How strange it is 
 to know nothing about them when they are so close 
 to you all the time. I can hardly wait." 
 
 We talked that evening long after Mr. Aylesford 
 had gone to bed, and always about Nanny. I have n't 
 said how the whole hushed, empty house was elo- 
 quent of her to one who remembered it with her at 
 home. . . . "Three times," her mother said, "she 
 has waited this way and gone through with it 
 alone. I mean with no one belonging to her — no 
 
 63 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 woman," she added in time, thinking of Nanny's 
 husband. 
 
 I repeated the words in surprise — ** Three times? " 
 " Yes ; there might have been a baby between this 
 one and Phoebe, but it did n't live. It never breathed. 
 Yes; she's been through quite a good deal, for a 
 girl that never had a real sickness nor a sorrow in 
 her life." 
 
 There had been a heavy rainfall both before and 
 after my visit began. One could walk nowhere on 
 the roads for mud. The meadow was a swamp ; the 
 lanes up towards the barn and hill-orchards were 
 lined with dingy snow-banks that wasted by day and 
 froze at night. All the hedgerows, so sweet in sum- 
 mer, were sodden with dead leaves clinging to their 
 blackened vines. The porches were not a good sub- 
 stitute for regular walks. The back porch was merely 
 a stoop ; the front one crossed the sitting-room win- 
 dows where Mrs. Aylesford sat with her sewing and 
 took pains to look up and smile each time as I passed 
 on my beat. This was not very satisfactory. One day, 
 the last of our waiting, I tried the baby-carriage 
 walk under the willows by the mill. Passing the 
 wheel-pit I stopped and looked down : it was cold as 
 death down there. Rain had leaked into the buckets 
 of the wheel and overflowed in icicles ; the stones of 
 the wall were cased in ice. I shivered and went on. 
 Our willows were saffron-red through all their branch- 
 ing twigs, against the low, gray sky. The wet stones 
 where Nanny and I had sat — everything here as well 
 — here more than anywhere — spoke to me of her. 
 
 64 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 Then Jonas came splashing by, the old horse in a 
 hurry for his stable. I stepped into the road and took 
 from him the afternoon mail from the North, by 
 which Nanny's letters came. It was there at last. I 
 opened it on my way to the house. Its first words 
 were a cry of joy. My dear girl said such sweet things 
 to me and about me that I could not hand my letter 
 over, generous as her mother had been with her own, 
 to me. 
 
 Inside the letter was pinned a check. It gave me the 
 strangest feeling to have business with Nanny ! Yet 
 it would have been exceedingly awkward if she had 
 not advanced my traveling expenses ("eh, what a 
 faim'lyl"), in this check signed with her husband's 
 name. I blushed at the amount. I was n't worth it 
 — I should never be worth it in the world. I said so 
 aloud. 
 
 *' My dear, my dear ! " Mrs. Aylesford cried. " I 
 don't suppose even / know what you will be to 
 Nanny I In all my married life I don't believe I 've 
 had so much sheer care as she has had in her six 
 years. It 's having people around whose minds don't 
 work the same way as your mind does ; whose ways 
 are not the same. People's little ways! Yours will 
 be such a rest. There won't be anything you don't 
 understand. Father and I have been saying how 
 natural it seems to have you here ! You just seem to 
 fit in every way, and you bring in so much that is 
 fresh too. And we are just two old people." 
 
 " But, dear Mrs. Aylesford, there is always one side 
 of Nanny's life that she and I can never touch upon. 
 
 65 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 Much the greater half does n't belong to me any- 
 more." 
 
 ** Oh, that side is all right, if you mean her hus- 
 band. I can assure you of that. She 's a happy wife 
 — only she sees so little of him. You will help her to 
 bear the times when she can't see him. That 's the 
 worst part of the whole strain, I expect." Mrs. Ayles- 
 ford sighed. " It 's wonderful to me how she stands 
 it. No gold mines in the world would be worth it to 
 me I But that 's something she can't decide, I sup- 
 pose. It would be like my wanting my husband to 
 leave the old place here and go and live in New York, 
 for instance." 
 
 I had often wondered what Nanny's parents really 
 thought of her husband. In so far as they might be 
 construed into an answer to that question, these re- 
 marks of Mrs. Aylesford's, simple and rambling as 
 they were, pleased me very much. 
 
 There were a few sentences in that dear, foolish, 
 wild scrawl of a letter which I could share with 
 Nanny's mother. 
 
 "You'll find me in bed with what is called a 
 * monthly nurse ' standing guard over me. She will 
 think I ought to get up on the ninth day and be walk- 
 ing around the house soon after ; that 's the rule with 
 her class of patients, otherwise you are considered 
 lazy. I shall be lazy — with you taking care of my 
 little Phcebe-bird. I want to be a tower of strength for 
 the good times I see coming. * Daddy' will be here, 
 of course, and a daddy is a wonderful thing to have 
 around, especially when so rare, but these daddies are 
 
 66 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 not much account when it comes to wet grass and 
 overshoes. We live by irrigation, yet I can't say it 
 is n't the bane of my existence in some of its aspects. 
 They seem to water the lawn whenever you don't 
 know they are going to, and little folk get such deadly 
 colds sitting on wet grass — There goes one of my 
 worries ! I meant this letter to be all pure happiness, 
 as it ought to be, but you see I 'm obsessed. You're 
 going to straighten out my nerves and make me sane 
 again. 
 
 " I shall follow you all the way on your journey, 
 beginning with those through-trains that used to go 
 thundering past our crossing and give us just a hoot 
 — and pack their smoke into the tunnel and burst out 
 again with another * hoo, hoo I ' and round the last 
 turn where the hills shut in. If you should start from 
 our house, father would be pleased to death to see 
 you off at Poughkeepsie and check your trunks from 
 there. But perhaps that would be cutting out your 
 own father ? " (Nanny could not know how she hurt 
 me there.) "Anyhow, if you do start from Lime 
 Point, don't let my dear mother force too big a lunch- 
 basket on you. The best of basket-meals pall when 
 you eat them in the same seat in the same car day 
 after day. Meal-stations are a rest, and they do give 
 you hot things." 
 
 These commonplaces were fascinating to me. I had 
 taken many journeys, but never one like this. This 
 was my start in life — at twenty-seven I I had never 
 made for myself and carried out a decision like this 
 before. 
 
 67 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 That night I went to bed early, as we all did by 
 custom. My fire had been laid but not lighted. I 
 thought I would e'en put a match to it and let the 
 morning take care of itself. Then I remembered Mrs. 
 Aylesford's early visits : I could see her seated on her 
 little slipper-heels, — bless her ! — in front of my stove 
 full of cold ashes, laying the kindlings and putting on 
 the wood with her whole heart in the task. I could n't 
 be sure of waking in time to get ahead of her, so there 
 was nothing for it but to jump into bed and lie there 
 thinking ; at home I never went to sleep before mid- 
 night. 
 
 So much has been said that no one pretends to be- 
 lieve about premonitions, — messages by the wireless 
 of our semi-detached souls — and such cheap use is 
 so often made of what we do believe, that some of 
 us hesitate even to mention any little occult experi- 
 ences of our own which have bordered on those ques- 
 tions we are satisfied to treat as mysteries belonging 
 to the hereafter. On my side of the partition that 
 separated my room from the one Mr. and Mrs. Ayles- 
 ford occupied, I could hear that good man snore. 
 From other suppressed little sounds through the 
 night I knew that I was not the only watcher. Mrs. 
 Aylesford was keeping me company, and I hoped 
 her vigil might be happier than mine. 
 
 It may have been due to want of exercise, worry 
 postponed and piled up about papa, excitement over 
 the coming change in my own life, but, lying awake 
 that night anxious, when I should have been thank- 
 ful things were no worse, I had grisly thoughts for 
 
 68 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 company. Nanny's check had been cashed and more 
 than half spent for my tickets : that practically closed 
 the contract between us. But if I could have drawn 
 back, I believe I should have done so, — and gone 
 home to Essie and the old mortifications in the 
 morning. 
 
 I lay there (in a feather-bed the enveloping warmth 
 of which I was n't used to) and went over minutely 
 that first home-visit when Nanny and I had been 
 fellow-guests in the house, both of us on our good 
 behavior. I returned to her last letter ; — even then 
 she could not control her irrepressible worries. How 
 would it be when she began to worry about me ? 
 Would I bear watching, as I had seen her watch the 
 care-takers of her child ? Could I be as patient as her 
 own mother — who had not always been patient I It 
 was not as if we were strangers : all the delicacy and 
 poetry of our friendship without a flaw, was at stake. 
 What had I to gain (except my support) by the ex- 
 periment of joining myself to her for that intensive 
 intimacy which I knew must be the result of our liv- 
 ing together ? Nobody had ever watched me in my 
 life. I had had no domestic discipline, but I had been 
 left alone. No ; I should n't bear it well, and I should 
 blame Nanny for not realizing the pressure of the 
 maternal bond when its operation included an out- 
 sider. I had never been an outsider to Nanny, because 
 the question as to out or in had never been forced. 
 Now, indeed, it would be forced upon us both. 
 
 I was caught in a trap of my own making; and 
 more or less of the time I should be watched by two. 
 
 69 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 As far as that old introductory photograph was a 
 likeness, I might say that I knew Nanny's husband 
 by sight ; his face came before me in the darkness, 
 and with the dark side of my imagination I read its 
 prophecies. He was a powerful person and a total 
 stranger — and Nanny had said he did not talk. 
 ''Such men are dangerous." We might set up a fine 
 mute antagonism for each other and crush Nanny's 
 heart between us. That was nonsense of course ; but 
 something awkward would be sure to come of it. 
 Tri-cornered arrangements were, my own father used 
 to say, the very deuce I I could put aside the old vul- 
 gar plot of two men and a woman, or two women and 
 a man, yet we three were an intricate combination. 
 We might develop situations quite as painful if not 
 so hackneyed. 
 
 Sleep came at last, some hours, very likely, before 
 morning : going to bed so early had made the night 
 seem endless. I feared, from my first look at Mrs. 
 Aylesford, that she had watched the night through. 
 I saw it in her ashen face when she slipped into my 
 room and turned in silence towards the bed. Out of 
 the window opposite, the cold, rosy east before sun- 
 rise confronted her. Her features showed a piteous 
 pallor which the night arrangement of her thin gray 
 hair made more haggard. How old she had grown I 
 
 I sat up in bed and smiled at her, and she smiled 
 — it only made her look more wan. 
 
 "I thought I heard you up in the night?" she 
 questioned me. 
 
 "Perhaps you did," I said. **I didn't sleep very 
 
 70 
 
THE STUDIO AND THE FARM 
 
 well; excitement, I suppose. I am a perfect child 
 about this journey I Did you sleep, dear Mrs. Ayles- 
 ford?'^ 
 
 " Why, no," she said, " and it 's queer I should n't. 
 Father slept. I guess it 's something in the change of 
 wind. It 's cleared oH and there was a sort of stir 
 round the house like rain, but it was n't rain." I saw 
 her shiver. " Lie still if you have n't rested well. Let 
 me send your breakfast up." 
 
 " No," I said. " I 'm leaving you to-day and I don't 
 intend to miss a single meal now I have so few left." 
 
 The look of apprehension back of her smile did not 
 pass from my dear hostess's face. " I never thought 
 I should be glad to see you go," she said. ** But now 
 I 'm glad. You '11 be with Nanny all the sooner. / 
 shall be there too," she added with a little laugh it 
 hurt to hear ; it was so like a sob. " I am there — 
 most of the time I I wish — " She did not finish. She 
 came to the bed and kissed me, and her hands trem- 
 bled as she touched my hair, looking in my eyes ear- 
 nestly. 
 
 "You didn't hear anything last night, did you, 
 dear? — that made you get up and listen?" 
 
 "I was up," I said, "but I wasn't listening." 
 
 She did not believe me I " Then you did n't hear 
 what I heard?" she whispered. "I can't speak of it 
 to father. It was n't the wind. It was a sort of throb- 
 bing in the air — I can't think of anything but our 
 swallows in the chimney beating their wings — in the 
 hollow chimney. And it wasn't like that either." 
 She shook — her lips were white. Her eyes had a 
 
 71 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 drear, strained expression, tearless with some incom- 
 municable fear. 
 
 ** Perhaps it was the wind in the chimney. It rose 
 in the night, you said ? " 
 
 " Oh, I know all the sounds of wind in this house,** 
 she answered. " Well ; I 'm nervous — I guess that 's 
 all. If there had been anything you *d have heard it 
 too, if you were awake. Unless," she added softly as 
 to herself, " it was only meant for me." 
 
PART II 
 AUNT EDITH 
 
VII 
 
 In thinking over the mass of memories an average 
 life supplies, almost without reference to compara- 
 tive values, one is at a loss, in telling a story which 
 hinges on one event, to choose only details that 
 bear directly or constructively upon that event. Such 
 a choice would leave out my continental journey 
 which had no significance beyond the impressions 
 of a few days ; impressions new to me because I had 
 never seen my own country in its longitude before. 
 The life and habits of a Pullman sleeper were new to 
 me also. 
 
 We changed at Ogden then, where I telegraphed 
 my friends in Idaho that I was on the way. This was 
 before the Union Pacific lines took you through from 
 Chicago in the same car. Also it was before railroad 
 officials had learned that woman in the aggregate 
 cannot be trusted with power to lock the door of the 
 common dressing-room upon her fellow-traveling 
 woman with rights equal to her own. I could not have 
 believed the total want of imagination as to another's 
 necessity, to say nothing of convenience, displayed 
 by one or two of the women aboard that Pullman 
 "sleeper." You waited in the narrow aisle outside 
 that locked door, in your wrapper with most of your 
 clothes and a bag of dressing-things on your arm, 
 or you returned to your berth to hear, ** Next station, 
 
 75 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 twenty minutes for breakfast," cried outside your 
 curtains. If you took the liberty of knocking per- 
 sistently or with expressive emphasis, the fair one 
 crimping her hair or manicuring her finger-nails 
 within, opened at last with looks more outraged than 
 your own. 
 
 All this, with other luxuries of home travel, I left 
 behind me when the porter led me across the tracks 
 at Granger and hoisted me and my bags up the plat- 
 form-steps of the day-car I was to spend the night 
 in on the Oregon Short Line. I thought I should 
 miss my porter very much. Friends, when I left New 
 York (for of course I did not start from Lime Point ; 
 that would have hurt Essie too much !), had brought 
 me books and keepsakes at the last moment to swell 
 my hand-luggage, and I had provided myself with all 
 sorts of things suited to steamer- but not to train- 
 travel, if you are to leave the main lines. But before 
 I could cope with my own possessions they were all 
 gathered up by the large sun-burned hand of a stran- 
 ger who showed me to a seat and reversed the back 
 of the next one, and advised me to ** hold onto " them 
 both, as I should need them that night. I was now 
 spread over twice the space I had paid for. My friend 
 raised his hat and went to his own seat farther down 
 the aisle. The man beside him turned and took a 
 long, deliberate, but respectful look at me over the 
 chair-back. It was the nearest approach to a stare 
 I encountered, though I was the only woman on the 
 train. 
 
 The Oregon Short Line was built then only as 
 
 76 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 far as Kuna, my station. Our train carried a caboose 
 and a string of fiat-cars loaded with material for the 
 road. The men aboard were in working, not travel- 
 ing, clothes. They looked like very free citizens 
 of these United States, although they were not in 
 one of them — merely in that future state of political 
 existence, a Territory. I don't know why it pleased 
 me so to think I was in a ** Territory." 
 
 The country now was vast and broken, not by 
 man with dynamite and steam-shovels, but by the 
 agency of rivers and ancient glaciers and lava-flows. 
 Through rents in the mountains that came down 
 to the high plain we were crossing, you saw bluer 
 mountains, snow-capped, flat against the sky. There 
 seemed to be no roads, yet there must have been in- 
 lets and outlets of travel to all this region, old as the 
 fur-hunters' and Indians' trails. They reached out now 
 to the centers from which the white man's occupation 
 had spread. 
 
 I began to feel such a castaway, so foreign to my 
 kind about me, that merely to hear the sound of 
 my own voice again I asked a question across the 
 aisle, in the silence of one of our unexplained stops — 
 When should we reach Kuna, and how far was Kuna 
 from Boise ? I was careful to pronounce it as Nanny 
 had, " Boy'-see." All seemed interested to learn I was 
 going there. I felt like a traveler of importance in 
 their eyes, with friends in the social centers and the 
 marts of trade. 
 
 We ran slowly and stopped for no apparent reason, 
 at places undistinguishable from nowhere. The heads 
 
 77 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 of the near hills sank from sight like ships going out 
 to sea. Others arose, a line of ethereal crests, the same 
 that we had gazed at through gaps in the foothills, 
 and these went with us, mile after mile. I asked and 
 was told their names. One great peak was called 
 " The War- Eagle " and the range it belonged to was 
 the " Owyhees." Nanny's Owyhees I So now we 
 were getting home. 
 
 Desert did not seem the word for this country, nor 
 was it deserted — it was just coming into being after 
 some long creative pause. Man as we know him 
 had never been here. Yet he was coming ; here and 
 there he had come, and brought his wife and babies 
 and dogs and chickens and with an appealing temer- 
 ity had planted his hopes in shelters as wild and less 
 habitable, they looked, than houses of prairie-dogs 
 or a sage-hen's nest. 
 
 But the wind 1 You ceased to hear it while the train 
 was in motion ; when it stopped and you listened 
 from your window or stood on the platform to look 
 out, it was there — filling the silence with that breath 
 of boundless atmosphere. It was this earth-stillness, 
 manifest in subtle unfamiliar sounds, that gave me 
 my first thrill — the ** feeling" of the West. I have 
 parted with it often for long periods and half forgotten 
 it, but never lost it altogether. And the voice of it is 
 that desert wind, soft, insistent, secret, that is known 
 only in the heart of a great continent. 
 
 We were very near Kuna now. It seemed more 
 and more improbable that any one could be waiting 
 for me there. I may not have looked pale, but I felt 
 
 78 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 pale — I felt like the last woman left on earth — 
 when I rose to button my jacket as the brakes began 
 to jar. My friend on the watch across the aisle rose, 
 too, and smiling an " Excuse me!^ gathered my lug- 
 gage in his comprehensive grasp. 
 
 " Expecting any one over to meet you ?" he asked. 
 "Stage for Boise don't get in for an hour yet." 
 
 I told him whom I expected. He looked at me 
 quickly — ** Did you say * Maclay ' ?— Oh, yes — " 
 He hesitated. " They '11 send some one over. You 've 
 come quite a ways, have n't you, lady ? Maybe you 
 didn't hear — Maclay 's lost his wife, a few days 
 ago ? I just read it in the paper." 
 
 ... I still heard them talking around me, but I was 
 obliged to sit down and close my eyes. " Is she sick ? " 
 some one asked. My friend's voice drawled, ** No; my 
 fault I I told her Maclay's wife is dead. / did n't 
 know she was a relation. Come like a surprise to her, 
 I guess." 
 
 Some one steered me out of the car — some one 
 whom the others called " Dick." He took me to an 
 empty bench against the warm house-wall of the sta- 
 tion. I leaned back in the darkness of intense sun- 
 light and of another darkness of the senses and heard 
 the clicking of telegraph-keys inside. Nanny's mother 
 was my first distinct thought. That dumb message 
 in the night — it was articulate now ! Those same 
 keys had clicked out the news to her while I, unwit- 
 ting, was on my way. 
 
 Two horses before a buggy were driven up. Vari- 
 ous persons who had tried to be useful, but seemed 
 
 79 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 to be there chiefly to look on, fell back as my escort 
 joined me again and sat down. He asked me if I 
 felt able to read a letter, and sat still and said not a 
 word while I opened it, yet the effect of his silence 
 was not cold but steadying. He was a young man, 
 and I knew without distincdy thinking of it that he 
 must be ** Dick Grant." 
 
 The letter was from Douglas Maclay — hardly 
 more than a page. I read it as one blow, but it took 
 several more readings, shrinking from the words, to 
 adjust my mind to their meaning. It was a very con- 
 centrated piece of writing. The blood went from my 
 heart to my head in a sudden fury with the brute 
 fact itself, with the way it was stated so tersely, with 
 the writer himself. I was not accustomed to the lan- 
 guage of men who as to their deepest feelings are 
 dumb. What I would have had him say I don't know 
 — to a stranger thrust into his life at this juncture. 
 It was the day after Nanny's funeral ! He had written 
 on the evening of the day itself. 
 
 I got up on my feet and took ** Dick's " arm and 
 we walked to the edge of the platform and I sat down, 
 and my feet rested on the soil of Idaho, my home. 
 For this much had straightened itself in my mind. 
 If there had ever been anything in our compact be- 
 yond self-interest on my side, my promise to Nanny 
 could not be broken now. I shuddered to think : if I 
 had completed my defection after that night of dis- 
 trustful brooding — my telegram would have reached 
 her just as she was parting from her babies, and dealt 
 her the last blow — that I had failed her too. 
 
 80 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 Mr. Grant (who said I must call him " Dick ") asked 
 for my checks and went to see the station-agent 
 about sending my trunks by stage. All this I heard 
 as if it were some one else going over to Boise City. 
 Back of the small noises of the station was another 
 sound which I found myself listening for. It was in the 
 air around one like the wind. It came again, but in- 
 termittent — not like the wind. The first meadow-lark 
 of spring ! Meadow-larks — of Idaho 1 The note was 
 not quite the same, though nearly, as we used to hear it 
 on the Hudson. Our meadow-larks nested in the long 
 grass of the mill-pasture and we started them up — 
 Nanny and I — when we went down there looking 
 for dog-toothed violets that grew in the thick swales 
 along the brook. And they would lure us on in short, 
 uncertain flights, as if wounded, from their nestlings 
 in the grass. 
 
 Under that great strange sky that seemed fairly 
 dark with its depths of clearness, with the songs of 
 the birds of home to welcome me, and Nanny not 
 there! — it broke me down. I sat and cried to my- 
 self, not thinking of where I was or of what must 
 come next, till my companion, who had seated him- 
 self beside me, said simply, — 
 
 " It does me good to see you cry. There has been 
 nobody to cry like that 1 . . . When I first heard of it 
 I wanted to get outside somewhere and howl like a 
 dog." 
 
 Afterwards I knew what he meant, poor Dick, but 
 then the words merely surprised me, coming from a 
 stranger, and silenced my own outburst 
 
 8i 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 We were trotting along the road through the sage- 
 brush, the song of the meadow-larks rising all about 
 us. I asked Dick to tell me about Phoebe. How was 
 it with her, had he heard? 
 
 "Oh, I don't know," he answered. "A neighbor 
 took her in for the first awful days. There 's been 
 nobody but strangers I I suppose they will tell her 
 something to satisfy her for the present." 
 
 '* You mean she doesn't know 1" 
 
 " Not the truth," said Dick bluntly. " I 'm sorry 
 for you!" 
 
 *' For me I " — I was thinking of the child's father. 
 Had he left her, the day after the funeral I — left the 
 "truth" to be handed to that child by a stranger? 
 "This letter tells me I am to ask you anything I want 
 to know. But I don't know what I do want to know 1" 
 I groaned aloud, to myself. 
 
 "Not yet, of course," said my companion. "To- 
 morrow I go back to the mines, but I '11 be down 
 again next week. Then you will want to know sev- 
 eral things. Mr. Maclay might have stayed down to 
 meet you, but he thought, I suppose, you would un- 
 derstand, and he very likely thought, too, that it 
 would be easier for you to be left alone at first." 
 
 "He's a great person to leave you alone, isn't 
 he?" 
 
 "Oh, he's a good boss," said my friend Dick. 
 " He 's on the job when he does n't show it. . . . He 
 wished me to tell you that he thought you were still 
 at her father's when he telegraphed — he supposed 
 the news would reach you before you left there. It 
 
 82 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 shocked him — on your account — when he got your 
 wire from Ogden. But you will stay, now you've 
 come? She counted on you sol And now you're 
 needed more than ever." 
 
 I had answered that question to myself already ; it 
 was n't necessary to answer it to him. I asked about 
 my dear Mrs. Aylesford — had anything been heard 
 from them since the news reached her? It was as I 
 feared. She was ill — prostrated : a word much over- 
 used that now and then tells the truth exactly. As to 
 the children's future, in this contingency — relatives 
 on the father's side who could take them, he knew 
 nothing. I had never heard Nanny speak of his par- 
 ents as if they were living. Dick said my name was 
 the only one he had heard connected with plans for 
 the motherless children. 
 
 " When he found you were coming and it was too 
 late to stop you, I could see he was immensely re- 
 lieved ; though he was anxious too about you. But 
 there was no time to think ! It was enough that you 
 were coming. He hopes, I know, to leave the re- 
 sponsibility with you for the present. You '11 do the 
 thinking! His orders to me were: 'See what she 
 wants and get it — if you can't get it, come to me.' 
 There 's help enough in the house, such as it is, and 
 there is a good doctor at the Post — Boise Barracks, 
 close to town." 
 
 Here was a question I needed to ask — not this 
 young man at my side. But perhaps if I knew the 
 answer I should have to keep it from her parents. I 
 should never know — for I could never ask Douglas 
 
 .83 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 Maclay ! I could not think of him as anything but 
 a tragic interloper in Nanny's fate. That he should 
 hold authority to give or withhold facts, as between 
 her parents and what had happened here, it was dif- 
 ficult to admit. There was nothing in my new attempt 
 that I feared really except this man. I had always 
 dreaded him, but Nanny would have been the key — 
 and now the key was lost. 
 
VIII 
 
 Spring, in that great inter-mountain valley, was a 
 setting fit for a lyric romance or a tale of daring and 
 adventure. Instead, I must use it for a chapter which 
 I can match with nothing in all my experience of 
 grime except those passages, fresh in memory then, 
 between me and poor old Captain Nashe. But through 
 all my servant-wars and petty conflicts with crude 
 circumstance ran one strain of exquisite compensa- 
 tion, sweet and haunting as the note of her own name- 
 sake bird, — " Phoebe, Phoebe I " 
 
 Noreen greeted me nicely. She had warm Irish 
 manners, and hers was the kindly task to feed the 
 stranger, suppressing curiosity as to how I might be 
 taking the situation that confronted me. She even 
 did that well. I sat still — at my first meal in the 
 house — unable to eat, but glad of a moment to my- 
 self. It was not more than a moment. A door was 
 pushed open, of a room adjoining the dining-room, 
 and a large person stood there and stared. The eye 
 that met mine suggested the mind of a fly behind it, 
 a suspicious, cogitating, female fly of an exaggerated 
 bodily distension, a blue-bottle fly persistent and pos- 
 sibly noxious. This I knew could be no other than 
 the ** monthly nurse," and it needed only a glance to 
 see that it would be well for her little charge when 
 the month was over and equally for the rest of us. 
 
 85 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 She was untidy, and being large there was a great 
 deal of her untidiness. Over one shoulder she held a 
 bundle of crumpled flannel containing Nanny's baby 
 — Mrs. Aylesford's grandson, awaited across the con- 
 tinent with prayers and welcomed with tears of hap- 
 piness. A foundling-hospital waif would have looked 
 like a princeling for comfort and sweetness beside it. 
 
 ** I expect you had quite a jar ? " She fixed me with 
 her dull, hard eye. " Pity they could n't 'a' let you 
 know what's happened 'fore you come such a long 
 ways for nothing. My name's Mrs. Lavinus. He's a 
 fine little fellow, ain't he?" She pivoted her person 
 that I might have a better look at a small puckered 
 forehead the size of a kitten's, pufTy eye-lids and 
 cheeks awry lopping against her fat, unpleasant 
 shoulder. " He 's a ten-pounder. He won't miss his 
 muzzer none, the duckums boy! his old Lavinus" — 
 pronounced "vine" — "will take care of him." 
 
 There was no outside air in the room behind her. 
 I glanced in : the simple, ladylike arrangements, the 
 disorder, the — the stench! Nanny's room! I felt I 
 should faint (though there was n't the least chance of 
 it I) if she did not close that door. 
 
 On that memorable May visit at Lime Point, I had 
 worn, as it were a sweater nowadays, a cloak called 
 a " Killarney." It was one of the new spring fashions 
 that year. I wore it walking in the woods ; I sat 
 wrapped in it evenings on the piazza-steps ; it was 
 always around me and often around us both, on gray 
 chilly mornings when Nanny and I sat talking under 
 
 86 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 the willows. This garment had been much admired 
 by Mrs. Aylesford and expatiated on by myself, for 
 it was one of my successful economies. It was copied 
 from the imported ones at Arnold and Constable's at 
 about a third of the price. Dear Mrs. Aylesford must 
 have committed a mother's extravagance just as 
 Nanny was going West, and sent for a duplicate of 
 mine made to order : you could have them of any 
 plaid you chose — mine was the Forty-second High- 
 landers, lined with scarlet. This, of course, I never 
 positively knew. I only inferred it from a cruel little 
 circumstance. 
 
 Noreen had gone across the yard to fetch Phoebe 
 from the neighbor's house close by, — in the same lot 
 only shut off by a slight fence. I had brought my own 
 cloak on the train and threw it around me to go out 
 and meet them. I found a little path (perhaps my 
 Nanny's feet had often trod it in the days of her im- 
 prisoned waiting). The irrigating-ditch that watered 
 the whole place ran alongside it ; on the other side, 
 the street-front, towered a wall of Lombardy poplars 
 not yet in leaf, their tops shot through with gold of 
 the spring sunset. Trust a Catholic priest for a sort 
 of canonical good sense in laying out a garden I 
 
 I saw them coming towards me like a pair of happy 
 friends, little Phcebe skipping along, her hand in No- 
 reen' s. A proud little face. The fair, straight hair, kinked 
 by braiding and freshly brushed, stood out around 
 the oval-round cheeks red with the breeze of running. 
 She loosed Noreen on seeing me and flew to meet me. 
 I had not dreamed of such a welcome I Her eyes — her 
 
 87 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 whole, out-reaching, tense little body expressed one 
 wild, passionate greeting. And then she stopped 
 aghast — she turned with a cry I shall never forget 
 and swerved from me straight to the house. I could 
 not know that seeing me in that ghost-garment, 
 walking where her mother had walked at this hour, 
 she had taken me for her mother come back as 
 mysteriously as she had gone. Her heart had leaped 
 to my arms and then, seeing my face, she had flown 
 like a wounded bird to escape capture. She had gone 
 to the house for one more search — we could hear 
 her as we followed, running from room to room, and 
 her short step toiling up the stairs. 
 
 We did not exchange a word. At the top of the 
 stairs she turned and saw me coming. 
 
 "Take it off! Take it off I" she screamed, and 
 pointed at me. 
 
 " What does she mean ? " I whispered. 
 
 Noreen looked me coldly in the eye. " You 've 
 got on her mother's cloak. I hid it in your closet on 
 purpose so the master would n't be seeing it around." 
 
 My bedroom door stood open. I went to the closet : 
 there hung Nanny's cloak, the mate to mine. Noreen 
 saw me gasp — saw the two cloaks identically alike, 
 and for that time she forgave me. 
 
 I could not bear the sound of Phoebe's hard crying 
 in the hall ; I shut my bedroom door and I did some- 
 thing else I had not done in years. I had not been a 
 good girl who says her prayers every night. I did 
 not say them even the night after papa went away. 
 No, I could not have said a prayer for papa. Even 
 
 88 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 Vhile mamma lived, shy little churchwoman, she had 
 not been able to keep up her own forms and house- 
 hbld traditions, in the face of his indulgent levity. 
 But I prayed then — if tears are prayer — and the 
 thought of a face one has loved, as if it were there, 
 looking at you and listening to the lonely sobbing 
 of her own child beyond her reach. 
 
 And then I rose from my foolish knees and made 
 my first effort with Phoebe. It was no more than an 
 appeal as simple as a child's game, the game of all 
 girl-children the world over ; the fun of feeding some- 
 body. 
 
 fc I asked Noreen if, when Phcebe had her supper, 
 she would give me a cup of tea at the same time, 
 adding that Phoebe and I would be down directly, 
 and that I was hungry I 
 
 Noreen looked at me in surprised attention till she 
 caught the idea, when she responded heartily. Phcebe 
 listened to the strange voice giving orders in the 
 house, interested in the fact that she was to have a 
 guest for supper. But she clung to Noreen till I said, 
 "Put her down," and took her in my own arms 
 struggling and bore her into my bedroom and shut 
 the door. Most young children respect physical 
 strength if it is not angry strength ; my back and 
 arms are very strong, — result of posing, — and as I 
 held Phoebe on my lap I told her this was " Aunt 
 Edith's room " now, and we must get acquainted if 
 we were going to have tea together. Nanny, in her 
 letters, had already brevetted me as ** Aunt " ; I hoped 
 Phoebe might have heard of my coming by that name. 
 
 89 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 She was at all events interested in my room which 
 already looked different from my brief occupancy 
 
 — strange bags and traveling-things, and garments 
 new to her eyes and trifles such as girls consider 
 necessary, lying around, on the bed and dressings- 
 bureau. 
 
 I had brought with me, because I could n't help 
 myself, one of those impulsive tokens friends are in- 
 spired to give one on the eve of a journey after your 
 trunks are locked and gone. The excuse was, " I 
 know you love it sol" Yes; I loved it, but hardly 
 enough to have hand-carried it across the continent : 
 
 — a little cast of the young Hermes, not the Praxiteles, 
 but him with wings on his temples, the lovely, arm- 
 less fragment now in the Boston Museum. I had taken 
 it out and set it on my bureau, and seeing Phcebe's 
 eyes fixed upon it, I put it into her hands. We looked 
 at it together while the sobs subsided. 
 
 She studied the face in its cold serenity. " It looks 
 like Dick," she said, and smoothed its bended neck 
 with her beautiful little hand that she used so daint- 
 ily. I had n't been fully aware of Mr. Grant out- 
 wardly, but I saw him now, the straight-featured, not 
 very strong, profile I had sat beside on the drive from 
 Kuna. It did look like Dick, in his modern-classic 
 likeness to an imperishable ideal. 
 
 "It's broken," she sighed. "Where are Dick's 
 arms?" 
 
 We talked a little while about the Hermes, and 
 then we returned to the question of tea — was there 
 a sugar-tongs and would Phcebe put sugar in Aunt 
 
 90 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 Edith's tea? Phoebe would I — the sugar-tongs were 
 stiff, but mamma allowed Phoebe to use her fingers if 
 she touched only one lump — ** Where 's mamma I " 
 — wildly. We smothered this outburst in more par- 
 ticulars about teas in general ; how at grandmamma's, 
 where Aunt Edith came from, we had tea in pink- 
 and-white cups with gilt handles, in a room full of 
 flowers. Did Phoebe know that she had once been at 
 grandmamma's when she was a baby and Aunt Edith 
 had seen her then, in her little carriage — ? But this 
 was dangerous ground. 
 
 ** I 'm going again some day, with mamma. 
 Where 's mamma gone / " I said tea must be ready, 
 and we must take "Dick" with us, and Phoebe must 
 feed him herself as he had no arms. This was a tri- 
 umph, and we waited no longer lest we spoil it again. 
 Dick had a clean pocket-handkerchief pinned around 
 his shoulders to go down to table, and we appeared, 
 all three, in the dining-room where Noreen was 
 scarcely ready for us. 
 
 It was not best to pursue the victory. Noreen put 
 Phoebe to bed, but I think she probably grew tired of 
 *' Dick" in the shape of Hermes ; I noticed that with 
 her Irish tact and ingenuity she had parted the little 
 god from his worshiper and he was back on my 
 bureau again when I went to my room to unpack. \ 
 
 The monthly nurse, Mrs. Lavinus, had found time 
 from her duties to stroll heavily upstairs, and, my 
 door standing ajar, she had entered uninvited and 
 helped herself to the rocking-chair, drawing it for- 
 ward conversationally. I had just planted a tray-full 
 
 91 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 of summer things on the bed. She looked at these 
 signs of a prolonged stay with a smile of irony. 
 
 " Be you unpackin' ? I did n't know you was ac- 
 quainted with any one out here except Mrs. Maclay ? 
 Who might you be goin' to visit with, if you don't 
 mind me askin' ? " 
 
 "I am not visiting," I replied. "I am Phoebe's 
 governess, come to take charge of her and give her 
 lessons. That was settled before I started : I stay to 
 keep my promise to her mother." It seemed best to 
 meet the issue squarely. 
 
 ** Well, that 's all news to me. I never heard a word 
 of anything like that, nor no one else in the house, I 
 guess. And I been here a week before the baby come. 
 That's a funny thing!" 
 
 It did not surprise me that Nanny had not men- 
 tioned her plans to Mrs. Lavinus, but it would, in- 
 deed, make things difficult if Noreen, whom I was to 
 supersede, and Hing, whose confidence I must gain, 
 and this woman with the low greasy forehead and 
 iron jaw, should all agree to look upon me as a guest 
 cheated of her visit by a death in the house, who pro- 
 posed to stay and assume command of the disorgan- 
 ized establishment. Whether this misunderstanding 
 were real or pretended on Mrs. Lavinus's part, I saw 
 she meant to work it to her own interest. She very 
 likely thought it rather clever of me, taking advan- 
 tage of the confusion to install myself in the new-made 
 widower's house. I could see it in her amused, hard, 
 speculating eye. 
 
 I had packed in the bottom of my trunk all my 
 
 92 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 photographs from the Old Masters, papa's gifts, se- 
 lected by him abroad. On top, as the trunk stood 
 open, could be seen one of Michelangelo's Titans, 
 from the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. Mrs. Lavinus 
 caught a glimpse of it through its covering of tissue- 
 paper. She hitched her chair closer and raised the 
 paper. I heard an exclamation. 
 
 ** Do you mean them things to be looked at I Ex- 
 cuse meT^ She held up the large photograph to 
 examine it, but worse lay underneath. The reclining 
 figure of Adam receiving the divine spark from the 
 finger of Jehovah, from the same series of the Creation. 
 
 " Well, I been in some funny places I " I heard her 
 ejaculate, " but I never struck nothin' like this. You 
 better leave them things right where they be I I 
 would n't advise you to have 'em around in a house 
 with men-folks and a little girl like Phoebe. 'Makes 
 me most ashamed to look at 'em myself and I seen 
 plenty of sick folks just as naked as the Lord made 
 'em." 
 
 She leaned back from my scandalous collection 
 with a frown of actual bewilderment. " — And if there 
 ain't another naked man ! " she screamed, " if it is a 
 man?" My poor Hermes stood on the bureau no 
 longer clothed in even a pocket-handkerchief. I 
 buried my face in throes of horrible untimely laugh- 
 ter that bordered on hysteria, and Mrs. Lavinus, re- 
 garding me with irony as well as suspicion, agreed 
 it was enough to make a horse laugh ! — such an ex- 
 hibition in a young lady's bedroom. 
 
 " Say J " she relented, to give me one more chance, 
 
 93 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 ** I don't talk about what I see and hear in other peo- 
 ple's houses, but what kind of a place is it you do 
 come from ? I know there 's all kinds in New York 
 same as everywhere, and I would n't say but what 
 you seem like a lady all right. But what do you want 
 of them things out here, would you just tell me — if 
 it 's true you come out to teach a little girl ? " 
 
 Mrs. Lavinus, as I learned later, was a person 
 whose presence had often been welcomed in that 
 land of little help, with almost desperate relief. Dire 
 necessity levels one's standards, and most of her 
 patients had no standards higher than her own. She 
 told me, in the course of incessant talking during 
 meals which we shared, most of the adventures and 
 hardships of her own life and all she had time to tell 
 of the private affairs of her patients ; she used the 
 language of her profession and went into its details 
 without mercy. Yet she was a woman of intrepid 
 courage and wild experience, if her stories were true. 
 She had borne children in extremity and lost them 
 by the will of Heaven, she deemed, or the hand of 
 fate. She could be a devoted nurse and work day and 
 night doing wrong things with unshaken faith in 
 everything except medical science and educated doc- 
 tors. Of these she had her suspicions, and she ex- 
 plained that she was doing her best with her baby 
 (Nanny's little son) in spite of ** Doc Davenport, who 
 thinks he knows it all!'* 
 
IX 
 
 Dick Grant stayed over a day longer than he had 
 ^aid, and came early next evening on purpose to see 
 Phcebe. We received him on the side-piazza steps, 
 and Phoebe rejoiced greatly to be swung aloft in his 
 grasp and let down gently, with a long, quiet look 
 into her upraised face. ** Again ! more 1 " she begged. 
 
 " No more," said Dick. " Must n't get too excited 
 before bedtime." 
 
 As this seemed to be partly addressed to me, I 
 smiled and asked how he knew all that. 
 
 " I 've been around a good deal, in this family," he 
 said simply. 
 
 He gently transferred the little maid from her 
 seat between us on the steps to his lap, where she 
 played with his braided-leather watch-chain attached 
 to a cheap silver watch. With my sensational ideas 
 brought from the East I asked if that meant ** hold- 
 ups" on the road to the mines? As I watched his 
 smile, with head bent and eyes fixed on the child, I 
 saw he was like the Young Hermes — in a blue serge 
 suit and fair hair close-waved about the temples that 
 were wingless. 
 
 We talked guardedly on account of little pitchers, 
 but in any case I should have had many things to 
 decide in my own mind before I began to bother Dick. 
 And I could not talk about servants to him — at least 
 
 95 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 I supposed I could not. I had not the full measure of 
 his usefulness in **this family." One could see he 
 was a dear, dependable boy. There would always be 
 that delightful seriousness about him and modesty 
 of a person gentle-bred who does one or two things 
 very well. The things he did were different from the 
 things they did — the geniusy youths whom I grew 
 up among, hanging about the studio, sometimes in 
 love with mamma (till she was past forty) or piling 
 their love-torments in other directions upon her in- 
 exhaustible patience and pity, but I felt I had known 
 Dick's kind all my life. He was a New York boy, 
 too, and had gone to Charlier's, — the old Charlier 
 School on Madison Square, — which also made us at 
 home with each other. 
 
 It had not taken any time at all to recognize his 
 trouble, as old as the hills. Perhaps Nanny never 
 knew it. She was preoccupied, and Dick had fine 
 qualities at his command. He might have been un- 
 selfish enough never to let her see it. It took me 
 back to her tale of the mesa — lonely little chatelaine 
 on her dry hill ; " hands," men of all sorts, and four- 
 footed beasts raising a dust around her and all the 
 good money in the ground spent in vain. Dick must 
 have been older than he looked, for he had been out 
 there, part of and witness of all she endured. No 
 wonder he had loved her. And, I added to myself, 
 no wonder a reader of men, as a " good boss" must 
 be, had trusted him. But she was the one who must 
 have quite unconsciously decided the course of that 
 perilous partnership. 
 
 96 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 Dick could not talk of her himself, but he hun- 
 gered to hear me talk, and I could n't — before Phoebe. 
 A question or two that he could answer, I asked in 
 French, and he replied as a Charlier boy should, 
 though he said he was rusty. I saw how it had hap- 
 pened that not one person in the house knew what I 
 had come for or why I stayed. Nanny's letter to me had 
 been not only her last, but the closing-up of her affairs. 
 Dick had posted it to catch the early stage and had 
 returned to saddle his horse and ride to Silver City. 
 There he had stayed till the news came of the end. 
 He knew nothing of what had happened ; but I was 
 sure he felt that he, or indeed almost any one, could 
 have done better than those who had had her life 
 in charge, though all he said was : " She was just as 
 well as you are — and then she was gone I " 
 
 Phoebe had fallen asleep as we sat murmuring of 
 things she could not understand. Dick carried her up- 
 stairs when Noreen came for her (I was not intruding 
 yet on the old routine). As he lifted her gently, one 
 arm and limp little hand slid off his shoulder. I laid 
 my cheek against it ; it was warm like a soft little 
 bird. It was easy to see how one might go distracted 
 over anything like Phoebe if it were one's own, and 
 lose all sense of proportion. 
 
 When Dick came back we talked business a few 
 moments. He gave me a thin yellow book like a 
 butcher' s-book, but it was a bank-book. Mr. Ma- 
 clay had deposited to my credit a month's salary (" if 
 satisfactory " ; the amount, I supposed he meant : it 
 was too embarrassingly large to be satisfactory). I 
 
 97 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 was very shy of the whole matter, and Dick felt a little 
 awkward too. 
 
 " It's a great deal too much," I said. " I 'm one of 
 these wretched amateurs." 
 
 " We 're all amateurs out here," he said gallantly. 
 " I was to have gone to France to buy silks and laces : 
 hence Charlier's. I came out here to try my 'prentice 
 hand — on the dog, as you might say. I met Maclay 
 and took the first job he had for me — anything so 
 that I could stay. The country had got hold of me. 
 But Maclay is n't an amateur. He knows responsi- 
 bility does n't come cheap. He expects you to run 
 everything and everybody in this house connected 
 with his children, and of course he '11 pay accord- 
 ingly." 
 
 I glanced around. The door was open into the 
 dining-room; Mrs. Lavinus's door also stood open. 
 It was her way of airing a room, and she liked to hear 
 what was going on — I think she heard Dick, I think 
 she was very carefully trying to hear what we were 
 saying, when we spoke in English. It was part of 
 keeping an eye on a young person who had queer pic- 
 tures in her trunk, and showed other signs of a very 
 free-and-easy bringing up. I had heard her more or 
 less of the time " patting " the baby a sound rather like 
 a gardener spanking a piece of new-laid sod with the 
 back of his spade, and this thumping had ceased. If 
 she had heard, there was no help for it: the news that 
 I was at liberty to discharge her would have to be 
 broken to her some time. I imagined there would 
 be no need now to break Noreen's share of it to her. 
 
 98 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 I went down to the gate with my caller, and as it 
 was early yet we walked up and down once or twice, 
 and I remained still pacing the ditch-path after 
 Dick was gone. There had been a long, entrancing 
 twilight (we were pretty far north), and now the 
 sallow afterglow took up the tale. There was not a 
 shadow, merely a slow, soft lapse of light. By what 
 was left, I saw crossing the grass towards me from the 
 rear porch a woman, probably our neighbor in the 
 little house. She was short and plump, dressed in 
 a black skirt too long for wet grass, and bareheaded 
 as befitted the place and hour. A light knitted shawl 
 she wore crossed over her full bust was held tight 
 against her waist by a pair of round brown arms. She 
 let them fall as we met with an inclination which 
 achieved grace, though she was not in person graceful. 
 
 ** Is it Miss Bonham ? I have heard that you came 
 yesterday. I was just now in the house, but you had 
 your company. If it is not too late I am coming to 
 pay you a little visit ? " 
 
 Without any defined accent she spoke in a cadence 
 that was not English, but all the more charming for 
 that. The management of the hands, the whole fig- 
 ure, showed other blood than ours. I welcomed it 
 just then, after the pure Western-American type of 
 Mrs. Lavinus (if that was her type), and my greeting 
 probably showed it. 
 
 She did not presume ; she walked beside me on 
 the path, but when a bigger tree-bole intruded to 
 narrow it she stepped back herself before I could, 
 with the same grace in her inelegant proportions, 
 
 99 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 Her voice was very soft and well managed ; the effect 
 altogether on my nerves was that of beauty or music 
 of a primitive kind that you do not compare or criti- 
 cize, but just yield to for the time. 
 
 " If you are the neighbor who took in little Phoebe," 
 I said, " her mother's friend owes you a great many 
 thanks, Mrs. ?" 
 
 " * Pettyjohn.' It is so they call it here. You owe 
 me no thanks, no thanks. Miss, for that lovely lady I 
 My God, to go like that I And she was my friend 
 too. Every evening like this we walk together. She 
 always say to me, * Come over as often as you want 
 — the place is yours; make yourself at home'" — 
 *'ad 'ome" ; she softened her consonants and slipped 
 a vowel now and then. " It was my home. Miss I I 
 hear you have been in the Catholic countries. You 
 know what is the place of a priest among his peo- 
 ple ? That was my uncle. Father Lanfrey. He own 
 all this." She looked around, and up at the trees ; 
 she opened her arms wide and sighed. ** It is a change 
 — from that big house, the fine cool rooms, the ceil- 
 ing so grand, the wall-paper — to my little, little 
 cabin. One room. Miss, and a bed in that room, and 
 a kitchen — for a doll ! A doll's house. But I am no 
 doll, ha I I work — I do not spare my hands. See!" 
 She spread them both before me. "And while my 
 uncle live not one thing, not one thing! Noreen 
 O'Shea, her mother, — she will tell you ! and she will 
 say I was one big fool when I marry Petitjean. Ha, 
 do I not know it 1 It shows upon me plain as the day 
 what a fool I was. Do me the pleasure, Miss, to come 
 
 100 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 and visit me. You shall see my folly in the house I 
 inhabit now that Petit jean has thrown away my for- 
 tune that I had from my poor uncle. He left me rich, 
 richy Miss I I was the mistress of that house, of all 
 this place from that road to this, and the meadow 
 and the stable on the other side. It was the chore- 
 man lived there who made the garden and took care 
 of the horse, where I am living now. I — where he 
 lived, my uncle's hired man I ' Poor Eugenie P I can 
 hear him speak to me in those leaves above my head 
 of the trees he planted ; ' Poor Eugenie I ' '* She laid 
 one hand upon her breast. " That is how it is with 
 'poor Eugenie' these days ! " 
 
 Here, I thought, might have been innocent amuse- 
 ment for lonely Nanny, now and then, but in the fre- 
 quency of those evening walks, and the freedom of 
 the place at all times, I did not put much faith. That 
 was not much like an Aylesford. And I should prob- 
 ably have to moderate my own indulgence in the 
 pleasing change from pure unadulterated American- 
 ism embodied in Mrs. Lavinus, to this seductive little 
 person of the shadows, — neither a lady nor a servant, 
 but with that touch of temperamental insanity one 
 so welcomes now and then after heavy doses of the 
 literal-minded. I thought it would depend upon my- 
 self to choose how much we should see of each other ; 
 I was involved much deeper than I knew. 
 
Next morning I took up my duties a little more 
 definitely and things began to fall into shape, not 
 without friction on Noreen's part: Mrs. Lavinus I 
 did not meddle with as yet. There had been a hitch 
 between the two as to which should wash the baby's 
 little things by dozens that could not go to "the 
 Chinaman " nor to the steam-laundry, with the fam- 
 ily wash. Hing, I found, did the bed- and table-linen, 
 but refused to include anything of Mrs. Lavinus's, 
 for personal reasons which he made perfectly plain : 
 I did not blame him. 
 
 " She wash herself — I wash her sheet. She no 
 wash, / no wash ! " This was an ultimatum. 
 
 Between Noreen and Mrs. Lavinus the question 
 had been settled out of hand by the latter walking 
 across the yard with the baby's wash and leaving it 
 to Mrs. Pettyjohn's good-nature to help out a neigh- 
 bor. I suggested to Noreen (never having heard of 
 a professional nurse who would do washing) that, as 
 I should now relieve her at certain hours with Phoebe, 
 she might find time herself to do the baby-things. 
 She agreed with me that enough of the work was be- 
 ing sent out. However, she carried the matter to her 
 excellent mother and Mrs. O'Shea added her word 
 to our counsels. I shall not tamper with her delicious 
 brogue in any of my feeble imitations. 
 
 102 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 She said, in one long, flowing sentence, that there 
 was plenty of help in the house if every one did what 
 they were paid for. That Mrs. Lavinus was used 
 enough to wash for her patients, both mother and 
 baby, and in many a place she would have the man 
 to cook for and the children to mind, so she need n't 
 be putting on any airs. She was having the time of 
 her life and if we made it too easy for her the life 
 would last a long time. Noreen was not one to count 
 a few bits of washing here and there, but the non- 
 sense of it, that woman claiming she had no more to 
 do than sit under a baby from morning to night! 
 But, not to make trouble in the house, Mrs. O'Shea 
 for the present would do up the baby-things herself : 
 thus the principle was maintained and the bills not 
 increased through Noreen being afraid of any little 
 thing she'd lay a hand to. Mr. Maclay, poor man, 
 was paying out enough, with three women and a 
 Chinaman in it and naught but two children to do 
 for. To drag in more help was a scandal. Thus Mrs. 
 O'Shea: — "And not a cent will it cost him whatever 
 /'ll do. A grand man ! — grand folks they were and 
 a pity there was n't more like them." 
 
 It was a defeat worth many a victory. Mrs. La- 
 vinus was supposed to feel keenly the reproach of 
 those baby-clothes sent in in speckless piles, but it 
 is doubtful if she did. She eyed Mrs. O'Shea's iron- 
 ing with a critical smile and remarked the woman 
 had better buy herself a pair of spectacles : her work 
 looked as if she had done it in the dark. 
 
 That evening I walked again under the poplars 
 103 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 and ag-ain was joined by my short and shadowy 
 companion from across the yard. I asked her with- 
 out any sentiment to give me the amount of her bill, 
 her wash-bill — and thanked her for helping us out 
 in an emergency. 
 
 ** Nothing, nothing, Miss I No ; I do what I can 
 when such trouble comes, but I do not take in wash- 
 ing. You have misunderstood. I do what I can — 
 anything, for the sake of such a friend as the lady 
 we lost. I never can forget her — no, never!" 
 
 It was a case for a little more tact than I had 
 shown, but my mistake was forgiven. Very soon the 
 stream of soft, measured syllables began to pour 
 forth ; our steps agreed, we turned at each end of 
 the path in perfect time. I saw how the little woman 
 could have danced. 
 
 " Ah, Miss I What an hour for those confidences 
 between friends I I never see the stranger I could 
 feel so near to from the first hour we met ! Here, 
 where I come to rest my eyes from the bare ground 
 in my back yard, looking, looking at the trees and 
 the grass — like I was a prisoner with one little hour 
 to breathe the fresh air. It comes so easy. Miss, to 
 tell you the secret of my heart," she murmured, 
 " and how it is I can bear what I bear now. I wait I 
 In less than two months my happiness will come. 
 May is my month — he comes, my sailor-gentleman, 
 my lover ! We are to be married. — A medical officer, 
 on board the ship I made my first voyage on to 
 France. It is not much, the salary — it is very little. 
 But my father 's aunt in Normandy has left me her 
 
 104 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 small savings. I make the trip to see about that 
 money, and so I meet my fate 1 A man any woman 
 — yourself, Miss — would be proud to love. Ah, 
 PetitjeanI Him?" — I had not questioned her — **I 
 give you my word I have not seen that man in two 
 years I If he is dead I do not know ; I am rid of 
 him ! But, Miss," — her voice fell, — " in our Church 
 they are very hard upon those who have the unhap- 
 piness in marriage. Because I make this one big 
 mistake I must be yoked with it now for the rest of 
 my life. I cannot be happy, I shall not make my 
 good lover happy — not though I never see that 
 man Petitjean again. No priest can marry us. No 
 church will have us at the altar. Very good I We go 
 before the magistrate. But where, I ask you ? Will 
 you step into my little cabin, Miss, — my chicken- 
 coop 1 Not that you will find the chicken, ha, ha ! 
 But small — one room and a bed in that room. 
 Hardly three person can stand on the floor. — Ah, 
 Miss ; I might have stood up with my brave doctor 
 in that beautiful bay-window of the house that was 
 my home. I do not ask that — my God, no I Do I 
 not see as I speak to you what lay there so white ! I 
 would not dream of asking that of the poor husband 
 so soon — not in one month, or two I But the dining- 
 room. Miss: what is that? What ^^^ference could 
 it make to Mr. Maclay up in Silver City if we make 
 our little procession across the green grass and be 
 married in that room what nobody use but to eat I 
 It is not even the house — it is the wing I " 
 When there seems nothing left in the world to laugh 
 105 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 at, and we feel as if we should never want to laugh 
 again, remains always the maniacal seriousness of 
 us poor humans, each involved in his own craze. My 
 aging boy of a father, his hand in his brother-mani- 
 ac's, chasing down the world to find the end of a 
 rainbow he beheld once when he was twenty-three. 
 And my Nanny — at the end of her rainbow — in the 
 priest's bay-window; and Mrs. Pettyjohn coveting 
 the place for her second nuptials ; and I alone, after 
 all the dreams, taking in my fearful hands the task 
 we had promised each other to share — I whom 
 Essie would not have trusted overnight alone with 
 one of her own brood (though she trusted almost any 
 nursemaid she could hire for seven dollars a week). 
 Surely it was enough to make one sob with laugh- 
 ter. But I am not often overtaken as when Mrs. La- 
 vinus first became acquainted with the art of Michel- 
 angelo. 
 
 Well; at least we — that is Mr. Maclay — could 
 give Mrs. Pettyjohn a piece of wedding silver and 
 square the washing-account. In my experience as a 
 woman and sometime housekeeper, the family wash 
 is one of the points on which the family existence 
 seems to pivot. No wonder it passes for one defini- 
 tion of a home. 
 
 The business part of Dick's call had included a re- 
 quest from his chief that I should send him weekly 
 reports on the children's health and domestic matters 
 generally, to keep up the circulation, as it were, be- 
 tween the two halves of his being. It seemed little 
 enough to ask, but herein I saw I should have a 
 
 io6 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 chance to earn a portion of my preposterous salary. 
 I am not practiced in writing reports, and I was on 
 frightfully delicate ground with this reticent, wounded 
 man. Moreover, I had some pride on my own ac- 
 count. In his business he must have had to be always 
 pushing aside importunate but not important little 
 matters — and now to get it weekly from what was 
 left of his home — my threadbare reports after Nan- 
 ny^s letters I I should have nothing to write of but 
 fusses between the servants and the personal habits 
 of Mrs. Lavinus. I might go off in raptures over 
 Phoebe, but there was not much danger there for 
 either of us. 
 
 I labored hard over those letters : I re-wrote, I ex- 
 cised, and put back, and transposed sentences, — I 
 even copied, humbly as a school-child thanking eld- 
 erly relatives for exactly the wrong gift at Christmas, 
 — and expected to hide the fact. I hid everything I 
 could connected with my private frame of mind. And 
 I hesitated to present Mrs. Pettyjohn's appeal. She 
 sighed over the delay which I did not explain — she 
 said it was very inconvenient not to know ; she was 
 lying awake every night with the horror of it — see- 
 ing herself reduced to the chicken-coop at last. 
 Would I please speak soon? I yielded and wrote, 
 though I should have much preferred to leave the 
 matter for her to settle with Mr. Maclay personally 
 when he came down. The answer was one sentence, 
 a curt negative ; at least it seemed curt to me who 
 had it to deliver, — and a check to "make it right *' 
 with Mrs. Pettyjohn, either in that form or any form 
 
 107 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 I thought best : I was to choose the form. There was 
 no recognition of her claim to be considered a friend 
 or an equal or even a neighbor in affliction. It was 
 " right " enough if he felt that way, but it left me with 
 a very unpleasant errand. I resolved to wait and try 
 once more in words when — if ever — he came down 
 to see his child. 
 
XI 
 
 Dick had arrived a third time ; he was becoming 
 apologetic. This time his chief, he said, had posi- 
 tively intended to come himself, but was prevented 
 at the last moment. When a certain business tele- 
 gram had been received, if it did not send him off 
 somewhere else, as it might, he would surely come 
 — if only for a day. Dick fumbled his wording of 
 these second-hand excuses which it struck me were 
 probably his own ; I was frankly irritated. 
 
 I said outright : " There is no necessity of his apol- 
 ogizing to me, or your apologizing for him. If he 
 dreads me half as much as I dread him, I wonder he 
 comes at all. That is, if he can stand it not to see 
 Phoebe." 
 
 By this time Dick and I were saying pretty much 
 what we felt to each other. He was my only safety- 
 valve. But there was another side to our fast-grow- 
 ing intimacy that bored and annoyed me. I too loved 
 Ophelia, but I didn't sit and brood over it in stern 
 silence and look at the stars as if I saw her there. 
 It was indecent for him to set up a lovesick bereave- 
 ment of his own in the face of our common sacred 
 sorrow. I thought he had better be shaken out of his 
 obsession that fate should have reserved Nanny for 
 a different and younger man ; that he should prob- 
 ably die unwedded since he would never see another 
 
 109 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 like her. I did not dispute that, but I would have 
 predicted without a blush that in one or two more of 
 these visits he would be in love with me if the thing 
 had not already occurred. He was exactly like a sen- 
 timental widower in the first stage of offering himself 
 to number two. Therefore in my heart I derided him, 
 yet forgave him, for I knew so well his kind. He was 
 a *' queener," but his queening would always be chiv- 
 alrous and never common. I saw I was destined to 
 my late Nanny's throne, and mocked myself of the 
 fate before me. Yet in bare self-defense and to shield 
 her memory, I prepared to do my duty in the case. 
 He would get little joy of me, but he might get a 
 few counter-pangs to medicine his woe. A good deal 
 of the time I wanted to shake him ; and he was bring- 
 ing me round to the side of the Black Douglas as 
 chapters of laudation could not have done. 
 
 I had just come down from putting Phcebe to bed. 
 That was the day's crowning duty now, and I did 
 not forget the bedtime prayer. I thought even more 
 of it, perhaps, because my own prayers had ended 
 at my tired little mother's knees. Dick had carried 
 her up and she had given him his usual payment. 
 
 " Phoebe sends you another * good-night,' " I said, 
 as we began our usual walk on the ditch-path. 
 
 "Good-night what?" 
 
 "Good-night kiss," I answered, careless of conse- 
 quences. 
 
 " Where is it?" Dick came back correctly. 
 
 One does n't stoop to folly with a child like Dick 
 without reason ; I have stated mine — perhaps need- 
 no 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 lessly : twenty-seven is not so very old, and playing 
 with pretty boys had been one of my accomplish- 
 ments formerly. I could spare it, but one likes to take 
 a hand in an old game just to convince one's self 
 that the art is not one of the things " that never come 
 again." I gave Dick my hand and conventionally 
 but very nicely he bent his Hermes head and kissed 
 it, flushing in the evening light. 
 
 The next moment was a trifle awkward for us both. 
 I fell back on my usual matter-of-factness. "You've 
 been a great help to me, Dick, but there 's more to 
 come I Before we go back to the servant-question," 
 — we had come to it finally ; there was no help for 
 it, — "I want to ask you to accept a little keepsake 
 from me. I happen to know it is your birthday. 
 Phoebe told me." 
 
 " Phoebe should n^t tell secrets." 
 
 " You should n't have secrets with Phoebe. I shall 
 get them all if you do. Wait here while I get zV." 
 
 ** It " was my cigarette-case for which I had no use 
 now. It was one of Jack's finds, which he swore he 
 had got for a song, but nobody believed him. He 
 was afraid to give it to Essie, he said, but he got his 
 wigging from us both, and I kept the case : there 
 was no sentiment between Jack and me. It was of 
 dark, dull silver, Russian workmanship, bearing a 
 crest of who knows who ? And under it a scroll set 
 with tiny turquoises and edged with tinier brilliants 
 like a blue ribbon with a sparkling border. 
 
 " But this is too splendid," said Dick. " I *m em- 
 barrassed." 
 
 Ill 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 "Not at all: it's only a second-hand thing my 
 brother-in-law picked up and chucked at me, so to 
 speak. Not but what I think it is good." 
 
 " Good ! I 'm afraid I don't even know how 
 good it is. Looks as if it might have had a his- 
 tory." 
 
 ** I dare say it 's had rather a checkered career. 
 Some grand duchess was robbed by her maid, per- 
 haps. . . . Neither of them any better than they 
 should be." 
 
 Dick had opened the case and found it filled. He 
 looked at me curiously. 
 
 " These your brother-in-law's too ? " 
 
 I said they were mine, and that he would find them 
 *' good " if they had not deteriorated. 
 
 "You smoke!" said he. 
 
 "Not now, of course." I had in fact given up 
 cigarettes early in the winter. Smoking one now 
 and then with papa in our cozy way was a quite dif- 
 ferent thing to making a three-some with Captain 
 Nashe. I had never permitted him to see me smoke ; 
 another of those little definitions papa must have felt 
 and passed over. 
 
 " Well, frankly, I like your giving it up ' now,' " 
 said Dick. 
 
 "Well, frankly," I retorted, "I should think that 
 goes without saying. It seems to be one of the most 
 obvious comments on women's smoking anyhow — 
 though I don't mean to be narrow. Do your women 
 at home smoke?" (I knew they did n't : the practice 
 was in its infancy in American society then.) 
 
 112 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 " No,'* said Dick decidedly, " and I don't think 
 they ever will." 
 
 " But you '11 take my box and help a friend to save 
 herself from temptation ? " 
 
 "And, not to be * narrow,' will you smoke a last 
 one with me — as a sacrifice to duty? " 
 
 " But don't let 's be too oppressively virtuous. Call 
 it * cakes and ale' for the new owner — the uncriti- 
 cized masculine who can do as he pleases." I took 
 a sacrificial cigarette — "I burn my ships," said I. 
 Dick gave me a light and lighted up himself. He was 
 getting interested, poor little brother Dick ! I could 
 have convinced him in two shakes that smoking was 
 all right in spite of my '' duties." . . . And so we 
 walked and smoked together without narrowness. 
 
 " To return to the servants," said I, " do you mind 
 their gossiping about us? I see Mrs. Lavinus stroll- 
 ing apart — not so very far apart. I think she can 
 see us — me." 
 
 " Why, I don't worry much about the servants — 
 have n't seen many since I came out here." 
 
 " You 'd worry more, perhaps, if you happened to 
 be one of them yourself. I think I shall desist, as the 
 saying is. It 's a form of amusement too worldly for 
 this place." 
 
 " Are you serious?" 
 
 " I can't even give you my reasons for being seri- 
 ous : I 'm not proud of them. So, here 's for coward- 
 ice ! " I had not courage to complete the ceremony 
 and finish my cigarette in public — not with Mrs. 
 Lavinus for the public. Remembering also that she 
 
 113 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 might have seen Dick kissing my hand — he had no 
 idea, indeed I Nor had I begun as yet to think of the 
 world outside our fences that now was my world ; I 
 had seen so litde of it. But I was uncomfortable about 
 Noreen being buzzed at by Mrs. Lavinus, perhaps 
 buzzing back to have her own impressions of the new 
 mistress checked off according to the weird distor- 
 tions of the Lavinus mind. 
 
 I knew that in coming to a place like that I should 
 need much poetry. Where there are no musicians, it 
 is music ; where there is no painting nor sculpture, 
 it is art ; where life is limited and centers on material 
 things, it gives wings to the mind ; where there is 
 no inspiring talk, it is "ashes and sparks, my words 
 among mankind." It is the concentrated essence and 
 impact of a human soul. And so I had brought every 
 poet I possessed except those I knew I should find on 
 Nanny's shelves. In my Swinburnes, in each volume, 
 there was much that I should never read again and 
 in each there were one or two poems that none of us 
 can spare. I went into my room one day and went 
 too quickly and surprised Noreen poring over one of 
 my Swinnys. She raised a heated face and closed the 
 book, confused and rather breathless. It was not be- 
 cause I had found her reading when she might have 
 been mending — she had been encouraged to read 
 books of my selection. It was what we know is wrong 
 with some of our biggest of the great ones, and since 
 they cannot die, it cannot die, but remains to mar 
 their work, — to provoke curiosity as to the au- 
 thor's age and the period it marks, and what stuff of 
 
 114 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 humanity went to feed the immortal flame. The psy- 
 chology of it did not concern either Noreen or me, 
 but I should have protected the immaturity of her 
 mind. Employers are sometimes blamed for leaving 
 money and jewels around to tempt character in the 
 making. This was a subtler but not less irresponsible 
 form of carelessness. My fault I And I saw how I 
 should be punished. 
 
 Nor should I have wished to assault even Mrs. 
 Lavinus's virgin mind with the sophistications of Old 
 World art, but that was an accident. In a measure I 
 had lived down Michelangelo with Mrs. Lavinus, who 
 was shrewder than Noreen, and more calculating, 
 and more hardened in looking out for herself. She 
 was not deceived as to the fact that I was a person 
 who wielded a certain sort of power ; that she did 
 not know what sort rather helped me than other- 
 wise : I had not given her much satisfaction as to 
 my past. She had ceased to regard me as " gay " in 
 her sense of the word. If she defamed me to Noreen, 
 she would do it deliberately now — to get me, or 
 Noreen, out of the way. Between us, then, there was 
 no misunderstanding to speak of; it was simple 
 war. 
 
 And yet I could not measure its importance. I was 
 taken up with other things. The baby was horribly 
 on my mind, remembering Nanny's rules, and I 
 could do nothing there as yet. Phoebe watched me 
 and took in every word and never forgot one that I 
 let slip, with the mental helplessness and amazing 
 perceptiveness of a highly intelligent, sensitive child 
 
 115 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 of her age. I had never listened to my own words, 
 and I was astonished to find how very much I needed 
 editing from this new point of view. I must abandon 
 hyperbole and bethink me of every possible miscon- 
 struction that a child's imagination can put upon un- 
 familiar words and expressions of her elders. I no 
 longer rose from the ground of literalness in my 
 speech unless we were telling stories. Between the 
 child's funny little ears and the servants' minds I cul- 
 tivated a habit of not talking, but listening. 
 
 Essie, who was so satisfactory herself when you 
 were with her, did not shine as a correspondent. Her 
 sisterly conscience did not remind her that letters 
 would be the chief food of my existence now. Meager 
 fare she gave me, yet I never knew before how I 
 loved her and depended on her light, cool touch upon 
 my congested frames of mind. And she loved me the 
 same, but was too busy to say so. Jack, when he 
 happened to feel like it, would chaff me now and 
 then in a perfectly unrealizing way which amused and 
 hurt a little too. It made New York seem very far 
 away. Subconsciously, I must have worried always 
 about papa. Essie had nothing to tell me of him be- 
 yond his cables — of course he would not write, in the 
 throes of creation. 
 
 As for the West — I had left it behind on the road 
 from Kuna, with the meadow-larks and the hot sun 
 on the sagebrush and the soaring sky between the 
 far-off blue ranges with their snow-capped peaks. I 
 remembered the wind and the simple great chord of 
 color and the sting of the air and its odors, but that 
 
 Ii6 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 was as far away too as New York or Tahiti. The 
 pioneer families of Boise, and perhaps of all other 
 little fortuitous towns, seemed to have shrunk into 
 their little yards thick with trees as fast as they could 
 grow trees, away from Nature as they found her. 
 They must have found her too much for them, or it 
 was pure homesickness as genuine but different from 
 mine. Lovely tall poplars or box-elders or cut-leaf 
 maples lined the streets ; they were out in full leaf 
 now. With so many leaves about the little house 
 you could not see the mountains or the sky. Be- 
 hind our fences in the priest's garden I felt stifled 
 with all this green, and I was restless for a long, fast 
 walk once more. Whoever has idled along with a 
 child's uneven step beside her, though she may fully 
 accept the bonds, will remember that they are felt 
 all the same. Everything about one is in bonds to 
 the child of one's care. This was what had tired 
 Nanny! I was treading in her footsteps — a few 
 weeks, to her six years. I stood in such awe of my 
 servant household that I should n't have dreamed of 
 going out at night after Phoebe was in bed — follow- 
 ing the street we were on out to the plain between us 
 and Boise Barracks, crossed by trails the soldiers 
 made. I should have adored to meet the soldiers 
 themselves, gallant chaps with white stripes, or yel- 
 low stripes on their trousers, — for the troopers 
 sometimes walked. They also rode : squads of them 
 two and two went clattering past our road-gate ; we 
 never got there in time to see more than their fiat, 
 square backs. How they sat those big bay horses 1 I 
 
 117 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 had never known a rider's thrills — and well I had 
 n't ! I could not have borne any more. 
 
 As to the town ladies calling — I never thought of 
 them ; I did n't know who they were. In my thoughts, 
 practically day and night, were three women : Nanny, 
 Essie, and Nanny's mother. Nanny for pure yearn- 
 ing dumb and lasting ; Essie for mundane pangs of 
 disappointment day by day, and often unjust re- 
 proaches repented of with more love ; Mrs. Aylesford 
 for a quiet, reverential sort of pity, knowing that 
 with her things could not last — her rest would come 
 one way or another before many years ; that was not 
 an urgent pain. Callers 1 I was so thankful that no 
 one came to perplex my life any further — and all of 
 it so little I I hope I have not exaggerated my blind 
 wretchedness at this time, nor overdone my impres- 
 sions of the smallness of the town. I know it was con- 
 sidered a little heaven below by the old stage-driv- 
 ers and their passengers, when they saw it across the 
 river after two hundred and fifty miles, I think I was 
 told the journey used to be, from the main roads of 
 travel. 
 
 . . . And so to return to our walk under the 
 poplars : Dick still smoking his share of our sacri- 
 fice, I inhaling its perfume with less envy of his act 
 than with one of those subtle stabs connected with the 
 ordinary sense of smell. Why should our noses open, 
 as it were, into our very souls I Of course a dog's 
 nose does — I have watched my bull-terrier on a 
 summer night, the air full of odors near and far, 
 planted on the parapet of the terrace like a statue 
 
 ii8 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 but for the quivering" of his nose and the slight shud- 
 ders that pass over his tense, tough body. We must 
 get it from them by the dark backways of being. I 
 was sick with old memories of things forgotten and 
 inexpressible, only because it was a night of spring 
 and I was still young and I breathed the odor of a 
 young man's cigarette of a brand I had smoked with 
 papa in the dear old studio days past recall, never to 
 return — such was my foreboding. Do we love those 
 who belong to us less because they have hurt us ? 
 We know that we do not. There seems to be no ap- 
 preciable end to love any more than to memory, if 
 we make an imaginative use of it. As to partings 
 — there are worse things (and I hope Mrs. Aylesford 
 knew it) than the clean pang of death. I could have 
 wished my father — Of course I did not wish any- 
 thing like that I 
 
 " Dick," I said " there is something I dread to ask 
 you, but it 's time I did. I 've never seen — where 
 they have — laid her. Is it a place it would kill one 
 to see ? Say so if it is. I 'd rather never go." 
 
 ** Oh, you must go I — some one ought to go. I Ve 
 been waiting for you to say this." 
 
 "Well, where is it?" 
 • " I 'd rather you did not see it first by day; that 's 
 the truth. When I go, I go evenings — after I Ve 
 been here and seen Phoebe." 
 
 ' (Oh, Dick, you dear boy) — "And you take her 
 flowers ? That 's what you wanted the white narcis- 
 sus for and the violets 1 " 
 
 "Yes," he said. "She planted the white narcis- 
 119 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 sus where it would show against the blue flag. She 
 said it grew like that at her old home." 
 
 " Oh, Dick I And I suppose they are the only 
 flowers she has had 1 I have been so selfish 1 '* 
 
 *' Oh, not you I " said Dick with savage emphasis. 
 ** But there are flowers sometimes — I met the one 
 who brings them, one evening. She was coming in 
 as I came out. I watched and saw what she did ; they 
 were hothouse flowers. She must have bought them 
 or begged them. It was little Mrs. Pettyjohn. She 
 sort of adored Mrs. Maclay.'* 
 
 " Well, when can we go ? If not by day you must 
 come early some evening — come to tea. We have 
 dinner in the middle of the day on Phoebe's ac- 
 count." 
 
 " I wish you could see it by moonlight. This is 
 the last night we could — the moon rises a little after 
 eight. Will you go to-night? I'm going back to- 
 morrow. I don't know when I may be down again. 
 Would you rather go with him ? " 
 
 " I will never go with him I " I cried. For slowly 
 I had been getting "mad" all through at what 
 seemed the man's unparalleled selfishness, up at the 
 mines, shifting everything on Dick, leaving it to the 
 poor neighbor he scorned to take a few flowers to 
 his wife's grave, and never coming, not once, to lift 
 his littie motherless Phoebe in his arms. I scorned 
 him I 
 
 I went to see if Noreen was in the house. She was. 
 I told her I was going for a walk and changed my 
 slippers to shoes. It was less than two miles there 
 
 I20 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 and back Dick had said. I had no wish to stay — 
 merely to take one look and learn the way. After, I 
 should go when I felt like it — and take Phoebe's 
 flowers, the wild-flowers we were finding now on our 
 rambles. 
 
 But we did stay. Dick was beginning to feel that 
 he knew me very well. He could speak of his trouble, 
 now that it was softened a little by what to youth is 
 " time." And he too was alone in his life of suppressed 
 emotion. Things were said in that moonlit place — in 
 the presence of that little mound so bare, with its few 
 withered flowers and Mrs. Pettyjohn's offering in a tin 
 tomato-can filled with water she had fetched herself, 
 planted in the dry soil. It all came out, Dick's con- 
 fession, which was the last irony I His youthful re- 
 sentment against one who had found the road to 
 Paradise and gone in, and, as Dick thought, trampled 
 the young flowers within the gate. I clothe his half- 
 uttered meaning in the words of an old fable that had 
 haunted me in the same connection. But when Dick 
 took up my case and made it his own, I did not feel 
 proud of it. Dick, I was sure, could be even less just 
 than I to Nanny's husband. It was Mrs. Aylesford 
 who knew. And one must allow something for a girl 
 like Nanny knowing her own mind. . . . But I lis- 
 tened to him and saw the time was not ripe for wis- 
 dom. 
 
 What struck me was that he, the despoiler, must 
 have chosen this spot. He had seen it was the only 
 place — in that horrible garden of monuments and 
 
 121 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 cheap symbols and private fencing and planting — ; 
 here in this virgin plot where some one had left a few 
 exotic cypresses, preparing for the tomb which was 
 never built, he had brought his own ill-guarded trea- 
 sure, withdrawn from the common grief. It was very 
 suited to an Aylesford. The very trees were like the 
 cedars of her old home. I could have told her mother 
 about this spot. Curiously it drew me towards the 
 man who had seen it too. . . . Dick could not know all 
 the while I listened what a sad young fool I was think- 
 ing him. But it behooved me to be patient. Had n't 
 mamma been so I I could not remember, but I knew 
 of her patience, her tired, bored despair with some 
 of the highly charged temperaments that cried for the 
 moon in her image. Papa in his inimitable way had 
 set this ofiE — seeing it and enjoying it with his literary 
 mind. He was not actually flippant — it came from 
 his appreciation of the humors of life, even married 
 life. I don't suppose my mother was a beautiful 
 woman, but she wore the imperishable rose of beauty 
 in her breast. And no fairy had bestowed it on her for 
 the subjugation of mankind. It was the flower of her 
 own heart. 
 
XII 
 
 It was late — very late — past ten, when we opened 
 the little road-gate and stepped inside to meet the 
 same odor of good tobacco that had raked me all up 
 before. A man came towards us slowly down the walk, 
 tossed his cigar into the thick of the poplars and re- 
 turned the hand to his pocket. He took it out again, 
 however, when he greeted me. It was Mr. Maclay, 
 arrived somehow at last and expecting to go off by 
 the early stage. So I had lost my only chance for the 
 talk I needed to have with him, and lost it in a way 
 that must seem unnecessary, to say the least. I tho- 
 roughly disliked Dick at that moment. And he looked 
 infuriatingly handsome as he returned his chiefs 
 casual recognition, and bowed over my hand with a 
 lingering good-night pressure I did not thank him 
 for. Bother Dick I Things were serious with me. 
 
 I said to my visitor in his own house that I should 
 like to tell Noreen that I was back ; as he had been 
 kept waiting already, so long, a few minutes more 
 perhaps would not matter. He smiled without look- 
 ing at me and said nothing. No one, not my own 
 father, could have passed the matter off more calmly, 
 and there was not a trace of my father's latent irony. 
 It was more the philosophy of the business man who 
 does n't expect people as a rule to keep their engage- 
 ments or to spare his time. I did not care to be taken 
 
 123 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 on that basis. I loved my trust ; and I seemed to have 
 been playing with it and showing an amazing insen- 
 sibility besides. Dick and I were associates in the same 
 delicate service, and I apparently was corrupting him, 
 a boy, and I an old girl of twenty-seven. It need n't 
 and shouldn't have been — the hour we sat there 
 talking unwholesome nonsense by Nanny's grave. 
 And I could n't have even the common satisfaction 
 of saying, "Out upon him 1" for Dick too was under 
 the pressure of loneliness and the subtle anguish of 
 the spring. 
 
 I ran upstairs to dismiss Noreen. I was ashamed 
 before the very servants. Noreen had been washing 
 that day and was a tired, sleepy girl ; and then I went 
 back to face my employer. I could see that this first 
 extraneous awkwardness had relieved him of some- 
 thing deeper which he must have dreaded in meet- 
 ing me with my heart packed full of memories — his 
 own memories. Did he suppose I should chatter to 
 him about Nanny ? We began upon business at once 
 hurriedly. I suggested we return to the ditch-walk. 
 He may have thought it was coming now — the 
 things women say, the platitudes of sympathy. 
 
 He looked at me keenly : " You have had a long 
 walk, haven't you?" (He would naturally think sol 
 We had kept him two hours waiting.) *' Are n't you 
 tired?" 
 
 " We were sitting under the trees part of the time," 
 I answered, gritting my teeth. 
 
 "You are very much confined — Do you know 
 how to drive?" 
 
 124 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 I said I knew nothing at all about horses. " But 
 this place does not seem small, after a city yard.'* 
 
 "But after a cityl" 
 
 ** I think we must talk outside," I persisted. ** I 
 want to speak of the 'domestics.' " 
 
 He seemed relieved ; he rose at once. 
 
 We began with Mrs. Lavinus : that lady's month 
 was up and I proposed we should get rid of her, or 
 if she could not be replaced, to put her strictly under 
 the doctor's orders, the doctor at the Post, and be 
 empowered myself to see that she carried them out. 
 " If she is doing as well as she knows how, then she 
 does n't know how I " He did not ask for specific 
 charges, but I volunteered a few. I had seen her test 
 the warmth of the baby's food by putting its bottle 
 to her lips. I knew the bottles were not sterilized — 
 I had been studying up myself a little, I told him, 
 and was no rude infidel — and I had the evidence of 
 more than one of my senses that the room she kept 
 the baby in — far too much of the time — was not 
 properly cleaned. I "let him have it," as the saying 
 is, for I thought he had shirked long enough. He 
 took a deep breath suddenly when I spoke of the 
 room. (I might have spared him that : it was almost 
 coarse to speak of Nanny's room.) 
 
 He said he did not suppose that Mrs. Lavinus was 
 very professional, but there were none who were — 
 she was as good as any of " them." I said I wished 
 to make Noreen the baby's nurse. She was clean, to 
 begin with. I could get my instructions from the 
 doctor and translate them to her much better than I 
 
 125 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 could stand guard over Mrs. Lavinus, even if she 
 would submit to it. The issue must come soon, and I 
 asked for authority to meet it. I saw him smiling to 
 himself, and saw no occasion for the smile. I added 
 that I wanted to make the baby's food-formula my- 
 self and take care of him at night. Hard-working 
 servants were too sleepy. And now he did not smile. 
 
 He said, " If you have Phoebe on your mind all 
 day, you must not be disturbed at night. You need 
 the mental rest." (We both must have thought at the 
 same moment, how much rest would the children's 
 mother have had ?) 
 
 "You may trust me not to injure my own health, 
 and with the doctor's advice I think I shall not injure 
 the baby. I hear him every night — it would be 
 easier to be there and see what he cries about. He 
 is a very strong little baby, or — " He gave another 
 quick gasp. I was an infidel I I was torturing him 
 quietly in every word. 
 
 He did not shirk now nor leave things at loose 
 ends. He gave me a free hand, as he had meant to, 
 he said, from the first. "If I hadn't, your letters 
 would have shown me that I could. I want to thank 
 you for them. . . . And now, about yourself ? Am I 
 forcing all this on you ? Do you want to go any- 
 where else from here ? " 
 
 " Not at present," I said. Pledges between us 
 were not required, nor that I should confess that I 
 I had not anywhere else to go if I would escape de- 
 pendence. 
 
 "I'm afraid I can't promise you any prospect of 
 126 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 relief, for some time at least. Mrs. Aylesford's house 
 would be the natural place for the children, but she 
 is — did Grant tell you ? — in a very critical condition, 
 mentally, it is feared.'^ 
 
 Mr. Maclay looked at you briefly but penetratingly 
 when he talked, and then ofi as if considering things in 
 general. I have noticed this in men who give orders ; 
 — but those short glances may go deep. I had one 
 more request, which wasn't mine, but Mrs. Petty- 
 john's. When I brought it up again he looked at me 
 in that cool, sudden way. I guessed he was surprised 
 that I should return to a matter he had once decided, 
 and wondered at my reason. I scarcely cared to have 
 him think it a personal espousal of Mrs. Pettyjohn's 
 affairs, but I was willing to bear the odium for the 
 sake of those flowers. One might smile at the unas- 
 suming tomato-can, poor soul I But the long walks 
 in the heat she had not advertised, with all her 
 love of effect. He would never know of them! I 
 took it as my own debt, and I determined it should 
 be paid. 
 
 I spoke once more of the loan of the dining-room, 
 intimating that it seemed a little thing for one that 
 meant so much to her. 
 
 *' It is not a little thing," he answered. " She should 
 n't have asked it. She knows if her uncle were living 
 he would not marry them nor permit them to be mar- 
 ried on this ground. You know what the Catholics 
 think of divorce! It's not certain she can be mar- 
 ried, legally, — I should doubt if she has her papers 
 all straight. That would be no business of ours if we 
 
 127 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 did not hold a candle to it — put a roof over its head. 
 ... I see you have some scruple in this ? Is it any- 
 thing- more than kindness?" 
 
 I said that she had been very kind — to little Phoebe. 
 He knew of that, and was ** very sorry." It should n't 
 have been I He was thankful I was there and such a 
 thing could not happen again. 
 
 But it had happened, I persisted. ** She did her best 
 — are we to do nothing in kind ? " 
 
 And then we both paused and he seemed to gather 
 breath in that racking way whenever he approached 
 the name he had not spoken once in my hearing. 
 
 *' Phoebe's mother felt as you do — about our neigh- 
 bor. She sent her fruit and vegetables — as you will, 
 when we can spare them from the garden. But she 
 found it best to have no running back and forth. It 
 wasn't easy — but it was necessary. As I came up 
 the street I saw some litde girls poking and slapping 
 something that lay out next the sidewalk, fanning it 
 with their skirts and breathing the dust. It was a mat- 
 tress that some doctor must have ordered destroyed. 
 They don't burn old mattresses here without special 
 orders. We may expect a crop of scarlet fever or small- 
 pox in the neighborhood soon. Sporting chances on 
 contagion are the rule, of course. A doctor who re- 
 ports a case and quarantines the family is boycotted 
 among the poorer class. Mrs. Pettyjohn is very kind, 
 as you say. She is one who * never takes anything' 
 and thinks she could n't spread anything. So I 'm 
 compelled to warn you that she must not come into 
 our yard, and Phcebe must not go outside these fences 
 
 138 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 — not for five minutes alone. That, of course, I need 
 not tell you." 
 
 I said I should think it would kill the mothers who 
 had a trained sense of responsibility — and sickened 
 over the speech the instant after. He said nothing. 
 His silences were the most effective part of his con- 
 versation. I was beginning to see that Nanny had 
 married, if not a protector of the poor, something 
 of a protector of his own. She had come of a self- 
 centered family — I knew she could not have quar- 
 reled with him there. 
 
 He went away soon down the empty street; it 
 seemed forlorn to see him go — out of his own house, 
 the house of his joy and his sorrow. There was a per- 
 fectly good reason for it — unless he had slept in the 
 room downstairs, the room with the bay-window. 
 
XIII 
 
 NOREEN'S manner next morning showed what she 
 thought of my conduct, — and who was to blame 
 her? Mrs. O'Shea had very good ideas and incul- 
 cated them upon the daughters of her care with the 
 metaphorical rod of iron. They were not allowed to 
 roam the streets at night with young men they had n't 
 known but a month-like I Mrs. Lavinus, on the con- 
 trary, claimed a sort of good-fellowship in the un- 
 lucky exposure. 
 
 " Some bosses think it 's smart to drop down on you 
 when you least expect 'em. I come pretty near being 
 caught out, too, but I didn't have no young man 
 along." She gave me a glance that was anything 
 but severe. ** I just stepped over to tell Mrs. O'Shea 
 she needn't put starch in the baby's ni' gowns after 
 this: I guess she took 'em for dresses, — they look 
 good enough, — but I ain't strong on starch in baby- 
 things nohow : lace scratchin' their little necks. I 
 thought it might make her mad if I sent her word 
 by Noreen. She did n't ask me to set down, though, 
 and just as well — I hadn't more'n got to the gate 
 *fore I heard Hing gabbling away to somebody — 
 my, but he was reelin' it of! ! I guess he 's been 
 pretty near ready to bust this long while. Chinamen 
 don't like women-folks round in their kitchens, 
 baby or no baby. And there sure enough it was Mr. 
 
 130 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 Maclay I I whipped into the house before he saw me. 
 But it did n't make no difference. He never stepped 
 inside the baby's room, nor even looked in. 'T was 
 as much as ever he 'd notice the baby when I brought 
 him out sound asleep to show him, and his little 
 mouth workin' for his dinner. He asked right away 
 where you was. I told him — not to say where, be- 
 cause I did n't know (and don't this minute), but I 
 told him who you went with. He took two strides 
 up the stairs and sent Noreen down and there he set 
 in your room maybe half an hour in the dark — or 
 perhaps it was moonlight — lookin' at Phcebe, I sup- 
 pose. Anybody could pity the man if he 'd let you, 
 but you can't say nothing to them kind. I told him, 
 'You needn't to be afraid to go in there,' I said. 
 'Everything has been put away. You won't see 
 nothin' to distress you.' He looked a past me as if 
 I was n't there. * Where 's Miss Bonham ? ' he says. 
 'Where's Miss Bonham?' That's all there was to 
 my part! How'd you come off? — he seem much 
 put out with you for keepin' him waitin' ? He waited 
 a good long while ! * My Land I ' I says to Noreen, 
 ' what do you suppose them two can find to amuse 
 themselves walkin' the streets in this town after New 
 York where they come from? — eight o'clock to ha' 
 past ten 1 ' I should have thought you 'd 'a' been 
 dead on the floor. And then to walk an' talk with 
 him I Don't you never set down inside with your 
 company? It looks funny strollin' about outside — 
 men-folks may like it, but I don't believe your ladies 
 would, if any of 'em ever come to call." 
 
 131 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 That evening's mail brought a city letter from Mr. 
 Maclay written on the paper of his hotel. It finished 
 suddenly something he probably had had in mind, 
 but would have postponed had he not taken a second 
 walk later than our words together. 
 
 " I went up to the cemetery last night, after I left 
 you. Now I know where you had been and where 
 you sat 'under the trees.' Your flowers from her 
 garden were still fresh. I have bought the hill with 
 the trees. No one will touch the place now. Could 
 you, without too much labor, with all that you have 
 to do, make me a drawing for a stone to place there, 
 just as you saw it last night? I can see something in 
 my own mind, but I could not work it out. Let it be 
 your own design, or, if you prefer, something adapted 
 from your studies together, something you know 
 she would have liked. The inscription should in- 
 clude her parents' names and her birthplace. I shall 
 be back in about three weeks. If you are not ready 
 to do this, wait. But when you are ready, will you 
 try ? Nothing that any one here could do, would be 
 tolerable." 
 
 My heart sprang to the task. Now I felt that he 
 knew what had been the bond ; why I had come, 
 and why I had stayed, unwelcome to those around 
 me, distrusted and lonely and alone. . . . 
 
 There were in the house four volumes of " L' Art 
 pour tons, industriel et decoratif." Papa had given 
 them to Nanny. For of course I had brought her 
 home, and it had been, as I knew it would be, a 
 great " mash " between them, with the unfair advan- 
 
 132 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 tage on papa's side. He, inventing preposterous 
 compliments to give her practice in the art of receiv- 
 ing them, he said, which had not been a part of her 
 previous education. She, blushing as expected, but 
 keeping her mind quite level, above her shy, fas- 
 cinated eyes, to the literary side of his Elizabethan 
 persiflage. If she did not know how to take a com- 
 pliment, she could recognize a charming phrase, even 
 if aimed with monstrous hyperbole at herself. He 
 called her " Diaphenia, like the daflfydowndilly " — 
 Heaven knows what he did not call her I — they were 
 an amusing pair. He was really vexed by her mar- 
 riage to "that fellow out West"; and he sent her 
 these books and others from time to time, to give her 
 ** a few standards " in a world quite bare to his imagi- 
 nation. If she wanted a fan or a footstool or a mantel- 
 piece or a door-knocker, here she could choose her 
 sitcle and her design, when great artists were also 
 artisans. Her fan (fancy Nanny with a fan at the 
 Doldrums !) could be an idyl by Gessner, her foot- 
 stool copied from Durer, such a stool as one of his 
 grim Virgins might rest her mediaeval feet upon. . . . 
 And to this use his gift had come I 
 
 I went over the books that evening and found a 
 suggestion of what I sought — in Vico's " Book of the 
 Roman Empresses," 1557 (there are later editions) — 
 the page fronting the life of the "lovely Julia," she 
 who died, and her unborn babe, at the sight of Pom- 
 pey's blood-stained garments — one of the casual- 
 ties of her time. Stripped of its figures dkcoratives^ 
 stripped of emblems of the Renaissance and every- 
 
 133 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 thing-, according to the taste of that time, belonging- 
 to the family pride of the Roman lady, keeping only 
 the lines of the sculptured screen at the back and the 
 beautiful Classic-Renaissance lettering (this repre- 
 sentation was not the actual tomb of Julia, merely a 
 title-page of Vico's designer) — there was my me- 
 morial stone. Place it on the hill among her dream- 
 ing trees with the distant, restful mountain-line ; let 
 the evenings and mornings and nights and days be 
 her visitors — whom she shared equally with those 
 below in the new-digged spots, or in the sun-smitten 
 graves of strangers, or the neglected plots of early 
 families whose friends had moved away ; — it seemed 
 to me enough. I worked at it, when I felt fresh for 
 the task, a good deal of the time while he was away. 
 In looking over these books I had come upon 
 pencil-plans — of Nanny's, I was sure. They were all 
 labeled, "The house at Silver City." Sketches of in- 
 terior details, book-shelves, paneling, newel-posts, 
 mantels : — Nanny could not have needed to label her 
 own drawings of a house that had no rival. She must 
 have printed those words for pure swagger, the joy 
 of seeing them on paper : ** The house at Silver City." 
 So they had planned to build in the mountain-camp, 
 taking the risks up there after those they knew in the 
 valley town ? A place she would have loved, and that 
 I would have loved. This was the good time coming 
 for which she needed to be *'a tower of strength." 
 Perhaps this house already was begun and Douglas 
 Maclay, in his work up there, had its frustrate walls 
 before his eyes to mock him. 
 
XIV 
 
 Mrs. Pettyjohn did not take the refusal of her pe- 
 tition as gracefully as nature had taught her to do 
 some other things. Nature flamed up in her heart, 
 and she aimed her resentment at me. She had thought 
 she had a ** friend at court," she said: Mr. Maclay 
 could not apprehend what there was no one to take 
 the trouble to present to his mind — a busy man. But 
 so be it 1 life was like that : — you have a friend — 
 she is snatched away ; you think you have found an- 
 other whom you could cherish — she does not read 
 you, she does not grasp what you say, though you 
 pour out your heart to her — or, she is indifferent 1 
 'Twas all the same — a hundred years from now. 
 She could walk into a law-office out of the street and 
 be married in a hat I The poor little divorcke had pic- 
 tured herself in a wedding-veil, perchance the one she 
 wore for Petitjean — and all the setting of a first ap- 
 pearance as a bride as good as new. And we had 
 stripped her romance down to street-attire, or the 
 alternative of the chicken-coop. She might even have 
 thought to avoid the expense of a walking-costume 
 and hat suited to her ideas of a justice of the peace 
 wedding. Her mind was mixed of thrift and dreams 
 of her second blooming, and there were many long 
 hours of the long spring days in which to work up 
 her feelings. 
 
 135 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 On taking leave I spoke of her flourishing plants 
 ranged on a window-shelf outside. I had come by the 
 road around the corner of the lot, and they made a 
 fine show to the passer. She sighed — ** They take 
 plenty of water. I have only these hands to fetch it, 
 but even the poor must have a few little pleasures." 
 I spoke also of a board that was loose in the back 
 fence that divided our premises (strictly speaking that 
 Hing had said was loose) and promised it should be 
 nailed up. I feared it might irritate her, the sound of 
 nailing boards from our side, against her, as it were. 
 It did — even the apology. 
 
 " Ah, for the love of God I If you could leave me 
 that one little convenience! It is the last — the very 
 last thing I shall ask of that rich man. Name of 
 Heaven I It is only to save me going the whole way 
 round with my pails of water. It was in the deed in 
 black and white that never, never shall that well be 
 shut to me. Before I sign it the lawyer he read it to 
 me : nobody has the right to do that — not if he own 
 the whole Territory. If it is by the gate I come or by 
 the fence — what is that to him? He never see me! 
 It will not disgrace his family if I crawl through a 
 fence and tear the clothes off my back to save my feet 
 the hot road and me walking with my pails like a 
 scrub-woman and meeting ladies that have called 
 upon me with their cards in their hands when I was 
 my uncle's niece. Father Lanfrey. I do not complain. 
 Such is my lot. But I do not think it is too much 
 to ask of that great man with his mines that never 
 come near my place, and never enter the door I put 
 
 136 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 between his child and the sight of them carrying her 
 mother out of the house he deserted, Hke a man that 
 was ashamed of death. And take her in my lap and 
 tell her of the Mother of God, that she forget a few 
 minutes what it means to lose a mother like she had. 
 I would do it again a thousand times, but not for him, 
 my God!" 
 
 And I was to brutalize matters still more (while of 
 course granting the loose board) by mentioning quite 
 pointedly that it should be replaced each time she came 
 through, and if we used it we would do the same ! 
 The implication was enough — she followed me to the 
 gate haughtily, and her lips quivered with words of 
 scant civility, as she bowed without giving me her 
 hand. 
 
 Hing had complained that the board never was re- 
 placed. He himself had nailed it up more than once 
 and always found it open again, and now that the 
 garden was sprouting, Mrs. Pettyjohn's fowls were a 
 serious annoyance. When I returned from my call I 
 investigated and found it as Hing had said ; so my 
 charge was not without foundation, even if our neigh- 
 bor did resent it : she probably knew herself that the 
 board was open at the time. 
 
 Little troubles never come single. I had scarcely 
 entered the wedge that was to part us from Mrs. La- 
 vinus (the doctor's visit, namely, and its results) when 
 I found myself practically unable to let her go. Noreen 
 had been told of the promotion that awaited her when 
 Mrs. Lavinus's time was up — to my surprise she in- 
 formed liie that she intended to leave, herself, at the 
 
 137 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 end of the week. I knew by her manner that she must 
 have been tampered with. She could not meet my 
 eyes and her reasons were absurd. They were, of 
 course, whatever excuse she chose to give me. 
 
 I advertised for a nursemaid and after a blank of 
 several days, with not a single applicant, came a 
 number of remarkably queer ones. I seemed to have 
 tapped the wrong vein as to service in the town. Per- 
 sons I had never dreamed of unearthing came and 
 soberly or shiftingly asked for the place of nurse to 
 Nanny's baby. One brought a soiled check-apron 
 protruding from brown paper and was ready to enter 
 on her duties at once. Another was addicted to ** fits " 
 and said there was no warning as to when they were 
 due. Others appeared to have come for the walk or 
 to see the inside of our premises. And there were 
 others, a few, with whom I did not parley nor dis- 
 semble. In short, there was no help in sight for us 
 save the redoubtable woman my wits were matched 
 against. She looked on, I may say, with her tongue 
 in her cheek. 
 
 The Post surgeon whom I consulted as a friend in 
 my extremity, advised me not to fly to ills I knew not 
 of. He said that I might leave him to manage Mrs. 
 Lavinus. I asked him if he ever had managed her. 
 My manner, I trust, did something to show that the 
 impertinence proceeded from my own despair. 
 
 "You can't watch her all the time," he said. "She 
 needs to be bullied. That's the only discipline she is 
 used to. It 's a wonderful baby or it would be a sick 
 baby now. He '11 respond to the schedule like clock- 
 
 138 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 work — you'll see. And she'll respond — to a few 
 words I shall say to her. I have a stick to hold over 
 Mrs. Lavinus." 
 
 The doctor, while he did not hold her (being who 
 she was) morally responsible, might have held her 
 technically so, I believed, for what had happened to 
 his maternity patient in her care. If she could not 
 be punished legally, her reputation could be injured. 
 The surgeon at the Post stood above any suspicion 
 of personal motives. It was a dreadful thought, but 
 it came to me as the only explanation of the " stick." 
 I did not believe he felt vindictive ; he knew her kind 
 too well. She would have had about as much respect 
 for some of his most critical orders as if he had told 
 her to go outside and stamp three times on the ground 
 before giving the patient a drink of water. I knew he 
 must have left as little to her as possible, but she was 
 in charge : he had to work with her as with other in- 
 struments of fate that must have met him at every 
 turn in his practice outside the Reservation, 
 f He was a small man with a big-topped head and 
 scornful nostrils, lean and dark from service on the 
 Mexican border. I bowed to him in every particular 
 and I enjoyed his slashing remarks. He was faithful 
 but irascible. To Mrs. Lavinus his words were few ; 
 they illustrated the truth, which I have never disputed 
 in her person, of the rude old saying: — 
 
 "A woman, a dog, and a hickory-tree, 
 The more you thrash them, the better they be." 
 
 It was a warm week, the first week in May. Phoebe 
 
 was in short socks and Dutch-necked dresses, and I 
 
 139 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 had fastened around her throat, which was tanned by 
 the spring sun a soft pale brown, a chain of white 
 coral beads, a little too long for her. It was one of 
 my own trinkets of the days when it was part of my 
 recognized business to deck myself for papa's eyes 
 that took note of everything I put on and everything I 
 wore with it. He had taken a book I was reading out of 
 my hands because it had a yellow cover and the dress 
 I had on was blue, not an artist's blue. "Primary 
 colors I " was his comment. The dress was one Aunt 
 Essie had given me which I needed ; he swore it 
 ruined his eye whenever I put it on. 
 
 Between our back lawn and the vegetable garden, 
 and in one spot extending to the fence, there was a little 
 orchard of perhaps twenty or thirty trees of mixed 
 fruits. The grass had been allowed to grow where it 
 would, or the ground ran to weeds beneath the trees, 
 but peach-blossoms were scattering their petals im- 
 partially upon weeds and grass. Apple-blossoms were 
 at their best, smothering the low boughs with clusters 
 of beatific bloom ; we were embowered, cut off from 
 all but glimpses of the bamboo hedge massed in flick- 
 ering green against the dividing-fence it was planted 
 there to hide. In one spot it had been much trampled, 
 and behind this was the board in dispute. I had not 
 visited it often, but Hing reported that it was always 
 in place ; he complained no more of Mrs. Pettyjohn's 
 chickens in his lettuce-bed, and so I regarded the in- 
 cident (and the board) as closed. 
 
 That day under the apple-trees, I remember, I had 
 been reading "The Grandissimes," a book that must 
 
 140 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 have been written with tears and laughter. One can't 
 help wondering why the Creole families in New Or- 
 leans were not enchanted with their ancestors in its 
 pages? It seems they were not ! We like, I suppose, 
 to have our blood-relations taken more seriously them- 
 selves and some of their institutions not so seriously. 
 But how the author adored them personally, who 
 can help but see — and how adorable he has made 
 them I I had got to the ''Fete de Grandp^re," intri- 
 cate, delicious chapter, marvelously mixed, with cryptic 
 allusions no reader is expected to more than half un- 
 derstand ; but one saw the scene — the great " mother- 
 mansion'* of the Grandissimes, its belvedered roof 
 and immense, encircling verandas " where twenty 
 Creole girls could walk abreast." As I read I saw the 
 ** laughing squadron" wheel and disappear and re- 
 appear at an end of the veranda and challenge the 
 group of young male cousins smoking on the steps. 
 ... I was far away and spell-bound, when the con- 
 sciousness of a rather long silence where had been a 
 succession of happy sounds caused me to look up and 
 ask myself, " Where is Phoebe ? " She had been skip- 
 ping about under the transparencies of bloom that 
 softened but did not shade the sun upon her upraised 
 face and changing attitudes. How could I have buried 
 my head in a book instead of gazing at her? What 
 was there in Louisiana gardens lovelier than that pic- 
 ture which suddenly I missed. She was nowhere to 
 be seen. 
 
 I hunted high and low. My next thought, after 
 rushing all over the place and asking every one I 
 
 141 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 met, was the fence. I went to the trampled spot — 
 the board had been pushed aside by some hand 
 stronger than a child's and left. I squeezed through 
 into Mrs. Pettyjohn's back premises, bare and broom- 
 swept and smelling of fowls. A poor place, neat with 
 that pathetic surface cleanness of her kind that pro- 
 tests so much, but by the odors cannot go very deep. 
 Phoebe was there, face to face with a big girl of nine 
 or ten who had taken off the coral chain and put it 
 around her own neck and was lipping it to feel its 
 smoothness. Seeing me, she hastily undid the neck- 
 lace and endeavored to restore it, but having trouble 
 with the clasp, fumbling under Phoebe's long hair, 
 she let it fall and ran into the house where I could 
 hear women's voices in a gale of conversation. 
 
 It was a wretched incident. I washed Phoebe's 
 neck and the chain in alcohol and tried to con- 
 trol my imagination. But Mrs. Lavinus, when we 
 sat together at tea that evening, gave me the final 
 stroke ! 
 
 She was not nearly so unpleasant to sit beside, 
 since the doctor had lambasted her. She took a cer- 
 tain pride in her enforced regeneration ; her daily 
 bath and clean apron and twice-a-week clean dress 
 set her up in her own regard. Being now ranged 
 with the sheep, she looked with corresponding sus- 
 picion upon her former goatish companions. 
 
 " I see that Briggs girl going in with her mother 
 to Mrs. Pettyjohn's this afternoon. I 'd like to hear 
 what Doc Davenport would say to that ! She was 
 took out of school for scarlet fever 't wa.'n't three 
 
 142 
 
AUNT EDITH 
 
 weeks ago and I know it. If there 's anything in this 
 six- weeks' quarantine idee, whether it 's a Hght case 
 or a hard one, some one 's in for a dose of it, the way 
 that young one 's let to run. Don't you say nothin' 
 — I would n't want it to come from me. But I seen 
 her all right." 
 
 I read no more **Grandissimes." The sight of that 
 old green cloth volume to this day gives me waves 
 of dim sickness of the soul. ... All we knew was 
 when to expect the blow if it came. The plan of the 
 house made it difficult to cut ourselves off from the 
 baby. It might have been managed, but who, under 
 these circumstances, could undertake to manage 
 Mrs. Lavinus. The doctor himself was afraid of her. 
 That old war-horse, snufBng the batde, might break 
 her bonds and go careering into the midst of our 
 quarantine. I became suddenly hysterical as we 
 talked of her. The doctor looked at me severely ; he 
 knew that if he sympathized, I should have to leave 
 the room. " You must get yourself in perfect con- 
 dition, you understand : if she 's taken, you '11 have to 
 go out there." 
 
 I asked where? 
 
 **To the place on the mesa," he said. 
 
 We could not wait for Mr. Maclay's return before 
 deciding what to do. His consent to what we decided 
 on must be taken for granted. The doctor said "we," 
 meaning himself. 
 
 " There is one thing that is n't going to be taken 
 for granted : that 's my nursing Phoebe," I said. " If 
 her father is willing to trust me — after what has 
 
 143 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 happened, then your orders stand, in my case — not 
 otherwise I " 
 
 "You exaggerate, you know," said the doctor. 
 " But that 's natural. Keep yourself in condition all 
 the same. Careful of your diet, and very careful of 
 hers. And don't worry." 
 
 He rode out to the Doldrums and inspected the 
 premises, talked over Mrs. Aden, the care-taker's 
 wife, into cooperating with her cooking, and gave 
 orders how our scarlet-fever camp was to be organ- 
 ized when the blow struck (if it did), with help from 
 the Adens that should not endanger their own chil- 
 dren. This was a good deal to do, but all had been 
 arranged when, in the very nick, Phoebe's father 
 came home. I saw him tested then — through and 
 through, I should call it. 
 
 I don't think he made a single comment in words 
 upon my bitter confession. We stood by Phoebe's 
 bed (and the blow had struck). Her face was darkly 
 flushed and the delicate little throat I had adorned 
 so fondly showed the ugly marks of the Fear that 
 had crept in under my slack guard. His answer was 
 to give me the higher, the supreme trust — the fight 
 out there alone for the life of his child. Yes ; he made 
 one other sign. He dropped the " Miss Bonham " and 
 called me ** Edith " as if he had done so all his life. 
 That somehow sealed the terms on which we entered 
 into this new and fearful test of amateur efficiency. I 
 told him, of course, that I had never nursed anything 
 more serious than the common cold of New York 
 winters and the common sick-headache in my life. 
 
PART III 
 
 THE WATCH ON THE MESA 
 
XV 
 
 The water of the Boise River was being fought for 
 in those days by irrigation companies little and big. 
 Some were dying, some were dead, some were sleep- 
 ing like the Eastern canal company Nanny had told 
 me of, and some were crawling along as usual — these 
 were the pioneer ditches of local ownership that could 
 use but little water here below, but wanted that little 
 very much to themselves. Few of the old settlers be- 
 lieved in the engineering talk of reservoirs in the hills 
 to store the river's fitful surplus — not believing it, 
 they knew there was n't enough water to go 'round, 
 at the rate the big corporations were laying out their 
 long-line canals with thousands of acres under them. 
 And they were not friendly to the Easterners in a 
 business way, though good-natured enough as man 
 to man. Maclay was a mining-man and one of the 
 sufferers by the break-down of the ** Big Ditch," as 
 it was called. He was if anything more popular per- 
 sonally for his losses, though losses on such a scale 
 give a man away pretty badly as to his judgment. 
 The misfortunes of our neighbors are nothing against 
 them, if they don't explain too much. Maclay did 
 not explain. 
 
 Douglas, as I was trying now to call him, sat in 
 front with Aden ; we were driving out to the mesa, 
 
 147 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 crossing the wooden bridge from town to the desert 
 valley beyond the strip of ranch-land under the old 
 ditch east of the river. It was a heavenly morn- 
 ing, the river in flood booming along under the 
 bridge. All the little fields we were leaving behind 
 us were a mist of green and patched with crops just 
 springing. The doctor had said that with so much 
 fever as Phoebe had she could not take cold, but we 
 had the window up between us, the pariahs on the 
 back seat, and those who were responsible to the 
 human family at large. Our side-windows were down, 
 and as the breeze fluttered through intermittently, I 
 caught a word or two from the front seat. Such queer, 
 matter-of-fact remarks, between the two men ; Aden 
 risking his children on our good faith, Douglas tak- 
 ing his child out — and how should we bring her 
 back again I They spoke of the old carriage, how 
 it held its own after the years in the hayless barn at 
 the Doldrums (since the establishment begun in 
 hope had declined to the uses of waiting without 
 hope). Aden said he used canned milk in his family, 
 but we could get milk and ice from a dairy-ranch, 
 and he pointed it out with his whip as we passed it. 
 He was an Englishman of the plain people and no 
 one was quite sure whether his name was Aden or 
 Hayden, but it did n't matter : he was keeping his 
 provisional word to the doctor and was even cheer- 
 ful about it. He told Douglas that his wife was n't 
 scared. She had a doctor's book which said just the 
 same as Dr. Davenport did about giving the fever. 
 As far as they had read up in the book, the doctor 
 
 148 
 
THE WATCH ON THE MESA 
 
 seemed to be about right. We ^d all do our best and 
 obey orders, and if anything happened, we 'd have 
 to take it as it come — implying that the ways of 
 Providence are not writ in any book that man has 
 learned to read. 
 
 We were in the very heart of the morning light, 
 moving swiftly across the gray-green plain. The line 
 of the mesa-lands, low at first with mountains snow- 
 capped above it, now rose brown and bare (where 
 ploughed ground had gone back to desert) close ahead 
 and cut off the mountains. Also a windmill strode up 
 against the sky. We drove in through a gate that 
 stood open and I saw the long sweep on and up the 
 bluff of two lines of skeleton poplars — those that had 
 leafed out and died ** when the May winds began to 
 blow." The May wind was blowing now, but there 
 was nothing more left that could die — unless I held 
 it here in my arms. I choked as I heard that wind, 
 the same that had haunted the silences coming across 
 on the Oregon Short Line. Thrills of excitement 
 shuddered inside me. This was my first stark responsi- 
 bility for life and death, and one mistake, one slip of 
 mine, one moment's forgetfulness, might ruin all the 
 others' work and lose the battle. The fear of it almost 
 stopped my breathing as we came in sight of the 
 house on our slow climb, and drew up in front of a 
 long, empty veranda opposite a door wide open into 
 a room bare and full of light. 
 
 We went inside, and when I saw the clean, lifeless 
 rooms smiling in the morning sunshine that flooded 
 them through curtainless windows, I thought of the 
 
 149 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 smiling dead alone with their mysterious dreams. 
 The gentle ghosts of that house gathered in the empti- 
 ness, the wide, cool, peaceful rooms received their 
 child. Little Phoebe stretched herself out on her moth- 
 er's bed, turned easily on one side and slid into the 
 half-delirious sleep of fever. We watched her a few 
 moments and went softly outside for our first consul- 
 tation. 
 
 It began with a man's notebook always handy, a 
 bent head listening, and things, things! I knew a 
 little what was before us, and all the way out I had 
 been trying to remember not to forget — things I 
 might need in the middle of the night three miles 
 from town. 
 
 The house was the first sketch of a home. There 
 was a very definite plan, but no architecture. It lay 
 out on that long shelf of land, the main rooms facing 
 the view, like dominoes placed endwise. The wing 
 which the Adens occupied made an L at the back, 
 and what plumbing there was, all the living conven- 
 iences, were with them. I had the big fireplace in the 
 sitting-room, the chimney going up outside against 
 the gable, and the two piazzas that made our halls of 
 communication and gave us a few feet of shade. Noth- 
 ing rose above the level of the mesa except the chim- 
 ney, one or two stovepipes for the kitchen and the 
 mighty windmill farther down the bluff, where it nar- 
 rowed and fell away like a cape into the sea of plain. 
 Grass and weeds and dead little poplars all seemed 
 desiccated in the sun and wind. And there was com- 
 plete silence save our own sounds about the empty 
 
 150 
 
THE WATCH ON THE MESA 
 
 house and the whir and clank of the windmill which 
 practically never ceased and so became one with the 
 wind which never ceased. Yes ; there were occasional 
 silences, when Aden unshipped the windmill in order 
 to climb the derrick and oil machinery up there seventy- 
 five feet from the ground. Then we heard the wind 
 alone. 
 
 Our first precaution for the Adens took the form 
 of a rope stretched across the front veranda part-way 
 down ; it was a little better than an imaginary line 
 dividing the clean from the unclean, to put it strongly. 
 On their side of that rope I never set foot nor they 
 on mine. My supplies of all sorts, ice and milk, fresh 
 water, clean clothes which Aden brought from town, 
 everything went over or under that rope. Mrs. Aden 
 slid her trays with my meals and the fever-diet under, 
 and tapped with a cane on the wall. When I sent 
 them back disinfected, I rang a little bell, which I 
 used like a leper when I went out of bounds. In a 
 general way I was n't expected to be seen around the 
 back premises at all. I rang my bell also to summon 
 Aden, who was our expressman to town. Every article 
 we sent to the laundry had first to be soaked in dis- 
 infectants, and nobody could help me here. Well I 
 remember the clank of those granite-iron tubs which 
 I used to haul about and the weight of the sheets 
 dripping from their bath of stinging chemicals. They 
 were hung out on the back piazza facing the morning 
 sun; Aden took them in when they were dry. As 
 there were no pantries or storeroom in my part, I had 
 to invent places for keeping things near by and these 
 
 151 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 we racked our brains to defend from the pack-rat 
 who was always with us. I can't say I ever saw but 
 one of him at once, though legions seemed to besiege 
 the house at night, but that one I have heard drop on 
 the floor from scuttling along a wainscot-ledge with 
 a thump like a large cat. By the doctor's orders, as I 
 had never had the fever, my cot was in the outer 
 room with the door open into Phoebe's room, but 
 after chasing a pack-rat over the floors and over the 
 foot of her bed one moonlight night, my darling 
 screaming and cowering under the bedclothes, I 
 moved inside and told the doctor why. He smiled I 
 He was a sensible man — "Oh, well; you won't get 
 it,'' he prophesied. 
 
 He must have elaborated the details of our quaran- 
 tine with a fierce satisfaction. I can see now that he 
 carried it to the point of absurdity. One terrible mis- 
 take had visited this family under his care — he must 
 have set his teeth (those remarkably square, white, 
 efficient-looking implements) on the resolve that 
 there should be no nonsense now, and there was n't. 
 Or if there was nonsense in the right direction, what 
 blessed folly it was 1 We were the bond who alone are 
 free. Our bondage gave us the right to ask the Adens' 
 help with their own children as hostages. It gave 
 Douglas Maclay the right to visit us, under bonds, 
 each evening of our imprisonment, and those visits 
 after a while, when she was n't too sick to care, were 
 the best tonic his child could have had : whatever I 
 wanted her to do all day she did that papa at night 
 might know she had been "good." She cuddled 
 
 152 
 
THE WATCH ON THE MESA 
 
 down in the deep sleep of convalescence after the bliss 
 of his good-nights — and it was only a look, or looks 
 and words, across the barrier between them, for the 
 sake of little brother's safety at home. She well 
 understood the meaning of our bonds. But this was 
 long later. 
 
 First, were the tired evenings when we walked the 
 top of the bluff, he to windward of my blowing skirts, 
 and I gave him the day's report and he schemed to 
 my advantage, thinking of ways to save work inside. 
 He supplied me with duplicate trays and dishes that 
 I might take my own time over the disinfecting and 
 boil my water in the cool of the morning, since it 
 had to be done over an open fire. Kerosene stoves 
 were smelly things in those days, and the wonderful 
 nursing-conveniences that have come in with electric- 
 ity were unknown. (Besides, we had no electricity.) 
 
 I reck nothing of piling on details in this part of my 
 story. Those six weeks on the mesa were the most 
 searching experience of my life, and their conse- 
 quences spread over many years that followed. As the 
 mesa lay out there under the bare sky, so was I ex- 
 posed and sorted and winnowed and beat upon in the 
 glare of a mortal mistake crueler than many a crime. 
 And as the shadow of the mesa at sunrise and at 
 moonrise extended far across the valley, so over the 
 subsequent levels of my life the shadow of that six 
 weeks extended. Also the mesa joins on to a higher 
 plain of its own on which it appears to proceed in- 
 definitely till it reaches the sky ; but the main thing 
 about it to me then, was its isolation and elevation, in 
 
 153 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 a stripped, stern way, above the whole plain of my 
 former existence. 
 
 This is my apology, if apologies are needed, for 
 a Swiss Family Robinson sort of recital, and I pro- 
 ceed. I had not enough clothes suited to the work, 
 and through my masculine chain of communication 
 with town, — Douglas to order, Dick to buy, Aden to 
 fetch and carry, — a nurse's outfit was somehow pro- 
 vided. Plain short skirts and tailored blouses that 
 must have been chopped out by the million in Chicago 
 or New York, for the Western trade. But the touching 
 thing to me was they were all white ! With that high 
 and haughty disregard for wash-bills which only a man 
 can soar to, I was become a white nurse I Even the 
 doctor looked pleased. 
 
 Collars I forgot ; corsets likewise ; sleeves were 
 easily disposed of and had to be, as I was always 
 liable to be up to my elbows in something. Shoes, 
 as my feet gave out, were cast aside for a pair of 
 moccasins somebody dug up from somewhere — it 
 was Douglas who produced them from his pocket 
 one night and sniffed their odor apologetically be- 
 fore handing them to me. They smelled curiously of 
 a long life in the neighborhood of camp-fires and 
 dried fish. We had a sort of dump below the bluff, 
 — a scandal, of course, but we couldn't hide any- 
 thing, even our sins, in that place. I remember I sat 
 down at once and clothed my feet in those soft, 
 yielding treasures and flung my slippers with heels 
 clean over the edge. And Douglas approved the act 
 with a smile. 
 
 154 
 
THE WATCH ON THE MESA 
 
 And so all day and often half the night, I padded 
 about the floors of my hospital, floors that I cleaned 
 with my own hands. As I looked from room to room 
 I sighed to think how prisoned, ** cabined " Nanny 
 must have felt before she found these ample halls of 
 peace. She wanted only one thing — room, and he 
 gave it to her ; unadulterated space. 
 
 Silent, but not uncomprehending man ! Even in a 
 solitude like this she had dared to think of life with 
 him alone. Was there anything more to be said 
 about that marriage ! I at least thought not. He had 
 seen the one or two essentials as she saw them ; he 
 had known how to house her spirit living ; he had 
 known where to lay her body dead. I sheathed my 
 sword of battle with this man (it had sneaked back 
 some time before) — I took ofT my hat to him — 
 though it 's hardly the custom and I never wore a 
 hat out there. And I no longer pitied Nanny even 
 the long waiting and the dying crops ; and when all 
 was lost and abandoned and the dream was done, 
 there could have been no ignoble regrets. It was a 
 good dream and their arrangements with nature had 
 been sound ; only certain men did not keep their 
 word, or could not, with certain other men. I under- 
 stood the place was called ** Maclay's Folly." I could 
 not imagine that he would have cared what it was 
 called. 
 
 I don't know whether Captain Nashe had given 
 them to me or whether they came through my great 
 scare about Phoebe, but in the strong light I dressed 
 in every morning, I discovered my first gray hair — 
 
 155 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 several of them, in fact. They could n't conceal them- 
 selves, for my hair is absolutely black, — soot-black, 
 papa called it. He liked its smoky fineness and ab- 
 sence of gloss, and because it was crispy its whole 
 length, it was easy to pack into any shape he desired. 
 All studios are a stage, and in our day we have 
 played many parts, my hair and I and every out- 
 ward feature of me. I don't know what papa would 
 have done without drawable daughters. Essie was 
 the ballroom beauty, superb in evening dress : I had 
 less avoirdupois and less beauty except to the weird 
 eye of an artist, but papa thought he could do more 
 with me in expression. He liked what he called the 
 " sling " to my poses — I ** slang " myself about 
 those rooms to some purpose in those days. I used 
 to wish (with that curious feeling that it was a life- 
 time ago) that the dear man could have seen me as 
 I was now I He would n't have given a fig for his 
 Tahitian dancers if he could have drawn his own 
 daughter with her slop-pails. I was certainly as 
 brown as they. This hardened sort of self-conscious- 
 ness becomes second nature if one is brought up in 
 a studio. The outside of one is no more one's self 
 than the garments one poses in. I had personated, 
 off and on, most of the beautiful women in history, 
 or classic myth, or poetry, ancient and modern : I 
 had been Sister Helen, and Circe, and Isabella with 
 her Pot of Basil — not for papa I he smiled on literary 
 subjects as he did on illustration ; but he never spoiled 
 another child's game. One reason, I think, why he 
 could draw from me better than from Essie was a 
 
 156 
 
THE WATCH ON THE MESA 
 
 slight suspicion that Essie smiled on his game. Her 
 cool eye upon him when she posed for him, I could 
 see put him out. He was never so absorbed as to 
 lose his sensitiveness to the human eye, even the eye 
 of a daughter. As I say, I had begun to think of my 
 life in New York (not six months ago) as what old 
 people call the past. Long and forever past, it seemed 
 to me. I could afford to forgive its little grinds and 
 ironies. Never again should I be able to squabble 
 heartily even with Captain Nashe. I used to laugh 
 aloud sometimes, alone with these back thoughts, 
 with a sense of emancipation as by years or death. 
 
 I lived with the dead in those days, much more in 
 reality than with the living. This ought not to be 
 hard to explain, but I suppose it will be because my 
 life at this time was not normal. No nurse, for in- 
 stance, would understand its exaggerations of what 
 to the profession is all in the day's work. What I call 
 my toil out there, and the breathless, choking excite- 
 ment of the first ten days when the case was acute, 
 no white-gowned nurse, nor blue-gowned either, 
 would understand, unless she were to go back to the 
 beginning of her training. It was the beginning of 
 my training in several ways. 
 
 Following this, with my child's convalescence, 
 came the blissful reaction when I felt like the bride 
 of joy. And with it a sense of immense floods of 
 time, hours for thinking. I could lie awake nights 
 for the pure pleasure of my thoughts. I had sleep 
 ** to burn." If everything was dead outside, and the 
 house inside despoiled by absence of pictures, books, 
 
 157 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 all signs of Nanny's life and presence there, it still 
 was alive to me with memories — I dwelt in a mem- 
 ory-garden of my own ; and distinctly I felt at times 
 that she was there with me. How else, I asked my- 
 self, had I done this which seemed a miracle? My 
 patient had developed none of the sequelce Dr. Daven- 
 port had threatened me with. We had no sequel to 
 the inflammation that we fought in her little swollen 
 throat. Nothing went wrong ; my own strength held 
 out — it positively increased. Day by day I spent it 
 as it was given, night after night I lay down aching 
 in every muscle with the delicious pain of relaxation. 
 And I did not catch the fever. I could n't, with Nanny 
 on my side with the angels. Now I understood why 
 nuns fret not at their narrow cells, why convent-life 
 may give wings to the spirit : not without help, I 
 thought, from the spirits of the blest. That help I 
 felt sure I had. In short, I became a mystic and tem- 
 porarily insane. 
 
 But, eveiiing after evening, I walked the bluff-path 
 that we had made ourselves, with Douglas at my side, 
 not near me, and we talked a divine sort of common 
 sense. I did not betray myself to him — my strange 
 infatuation with my bonds : the long days when 
 hardly a word was said to me or an eye looked at 
 me but my child's watching me from her bed. Not 
 as she had watched me at first when I laid hands on 
 her life, but as I knew she had regarded her own 
 mother, taking her as much a matter of course as the 
 glass of water on her table or the march of sunbeams 
 on the wall. When I went forth to empty my pails 
 
 158 
 
THE WATCH ON THE MESA 
 
 off the edge of the bluff, every being kept away. 
 Alone I could stand and open my chest with great 
 breaths of that air, and clasp my hands behind my head 
 and look up deep into the amazing sky I Early morn- 
 ing, and evening after Douglas went away, I chose 
 my time. Each morning the mountains were there 
 inconceivably the same. The Owyhees swung down 
 along the southern sky and where they approached 
 the Boise Mountains with their near foothills, there 
 was a break and through it one looked far off into the 
 Powder River country and saw the Blue Mountains 
 of Oregon. As I knew very little Western geogra- 
 phy these names were as new to me as names in a 
 fairy-tale. All fairy-tales — except one — were tame to 
 this. " And the evening and the morning were the sixth 
 day," I used to say to myself aloud. I fancied I knew 
 why evening came before morning in that stupen- 
 dous record. Night is the constructive time when 
 miracles are to be wrought ; night for the mind and 
 spirit, day for the body and will. 
 
XVI 
 
 We were nearing the close of the fifth week, our 
 patient well advanced in the last stage called desqua- 
 mation. The end was in sight, but Dr. Davenport 
 took care I should go in fear of that end. In a few of 
 his snapped-off sentences he taught me what break- 
 ing up quarantine means according to rules. The rules 
 were pure technique; mechanical, he said, but the 
 mechanism in this case was me. He frowned above 
 his kind, tired eyes while he gave me a few par- 
 ticulars. Caulking doors and windows, narrowing 
 my line of retreat until a hair perhaps divides the 
 False and True — after the work inside was done, my 
 patient purified and sent forth into Mrs. Aden's arms, 
 my own caste restored standing on my island of 
 sterilization — no part of me thereafter must come in 
 contact with any part of the infected rooms except 
 the soles of the slippers I stood in (as I had n't 
 wings), which must be cast from the feet that wore 
 them back into the room I was leaving, and the knob 
 of the door I closed on my vile past must be clean 
 — medically clean — before I touched it with my 
 regenerated hand I It was like " the backward mut- 
 terings of dissevering power." 
 
 ** You light your sulphur fires the last thing, you 
 know. Be sure they are smoking well before you 
 
 i6o 
 
THE WATCH ON THE MESA 
 
 leave them. Each pan must stand on bricks or a 
 piece of zinc, or you '11 set fire to the house." 
 
 "And then do I * walk backward with rod re- 
 versed ' ?" I asked, to see the doctor regard me with 
 professional suspicion as to my wits in this warm 
 weather : however, he had gathered that my words 
 were as chaff to the few grains of sense he could de- 
 pend on in carrying out his orders. 
 
 I saw very clearly that I should be near collapse 
 before my spells were done in those air-tight rooms 
 after a scalding-hot bath and washing my hair. The 
 doctor spoke of that incidentally; I wondered how 
 he would like to wash his hair if he had a yard of it, 
 with the temperature at 104°. 
 
 I listened with gibes on the tip of my tongue, but 
 there was no frivolity in my soul. I made a list of 
 each thing I was required to do and the order in which 
 it must be done^ that no back step should be taken, no 
 step aside, no instant's forgetfulness — sudden mania 
 I could not guard against. I began to fear something 
 might crack in my brain at the last and ruin all. So, 
 in these days, my heart began again that heavy beat- 
 ing that had made it difficult to swallow food all the 
 first week out there, for I knew that for the *' little 
 son " Douglas now talked of so often, my last day 
 would be the critical one. 
 
 When I spoke to him that evening of my lesson, 
 he remarked, '* Nice cheerful companion, that doctor 
 of yours. Almost as pleasant as a hangman." 
 
 " I hang on his words ! " I said. " He 's the only 
 man I ever obeyed absolutely without question. 
 
 161 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 Hence, according to the popular ideas about women," 
 — I hadn't thought ahead in this sentence, and 
 Douglas looked at me as if he scarcely cared for my 
 jokes about our little doctor — literal-minded man I 
 Two literal-minded men! Never had I spent six 
 weeks with such a pair. I plunged into metaphor — 
 sacrilegious metaphor — to hide my confusion. 
 
 "'When this corruption puts on incorruption,' " 
 had fresh meaning for me now, I said, and oh, that 
 it were possible while still in the flesh we can't escape 
 from, that we might be immune forever from one or 
 two other things — 1 
 
 *' From what?" said he. 
 
 " * From too much love of living* " — I don't know 
 that he knew I was only quoting — " 'from hope and 
 fear set free.' " I heard his long, deep breathing like 
 a sigh of some inevitable tide. It was a long time 
 since I had said anything wantonly like this to hurt 
 him, because we had talked of those blessed common 
 things. I had grown sick of other kinds of talk — 
 extremely sick of my own last words. 
 
 But all these slips of the tongue were part of the 
 fiendish way in which, from the ambush of our very 
 security and triumph, what we call inanimate nature 
 suddenly sprang upon us and made our last days 
 hideous. Every day a wind arose — quite usual, Aden 
 said, at this season. It came from somewhere east of 
 us as from a furnace-mouth wide as the horizon ; it 
 made its own atmosphere, thick and yellow ; it burned 
 the back lands to cinders and ashes and scooped them 
 up by the acre and flapped them over us, sweeping 
 
 162 
 
THE WATCH ON THE MESA 
 
 the mesa in its path and blotting out the valley. We 
 tore from room to room shutting doors and windows 
 ahead of it, but it descended on us like the vomit of 
 a volcano. The air smelled of it, our food tasted of 
 it, its scum was on our water-pails and lined our wash- 
 basins ; our hands were gritty and our clothes not nice 
 to touch. Mrs. Aden came and wailed to me across 
 our rope of the state her part of the house was in, and 
 I wailed back of mine. The piazza-floor under our feet 
 bore out the tale ; it was white as a sea-beach. Phoebe 
 wandered from room to room, overheated in the close- 
 ness and tired of all her games. I felt like rending 
 my garments and casting ashes (but that was n't 
 necessary) on my head. 
 
 Perhaps an hour it lasted 1 Its recurrences were the 
 burden, and its results in extra cleaning at trying 
 hours. Each day when the Voice said, ** Peace, be 
 still ! " it slunk away or died somewhere in the desert. 
 Its demon-life was no more. At sunset fell silence ; 
 celestial colors bloomed along the yellow, bewitched 
 horizon, and after these faded slowly came the night. 
 We rose each morning made anew. 
 
 Phoebe's room was oddly, charmingly lighted by a 
 band of windows opening like transoms near the ceil- 
 ing; the rooms were high-studded — there was no 
 second-story. They opened above the piazza-roof into 
 clear sky. It put me in mind of the beautiful studio- 
 light at home. Sunbeams in the morning, moonbeams 
 at night marched along the walls. Phoebe caught the 
 sunbeams in a hand-mirror, sitting up in bed, and 
 scattered bits of rainbows about the room like flowers 
 
 163 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 from the skirts of Iris. All the goddesses of the morn- 
 ing- were with us when we woke, and one immortal 
 spirit was with us all the night. ... I used to whis- 
 per it to myself, her little common name — ** Nanny, 
 Nanny!" — such a homely little name for one who 
 now inhabited ** the lordly halls of death." 
 
 That they were suffering in town, too, I judged by 
 Douglas's appearance when he came out to see us, 
 and by the way he stretched himself full-length on the 
 bluff and welcomed what to him must have seemed 
 our peace and cool immunity. I did not say too much 
 about the wind — it was our last week ; Nanny must 
 have endured it when it was much worse, with fresh- 
 ploughed ground for half a square mile around her. 
 He brought the mail, and flowers that had wilted 
 against his horse's neck. And he looked wilted and 
 spent himself, when he flung off his spurs and carried 
 my druggist-parcels extracted from saddle-bags and 
 coat-pockets, and spread them out on the veranda- 
 parapet to amuse Phcebe. It was broad enough for 
 her to squat on it Turkish-fashion and play store, with 
 her customer lounging and smoking outside at a 
 smiling distance; also very Oriental. No purchase 
 was ever effected between the two ; there was endless 
 chaffering, but everything remained in stock, and 
 bedtime closed the bazaar. Phcebe was a little lady 
 about bedtime. She was not greedy with her cup of 
 pleasure — reluctantly she set it down undrained ; 
 another night, another taste. On the threshold she 
 would look back and kiss her fingers to him, little 
 fatal fingers! She was fair with her new skin and 
 
 164 
 
THE WATCH ON THE MESA 
 
 the bloom of a child's marvelous recuperation — so 
 lovely and so unsafe I 
 
 •' ' Rappaccini's daughter,' " I whispered to him one 
 night. He smiled — he did n't know the lady nor pre- 
 tend to. I owed him constant apologies for my lan- 
 guage of old quotes. Like a camel far from water- 
 pools, I was forced to subsist on such refreshment as 
 my brain-system had stored. He grudged me noth- 
 ing, neither did I apologize. 
 
 One day — it was Saturday, I remember — the 
 Adens went to town taking their two children and 
 leaving a big clod of a boy from the milk-ranch to an- 
 swer my bell. That day I had a special but not divine 
 visitation, unless it was one of Wrath. I rang and rang 
 the bell when I saw it coming — no one answered. 
 Clouds of winged ants (I did not know them from the 
 plagues of Egypt I) bore down on us from the north. 
 Our chimney was their port of call, it seems, but how 
 should one know it was only a call ? The top of the 
 chimney soon was black, or red, with them, embossed 
 as with moss or ivy. Bunches of them broke off in- 
 side and fell down on the hearth and burst, as it 
 were a bomb, into myriads of the little red mites 
 that swarmed up the walls and furniture and over 
 the floors and over me. I ought to have had a hun- 
 dred brooms and fifty pairs of hands — I had only one, 
 but I lighted a great fire and swept ants into it, as 
 Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. Aleshine swept their way o'er 
 the deep to save themselves from drowning. I did 
 not, like them, fear sharks — but, as I say, the crea- 
 tures were all over me 1 I nearly burst my heart in that 
 
 165 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 red-hot Armageddon when the tribes of ants came up 
 against the power of my broom. I dealt with them 
 as Jehovah and I felt the peace of divine vengeance 
 after wiping out a few millions of them (as I hoped), 
 those misbelievers in their right to roost on my 
 chimney ! 
 
 This tale I told to Douglas as we sat on the edge 
 of the bluff that evening. I had expected him to be 
 amused, but his mirth exceeded the demand. It struck 
 me as inordinate. He rocked himself and lay back on 
 the bluff and rolled with laughter. It was ridiculous, 
 in the face of darkness where we sat. I had never seen 
 him in a paroxysm, of laughter, or of anything be- 
 fore. I was annoyed with him. Presently he sat up 
 and said, in the language of the country : " It 's not 
 what they eat up, it's what they tramp down 1 " 
 
 I did n't know that he was quoting, and I did n't 
 think it very funny (and don't now) — but that was 
 the way we talked — only half understanding each 
 other in words, but with a very good understanding 
 somehow underneath. 
 
 Then, seriously, but with amusement still twitching 
 the corners of his mustache, he told me in effect what 
 a goose I was. Winged ants, like other winged things, 
 have their appointed way, and are no more to be 
 turned aside from it than crawling ants. They 
 had n't wanted to fall down my chimney ; merely that 
 rock in the midst of the sky was n't big enough to 
 hold them all. If I had simply gone out of the room 
 and left the veranda-door open, by the cool of day 
 they would all have vanished. 
 
 1 66 
 
THE WATCH ON THE MESA 
 
 As the moon rose later and later, he stayed later to 
 get her light riding back to town. He would question 
 me from time to time : " You must be tired ? Won't 
 you go in when you are ready ? I should like to spend 
 the night out here on the ground if I could I My 
 room in town is Gehenna." He was still at the stage- 
 hotel. 
 
 I praised in this connection the plan of our bed- 
 room windows which spared us the afternoon sun. 
 ** We bless you every night," I said. 
 
 " It was n't my plan." 
 
 We were both silent for a long while (it was Nan- 
 ny's plan he must have meant). The arm that lay 
 across his chest went back on the ground like a flail. 
 He turned on his side away from me. Very slowly 
 the light of the full moon began to show in the dis- 
 tant valley beyond the shadow of our hill. It touched 
 first a pennon of dust from some late freighter crawl- 
 ing in to Boise. 
 
 " By the way," he sat up suddenly, digging his 
 boot-heels into the ground and leaning his arms on 
 his knees. " Grant would like to come out to see 
 you. He 's been hinting for some time, but I keep 
 forgetting to ask you. Would you like to see 
 him?" 
 
 " I shall see him next Sunday, I suppose," said I. 
 
 ** No ; he '11 be up at the mine. If you wish, I '11 
 tell him to come out some day early next week. Is 
 that right ? " 
 
 " Yes. But let him know the rules. Hailing dis- 
 tance — tell him to * speak' us and the captain will 
 
 167 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 answer. * The bark Edith and Phoebe forty days out 
 from Boise, homeward bound.' " 
 
 Why did I say it ! He dropped his head an instant 
 in his hands — " homeward bound," to him ! But he 
 took it very gallantly with something about a long 
 voyage and a ** hot ship " for us, implying we had 
 suffered on the trip. 
 
 " No," I disclaimed ; ** it has been a wonderful voy- 
 age — and if we have n't found the Happy Isles, / 've 
 found a better place, a sort of Soul's Rest. Have n't 
 I heard of a town out here by that name ? " 
 
 ** Not very near here, but the same sort of ' rest ' : 
 wind and sun and high dry plain." 
 
 "Well, I have found out here something that I 
 had almost lost — the * power to dream ' — to dream 
 of her." 
 
 ** Do you mean literally — to dream — ? " 
 
 ** No ; but I think Phcebe dreams of her and for- 
 gets and does n't know why she is so happy when 
 she wakes. If you don't mind, I 'd like to speak of 
 her, just once?" 
 
 " It would be strange if I should mind your speak- 
 ing." 
 
 " I have always been able to see her very clearly ; 
 I suppose it is what is called visual memory. But I 
 lost her somehow in Boise. On the little poplar- 
 walk, sometimes, I could see her — but out here it 
 all came back. I have a garden of memories planted 
 on this hill — every flower a thought of her. Flowers 
 like that don't grow in crowded soil — they need 
 solitude and concentration with the one idea. Then 
 
 i68 
 
THE WATCH ON THE MESA 
 
 it becomes more than a dream ; it is vision I And 
 you — I have felt, believe me — what this place must 
 mean to you I I am careless sometimes in my words ; 
 perhaps because I am so sure you must know that I 
 know I I have taken you into my garden, just as it 
 might have been with us three if — if — I " I rose and 
 he was on his feet too, and without thinking he 
 started to offer me his hand. Then, of course, I drew 
 back and he remembered — 
 
 "Keep me in that garden," he said. "And if you 
 lose her again we'll come out here for — our souls' 
 rest." 
 
 This was my last night of happy thoughts on the 
 mesa. Of course it is no way to tell a story — in 
 dark hints, and very likely the wise reader has 
 guessed already what was coming. But I was far from 
 that sort of wisdom — any approach to it in my 
 thoughts would have been an inconceivable insult 
 to the man and to myself. I can never be too thank- 
 ful that I was not wise — was in no respect on my 
 guard ; that the shock when it came found me just 
 as helpless and left me just as crazed : as a bird that 
 has chosen a safe crotch for her nest hid in the heart 
 of the tree, and has spent days adding a straw or a 
 feather or any bit of another's waste that is precious 
 to her that can use it, and gone on happily weaving 
 her nest and filling it with dreams, fears nothing in 
 the future, sees no warning in the sky, before the 
 wind comes that tears the nest from the tree and 
 strews her hopes broadcast on the ground. She too 
 is crazed with her loss — hopeless where or how to 
 
 169 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 begin her life anew. She circles with cries about the 
 place of her life's tragedy. What matter to her if the 
 wind that bloweth where it listeth knew not of her 
 nest — nor understood the ruin that was left in its 
 path. 
 
 I was extraordinarily happy that night — so happy 
 I could n't stay in bed. When the moon had crossed 
 the zenith to the side towards the valley and her 
 light came in through the high west windows and 
 struck upon the wall above Phoebe's bed, I took a 
 blanket and stole out of the door onto the back ve- 
 randa. The Adens* wing shut in that end near the 
 door. Out at the far end towards the north one saw 
 dim hills where the canal-line cut its way through, 
 making a white gash. Eastward the plain that joins 
 the mesa went back in desert land or ploughed land 
 returned to desert ; at night the mountain-line with- 
 drew, the whole earth disappeared as it were and the 
 sky was paramount. Stars, millions of stars, and the 
 great soaring path of the Milky Way amazingly white 
 and sown with sparks of light defying the moon. 
 The wind blew soft and steady ; I heard the prosper- 
 ous tune of the windmill go on and on, but I could 
 not see its bulk against the sky ; it was too far down 
 the bluff behind the house-wing. Only the five dead 
 poplars, which must have been quite trees when they 
 were planted, whisked about in the night-gale like 
 witches' brooms. It was n't beauty — it was a lofty 
 loneliness that resembles the sea, far inland as we 
 were. I began to feel how people who have lived in 
 such places can never go back to the old values of 
 
 170 
 
THE WATCH ON THE MESA 
 
 life in villages and towns ; they must forever be the 
 *' gypsy-souls," homeless in the paths of men. . . . 
 But I was no longer homeless ; and by the blessing of 
 God I had earned my home. All would be well when 
 we w^ent back to the house in Boise : no more explana- 
 tions for conscience (or vanity) to make and for pride 
 to withhold. My paymaster was a man of good coun- 
 sel and a friend. Phoebe was now the child of my 
 arms as well as of my duty and my will. She had 
 found her own way to those arms when she needed 
 them. 
 
 She had asked me those questions — about her 
 mother — which the daughter of a skeptic dared not 
 answer. I had given her allegories, fairy-tales, verses 
 from the PsalmS. She was not satisfied. The little 
 lonely soul retreated within itself and answered its 
 own questions. But when she was able to sit up 
 and be dressed, yet her strength not returned, she 
 would get into my lap, we would hug up to each 
 other, she would find a place for her head, and her 
 long legs would dangle, but we were most, most 
 content I We rocked and told stories and sang 
 scraps of old songs and said bits of poetry, and one 
 day I repeated to her : — 
 
 " Motherless baby, babyless mother, 
 Bring them together to love one another." 
 
 Her arms clasped me closer with a slight shudder : 
 she was a child of a remarkable precocity of feeling. 
 "Say it again I "... I said it again and many times 
 over, and it became a charm to rest on in the face of 
 
 what I learned must have been the ancient, nameless 
 
 171 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 dread after the child of mortality has heard of that 
 thing called death. 
 
 ''You won't go too?" she asked me. "Please, 
 don't go I" 
 
 "I won't go — ever, so long as you want me, 
 dear." 
 
 "But I do want you. I don't want that — to hap- 
 pen to you that happened to mamma." 
 
 " It won't happen to me, and I shall not go away." 
 
 We kissed on that promise, pariahs as we knew 
 ourselves, dangerous to the rest of the world, but safe 
 in each other's arms. Next morning she smiled across 
 the beds at me : — " * Babyless mother 1 ' here 's your 
 baby I " Was it any wonder I felt that I should leave 
 the mesa richer than I came ? 
 
XVII 
 
 Next day was Sunday and we made a special toilet 
 for papa. Often on Sundays he would come early and 
 loaf about the veranda half the day, making rude 
 toys we could burn when we left the mesa, fixing up 
 little conveniences for our routine : he made a bed- 
 tray for Phoebe's breakfasts ; he made her a stool to 
 carry here and there, as we were short of chairs and 
 those we had were heavy ; he made a paper windmill 
 that stood in the window-casing and "talked" to us, 
 as she said. It fluttered and talked all day, but papa 
 did not come. Towards evening the watch became 
 acute ; like persons adrift on a bit of wreck searching 
 the horizon for a sail — such hunger I read in the 
 eyes of Douglas's child. Every spurt of dust that 
 moved across the plain we thought might be his horse 
 galloping towards us from the river ; it always turned 
 north long before it reached our shelf of land. Had it 
 been his it would have gone out of sight for a few 
 moments and we should have heard the clink of hoofs 
 and great hot strides before it reappeared, first a horse's 
 head and then a rider topping the bluff, and the rider 
 would wave his hat and hail us with the shout Phoebe 
 loved. I can hear it as I write — but I shall not try to 
 reproduce it on this page ; it was a raucous, a primi- 
 tive call, a note for the open and the wild. But we 
 both loved it. 
 
 173 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 He did not come. Mrs. Aden had prepared him an 
 extra dinner and kept it waiting ; night closed over 
 us, moonless and the sky was fathom-deep in stars. 
 There were a few tears when bedtime came, — late 
 bedtime, — but my little girl was an angel of forgive- 
 ness. Papa *' could not help it " somehow, and of course 
 he had no means of sending word. 
 
 When he did come there was no call. I was 
 struck cold by that silence, even before I met his 
 changed expression. We were outside in the house- 
 light from a window that pierced the dusk, and he 
 handed me a telegram, his head uncovered, as we 
 stand mute in the presence of sorrow. He went away 
 then towards the stable and I waited a moment be- 
 fore opening my message. I knew it meant papa — 
 my father who wrote no letters, gave no sign, yet was 
 loved just the same. As Phoebe could forgive her one 
 day's disappointment, so the older child forgave a 
 whole lifetime of disappointments little and great in 
 the well-beloved, and knew that somehow " papa 
 could not help it." . . . He had died at Papeete and 
 been buried off-shore three miles from land, under the 
 flag of France, which he loved next to our own, and 
 in the sea that owns no flag. Papa always hated the 
 custom of moving the dead from place to place. Cap- 
 tain Nashe had cabled Essie, from whom my message 
 came ; she would send me the details when she had 
 them by letter, I wished that we might hear no more. 
 Buried in the seal Of course he would never be 
 buried ** plain." . . . But it shouldn't have been — 
 not for ten years more ; and I should have been be- 
 
 174 
 
THE WATCH ON THE MESA 
 
 side him, and those years might have made his fame. 
 It was unforgivable of fate to cut us apart in this 
 senseless fashion. And it is not the prematureness 
 alone that hurts ; it is the manner also. We demand 
 that the greatest thing that can happen to us should be 
 done, not dramatically, but decently and in order. One 
 may live picturesquely, but death is an old institution. 
 I knew it must be now in the newspapers with 
 smiles going round, sad smiles among his friends 
 at his incorrigible quaintness. Ah, well; I had no 
 tears I I wandered off and sat down — lay down — 
 on the dry hill and ached with it. The ground held 
 the long day's heat ; it comforted one like the heart 
 of mother earth. As it happened I was dead tired 
 that day — for no reason unless it were watching a 
 child's eyes grow tired with waiting, and the adorable 
 patience with which she controlled her tears. I had 
 wondered what she would do when her father, whom 
 she had grown so to depend on, went back to his 
 mines again. I drifted away from my own instant 
 grief — it would last : there was no need to press the 
 realization. I could almost have fallen asleep as I lay 
 there, with sorrow for my pillow, worn out with the 
 pain of an old regret that washed back and over me 
 and drowned even the pang of this final loss, the end 
 of all regrets. And then, hearing Douglas's step, I 
 roused myself to meet his sympathy. He had taken 
 the telegram and of course he knew. 
 
 He came and sat down beside me, a little nearer 
 than the terms of quarantine allowed. I knew that he 
 
 1/5 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 was looking at me, but I did not wish to speak nor to 
 hear him speak of my loss. He would think of it as 
 grief pure and simple ; it was less, yet much more than 
 that. And then he said something, and the words at 
 first conveyed not the slightest meaning, unless the 
 shock of what directly followed those first words struck 
 back and for the moment numbed my understanding. 
 
 This was what he said : " Edith, I wish you would 
 let me take your hand. I must have a serious talk 
 with you — even to-night ! It is a great intrusion, and 
 it is very difficult to — to say. It would help me, that 
 sign of your trust — that I must count on if I am to 
 go on. Will you give it to me?" He Held out his 
 hand. 
 
 I was so astounded that I thought I could n't have 
 heard him. But naturally I did not give him my hand. 
 It would have been more natural to have asked my- 
 self could he suddenly have gone out of his mind. 
 
 " You have trusted me in other things — I hope 
 you will trust me now." Here I turned and we faced 
 each other. Even in the dusk I saw his pallor, and 
 the strange, hurt smile with which he met my amaze- 
 ment. What in Heaven's name was coming 1 
 
 " We are going back next week and I wish you 
 would allow me to announce our engagement. We 
 cannot go on like this. You must come to me alto- 
 gether or you will be driven from me. And I need 
 you." 
 
 That was all — I felt as if stones out of the sky 
 were rattling on my head. If the whole hill that in- 
 stant had been swept away beneath us, the world 
 
 176 
 
THE WATCH ON THE MESA 
 
 could not have changed for me more than that speech 
 of his had changed it Earthquakes are easy to under- 
 stand. . . . I don't know what he saw — I hope he 
 saw something in my face that stopped him. We con- 
 tinued to look at each other. He drew in his breath, 
 and I could hardly gasp : — 
 
 ** Wait — till I think a moment." 
 
 He waited. I began to count, saying to myself 
 feebly, "How long is it? March, April, May, — we 
 have been out here six weeks. Is it even four months 1 
 Call it four — " Suddenly, as clear as print before 
 my eyes I saw the inscription I had been working on 
 those weeks he had been away; the letters I had 
 spaced and measured and traced in pencil and inked 
 in black — I had followed an old form of wording 
 used on the stones in the family graveyard at Lime 
 Point, names and dates going back to the early seven- 
 teen hundreds: — 
 
 Erected by Douglas Maclay 
 
 to the beloved memory of his wife 
 
 ANNE AYLESFORD 
 
 daughter of William and Phcebe Gurney Aylesford 
 
 born — 
 
 The drawing still was mine — I would burn it as 
 soon as we went back. Nameless be the grave of 
 Anne Aylesford, forgotten in four months I ... To 
 him I said — "Couldn't we put off this * announce- 
 ment' till we might at least call it a year ? A year is 
 common : plenty of men think a year is long enough 
 to wait. Did you think I would listen to you in less 
 than a year? Why, I must be rather easier than the 
 
 177 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 easiest!'* There was silence and I cried, "Do you 
 know what I mean? Do you understand anything!" 
 
 It was impossible all at once to grasp the full 
 measure and significance of this infamy. I trembled 
 with my own impotence to speak as it deserved. As 
 I turned it from side to side and its consequences 
 spread, blotting out every peaceful certainty, every 
 hope of that future I had counted on, I must have 
 raved ! 
 
 I remember pouring out things like this : " My 
 father, you know, is dead : that was your telegram 
 — it seems ten years ago, since what you said just 
 now. I believe you did say it? You asked me to 
 marry you — that was what you meant ? " He did 
 not undeceive me. ..." Nanny, Nanny I " I cried, 
 ** I shall never grieve for you again. Six years was 
 enough — she could n't have lived with you six 
 years without knowing what she had married. She 
 must have seen all around and through you and 
 known there was nothing there. She must have died 
 of that emptiness — before the accident of death. 
 Slow shock to her whole faith and being. And she 
 must have known that if she did die, if by any chance 
 she slipped out of life, that chance would be your 
 opportunity to show every one — to make hideously 
 public — the cheat her marriage was, the poor imi- 
 tation love you gave her. Thank Heaven, if this in- 
 sult must be hers, I am the woman who shares it ! 
 You might have spoken to some one who would miss 
 the whole meaning of it, or not try to make it plain 
 to you what she felt — she might not think you 
 
 178 
 
THE WATCH ON THE MESA 
 
 worth it I but only laugh at you as the world laughs 
 at widowers. I have laughed at them, but I don't 
 laugh at you. I know that you are well worthy of 
 my scorn I Because it is you, and because it was she, 
 and for that matter, because it is I, this thing is a 
 tragedy. We — the perfect Three I And what comes 
 next?" 
 
 I had paused, but he did not speak. Silence be- 
 tween us was unbearable ; it gave more chance for 
 thought to burn new places in one's consciousness. 
 
 '* You have cut the ground from under me ; you 
 have insulted what I came here to do ; you make it 
 dishonorable for me to stay — But I shall stay ! It 
 was my promise to Nanny, it is now my promise to 
 Phoebe. She loves me — she shall not be wrenched 
 from one to another as soon as her heart begins to 
 cling. Whatever you have said to me, whatever I 
 may have been that you should dare to think you 
 could say it, that does not touch her. I shall see to it 
 that it does not and you shall help me. I shall stay 
 for Nanny's child — even if I am in the position a 
 woman like Mrs. Lavinus thinks I am in, knowing 
 the world, and widowers ! " 
 
 He uttered one word — " God I " He got up and 
 went away — back on the hill, where I heard him 
 walking up and down, stumbling now and then. I 
 sat still and wandered and stumbled too in the dark 
 confusion of my thoughts. What was left I had 
 blindly hit upon : Phoebe was the sole ground be- 
 tween us now. It was sacred ground and we might 
 still (now that I was warned) keep it so. To remove 
 
 179 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 far from her consciousness this wreck we had made 
 of our part of the compact ; to find some basis on 
 which to communicate as to our duties to Nanny's 
 child, or my duties ; — that remained, and to keep 
 out of each other's lives henceforth. 
 
 As he approached within speaking distance I 
 looked around and summoned him. "Please come 
 back," I said. ** Sit down — I will be quiet. We have 
 things to talk about. We begin all over again now." 
 
 ** Then let me say one word I " he interrupted, and 
 I thought in his hawk-eye — the eye of a creature 
 mortally hurt, but full of scorn of pain, of death -— I 
 saw an indignation equal to my own ; also a man^s 
 human rage against a woman whose tirade he has 
 listened to until he could seize and choke her into 
 silence. 
 
 " This is not ^«ything you think it is I It is a blun- 
 der. You will hear no more of it. Dick will be out 
 at the end of the week to move you in — I shall be 
 up at the mines. After this I will do what I can for 
 you at long range ; Dick will be my substitute." 
 
 That would not do either, I said. Dick could not 
 be his substitute with Phoebe. I fairly beat the ground 
 in my despair. 
 
 " You cannot mean that you desert your child 1 
 She must see you. You don't know how she has 
 grown to depend on you. You must come as you 
 promised her, and I will keep out of the way. There 
 must be some working basis we can meet on — we 
 are not children to refuse to speak ! Men who dislike 
 and despise each other do business together for 
 
 1 80 
 
THE WATCH ON THE MESA 
 
 money reasons. With Phoebe for our reason I should 
 think we might do the same." 
 
 " But you are not a man, Edith. There is a side to 
 this question you do not understand, and I cannot 
 make you — nor will I try I " 
 
 " You thought it would be easier to marry me, I 
 suppose.'* No ; taunts would not do, and I must not 
 be cheap ; nor dared I antagonize him any further. 
 How terrible that I should rob my motherless Phoebe 
 of her father too, who was good enough for a child's 
 undiscerning love. Unhappy man, devoid of all the 
 heart's understanding I When one is civilized up to 
 a certain point, rage, even long-sustained reproach, 
 becomes habitually impossible. One has to learn to 
 hate and revile ^s one learns to love and forgive. I 
 looked at him — he was just the same, and I had 
 grown to care very much for his kind of looks ; his 
 features had pleased me as I came to know the ex- 
 pressions they were capable of. And there he was, 
 unaltered ! He looked as tired as I felt — as despair- 
 ing ; leaning forward, his arms on his knees, crum- 
 bling the dry grass in handfuls torn up from the 
 ground, milling it in his palms and sifting the dust 
 between them. The incredible things I had said to 
 him it hurt me to remember, though he were the 
 very Judas of friendship and good faith. 
 
 " I know," I said, relenting, " that we don't speak 
 the same language in some things, and I am willing 
 to own that I may have been morbid — perhaps 
 overstrained, out here alone ; but we ought to try to 
 understand why we have hurt each other so horribly. 
 
 i8i 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 I hate my own words ! May I show you my excuse 
 for them? — lay my reasons once before you, calmly, 
 reasonably — then we will agree to forget it. I seem 
 to be going mad when I think of what you have 
 said to me, but I am not mad. I cannot suppose 
 that you are — that you should call a thing like this 
 a * blunder.' I can't let it pass as merely that I Will 
 you listen ? — Let me convince you that I am not 
 mad, that what may be common in the world is not 
 common to every woman's thought." 
 j^ He listened as patiently as I could ask. 
 
 "First, there is my father's death — that has be- 
 come to me in the last half-hour like an old, accus- 
 tomed grief, because of this * blunder.' I do not 
 exaggerate — I cannot help stating it just so. Sor- 
 row is no longer a thing to complain of in a world 
 where a man like you can call — what you said to 
 me just now — a 'blunder.' Then, Nanny — that is 
 the same thing ; I am reconciled to her death. This 
 has done it. It seemed untimely, but she had got all 
 the happiness she ever could have had. Death at 
 any age is not untimely, when life is out of joint, 
 though it may look fair enough outside. You see, I 
 knew her, though I did not know you ! That seems 
 to cover the case so far. But now for you and me — 
 what we might have been to each other. Not the 
 perfect Three — that was denied us ; but we might 
 have been the perfect Two. We might have shown 
 what friendship can be between a man and a woman, 
 — young, free, respecting each other's freedom, do- 
 ing our work apart, with a sacred trust to share. It 
 
 182 
 
THE WATCH ON THE MESA 
 
 was a dream worth dreaming. All that goes into the 
 discard. . . . Then, closer to the soul of things as I 
 thought we both felt it, — do you remember how I 
 took you into my * garden ' ? (was it only last night I ) 
 and you said, ' Keep me in your garden,' and if I 
 lost my dreams again, my dreams of her, we would 
 come out here — for our * souls' rest' ... I hope 
 never to see this place again, — never to think of 
 the time that seemed so blessed I I thought myself 
 blest — safe, at least, from insult and desecration. 
 All that I see now in my garden is the man I took 
 in there and showed my secret paths and the places 
 of the spirit they led to ; and suddenly that man be- 
 came as one mad, and trod on all my flowers and 
 tore up my precious memories and trampled the 
 garden of my heart into one wild ruin and went out- 
 side and laughed I That is what you have done — 
 to her, to me, to us both, and to yourself as I thought 
 I knew you. Can you understand that when you 
 call a thing like this a * blunder ' you really drive me 
 mad!" 
 
 His chest lifted hard and slow. He got upon his 
 feet heavily like an old man. ..." And now," he 
 said, ** if this is reasoning together calmly, let us 
 calmly curse and swear I You have called me a four- 
 footed beast, and I feel as if a delicate fiend in hell 
 had been sorting me, with fine pincers. If you think 
 there 's any part of me you could have missed, go on 
 — don't spare me. I am the damned." 
 
 He stood a moment as if literally awaiting my 
 next experiment — he gave me plenty of time — and 
 
 183 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 then he walked away. After a silence that might 
 have been long or short — it was something of a 
 blank to me — I heard the clink of spurs and his 
 horse's shuffling tread following at a walk, then a 
 pause at the hitching-post. I could see him stroll on 
 a little way till he stood looking off where the road 
 drops down the bluff. It was a night clear, dark, 
 marvelous in stars. He looked up at those stars. 
 The moon was not yet risen. I shivered all over, 
 but I could not weep — not though I had slain a 
 human heart in the torment of my own. 
 
 His voice when he spoke was as quiet as the 
 night. " Forgive me : I had forgotten your tele- 
 gram. You would like to acknowledge it ? " 
 
 And I had forgotten that acknowledgment I It 
 would have to be dictated, and I could not frame the 
 words as he stood there waiting. He seemed to see 
 my difficulty. 
 
 " Give me your sister's address and let me send 
 your answer. She knows where you are, doesn't 
 she — how you are situated out here?" 
 
 I had written her once from the mesa. As my let- 
 ters had to be disinfected, I wrote but few and they 
 had all passed through his hands. " She will under- 
 stand," I said, and thanked him. 
 
 He paused. "You have some hard daj^'S before 
 you. Breaking up a quarantine is no easy job for 
 one woman alone. Grant will bring you out the 
 stufE you need for the last day ; have you got your 
 list ready?" 
 
 I said the doctor had it, the medical part "But" 
 184 
 
THE WATCH ON THE MESA 
 
 — I was forced to go on — " will you take down the 
 things we shall need to go back in, Phoebe and I ? 
 Mrs. Lavinus will get them ready." He stood there 
 and wrote to my dictation, in all the terrible inti- 
 macy of our estrangement, every personal article we 
 should need to wear : — I would sooner have gone 
 back wrapped in a blanket. The light of the window 
 where he stood writing showed the short hair blown 
 boyishly across his forehead, and his features drawn, 
 whitened, aged in an hour. 
 
 "You will remember — about Phoebe?" I said. 
 
 " I shall be apt to remember Phoebe — among 
 other things," he answered, without looking at me, 
 shoving his notebook in his pocket. 
 
 "But it's not remembering in the right way if you 
 don't come to see her. She has been promised," I 
 kept harping. " How can I explain your absence if 
 it goes on ? " 
 
 "Nothing can be explained," he said. "As for 
 what you expect of me, is n't it a little unreasonable ? 
 You cast me into the pit, then you tell me I must 
 come and play with Phoebe. . . . Dick will be out 
 to-morrow, if I can get hold of him. I shall not see 
 you probably for some time. Phoebe will not suffer ; 
 
 — she loves you now, as you say. She must learn 
 to do without what was her father." 
 
 It was a great surprise when he came again next 
 night. I wished, for Phoebe's sake, I could have 
 known that he was coming. There had been a sad 
 time over this second disappointment. She had cried 
 herself to sleep because I could make no promises for 
 
 185 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 the future either. She was quick to feel the change 
 in my own spirits which, for utter weariness, I could 
 not hide. 
 
 I don't know why he came so late and cheated 
 Phcebe, unless he dreaded another evening with me. 
 There must have been some strong practical reason 
 for his coming at all. 
 
 " Don't be afraid to speak to me : I 'm not a 
 man " — He addressed me in an offhand way — **I 'm 
 what 's left of a man who died here last night, by his 
 own hand." 
 
 I retorted hotly, " Considering what did happen 
 here last night, I should think we might use plain 
 English. Do we need metaphors?" 
 
 "I don't — this is your language I am trying to 
 talk." 
 
 I saw what had happened, for much the same thing 
 had happened to me. We had both said impossible 
 things and recoiled from them without being really 
 repentant. His wrath (and mine) had settled on its 
 lees. This was the clear wine of resentment iced with 
 sarcasm that he offered me. I did n't believe he was 
 the man to use sarcasm as a habit to a woman, a 
 child, a servant, or a dog, because none of us will 
 bear it. He used it only to finish all chance of natural 
 words between us in the forthcoming interview, which 
 he would n't bear. As soon as he began upon our 
 business he was himself, only a rather more familiar, 
 careless self, as if I had broken some delicate bond of 
 restraint, set free the man as a man talks to anybody 
 — to another man. But perhaps this also was studied. 
 
 i86 
 
THE WATCH ON THE MESA 
 
 " Dick is n't able to come out. He 's laid up for 
 a while. He 's at the house. Mrs. Lavinus is taking 
 care of him, for his sins. Yet she 's not so bad these 
 days.'' 
 
 " What is the matter with him ? Is he ill ? " I asked, 
 thinking of contagion. 
 
 " Oh, no ; an accident — with a pistol. Dick 's 
 rather an ass." 
 
 *' Is he?— with pistols I " 
 
 " It was pistols this time, or a pistol. He '11 soon 
 be out again. I hope you won't mind a little crowd- 
 ing ? He 's in the sitting-room downstairs." 
 
 " Has Mrs. Lavinus time to do justice to the baby 
 and Dick too?" 
 
 " Oh, yes ; there 's heaps of work in the old girl 
 if you know how to get it out. Davenport manages 
 her. . . . Well, I '11 take myself off, and to-morrow 
 it won't be Dick ; but don't promise Phoebe any visits. 
 Thursday I '11 be out to move you in ; the carriage 
 has been fumigated. You must get busy early in the 
 morning, by daybreak — to avoid the heat, though 
 you can't ! Plan it so you can do your heavy work 
 before you begin caulking doors and windows. 
 You '11 stifle in the last hole ! " 
 
 " I wish I could die in the last hole I What are we 
 to do about Phoebe? I'll go anywhere," I prayed, — 
 " do anything you say — except leave her altogether. 
 But she must see you I She '11 pine away I Two dis- 
 appearances in her life — Will you tell me what I 
 can do 1 " 
 
 187 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 " Do what you are doing, Edith. No one could do 
 more. Only just please leave this other thing alone. 
 It 's there 1 It can't be helped. But we can try to keep 
 
PART IV 
 TRYING TO KEEP SANE 
 
XVIII 
 
 We were moved, but we could not know for a few 
 days yet if our breaking-up had been perfect. The 
 little boy, whom we watched in fear, remained very 
 well. 
 
 Dick's wound was progressing also. It had not 
 been serious enough to keep him in bed, still it must 
 have been painful, and painful to his feelings as well, 
 of a young man supposed to be not unacquainted 
 with firearms. One saw that he did not care to be 
 questioned about it. He roamed the house and 
 grounds, bored and pale and looking handsomer 
 than ever in his soft-collared shirts and white trousers 
 and his left arm in a sling. Phoebe returned with joy 
 to her "Dick" when she found him again on my 
 bureau. She was much interested in the real Dick's 
 bandages and must have the same for Hermes, arm- 
 less as he was. She hung a doll's petticoat around 
 his shoulders after the manner of Dick's coat with 
 one sleeve tucked in. 
 
 The baby slept out of doors now, in his carriage, or 
 in the jalousied end of the piazza. Mrs. Lavinus seated 
 beside him, mending whatever she could be trusted 
 to mend very badly, looked on at Phoebe's play like 
 a large bird of the wading species invited to a feast 
 of wood- warblers. Dick and I made our little jokes 
 about her: we called her the "Listening Crane" 
 
 191 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 (though that was not her figure), and undoubtedly 
 she listened. Dick and I were supposed to be play- 
 ing an older game. But Dick's heart was in the right 
 place ; he could hardly have given it Mrs. Lavinus, 
 my only rival on the premises. It was as certain as 
 June is June that he must make love to somebody. 
 Mrs. Lavinus, I think, had begun to like me ; she took 
 some trouble, at least, to warn me not to waste the 
 flower of my days on a youth, however handsome 
 and pleasant, who could n't have more than a hun- 
 dred and fifty a month and sent fifty of it home I Mrs. 
 Lavinus always seemed to be posted as to the main 
 chance. In the midst of all this, I went about feeling 
 at times like a gibbering ghost, at other times jeering 
 at my own ghost for retaining a preposterous and 
 carnal interest in the fresh fruit and vegetables which 
 now loaded our table. Hing, won over completely 
 by that six weeks on the mesa, hovered over me and 
 my appetite (which really needed no petting) like a 
 mother with an only child. His queer, high-pitched 
 tones fairly coo-ooed when he spoke to me. 
 
 But Phoebe's delight in the freedom of a whole 
 yard, in the old places recovered which meant home, 
 in the cheerful human noises of the house all day, in 
 the green grass and the flowers and the street-pass- 
 ing outside our gate — all this was pure joy to watch, 
 and a relief I had not counted on. For I saw that she 
 did not pine — at least not yet. No memories of my 
 own poisoned past could affect the triumph and satis- 
 faction I might now give way to : Phoebe in perfect 
 health, nay, even better she seemed than before her 
 
 192 
 
TRYING TO KEEP SANE 
 
 fever, and the little boy past all danger of taking 
 it from us. We had not brought back a single 
 germ. 
 
 "You're a wonder!" Mrs. Lavinus pronounced 
 one day. She had strolled in her free fashion into my 
 bedroom while I was doing my hair, the door being 
 open for the draught. The sun was in the west just 
 at supper-time, shining through my closed curtains, 
 and I, in the thinnest wrapper I possessed, was 
 melting I 
 
 "Your hair looks kind o' dry and your skin's 
 browner, and I guess your hands are coarsened up 
 some with those dissyfectants, but you might be a 
 girl of twenty as you stand there I And I know you 
 must have done some work in them six weeks you 
 been away. Just how old be you, if you don't mind 
 me askin' ? " 
 
 I told her my age. — "Twenty-seven! and I set 
 you down for twenty-four at the outside. Well ; I 
 admire your not hidin' it. You don't need to — 
 you 're a good looker. Dark folks last longer than 
 fair ones, and you got the sort of features you can 
 do anything with — it don't matter how you wear 
 your hair ; I 've seen you all ways and I never see 
 you look plain. That's the truth." 
 
 I dashed into my closet for a dress, and the wrap- 
 per being off, Mrs. Lavinus (who was in her way a 
 student of how the Lord has made us, sick or well) 
 inspected my arms and shoulders. " Well ; you 're a 
 picture at any age ! You don't need to worry, unless 
 you're thinkin' of a man younger than yourself. 
 
 193 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 Take my advice and hold on for a rise as the saying 
 is. You might not have to wait so long!" 
 
 I was hurrying as fast as I could, but her tongue 
 pursued me. 
 
 "Landl don't I know 'em? — them widowers! 
 I 've seen all kinds. There's one kind — you can't 
 blame 'em, let 'em marry as soon as they would. 
 They just got to ! Take a man with his livin' to earn, 
 gettin' up to work at six o'clock and no fire made 
 and no breakfast got and a passel of young ones 
 bawlin' to be dressed and fed — they can't aflord to 
 hire help. I 've helped 'em out myself for my keep, 
 and poor keep it was, and picked out a wife for 'em 
 and 'most done the courtin' — But there's others 
 with no excuse acts just as common. And there's 
 the sly kind, awful solemn and indifferent, but they 're 
 thinkin' just the same. There 's a mighty difference 
 between live folks and dead folks. Unless you shoot a 
 man and bury him with his wife, he '11 sure be look- 
 in' out for another one. They 're made that way. . . . 
 And, my land ! if you could see what some men '11 
 do to their wives when they 're livin' you would n't 
 worry about the wives that 's dead. No ; there 's many 
 a woman envies them that 's underground for good, 
 and wishes number two was in their place." 
 
 "Mrs. Lavinus," I broke in — I could n't leave her 
 till I was dressed and everything I needed to com- 
 plete my dress seemed to have hidden itself in places 
 beyond discovery ; — " tell me about Mrs. Pettyjohn ? 
 Isn't she married yet?" 
 
 " That one ! " Mrs. Lavinus threw up her hands and 
 194 
 
TRYING TO KEEP SANE 
 
 brought them down one on each broad knee. " She 's 
 as much married as she ever was and no more and 
 don't need to be. The French fellow did n't show up 
 and May went past and it got to be June and she 
 was in a fever and mortified to death, and who should 
 come along but Pettyjohn all dressed up lookin' like 
 a sport. He 's got hold of something in the minin* 
 way where other folks puts up the money. They've 
 went ofi camping on their second honeymoon as 
 good as the first one. She lived with him six years 
 contented enough till that money was left her and she 
 went traveling and met the other one — I don't mean 
 to say there wa'n't no interval, for there was — but 
 nothing to hurt her going off with Pettyjohn and no 
 ceremony about it. And did n't need to be 1 That 's 
 what the Catholics was so mad about. And they 
 did n't like the looks of you bein' hand and glove 
 with her as she claimed — wanting to lend her this 
 house to be married in, the priest's house. Married I 
 Everybody knew, if Pettyjohn should come along in 
 time with a good job, she 'd be willing to help him 
 spend his pay. As for ker money that she says he 
 threw away — 't was she gave it to him and was as 
 wild as he was to put it into every wild-cat scheme 
 they heard of. This here 's a pretty poor lookout they 
 got now, some thinks, but it '11 last, likely, till snow 
 falls in the mountains, which is where they 've went.'' 
 I had listened with patience this time, and I went 
 downstairs reflecting on a few things ; for one, how 
 it is that your very thoughts are known to the women 
 in the san^e house with you, I had never mentioned 
 
 i?5 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 Mrs. Pettyjohn^s solicitations, nor my wish that they 
 might be granted. She, of course, had boasted pre- 
 maturely and made much of our few talks, as she had 
 to me of her intimacy with Nanny. In any case my 
 character in Catholic circles, which included Noreen's 
 respectable parents, must have suffered. 
 
 I had not been down to the end of the yard, but 
 now I went with a sense of relief. The fence was 
 gone ; the bamboo waved free, with a space of light 
 beyond. There were no more fowls, and no more 
 flowers. A stained flannel shirt and a pair of blue 
 overalls hung on the clothes-line, property of our new 
 chore-man, washed by himself. He lived in the little 
 house now, one of the lone birds of the frontier who 
 pass for bachelors. I took an inhuman satisfaction in 
 his freedom from every visible member of my sex, 
 and from all evidences of the presence of one of them 
 inside our bounds. Dick told me that a horse for my 
 use would be kept in the stable across the lane be- 
 tween us and a small meadow where he was now at 
 grass with no shoes on. It sounded like a home on a 
 basis of security and comfort. I knew it was all false. 
 But it was ** playing the game." 
 
 One day, in the afternoon, a man in working-clothes 
 came to the front door and said he had a piano out- 
 side which Mr. Maclay had ordered sent up to the 
 house, and asked where it should go. The dray stood 
 backed to the front door and the house was in the con- 
 fusion four men and a piano can make in a small 
 passageway, when another sort of vehicle drove up 
 with a spanking team of well-kept mules before it. I 
 
 196 
 
TRYING TO KEEP SANE 
 
 knew it as the ambulance from the Post in which 
 the officers' ladies went on calls and errands to town. 
 A smart orderly opened the gate of the poplars ior a 
 lady, who entered as if she might be the first lady of 
 the land, as she was the first lady at the Post, Mrs. 
 Forth, wife of the colonel in command. Not that she 
 assumed it — she simply looked it in a frank Ameri- 
 can way, perhaps a Western way, which was very 
 good-natured and a trifle humorous. 
 
 I perceived as she came up the walk that the world, 
 of dress, was with us. She smiled as if we had always 
 met in this way, with a piano and four perspiring 
 men with hats on the backs of their heads (one had 
 taken his off and laid it on the piano) blocking our 
 entrance. 
 
 " This does n't look well for my mission," she re- 
 marked, after a moment, indicating the piano. She 
 met my eyes with an air of confidential mystery. 
 
 "Really? — a mission?" I asked. "And I hoped 
 you had come to see me." 
 
 " Oh, I have. But I 've brought my mission, or com- 
 mission, from your aunt in New York. You are not 
 too busy — with pianos and things — to have a long 
 talk with a perfect stranger, all about your own 
 affairs!" 
 
 Having included among our visitors at the studio 
 some of the queerest as well as cleverest persons in 
 the city, as well as other cities, I was prepared to 
 take this lady and her " mission " just as they had 
 happened to come, and to be very much entertained. 
 
 "How nice that we can talk outdoors," she began, 
 197 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 as we strolled forth into the shade. My "aunt in New 
 York" was certainly the last person I should have 
 expected an introduction from to a lady in Idaho, 
 but army people are from everywhere. If she meant 
 Aunt Essie, I felt sure of a lively talk before we got 
 far into that topic. 
 
 " This is a pretty place." She looked around from 
 the bench where we sat under our deepest trees. " I 've 
 often stared in as we passed. It 's a regret to me now 
 that I did — pass; that I was lazy about coming in. 
 We 've been stationed here a long time. When we 
 first came your friend, Mrs. Maclay, had gone out to 
 that dry ranch where you were in your quarantine. 
 She had lived a good deal in the country, had n't she? 
 The town, I think, had been rather too much for her 
 — the flood of first calls in their friendly, pioneer fash- 
 ion, perhaps. We all expect to go through with it. 
 By the time Mrs. Maclay came back to town, the feel- 
 ing had gone round that she did not care for calls, or 
 at least she did not return them always. She had 
 good reasons, no doubt. . . . Now, I 'm going to 
 talk to you as if I had known you all my life I I 've 
 heard you talked about in New York — I've been 
 there all winter, you know — till I feel that I do know 
 something about you." 
 
 ** I don't know that that follows," I could n't help 
 saying. ** It depends on who does the talking." 
 
 "There's a great disturbance about you among 
 your relatives, and I think there would be more if they 
 knew all that I've heard since I came back — from 
 all sorts and conditions! Dr. Davenport, of course, 
 
 198 
 
TRYING TO KEEP SANE 
 
 speaks the truth. I Ve never heard him say so much 
 about any human being in my life as he says about 
 your six weeks' campaign on the mesa. He ought to 
 know ! The other talkers we '11 leave till later. I may 
 be frank?'' 
 
 ** Oh, frank I I have n't listened to a woman's frank- 
 ness — to a woman who knew how to be frank — 
 I've forgotten what it is." 
 
 She detected my involuntary passion of emphasis ; 
 the note of estrangement from one's sex and kind. 
 "* Well ; there are certainly several sorts of women's 
 frankness. As for men — they 're poor, deprived crea- 
 tures. They go about halfway with their frankness, 
 which is n't half bad of its kind. But they get mud- 
 dled and we have to guess the rest. And we are sure 
 to guess wrong. I 'm going all the way with you I 
 May I even speak of your friend — ? You have stepped 
 into the same tide of raw brute circumstance that she 
 met out here. The West is tragedy to some women. 
 We must n't let it be tragedy to you, too ! Mrs. Maclay, 
 I imagine, was very, strong, very self-centered, very 
 indifferent, perhaps, — where I 'm not sure that we 
 who look on should allow you to be indifferent. I am 
 here to open your eyes to a point of view you may 
 have met in second-rate novels if you ever read them, 
 or third-rate plays. But here it is genuine and honest 
 and it makes in one way for good citizenship. We 've 
 no classes, but we have public opinion chopped out 
 to fit the masses, and which makes no distinctions in 
 individual cases. I don't know very well what I 'm 
 talking about, so I don't expect you to. . , . But, to 
 
 199 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 illustrate : Mrs. Maclay was called * peculiar.' I sup- 
 pose she was about as peculiar as you are, or as we 
 are up at the Post. But we are a family by ourselves ; 
 we talk about one another, but we don't talk outside, 
 and outside talk does n't affect us. 
 
 *' I 've come to ask you, first, in the name of your 
 relatives, to go back to New York. And if you won't 
 do that, to come into our family — our little army- 
 family, and let us environ you. You 've been at the 
 mercy of the town and the town-talk long enough." 
 
 " But the town knows nothing about me I " 
 
 "That's just the point — except through your 
 servants. We '11 come to that presently. No : we '11 
 come to it now I You must get rid of that dreadful 
 old woman you have here. She has simply sowed 
 the whole place with stories about you. You will 
 never get any decent help while she is in the house, 
 and she proposes to stay, you may be sure. That is 
 the object of the stories — to frighten everybody else 
 away. She 's a little scared just now by the shooting, 
 and she may keep still after this. But the mischief is 
 done." 
 
 "I don't understand — what shooting? You don't 
 mean Dick Grant's accident?" 
 
 " Accident ! " she cried. " Do you mean no one has 
 told you? Well, well I" She colored a little — *'! 
 suppose I 've put my foot in it now ! You did n't get 
 the papers at your ranch? Dick, of course, isn't 
 boasting — and Douglas Maclay is pretty tired of 
 Dick just now. You see I know them both. But the 
 old person of the bibulous name — hasn't she ex- 
 
 200 
 
TRYING TO KEEP SANE 
 
 ploded with it ? Well ; it 's a man's way, the whole 
 of it. To set you in a place where you 're exposed to 
 affairs like that and say it is n't so 1 And try to per- 
 suade you that you 're as safe and protected as if you 
 were in your aunt's house in New York 1" 
 
 ** I 've not been in my aunt's house in two years," 
 I cried under this fire of frankness. "And I 've never 
 been *safe' in New York, if you mean safe from gos- 
 sip. But shooting is another matter. Do you mean 
 that some one shot Dick?" 
 
 " I do — two days after I spoke to Douglas Maclay 
 about you — well, as frankly as I 'm speaking now." 
 
 "I hope not." 
 
 We gazed at each other — 
 
 " I am an old friend of his," she answered my look. 
 ** And I could n't get at you, and my * mission ' seemed 
 rather pressing just then. I had been hearing the 
 stories, and that nobody was calling on you — in 
 a town like this I But when I heard that Douglas 
 Maclay had taken you out there to his ranch across 
 the river and was riding out every evening — " 
 
 " He did n't, Mrs. Forth I It was Dr. Davenport's 
 orders that we should go, arranged before Mr. Maclay 
 came home." 
 
 ** Then the doctor ought to be around to say so I 
 It need n't be said to me. The male gossips in the 
 saloons here never heard of a six weeks' quarantine 
 for anything. They laugh I Can't you see ? " 
 
 ** I refuse to see. I see your ' point of view,' of 
 course, but what has it to do with me more than with 
 you?" 
 
 20I 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 " Because your environment out here consists of 
 two men, very nice fellows, but there 's no special 
 brand on them to the town. They can't protect you. 
 It 's just a character novel of the plains, and we are 
 the characters. And a dangerous mixture we are. I 
 sent for Douglas Maclay and took more liberties 
 with him in ten minutes — than I ever shall again if 
 we both live long. I informed him what he had done. 
 I told him your relatives in New York were in a state 
 of mind about you and that I should do my best to 
 send you home, and that he must resign you — in 
 view of what — of what I told him. And meantime 
 he must do what he could to change things — " 
 
 " Please, one moment, Mrs. Forth. Did you meet 
 my sister in New York, Mrs. Landreth ? You have n't 
 spoken of the one relative there who does know all 
 about me and is not asking me to come home. Be- 
 cause she knows why I came and that I must stay, 
 or do what would be worse than anything the town 
 can say of me, from our point of view — which, after 
 all, is the one we have to live by. In the army you 
 don't believe in desertion, do you ? " 
 
 " I did n't know you had a sister in New York," 
 said Mrs. Forth, dropping her voice and looking 
 puzzled. "I saw a good deal of your aunt, Mrs. 
 Charles Braisted, a delightful woman — talk of frank- 
 ness I " 
 
 " But I hope you don't mean to add her frankness 
 to the kind we have out here — that is, when I 'm 
 under discussion, as I seem to have been." 
 
 "Don't you like her?" 
 
 202 
 
TRYING TO KEEP SANE 
 
 " Of course I like her. But I don't ever do any- 
 thing she says. We 've always been her despair, my 
 sister and I. She disapproves of everything we do 
 without knowing why we do it or being able to tell us 
 what else we could do in our circumstances, which 
 are not the same as hers. But of course she 's de- 
 lightful, and if we were n't her nieces she would think 
 we were delightful too. Her idea for me is to live 
 with her as her secretary — she would call it that. 
 What she wants is to see me dressed in a certain 
 way and married to some one rich. There 's frank- 
 ness ! " 
 
 ** And I thank you for it I You 're very generous to 
 pay me in that way. For of course I 'm horribly scared. 
 But I promised, you know, — I promised your aunt 
 I would try. She seemed to think letters could do 
 nothing compared to the spoken word." 
 
 ** Aunt Essie's letters could n't, for she never writes 
 any. Anything she can't telegraph, or delegate to 
 another's words, goes by default. I simply mention 
 it as one of her sides — she has a great many." 
 
 Mrs. Forth responded to my smile rather absently, 
 and I saw we were done with ** my aunt." Something 
 else lay back of my words, and, I fancied, something 
 else was in the back of her mind. She asked me — 
 in that manner of thinking aside — if I was sure I 
 could forgive her meddling with my affairs ? I said 
 — also thinking aside — that I minded nothing, only 
 the talk, the talk ! Not so much the talk of the West, 
 which was a wild and picturesque travesty of the 
 truth, as the talk of the East that came so cleverly 
 
 203 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 near it as to be almost mistaken for it — by those who 
 talked. That had been poor papa's style of analysis : 
 it amused, but it did not help to enlighten. 
 
 " Well," said Mrs. Forth, "I 've offered my creden- 
 tials, and you won't receive me as a special envoy 
 from anybody I " 
 
 "Only yourself. Come as your own envoy and 
 come often. Oh, do come ! This has been a most illu- 
 minating talk ! " 
 
 I certainly was excited, and she was too keen not 
 to have noted how little the main object of her visit 
 seemed to afEect me, compared to some obscure re- 
 lation it perhaps bore to something deeper in my 
 mind than the disturbance among my relatives or the 
 gossip of the town. I knew she was dying of curi- 
 osity as to what had happened out on the mesa, if 
 she were not in her own conscience guilty therefor. 
 
 " But I want to know more about Dick Grant." I re- 
 turned to the safer topic, ** What has he been doing 
 in my affairs ? I 'm getting puffed up with all this at- 
 tention of the town — after this I shall never talk 
 of anything but myself." 
 
 " Dick only did the chivalrous thing. He knocked 
 a man down for saying disrespectful things about 
 you and a friend of yours in a * public place.* You 
 observed, coming over on the Oregon Short Line, how 
 'public' we are! This thing might possibly get into 
 a Salt Lake paper I The man was one of the kind 
 who * carry a gun.' He used it — that 's all. I don't 
 know that he meant to kill Dick, but that 's immate- 
 rial — Dick will not appear against him." 
 
 204 
 
TRYING TO KEEP SANE 
 
 " I wish Dick had left the man alone. I don't won- 
 der Mr. Maclay is tired of him ! Is it really possible 
 we are expected to take that point of view into 
 account ? " 
 
 ** Mrs. Maclay felt as you do, my dear. As her 
 friend — forgive me — but you step into her disfavor 
 with the town. They are prepared to find you * pecu- 
 liar ' too. She had no Mrs. Lavinus ; but you may be 
 sure there was talk — more than I could have heard 
 
 — when she went out there and lived alone with her 
 men and her maids like Marianna in the South. 
 Marianna did n't have any maids, did she ? Perhaps 
 Mrs. Maclay did n't — It 's not understood here why 
 anybody should want to shake the dust of this pretty 
 little town ofE their feet and go and live with jack- 
 rabbits. There's no real love of the country when 
 it's as big as this. The poor lone humans have 
 had all the solitude they will ever want. It 's rather 
 nice and kind of them. I 'm afraid you 're not very 
 kind?" 
 
 ''Only to jack-rabbits," I said. "I'm a sister to 
 jack-rabbits — and winged ants." 
 
 ** j^^^ Mrs. Maclay peculiar?" Mrs. Forth looked 
 at me as if slightly in doubt whether we had not both 
 been a little "touched," according to the popular 
 understanding. 
 
 I agreed that she was peculiar, in a certain attitude 
 of mind. She had it very strongly without knowing it 
 
 — it was a family attitude and she had not traveled 
 enough to be able to see her own people. But she 
 would have preserved the type in her little daughter : 
 
 205 
 
lEDITH BONHAM 
 
 broadened it to suit the change that was coming 
 gradually in herself. It would have been a long process 
 and she would have got results. ** I think she would 
 sooner have lost the child by death,'' I said, " than 
 seen the type in her cheapened, or go down. She 
 wanted my help and I came ; and I shall not go till I 
 have done what I came for, or know that I am no 
 longer needed. I will not give in to the local point 
 of view, nor to any distorted action from a bigger 
 point of view that may spring from it — in those who 
 do give in." 
 
 "Are you thinking of my present * frankness'?" 
 said my visitor. 
 
 We smiled at each other. She knew I was not, and 
 that I had no intention of telling her of what I had 
 been thinking. Distinctly I was wondering what that 
 frankness might have done to Douglas Maclay, ex- 
 posed to it as I had been. What could a man say — 
 how could he explain — to a woman with a tongue 
 like this I 
 
 "In short, you intend to show fight?" she asked. 
 
 "I intend to stay and mind my own affairs — and 
 get rid of Mrs. Lavinus as soon as I can find a sub- 
 stitute who is no worse." 
 
 "That's where I intend to help you — " But she 
 paused. Evidently she had something further on her 
 mind, or perhaps her conscience. " I wish I 'd seen you 
 sooner — well — before I plunged into my mission 
 with Douglas Maclay. I like him so much ! We 've 
 known him a long time without ever knowing him 
 at all really. He is peculiar 1 and he 's very unsocial. 
 
 206 
 
TRYING TO KEEP SANE 
 
 I made him come up, when I could not get at you 
 — and I drove things into him.'* 
 
 " I don't see what there was left for you to drive 
 into him, if the whole town was doing it?" 
 
 "He never would have heard it — not a word — 
 any more than Dr. Davenport. But what / told him 
 Dick's affair confirmed short and sharp. He 's hard 
 to impress, but I believe I impressed him — with 
 Dick's help.'* 
 
 "I think you did!" I remarked to myself with a 
 shiver. 
 
 ** How much of the time does he leave you alone 
 here with Dick and Mrs. Lavinus ? " 
 
 *'A11 the time, since Dick was hurt," I answered 
 bluntly, for really I was becoming weary of my new 
 friend's excessive interest. 
 
 ** Dear, dear I the town won't bear it. A young 
 woman, and a young man notoriously good-looking 
 and popular (and your own looks are no defense), 
 and two widowers, neither of them past forty. It 
 won't do I " 
 
 "Was that what you drove into Mr. Maclay?" 
 
 " I and the town — I used better language. To you 
 I speak as the town, because I see you are not half 
 enough impressed." 
 
 ** Who is the other * widower ' ? " 
 
 " Dr. Davenport." 
 
 I laughed, as Douglas said, like " the damned." 
 
 " The baby, you see, was never really sick (this is 
 how it goes), yet you had the doctor down here every 
 week just to have another man to talk to. Another 
 
 207 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 suspicious thing about you is you talk to young men 
 you have only just met, in French, or some language 
 the servants can't understand ; which to a woman 
 like Mrs. Lavinus is about the same as whispering 
 
 — things not fit for delicate ears like hers to hear. 
 Well ; you must get rid of her. I 've got a splendid 
 woman for you — that 's another part of my mission. 
 She 's a regular * Nanna ' trained in England. You 
 can have her just as soon as Major Kennedy gets 
 his orders. His children are a little old for her, and 
 she does n't want to go to Arizona. Meanwhile, if 
 you intend to stick it out, you must let us see all we can 
 of you. I want you to teach my young ones French. 
 . . . And will you come up and dine with us Thurs- 
 day night ? Half-past six — we '11 send for you ? And 
 
 — how about smoking a cigarette with my husband 
 after dinner by the fire — or even with me I " 
 
 I could laugh now. " You certainly know all there 
 is to know ! But I smoked my last with Dick and 
 gave him the case to commemorate the sacrifice." 
 
 "It doesn't go with the 'type'?" 
 
 " Not with the Aylesford type." 
 
 " Is there anything else I can meddle with, sticking 
 my finger in your pie?" 
 
 " There is one person here I do care about ! Noreen 
 O'Shea is a good girl whom I thought something could 
 be made of. It would be bad for her to believe these 
 things in a horrid way. You see there 's some founda- 
 tion for them all 1 " 
 
 *' We '11 get her back for you, when we 've rid you of 
 La Vinus. What a name 1 Do her habits support it ? " 
 
 2o8 
 
TRYING TO KEEP SANE 
 
 ** Somewhat — for a time, I think — till Hing, the 
 Chinese cook, complained to Mr. Maclay of our ale 
 and porter bills and he shut down on all stimulants 
 for the women and children of his household." 
 
 "Oh, dear! It's as good as a play — a low-down 
 play, but so funny — with you and Dr. Davenport 
 and Douglas Maclay in it. I could weep tears I But 
 you'll think me as rowdy as all the rest of us." 
 
 I was thankful she really had her handkerchief to 
 her eyes just then, for my face must have looked very 
 queer. She glanced at her watch — " The ambulance 
 will be here at a quarter to six. Does your little girl 
 have an early supper?" 
 
 At six, I said ; but we could go in and have tea at 
 the same time. We heard the wheels of the heavy 
 ambulance just then, and she said she would not keep 
 the ladies waiting who were with her. "I wouldn't 
 let them come in; they'll call later. My mission was 
 on my mind. And now it's off, I wish to say I 'm de- 
 lighted you are n't going to run. I hate the white 
 feather." 
 
 **So do I, if it comes to that — " 
 
 She interrupted me, as we were walking towards 
 the gate — " Men have rather crude ideas of how to 
 * protect' us, haven't they? Or perhaps their ideas 
 don't advance. They think they can't do anything 
 for us but fight for us or marry us. When they can't 
 do either, what are they to do 1 I would n't answer 
 for any man under those conditions." 
 
 Her remarkably keen eyes were on my face, not 
 rudely ; but the confounded blood that tells so many 
 
 209 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 lies, and occasionally tells the truth, flew all over my 
 helpless countenance. I could only hope she might 
 think it meant Dr. Davenport, or Dick ; even for her 
 imagination it would have been too wild a flight in 
 the other direction. But I was relieved when she had 
 gone. 
 
XIX 
 
 I LONGED to be alone and think over this extraordi- 
 nary first call I Phcebe was rather fractious at supper, 
 for Dick in the parlor was drumming one-hand ac- 
 companiments and whistling- "Golden Slippers" in 
 a manner too distracting. She finished finally at his 
 elbow, still in her eating-apron, pursued by me with 
 last drinks of milk. 
 
 The piano had been left without orders in the bay- 
 window, where it could n't stay. After supper there 
 was a union of forces to move it to a better place and 
 a disunion of tongues as to where that place should 
 be, Dick and I being the contestants. It was dusk 
 before I escaped at last to the ditch-path, and even 
 then Dick followed, to make his peace. I told him I 
 had been talked to death that afternoon by probably 
 the greatest woman-talker in Idaho and my heart was 
 steeled against any more conversation. He said he 
 could be as silent as I wished, and I retorted that one 
 silence is company and two is a crowd. This was not 
 coquetry as it might have sounded, nor did Dick set 
 it down to ill-temper — his own was too sweet for that. 
 He took himself off with reproachful looks, but I was 
 steel to them also. 
 
 Such a knot as my thoughts were in it gave one 
 mental pain to pick at I Was it any excuse, even if 
 Mrs. Forth had provoked this thing — goaded him 
 
 211 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 into the madness which he came straight to me with 
 and perpetrated — as if I could understand and bear 
 it ! On the other hand, / was not mad : suppose he 
 had acted the part of a baited bull with darts in his 
 hide and a cloak over his horns plunging at the bar- 
 riers — could I go on and class him as one, in our 
 future relations? I knew I could not and should not 
 be able to treat him so when we met again. And was 
 it true that I believed Nanny's spirit had died within 
 her, watching this man as her husband? — that she 
 had been glad to go, but for that sure foresight of 
 the exposure that would follow when her death gave 
 him back his freedom ? I did n't believe it, of course : 
 it was monstrous. I remembered the peace in Nanny's 
 eyes when she talked of him ; her humorous yet ap- 
 preciative allusions to his habit of silence. But where 
 was the exact line between his madness and my own ? 
 Is evidence even of the senses to hold against that 
 mysterious inner testimony of soul to soul ? On the 
 mesa those nights when our thoughts lay bare to 
 each other under the bare sky, how could he have 
 cheated me I Incredible, outrageous as the words were 
 that I had heard him say, somehow the man himself, in 
 some deeper way, still kept my respect. 
 
 I think it rested, as to evidence, on one fact which 
 also was of the senses. He had never made love to 
 me by word or look. After such a girlhood as mine 
 no man could deceive me nor creep up on my de- 
 fenses unless I chose. I would have detected the first 
 sign of such approach. His savage reasons, whatever 
 they might be, I honored as against that sickening 
 
 212 
 
TRYING TO KEEP SANE 
 
 defeat of character through the senses of which I had 
 accused him. Brutal as his^ calculations had been, 
 they were cool, they were mental ; he had n't even 
 been obliged to put on the curb. His heart was 
 coldly with the dead, my blessed dead I And here I 
 had further evidence, and it clinched the argument 
 finally between his soul and mine brought up for 
 judgment in the mind's tribunal, which may not be 
 after all the court of last appeal. 
 
 On the evening after the day when he came back, 
 and I had to meet him with my confession, in the 
 midst of our concentrated talk in preparation for our 
 flight to the mesa, — suddenly he paused and got up 
 and moved around vaguely and said, not looking at 
 me, *' Did you niake — did you have time to make 
 the drawing I asked you for?" 
 
 I went and fetched it and gave it into his hand on 
 the drawing-block as it was, covered with thin paper. 
 I watched, because I was jealous to be sure if he felt 
 it, if he would feel it as I did every time the name, her 
 name, met my eyes. I watched and I knew — by the 
 hard breath that caught him like a sob. He turned 
 instantly and went to the window with what he held 
 as if to see better. There was only night outside! 
 He was alone with it and there was no one with 
 whom he could share one pang, one word. I left him, 
 satisfied. He had loved her then — not six weeks 
 before the monstrous thing that happened on the 
 mesa. . . . And in the interval, not one word, not 
 one look had transpired between us that I, or the 
 angels, would have had recalled ; a record of pure 
 
 213 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 good understanding". Acquitted ! — of the baser infi- 
 delity. No charge was left but that strange brutality 
 of the man's practical mind which no woman can 
 ever understand I As I saw it now, he had trampled 
 on his ideals for the sake of certain living results and 
 had expected me to meet him by trampling on my 
 own. He would have said, perhaps : "Our ideals are 
 in a safer place than the world here can know, but we 
 know, and so that we trust each other, what does it 
 matter I " 
 
 It certainly mattered to me. I would have met 
 him in another way : I would have been pilloried 
 beside him in the eyes of that world, and called it 
 glory to be so in the name of a friendship and a loy- 
 alty as proud as ours might have been. To spare me 
 the pillory — was that the idea ? — to spare the living 
 who could be hurt, to sacrifice the dead who are 
 safe ? — I could hear all his man's argument. He owed 
 me, Nanny's friend, his protection in an exalted 
 sense since I had come unprepared and stayed and 
 cast in my lot with his, in this unparalleled loneli- 
 ness, for the sake of Nanny's child. The whole town 
 was tossing my name about ; friends in the East were 
 hurrying to my defense — " They can only fight for 
 us or marry us" — that is if they want to keep us. 
 " And I need you I " he had said. That was the other 
 side of the man's argument. 
 
 Being settled in my mind that these were his rea- 
 sons, I threw them all away as too desperate and 
 utterly preposterous. I gave up, from the point of ar- 
 gument — still he did not love me I Safe from that 
 
 214 
 
TRYING TO KEEP SANE 
 
 insult, the rest might go. But with it went the dream 
 of that perfect, proud understanding. He was as 
 other men. We never did understand them. My 
 father had been a mystery often to his own children, 
 perhaps even to his wife. God has made us perversely 
 different to give room for the last effort of the heart ; 
 long patience and practice in forgiveness, with no 
 hope of understanding ! They know not what they 
 do, and we know not what we do to them. 
 
 Peaceful days followed, or days that should have 
 been peaceful. To me they were hot and colorless 
 and empty, with that sense of loss which means there 
 was not much to lose after all. I felt a longing for 
 my own old set, the talkers. Tired as I had been 
 of them often and their talk, impatient of their ego- 
 isms, their self-conscious dwellings on one topic, them- 
 selves ; — still they had imagination, if they chose to 
 use it, they had subtlety — they pushed and crowded, 
 but they did not trample. They fluttered and flapped 
 and darkened the air with cries or with counsel 
 without wisdom, but they did not attack with hoofs 
 and horns and lowered, brainless heads. Give me no 
 more of these strong and simple men I — they were 
 God-forsaken idiots. They were the " deprived," as 
 Mrs. Forth had said. No ; I must remember now 
 that so far as friendship went I was in a place that 
 knew not the word. I was alone. 
 
 Dick, of course, was a child. I gave him the 
 honors of his chivalry in my defense — as I tried to 
 forgive Douglas his stone-age protection. His wound 
 would trouble him for some time yet, but he went 
 
 215 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 back to work, such work as he could do, carrying 
 another wound, as it is sentimentally called. I could 
 have staved off a regular proposal, but I knew he'd 
 never be satisfied till he had got his answer. It was 
 some time before we were "by with it" altogether; 
 perhaps I was too gentle with him. Dick had been 
 very good to me. And it is true I had encouraged 
 him — but I had no fears for his future or that he 
 was doomed to a homeless existence on my account, 
 nor even on my dear Nanny's. These harmless little 
 masculine tributes go with us on our way ; one ought 
 to be grateful for them while they last. 
 
 Dick's chief never came and I adduced, of course, 
 that he was living up to his word. It was a surprise 
 and a great relief that Phoebe did not pine I Indeed, 
 I believed that of those two he must have been the 
 defrauded. She was not faithless, but she was six 
 years old and well and happy, and new friends had 
 come into her life, the first of her own age she had 
 ever had. She was much taken up with the little 
 people at the Post ; there were rides in a goat-cart 
 and there was a pony and an old trooper who 
 buckled the blanket and surcingle and held the rein 
 and ran at his side when the children rode him, and 
 set them on again when the pony shook them off ; 
 and other thrilling adventures connected with visits 
 to the Reservation. Isabel Forth, as I now called 
 her, had justified her interference in my domestic 
 and other affairs. Thanks to her I had my English 
 nurse and Noreen too. Worthy Mrs. O'Shea had a 
 great respect for "the military." Seeing me on visit- 
 
 216 
 
TRYING TO KEEP SANE 
 
 ing terms with ladies at the Post and dining with 
 the CDlonel's wife and teaching her children, she con- 
 cluded, I suppose, that appearances had deceived 
 somebody. Through this one and that one, good 
 Catholics all, the return of Noreen was diplomati- 
 cally achieved without loss of prestige on either side. 
 As to Isabel Forth, my rapid intimacy with her was 
 not friendship — my idea of friendship — it was one 
 of those wayside flowers of fancy and homesickness 
 that spring and bloom in the long heats of a fron- 
 tier summer. She was, of us two, the more rapid 
 bloomer, though I should not say she was quicker 
 to fade. It is now rather as a dried flower of fancy I 
 find her image in my records of this time, still color- 
 ful and faintly pungent ; there is much tenacity in 
 these pressed flowers of memory unless one handles 
 them too often. 
 
 Besides the dinners and the French lessons I had 
 other errands at the Post. Isabel had begged me to 
 start a little dancing-class, having surprised me one 
 day in the act of giving Phoebe her first positions. 
 Hardly any one knew of my loss — no one who knew 
 it from me. I did not go into mourning. There were 
 sad and sordid reasons against it. My railroad fares 
 had been advanced by Douglas Maclay ; to be sure, 
 that was not Nanny's way of putting it, but it was 
 mine. The money must be paid back or saved for 
 that purpose, month by month, and enough more 
 piled up to take me home, if the time should come 
 when that would be the next step before me. Who 
 could say what the practical male mind might lend 
 
 217 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 itself to next? Something I felt was coming; the 
 ground was too queer and shaky under my feet. I 
 felt it coming in the long, hot days, and short, mndy 
 nights of starlight, or of waxing, waning moons. 
 
 As the summer grew old, Isabel and I had our 
 first quarrel. I love to dance and by nature I can, — 
 though not better than Essie. Papa used to play for 
 us in the right hour for exercise up in the studio, 
 and we, at any age, and in any sort of costume he 
 chose to array us in, used to caper about the big place 
 to the rhythmic beat of his improvisations. The 
 music, and his hand raised and his eyes upon us, led 
 the movement he wished to inspire us with. It gave 
 us our best physical development and by degrees it 
 led to ball-room dancing, in which, however, we had 
 less practice. The quarrel began with Isabel's pride 
 in our lessons and her craving for spectators. It was 
 ball-room dancing I was supposed to start the children 
 in, but we had our interpretive attempts. Such danc- 
 ing is called by high names now. They were an 
 exceptional group of children to teach and our prog- 
 ress was beautiful to see. Among those who came 
 to look on was Dr. Davenport with his kind, tired 
 eyes and rather savage smile, and a curious intent 
 gravity which had struck Isabel, but I was too busy 
 to notice him. 
 
 " Some day " — this was our quarrel — " Dr. Daven- 
 port will up and ask you to marry him point-blank 1 
 You won't know anything about it till it happens. 
 And you '11 go up like fire and refuse him and you '11 
 make a great mistake." I looked at Isabel Forth, but 
 
 2l8 
 
TRYING TO KEEP SANE 
 
 she is not an easy person to look down I She con- 
 tinued : ** There's no one to compare him with pro- 
 fessionally but the best. You need n't stay in the 
 army if you don't like it — he 's in it for the love of it : 
 his boys in barracks and his army mothers and little 
 children in the wilds. He has a private fortune. He 
 lost his wife twelve years ago and he has been a 
 most dignified — " 
 
 "Widower," I supplied. 
 
 "Yes." She accepted the word without a smile. 
 " All the women in the army have tried to marry him 
 themselves or to some of their friends — but, as I say, 
 he 's a most gentlemanly — " 
 
 " If you say it again you '11 be sorry, Isabel ! " 
 
 " I shall say it again till I convince you he is up to 
 his ears in love with you, and it will come upon you 
 in a flash, and you '11 flash back and it will be a flash- 
 in-the-pan. And it ought not to be I " 
 
 " It will end everything between us, if I can't come 
 up to the Post without being badgered about widow- 
 ers, or men of any description." 
 
 "Nothing will end anything between us I" she re- 
 torted gayly, " because I 've got some humor. You're 
 not blessed with much these days." 
 
 "I'm blest if I care for your style of humor, if this 
 is a specimen," I said. " You know you 'd bring the 
 whole Post about our ears if we should be overheard." 
 
 She seized her advantage in this poor speech in the 
 haste of anger. "I don't wonder you think of that 
 after your own experiences, poor dear, but I 'm on my 
 own ground. If I'm safe, you're safe.'* 
 
 219 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 " — Not from you, it seems I I thought we had a 
 special testimony to bear against this particularly 
 primitive sort of gossip?" 
 
 ** I never said the army is not primitive. But the 
 army has humor — if it isn't stationed too long in 
 one place, in a place like this. I 've just been East, so 
 I have some left. It tickles me to think how pleased 
 your aunt would be — " 
 
 ** Why do you make me hang my aunt I — by drag- 
 ging her into all my affairs, even the ones you invent 
 for me? If you keep on, Isabel, I shall say, as Beatrix 
 Esmond said to her mother, — * Something hath broke 
 between us.' " 
 
 " Nothing will ever break between us, you goose 1 
 — by the way, when you do go back to New York, 
 you '11 notice one thing : you '11 hold yourself better. 
 You're beginning to stoop a little, Edith. But the 
 moment your feet touch the pavement you'll feel 
 braced ; set up I — I always do. My waist goes in 
 and my chest goes out and my head goes up — " 
 
 She proceeded to show me how she looked in New 
 York, **set up," and how I looked in Boise City, 
 Idaho, when I had slumped and lost my sense of humor 
 and my pride of port. The exhibition provoked im- 
 moderate mirth and ended in a swirl of skirts as we 
 chased each other down the narrow hall and nearly 
 bumped into the colonel, coming out from his study 
 buckling on his sword — not to beat us with, but as 
 the instinct of an officer recovering his pride of port, 
 after relaxing on a hot afternoon. Isabel's sense of 
 humor occasionally descended into romps, or what 
 
 220 
 
TRYING TO KEEP SANE 
 
 might be called so in a lady of her position and 
 perhaps her age — which I cannot answer for. She 
 romped in her conversation, too, at times, and I was 
 not far behind her : but it left a slightly unpleasant 
 taste in one's mouth for which one was inclined to 
 hold her responsible. 
 
 The colonel did not hold us responsible : he smiled 
 on us indulgently. The colonel was not young, but 
 then he would never be old. Isabel looked after him 
 a moment as he closed his door. Suddenly she took 
 me by the shoulders: — 
 
 "Let me tell you a secret I My husband was a 
 widower — not twelve years — two! Don't blush. 
 I '11 tell you the rest some day." She made mournful 
 eyes at me. 
 
 I said if I blushed for anybody it would not be the 
 colonel — he undoubtedly could not help himself. 
 
 " You need n't blush for me, then I I saved him from 
 a far worse fate. Did n't I say the army is primitive 1 " 
 
XX 
 
 The gray-stemmed poplars that were bare when I 
 first saw their columns closing down the streets of the 
 valley town, were turning gold, and flocks of leaves 
 were slanting across the shadows on our ditch-path. 
 It was cool enough to assemble the little dancers 
 as early as three, and that afternoon Miss Phoebe 
 Maclay was At Home. It was more than a dancing- 
 class, it was a Birthday. Phoebe was not only in her 
 sixth year — she was six, and hereafter would be in 
 her seventh year. This had been explained ; also I 
 warned her that her father in Silver City might not 
 have been advised of the important fact and she 
 would do well not to count upon his presence. Such 
 things should not be, but they were 1 It was sad even 
 to see how easily she accepted the disappointment. 
 
 We had come to the last dance before supper, the 
 climax of the lesson. I saw Isabel smile and nod, as 
 her fingers played on, to some one out of the window 
 at her right. As the dance swayed down the room I 
 passed the window and looked out. My eyes met 
 those of Phoebe's father gazing in as if he might have 
 been standing there some time. We did not speak ; 
 we did not even smile ; Phoebe had not seen him. The 
 music stopped and Isabel turned on her stool and he 
 swung himself inside and sat on the window-sill and 
 opened his arms to Phoebe. She flew into them and 
 
 222 
 
TRYING TO KEEP SANE 
 
 he raised her to his knees. She clung to him close 
 and clasped him round the neck. 
 
 " You 've come to my birthday ! Aunt Edith said 
 you might not know it was my birthday." 
 
 "Is it your birthday?" he asked, and I saw the 
 pang shoot across his face. Phoebe was not the kind 
 of child who demands, "What have you brought 
 me?" She had a remarkable delicacy about gifts and 
 her scale of values might have been that of the angels, 
 so disassociated it was from price. But he had not 
 even a flower. I knew what he was thinking — his 
 child's first birthday since she became motherless ; 
 strangers were there to celebrate it, and he, the great- 
 est stranger, had come not even knowing it was the 
 day I 
 
 At supper there were little gifts at each place, and 
 a chaplet of pale yellow poplar leaves to crown each 
 guest. They were so Greek in their bare brown limbs 
 and slender grace of proportions, and the pearly 
 shadows beneath uplifted chins as shining heads 
 were raised — I Phoebe's father placed the wreath on 
 her head and she smiled up at him divinely and he 
 stooped and kissed her. It was his only gift. He re- 
 tired to one side and Isabel Forth made talk with 
 him while Noreen and I waited on table. We had 
 had all the pleasure — I had had — preparing for the 
 beautiful sight; he had only the enduring pain of 
 absence, worse perhaps than loss. He was silent and 
 his eyes hardly moved from his own child, though all 
 were lovely I Two little crop-headed boys in middy 
 suits and two little girls in corresponding white of 
 
 223 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 a filmier texture and ribbons blue and pink. All of 
 them as brown as only the sea and the sun of the 
 plains can do the trick, and all little Americans of 
 the super-representative class. 
 
 Everything was easy while the party lasted, but 
 when our guests were gone and we had seen them 
 off at the gate, a stiffness fell upon the unhappy grown- 
 ups in their individual maladjustments. Phcebe, 
 mounted on her father's shoulder, had taken off her 
 wilted crown and mashed it down on his head 
 crookedly over one eye, and he squinted up at her 
 decorated in this bacchanalian fashion. In the same 
 guise he bore her off to bed. I found them waiting 
 at the top of the stairs. 
 
 " Would n't you like to put her to bed yourself?" I 
 asked. "She's very clever about undoing things. 
 Noreen will come up and straighten the room after 
 you." I smiled, inferring romps. 
 
 " Oh, do, papa 1 oh, do put me to bed I " Phoebe 
 jumped up and down in his arms and squeezed him 
 around the neck. 
 
 " I might n't live to go through with it if I 'm to 
 be choked like this. I 'd fall on the floor and Noreen 
 would have to pick me up." 
 
 " Oh, do fall on the floor I " Phcebe was only too 
 pleased at the prospect. 
 
 *' Perhaps you 'd be good enough to wait awhile 
 till we see what's going to happen?" I supposed I 
 was the person addressed, as there was no one else 
 present, but he did not use my name. 
 
 I sat outside on the stairs and heard Phoebe's ex- 
 224 
 
TRYING TO KEEP SANE 
 
 cited laughter and her chatter like a whole nest full 
 of young birds settling for the night. 
 
 " Now bring me Dick," she commanded, being at 
 last in bed. 
 
 "Dick? what 'Dick'?" 
 
 "Why, Dick! — on Aunt Edith's bureau. Don't 
 you see, papa? He 's got a bandage on." 
 
 The Hermes still wore a bandage, though the doll's 
 petticoat was at present " in the wash," and the 
 bandage ought to have been, I regret to say. Any 
 eye could have seen the likeness to the real Dick 
 "of ours." 
 
 "Now give him to me, papa. Not on that side — 
 that 's his hurted side. Lay him the other way." A 
 good-night kiss followed, a very fervent smack from 
 Phcebe. "Now kiss Dick too, — kiss Dick, papa!" 
 
 He came out looking slightly heated. It was a 
 warm room at bedtime even in September ; one of 
 Dr. Davenport's reasons, by the way, for sending us 
 out upon the land. 
 
 "I want to say * good-night' to Aunt Edith," 
 Phoebe called cheerfully. I went, knowing what 
 would follow: — " Now kiss Dick, Aunt Edith." 
 
 It did seem possible, as Isabel had declared, that 
 I had parted with my sense of humor and needed to 
 go East. The fly-mindedness of the place affected 
 one's own mind evidently, if one did not take care. 
 
 " Will you give me a little time for a talk, some- 
 where?" he asked at the foot of the stairs. "Sup- 
 pose we go outside." 
 
 Words as serious as these, from him, sent the blood 
 225 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 to my heart. I suppose I may have turned pale. He 
 turned savage. 
 
 " Are you still afraid of the brute ? " 
 
 " I 'm not afraid of you." 
 
 " You are I — you are trembling this minute. Be- 
 cause you don't trust me, and you never will trust 
 me again. Well ; I shall soon be saved the necessity 
 of forcing myself upon you, even on birthdays." 
 
 I was silent, grieved at his anger, for mine had 
 died. His must have been welded fast to his thoughts 
 of me forever, by my own hideous words. Only some 
 fire hotter than the wrath that had fused them could 
 ever melt them apart. So we must go on senselessly ; 
 for all was dead and cold between us now. We went 
 to the usual place, and mechanically, side by side, 
 began walking up and down. 
 
 " Have you had a letter from Mrs. Aylesford lately ? " 
 he inquired. 
 
 I had had one not long before, I told him, from the 
 sanatorium; but she had spoken of going home — al- 
 most at once, she had said. The letter sounded as if 
 she were quite ready to go — better, better altogether, 
 than I had ever expected her to be. 
 
 "Yes; that is it — better altogether. She has pro- 
 posed to take the children if it would suit me to have 
 her. You, of course, she hopes to have with Phcebe ; 
 and the baby's nurse under your commands. She has 
 everything planned. But she is careful not to urge it. 
 She knows it is a good thing for a man to see his 
 children — The question for these children is, what 
 will be best for them ? It would be a great relief to 
 
 226 
 
TRYING TO KEEP SANE 
 
 you to go back in this way which is so good for them 
 and so happy for her — Mrs. Aylesf ord. And she robs 
 me of nothing I had not lost, you know. But you will 
 still take care of Phoebe?" 
 
 " As long as Phoebe needs me and you will let me,'* 
 I cried. 
 
 **I let you! How strange it is that you can't even 
 understand that I that for the sake of Phoebe I would 
 . — and I do — and I have — sacrificed more than I 
 care to think about." 
 
 " We will not raise that question after this, then," 
 I said. " I wish to go straight on with Phoebe ; I have 
 loved her from the time she was a little mysterious 
 baby looking at you with those eyesl" 
 
 He drew one of his great breaths. 
 
 "And you will write to me? I'm afraid I can't let 
 you off from that. And I will write — to Phoebe. I 
 must keep in touch with her to that extent." 
 
 It was n't really safe for us to be together in the 
 unhappy distortion of our minds. Or his mind ; my 
 own I thought was safe from bitterness, but I was 
 hurt and heartsick at his words. Would I write to 
 him about his child? would I endure that he should 
 write to her? His resentment had destroyed his 
 common sense. 
 
 " If you find it strange that I can't understand you, 
 it may seem strange to me that you can't give me 
 credit for being even human." 
 
 "You are human, to children." 
 
 " Very well ; children are the issue between us." 
 
 "Exactly," said he, "if you wish it so." 
 227 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 " If I wish it so I I should say all other issues that 
 might have been, and should have been, are dead 
 between us." 
 
 " As dead as the Doldrums ! . . . I shall telegraph 
 Mrs. Aylesford that her * terms are accepted.' And 
 you will be glad to go as soon as possible, of course. 
 Your friends at the Post will miss you." 
 
 I hoped so, I said. " Mrs. Forth is rather a human 
 sort of person : strange that she and I should get on 
 together." 
 
 ** Oh, women I " he retorted. "You are a close cor- 
 poration ; you have a code of your own." 
 
 "As for going back," I resumed, "I love Mrs. 
 Aylesford too. I can't imagine a sweeter place to be. 
 But I do — if you will let me say so ? — appreciate 
 what you are doing for your children. Setting your- 
 self aside as if you had no rights in them." Thus 
 awkwardly I put it because it was become so difficult 
 to approach him. 
 
 " I am well aware of my rights," he answered coldly. 
 " Some day I may claim them. This is for the pres- 
 ent. We may hit upon some compromise later; not 
 so good for them, perhaps, but a little more * human' 
 for their father. Mrs. Aylesford will write you all 
 the details — about your rooms and the fires and 
 the bathroom they are going to build. I should n't 
 wonder if it may prolong her life, having the children, 
 — now that she has returned to life. She is a very 
 single-minded person." 
 
 "But not small-minded." 
 
 " No ; her letter to me was very far from that I " 
 228 
 
TRYING TO KEEP SANE 
 
 He hesitated — "I don't believe much in showing 
 letters." 
 
 For some reason he desired, I could see, to show 
 me this letter. I did not wish to read it. 
 
 "I agree with you," I said. "She will probably 
 write to me soon." 
 
 " She spoke of writing to you as soon as she had 
 heard from me. She has a great fear of your going 
 back to your family, giving the children up?" Per- 
 haps that was his reason for wishing me to read her 
 letter, just as she had revealed her heart to him. 
 
 I turned to go in. He stood in front of me obliging 
 me to stop. ** Edith," he said, — and then he paused 
 and finished (but I did not believe it was what he had 
 begun to say), -—"did you see Mars last night — 
 how close he was to the moon? It may not be an 
 occultation, but it will come pretty near it to-night. 
 Would you care to sit up and watch it — about 
 twelve?" 
 
 " No," I said shortly ; " I \e seen occultations be- 
 fore. They don't interest me much." 
 
 It was rude to leave him so, and besides my last 
 words were not safe to leave him with. They had a 
 double meaning which is not a wise thing to indulge 
 in at another's expense, unless it is pretty well cov- 
 ered. He had been a sort of star, a red planet of the 
 night, — our lonely nights on the mesa, — watched 
 for after sunset, burning bright against the growing 
 dusk. The main point just now was, not that he had 
 been a star, but that he had gone out. So I went 
 back and changed the key : — 
 
 229 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 " Is n't the boy to have a name one of these days? 
 Will you write to Mrs. Aylesford about it ? — any 
 choice that you have made, if you have chosen? " 
 
 He paused, looking at the end of his cigar in a 
 man's attitude of gaining time and self-command. 
 "The boy was named — for me — before he was 
 born. It is not a name I like, but we will not change 
 it. Except — please put * William ' before it." 
 
 I seemed doomed to stab him. " Before he was 
 born I " There is nothing so simple as losing a wife, 
 nothing more common than naming a child. But 
 where do the infinite chords of attachment lie, and 
 how can one approach these simple facts of life with- 
 out striking one of those thrilling strings that are 
 fastened to a human heart ! 
 
 I was altogether melted and relentant. "For all 
 that I keep saying to wound you, and for all that I 
 have said, and may say hereafter, will you forgive 
 me, Douglas, for the sake of her I know you loved 
 — whom I believe you love this moment still?" 
 
 " Have you discovered that ? Then there is hope 
 you may learn something else if we both live long 
 enough," was his answer. 
 
 "Tell me, now I " I demanded. " I have made you 
 suffer — it would be a sign of your forgiveness I " 
 
 He shook his head. "We are done with words. No 
 more words 1 " ~ . 
 
PART V 
 THE TWO ESSIES 
 
XXI 
 
 The week of the equinoctial, that autumn, I spent in 
 New York, having delivered my two charges safe 
 from their journey to the grandparents, and seen 
 them settled at Lime Point. There had been many 
 a beaming "Well, well!" from Mr. Aylesford, and 
 much wiping of spectacles by grandmamma herself. 
 She really was herself, though she no more trotted 
 through the halls with a guest's wraps and satchels ; 
 nor were the halls cold as they used to be. Heaters 
 had been put in and registers — all sorts of dread- 
 ful things they had done to the dear old house for 
 the sake of the little hostages of the new generation 
 that must have things different from the old. In all 
 ways Mrs. Aylesford had lost her initiative and was 
 subdued ; she did less with her hands and feet, she 
 noticed less what others did. She had never, after 
 twenty years, quite trusted even Mary Martin in cer- 
 tain departments, — for instance, guest-towels, as I re- 
 membered. She did not examine my towels now, nor 
 chase after me with wraps on cool mornings. 
 
 She was like an old-fashioned instrument of taut 
 wires, unscrewed. The music was hushed ; there were 
 none of those quick shivers of response when the in- 
 visible breaths of life passed over her ; she was lax, 
 but she was not going to snap. She spoke in the 
 same gentle platitudes, but with less energy of de- 
 livery. Things, even as late as this and so soon after 
 
 233 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 the shock of her grief, had taken new proportions. 
 She had no less sweetness, but more repose. 
 
 Perhaps the thing that touched one most was her 
 timidity about the children ; she seemed almost 
 afraid to touch the baby. As to advice, she was si- 
 lent. I am sure she would not have argued with 
 Nanny now. She made no protest, of course, against 
 my visit, leaving the baby to his nurse so soon — 
 she knew I must see my sister, and that many serious 
 matters since papa's death remained to discuss and 
 settle. But I could see the shades of apprehension 
 close over her. I need not say that I left her with re- 
 luctance, not only on account of her visible dread of 
 my absence : I feared, somehow, for her — as if she 
 might take flight. 
 
 In New York I was given a wonderful, a surpris- 
 ing welcome by everybody belonging to us and 
 everybody I knew. One had to go to Idaho it seemed 
 to learn one's value in New York. Absence, in the 
 case of relatives, may possibly draw one closer to 
 those we have had so near us that any day we might 
 have seen them and done things for them ; hence 
 we never did see them and never did anything till 
 they were gone and it was too late. This was 
 Essie's suggestion, who always managed to let in 
 a ray of irony upon my hasty self-gratulations. 
 
 " My dear, they are so relieved to have you safe 
 back again, so they need n't reproach themselves — 
 and to know you are so nicely settled up there with 
 the Aylesfords. What is one week I People will do 
 anything for you if it only lasts a week." 
 
 234 
 
THE TWO ESSIES 
 
 As Essie sat there making this Chesterfieldian 
 speech with an engaging smile, I thought her the 
 prettiest woman certainly that I had seen since I saw 
 her last. I did not mind her cynicism — not relatives, 
 or anything else in New York, could hurt me now. 
 I had gone through that which leaves one immune 
 from such things as petty slights and fancied neglect 
 or patronage. Essie was a comfort in that she was 
 mine, my own sister, just herself, talking in her old 
 way. As to Aunt Essie, I was very soon able to 
 prove how mistaken she had been there. 
 
 Aunt Essie had been at the train to meet me with 
 Essie in her carriage. This was my first surprise, 
 but explainable (according to Essie) if it meant I was 
 welcome if I did not stay too long. She took me at 
 once to certain shops, for she would n't have me seen 
 a moment out of mourning. The next surprise — 
 even to Essie, I think — came when she asked me 
 to stay with her, Essie's house being full — as I 
 knew it was, but that had been settled between Essie 
 and me. I glanced at her, and she smiled on the 
 proposition. 
 
 "Of course you girls must see each other — we 
 shall manage about that. Come, Essie : you '11 give 
 her up, won't you — just for bed and board?" 
 
 I knew that Jack and Essie were not in favor with 
 our clever aunt in the smart world. Their ways did 
 not please her, and their independence of her criti- 
 cism offended her and hurt her affection. And none 
 of us on papa's side had seen much of her since the 
 silly " breach," because of that or other things inher- 
 
 235 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 ent both in papa and herself, and in us very likely. 
 My having done this startling thing — as she must 
 have thought it — seemed to have made all the dif- 
 ference, or was it papa's death ? I chose the gentler 
 reason, for I knew they must have loved each other 
 well and missed each other during their absurd 
 estrangement. Essie and I thanked her and agreed 
 to consider the invitation, after we had had one night 
 together under the same roof. 
 
 In the course of that evening's prolonged talk, till 
 after midnight, I learned why Essie was mollified 
 toward our aunt, though to a degree only. 
 
 ** Mind you," she said, " I don't believe she would 
 ever have thought of it herself or asked about 
 debts and such things, though she must have 
 known we had nothing ; but she heard through 
 Uncle Charles at his club that a plan was on foot 
 among papa's artist friends to take all that off our 
 shoulders. They knew, of course, how we were left. 
 That hurt her dreadfully 1 strangers — beggarly art- 
 ists and literary men — helping out her own blood. 
 She swept in then magnificently and took it all out 
 of their hands and Uncle Charles wrote a check — 
 I don't know how much it was and I don't want to 
 know. It 's done, and that much, however it was done, 
 we have to thank her for. She has never mentioned 
 it. But it began with those old dears with nothing of 
 their own to spare, but such memories of papa — 
 such a friend, such a host as he was 1 Well : he '11 
 be missed — and the studio will be missed. ... It's 
 perfectly horrible to see it now I — babies and dirt 
 
 236 
 
THE TWO ESSIES 
 
 all over the place. You won't mind its being sold, 
 will you ? " 
 
 " I shall mind nothing," I said. " But I 'm going 
 to see what's under this invitation. I want to stay 
 there. You won't care if I do?" 
 
 " Certainly not. It 's quite the thing you ought to 
 do, and Jack and I are not too proud to go there to 
 dinner if she wants us. Something very interesting 
 might come of it ; something interesting to you is 
 sure to come of it. She sees you now as a stranger. 
 She 's very much bowled over — she can't keep her 
 eyes off you. It 's the funniest thing I ever beheld, 
 you two in the carriage side by side — you noticed 
 she ignored that I was the elder. — As I sat oppo- 
 site, I could see her trying to see your profile, peep- 
 ing at you, listening to every word, taking you in 
 in an amazed sort of way. We are a wonderful 
 family I 
 
 ** But you are changed, Edith ! " Essie regarded 
 me calmly, but with keen eyes. " I 'm impressed 
 with you too. Is there anything out there that ages 
 people ! — inside, somehow ? You look not much 
 different, now I'm used to you — you 're browner, 
 like the sea. I should say you were just off ship- 
 board, a long voyage — on deck most of the time." 
 
 ''I've been on deck — and it was something of a 
 voyage," I agreed. "Yes ; I think the West is aging. 
 The men you know are dry, cool, indurated somehow 
 — but they are children. I 'm no child 1 " 
 
 "No ; you're not. I can see that I Aunt Essie will 
 be a child in your hands, my dear. Use her nicely, 
 
 237 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 won't you? She'd be dreadfully convenient if she 
 liked one." 
 
 " You need n't say that sort of thing to me ! As if 
 I didn't know how 'nicely' you've treated her for 
 convenience' sake." 
 
 ** I was mistaken. I 'm wiser now. I wish we 
 could be friends — with all the family we have left. 
 New York is lonesome — without papa." 
 
 We shed our first tears quiedy together over this. 
 New York was lonesome to me — stripped of a cer- 
 tain glamour, and of a certain anguish it used to hold 
 for me that would never come again. I was stripped 
 — bare to the bone. It startled me how little I cared 
 now for things I had thought I depended on. It is 
 being aged very suddenly when one cares for so 
 few things. 
 
 In Aunt Essie's great beautiful house the thing I 
 enjoyed most was the silence of a well-bred mechan- 
 ism that left one's thoughts free for immaterial things. 
 An achieved silence, not like nature's fallow pauses, 
 or transitions, yet a thing to rest on too. I would find 
 myself at dusk standing between the curtains of a win- 
 dow on the street, looking at the lights shine reflected 
 in long, quivering lines on wet pavement (it rained 
 nearly every day whilst I was there) and watching 
 the stream of carriages that took men home to their 
 dinners or men without homes to their clubs, or guests 
 going out to dine. That was the sort of pang I might 
 have felt only a year ago — of a girl with no dinner in- 
 vitations and no new gowns to wear if she had them, no 
 personal hold on one of the throng of exciting folk that 
 
 238 
 
THE TWO ESSIES 
 
 passed and passed! They did not excite me now. 
 Not one of them could do a stranger thing than I had 
 known, nor demand in me a more difficult, desperate 
 counterpoise. Nothing in humanity could involve me 
 deeper than that soul's adventure in one of the lone- 
 liest spots on earth. Fashion could not awe me, nor 
 society nor the world cast down — I had been where 
 men and women suffer mental shame and say to one 
 another naked things. 
 
 Gowns indeed I In all my life of " dressing up " to 
 be looked at by critical eyes, I had taken no joy in 
 anything I ever wore, as in those machine-made 
 dresses bought in Boise City which I put on with the 
 pride of a soldier in his first uniform. This is not pose, 
 it is literal truth. I loved those white dresses on the 
 mesa that were the sign of my acceptance for a serv- 
 ice which to me was a consecration. I had tried my 
 hand before at this and that : my time had never been 
 my own. Everybody had a right to it — and a per- 
 fectly good right — but system, straight responsibil- 
 ity, definite, consistent orders, had never been mine. 
 I could not forget the one experience of my life when 
 a fearful trust was given me to hold alone, not 
 blindly, — that would have meant despair, — but un- 
 der orders that I trusted and knew I could obey. 
 
 One evening after the tea-hour, as we sat alone 
 waiting for carriage-wheels to announce Uncle Charles 
 — his quiet entrance and his kind hand-shake (I never 
 saw him earlier in the day) ; seated so, on opposite 
 sides of the fire. Aunt Essie said to me : — 
 
 " How satisfying this is ! I 'm so tired of petting 
 239 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 up myself — I wish I had some one else to pet. 
 Charles, of course, is a great baby too, but he has 
 people to do everything he wants — Fancy my trying 
 to meddle with him I But you, my dear — I could do 
 heaps of things for you. I could dress you for one 
 thing. You are so lovely the instant you get the right 
 thing on. You do so respond to clothes 1 " 
 
 She smiled at my amusement, but it seemed she 
 wanted an answer. **Now, are n't you going to stay 
 with me — now you see how we get on together? 
 You have so much of your father in you, and, thank 
 Heaven, of your mother too I You have his imperious 
 look and her gentle way. The last I believe you must 
 have acquired somehow : I remembered you as a 
 rather haughty young person ; you were a trifle saucy 
 to an old aunt sometimes, my dear 1 Do I malign 
 you?" 
 
 *' I should think not," I laughed. " But sauciness 
 gets taken out of one ; I could n't have been much 
 like papa if I were not to see a light now and then 
 borrowed from wiser sources." 
 
 " Ah, he never was wise — he never borrowed any 
 more wisdom than he could possibly help. But he 
 was always the most charming, everywhere. I begin 
 to see that in you too ; you grow upon one quite 
 dangerously. I 'm getting much too fond of you — 
 unless you are going to stay with me, always? I 
 should not be so dull if I had you to look at and to 
 listen to." 
 
 " But my children, dear Aunt Essie I I have two 
 children on my hands." 
 
 240 
 
THE TWO ESSIES 
 
 " That is an engagement you can break, can you 
 not, now that your own life is so changed?" 
 
 ** My life is not so much changed — and the en- 
 gagement is with one who is not here now to release 
 me." 
 
 "You mean your girl friend who died ? But, my 
 dear, that is fantastic. Her children have a father, 
 have n't they ? Is he quite without means of caring 
 for them?" 
 
 " Not without material means. Otherwise there is 
 only the grandmother, who is old and very frail ; a 
 breath would blow her away." 
 
 " Still, I think you are quixotic. I distrust any re- 
 lation which is not counted natural by ordinary 
 standards. It 's unnatural for a young woman like 
 you to give her best years to the children of another 
 woman, even a dear friend." 
 
 " It may be unnatural in some cases. In my own 
 case it comes very direct ; I find it quite simple, and 
 I love the call. I love the children — the little girl 
 especially. I am unable to think of my life going on 
 apart from her now." 
 
 " But how extraordinary ! " said Aunt Essie. "You 
 talk like one who is dreaming. It is not real life." 
 
 " I am sorry if I cannot make you see it is life to 
 me. As for dreaming — do you despise dreams?" 
 
 " I lost the power years ago to have any. Except, 
 now, this dream of having you. Don't refuse me, 
 Edith ! " 
 
 " It hurts to refuse you — believe me it hurts ! But 
 it would be worse to break this contract which I de- 
 
 241 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 liberately entered into. It would bring injurious re- 
 actions. If I had made a compact with you first, that 
 could not have been broken either." 
 
 " Ah, don't say * had ' — am I too old for a young 
 woman to love me — for a brother's child to be partly 
 mine? I shall not press myself upon you — only in 
 externals where I could set you free. I like your not 
 caring how you dress ; I know how you must have 
 been teased about your looks, living all your days 
 with those silly artists — You should forget your 
 looks with me : I'd attend to them I You are a thinker 
 
 — I feel in you a certain greatness, child. You were 
 meant for a great part in life. I want to take you 
 into the world and show you people who don't ex- 
 plode with the first idea that comes into their heads. 
 I want to show you to them I I should be proud in 
 my old age to show you: — *This is America; this 
 is what we can do over there where you think we are 
 so cheap I ' You have seen Europe with your father 
 
 — very delightful, no doubt, but utterly deplorable 
 socially, for you. I could take you into a society that 
 was his before he threw it all away for a palette to 
 stick on his thumb. Don't I know the talk you have 
 been immersed in? — technique, babble of the work- 
 shop — You belong in circles where the talk is deep, 
 and simple, and strange to an outsider — where there 
 is a reticence and a grace of the times that do not 
 come again ; where elegance is understood, and man- 
 ners have become a manner as old and mysterious as 
 the past that made it. Your youth has been wasted 
 up to now — and for that I hold myself in part re- 
 
 242 
 
THE TWO ESSIES 
 
 sponsible. But it is not too late. Having been wasted, 
 will you go now and throw yourself away?" 
 
 " I am not thrown away. I am found and used," 
 said I, — "to a purpose more real to me than the life 
 you show me. You make it very wonderful, but it 
 takes no hold — This that I do is an inevitable, a 
 fated trust. I touched it timidly at first fearing all 
 sorts of things, then I took it in my hands — always 
 fearful — then it took hold of me, and I belong to it 
 now. It is a safe and a blessed future, as I see it. All 
 I need is just what you say that you need — some one 
 to pet who is not yourself. In my case of course there 
 is the danger — it may not last." 
 
 Here a message interrupted to say that Uncle 
 Charles had been detained downtown — would not 
 dine with us that evening. . . . "What does that 
 mean — *it may not last'?" Aunt Essie resumed 
 when the door had closed. 
 
 " The child is her father's and he may marry again. 
 And his second wife will replace me with his children." 
 
 "Good Heavens 1" cried Aunt Essie; "and you 
 dare to take those children seriously — like this ? 
 And what is the man himself, for mercy's sake I" 
 
 " He is like other men," I said. " He will probably 
 marry. So I have no time to lose. I must not waste 
 a month, a day — doing what I hope to do for this 
 child — though it's done mostly in the way she is 
 made. I shall try to keep hands ofl her that are 
 clumsy or not clean." 
 
 "What is this child — you mean the little girl, I 
 suppose ? " 
 
 243 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 "Oh, she*s a type — as pure as any of your exclu- 
 sive circles can show, and she is 'America' too. I 
 find refreshment in the study of her mind, as deep 
 and strange as any I can imagine in the society you 
 speak of, and I am proud to be given the trust of 
 guiding it. It is not simple, and I cannot see either 
 why it is quixotic. I think, sometimes : — suppose I 
 had married and died and left a child ! " 
 
 *' You make me shudder I " cried Aunt Essie. " I 'm 
 afraid for you. There is in every one of us Bonhams 
 a streak of wild exaggeration that borders on insanity 
 — the passion of one-ideaed folk wherever you find 
 them. We are not responsible. Your father had it — 
 fancy his throwing away his life as he did ! / had it 
 — you can never know about that, though. I em- 
 braced an idea, the wrong one, of course, — and, well ; 
 I threw away what I had not the courage to think I 
 could meet as it deserved. It was madness — and 
 cowardice. I see you at least are not a coward, but 
 you are a gambler of the wildest sort. You stake these 
 years of your life, — the last years of your youth, my 
 dear! — on the children of a dead woman and a liv- 
 ing man — who may take them from you any day. 
 I pray it may be soon — and then we shall see ! " 
 
 " If it should be too soon he shall not have them. 
 I will not give them up to a woman who would marry 
 him too soon!'' 
 
 "Ah, bless you, they do anything! The nicest 
 creatures you can imagine will marry a man before 
 his 'shoes are old' — that's the world, my dear. You 
 dream and forget about human nature, but it does 
 
 244 
 
THE TWO ESSIES 
 
 not change, cultivate it all you may. My own hus- 
 band is indifferent fond of me, but if I were to let go 
 — drop out of the procession — he would travel on 
 with another, just as soon as he found one he liked 
 well enough to take instead of his chance of a better 
 one. And what is it to me I I merely thank Heaven 
 we are not men ourselves." 
 
 Aunt Essie, I think, made a great mistake classing 
 her husband with men in general ; no wife can afford 
 to do that. It was one of her many mistakes that usu- 
 ally did not meet their punishment as this had, one 
 could see, in her loss of any real influence with Uncle 
 Charles. She might have made him a brighter, bigger 
 man, but hardly a kinder one. She had paid him the 
 supreme compliment of marrying him — she might 
 at least have tried to understand him. In the one 
 week I stayed with them he seemed to me much 
 more than a check-book, — a major-domo, an efficient 
 eye to her equipages and traveling arrangements, an 
 amiable presence at her table. She made him her 
 foil in conversation and sometimes her butt. It was 
 quite terrifying to watch the light play of her words 
 pinning him to his background of silence. She never 
 actually drew blood, but as a spectacle it was no 
 pleasure to her guests — I thought his by far the 
 better part ; passive, patient, serene — abiding her 
 words in silence, but not a negligible silencer 
 
 But Aunt Essie was too restless to understand her- 
 self or other people very deeply. Hers seemed to me 
 an empty life made of everything the world gives 
 and takes away. The shadow of a life, or rather a life 
 
 245 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 all light, revealment without revelation, without the 
 softening mystery of nature's shadows, and the defi- 
 nitions of things as they are. 
 
 '* What did you think of that woman I sent to you 
 with a message in Idaho ? I hoped it might remind 
 you that you had a few relatives left in the East. 
 Was she as much of a fool as she appeared to be ? 
 Of course no wise person would have listened to me 
 with the least intention of doing what I asked ! " 
 
 ** She did do what you asked — and had no right 
 to ask. She is not a woman easily intimidated.'* 
 
 " No right to ask I Who had a better right, I should 
 like to know ? " 
 
 " Some one who had taken the pains to know me, 
 and to remember that I am a woman of — " 
 
 *' Don't repeat to me your age, child. Think what 
 it does to my own I We are heart to heart, and I 
 hope you have a memory that can be trusted to do 
 some wise editing." 
 
 " I hope so ; besides, we are going to have time to 
 live things down. I was far from resenting your mes- 
 sage — I was flattered, but it did amuse me." 
 
 "Well ; did it inconvenience you any?" 
 
 "That would be a long story," I said. " But please 
 don't set Mrs. Forth down for anything like what you 
 said in your haste — " 
 
 " Granted, granted ! It does n't matter — ske does n't 
 matter. I thought her a trifle spoiled as garrison ladies 
 must be, when they are pretty — She told me inter- 
 esting things about the West. Come, we must dress 
 — I hope I have n't taken away your appetite." 
 
 246 
 
THE TWO ESSIES 
 
 Aunt Essie was silent during dinner and rather 
 cold, but 1 knew she could not have taken offense at 
 any words of mine, nor was likely to be preoccupied 
 by anything she herself had said. In her life she must 
 have been too often unguarded, with the right per- 
 sons, to waste time on afterthoughts. I only feared 
 she might have been more deeply hurt by my rejec- 
 tion of her plans for me than it seemed possible to 
 imagine ; for they must have been so lately born, 
 vividly as she had presented them. 
 
XXII 
 
 More people were coming home every day from the 
 country and from abroad, many of them old acquaint- 
 ances or friends of papa's. Aunt Essie asked whom, 
 mentioning names, I would like to see ; I thought 
 she seemed relieved when I begged to see as few as 
 possible, as if the prospect of entertaining in my be- 
 half had bored her. Essie was at the house almost 
 every day, and at luncheon there was nearly always 
 a guest or two added casually to our number. I en- 
 joyed the well-bred faces and well-bred talk — Aunt 
 Essie's talk the cleverest and Essie's face the pretti- 
 est, as it seemed to me. But in each person present 
 there was a something subtly satisfying, distinctive 
 in her own particular way. So, after making an ex- 
 cuse of our mourning to see no one, when it came to 
 really seeing those whom Aunt Essie selected to ask, 
 I enjoyed meeting them immensely. 
 
 One day, she said abruptly, after the last guest 
 had departed, ** Essie, my dear, I wish you would go 
 too — you will have Edith all to yourself to-morrow ; 
 this is my last day and I 've saved up something to 
 say to her by ourselves. So be of! with you like a 
 dear!" 
 
 Essie's eyes narrowed a trifle : she never enjoyed 
 liberties nor being bounced like this, but she showed 
 no annoyance. Later she retaliated by commenting 
 
 248 
 
THE TWO ESSIES 
 
 on the speech with the remark that it was odd Aunt 
 Essie, after all the good company she was supposed 
 to have seen, should not have better manners. 
 
 It was nothing new Aunt Essie had saved up. She 
 merely wished to sound my resolution once more 
 as to renouncing the world, as she chose to call it, 
 and burying myself in the flower of my days. But 
 her world, I said, was not for me. I preferred my 
 "gamble." And for that matter, the existence of any 
 natural mother was a gamble for the life of her child, 
 from the hour of its birth. Character was the next 
 risk that parents had to take ; marriage, for a girl, 
 grown to womanhood, was the greatest gamble of all. 
 But what we win goes on and on, and what we lose 
 — well, there still was time, some good years yet for 
 the game of playing mother to Phoebe. 
 
 " And what are you going to do with all that time, 
 up there in a farmhouse on the Hudson ? You can't 
 spend it all on a child unless you smother her to 
 death. What are you going to do to keep yourself 
 alive?" 
 
 " I have a plan," I said. "Perhaps it is too soon to 
 speak of it, but you, of course, are the first one to 
 whom I should speak, and you can help me. Aunt 
 Essie. I need your help." 
 
 I thought that I might surprise her, but I had not 
 expected to give her such a shock as evidently I had, 
 by the news that papa's friends, some of the cleverest 
 who were writers and men of note, had broached a 
 scheme for collecting his letters and, with the consent 
 of his children, arranging them in biographical form 
 
 249 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 which in a sense would be autobiographical. He 
 would tell his life-story in the spontaneous form of 
 letters to intimate friends, and his personality (which 
 was the greatest thing about him) would be manifest 
 also in the responses these letters evoked from those 
 who had known him closely. Such a book would, 
 they thought, have exceptional value because of his 
 large acquaintance with persons of distinction and 
 his residence in many places of interest and his in- 
 imitable power of illuminating everything his words 
 touched, his views of life and people and art and 
 nature, everywhere. 
 
 Aunt Essie threw up her ringed hands in despair. 
 " Merciful Heavens, this is what comes of knowing 
 those awful lits 1 I would n't have those crazy friends 
 of his get hold of his private letters for wide worlds. 
 You know what they would do : they would never cut 
 out a phrase that tickled their fancy — not if it broke 
 a living heart — or slurred an old friendship in the 
 grave. Copy, copy, that 's all they would care about ! 
 Your father was as reckless as I am, my dear, and 
 much crueler — without knowing it. He never was 
 cruel on purpose, but those letters would make him 
 seem so. They would give pain to hundreds whom he 
 really loved. Bless me, I am his sister, but how do I 
 know what the wretch has said about me I You may 
 be sure it was clever enough. I made mirth for him, 
 and he was my despair. So it went in our family 
 when the temperaments began to get in their work. 
 What is love where there are tongues ! Never, never I 
 If it *s done it will be over my dead body." 
 
 250 
 
THE TWO ESSIES 
 
 I assured her that it never would be done — not 
 while any one was living of his contemporaries or 
 their children. I had seen to that effectually. For, of 
 course, his children would not consent. Not although 
 they had been asked to assist in the editing — As to 
 the letters, this plan had startled us, Essie and me, 
 into seeing the necessity of collecting them if pos- 
 sible from wherever he had scattered them in all parts 
 of the earth. And here Aunt Essie might help us. 
 Meantime, I begged her to believe that the scheme, 
 so far as his friends could make it so, had been a 
 vast compliment, an immense appreciation, presented 
 with much more delicacy than I had shown in pre- 
 cipitately declining it — in Essie's name and my own. 
 Essie had waited doubtful and half persuaded by Jack, 
 who saw in it fame for papa of a fresh, unexpected 
 kind that would astonish everybody ; he looked for- 
 ward to wonderful reviews, and perhaps to some 
 money for papa's daughters. I did not blame him. 
 But I crushed the plan at once, Essie consenting and 
 much relieved, I could see, at the stand I took. But 
 even she was astonished when I said that I myself 
 would undertake this work for the sake of papa's 
 memory, though the publication of it none of us 
 would ever see. 
 
 ** And yoiL will read those letters, you scamp ! I see 
 what will become of us all : You '11 read us like a 
 novel of Bulwer's time ; you'll satirize us — " 
 
 " I shall love you all ! " I cried ; '* I have read his 
 letters, some of them written with all that gay excess 
 of spirits that you fear so much. When they are read 
 
 251 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 — fifty or sixty years from now — they'll be a most 
 wonderful picture of New York and London in the 
 days when you were all young, and cleverer than 
 any one living now. And I have read other letters 
 of his that were not written to be clever — written 
 with all the best that was in him." 
 
 She looked at me anxiously : ** Were those family 
 letters?'' 
 
 I had to answer, after the jar I had given her ; I 
 saw she was deeply stirred, her past torn up before 
 her eyes in ways that to her might seem terrible. 
 "They were his letters to mamma: she left them 
 labeled, 'Your father's letters to me between 1840 
 and 1859.' We thought it seemed like a message. 
 They were in her old desk found when we carted 
 everything out of the studio. I have only just read 
 them myself." 
 
 "You have just read them — in this house?" 
 
 I answered : " Yes ; in my bed — and slept with 
 them beside my pillow." 
 
 " He would have been a perfect lover," she sighed. 
 ** Poor fellow 1 but what a husband I " 
 
 I protested. "Oh, Aunt Essie, can't you see? — 
 that was why she wanted us to read those letters. 
 She was too proud to accept sympathy even of her 
 daughters for what she knew we must remember of 
 the drudgery of her life. This was her one piece of 
 vainglory, her complete and satisfying boast. So she 
 was loved — as few women have been loved — that 
 covered all the cost." 
 
 " At least he never put another in her place, thank 
 252 
 
THE TWO ESSIES 
 
 God ! " said Aunt Essie. *' I don't know that it was 
 constancy ; he had a sense of the fitness of things. 
 He would have hated the anti-climax. Well, welll 
 no wonder, with that message from your poor roman- 
 tic mother, you would n't listen to me. Your world 
 is the same as hers, eh ? * Love is best I * But where 
 does your lover come in ? " 
 
 " I am the lover of Phoebe : to love is better than 
 to be loved. That was my mother's message." 
 
 " StufE and nonsense I Her lover could make love 
 in the words of a poet, but he would ask his Phyllis 
 to fetch his slippers. Indeed, I have heard him 1 " 
 
 ** Very likely, and what of it ? My little love shall 
 fetch my slippers because it is best for her, but when 
 it comes to the fun of life, is n't it all in the things we 
 do for them? — the things you wanted to do for me, 
 dear Aunt Essie, — which I am too old for now, alas I " 
 
 " You talk all around and over me, but it comes 
 to the same thing : false economy. Nature protests. 
 You throw away a heart of gold — you refuse to 
 bear more beautiful children into the world and 
 double up on another woman's child who would get 
 on just as well without you. If she 's so remarkable, 
 hands can't make nor mar her. No ; you are a strange 
 sport for us Bonhams to produce. You must throw 
 back to the Quaker Gurneys. There was never any- 
 thing like you among us until they came into the 
 game." 
 
XXIII 
 
 That was my visit in New York, memorable for cer- 
 tain talks, — after the summer of inhuman silences 
 and infernal misunderstandings. These talks enriched 
 the winter that followed with more silences, not in- 
 human, with a few misunderstandings that did not 
 matter. For the basis was sound and true. 
 
 I had ample occupation all day in the children, 
 and in the evenings, the long winter evenings begin- 
 ning after our six o'clock supper, I had papa's letters 
 to live with ; actually a life and a story, or many 
 stories, in themselves ; while Mr. Aylesford dozed in 
 his chair, and dear Mrs. Aylesford, tired of knitting, 
 went to the sofa and lay down, with her faint smile 
 of apology up into my face as I spread the afghan 
 over her and shaded her face from the lamplight. 
 She would close her eyes, but I do not think she 
 slept. Then I would take out my bundles of letters. 
 I kept them, the ones under consideration, in two 
 boxes. Those I meant to suppress were in one box ; 
 those that needed going over carefully were in a 
 second box ; others that seemed perfect just as they 
 were, I carried off as jewels and put in a safer place. 
 
 There was no haste about this work. It was scarcely 
 in fact begun, as I had only a small proportion of what 
 must have been the bulk of his correspondence to 
 work upon. Aunt Essie had promised to help me 
 
 254 
 
THE TWO ESSIES 
 
 collect — but her promises were never very promptly 
 kept. She proclaimed her wisdom in never setting 
 her hand to paper, never trusting the dearest friend 
 she had with anything personal in a letter ; but I fear 
 it was not so much wisdom as laziness. It was cer- 
 tainly very inconvenient for her friends when they 
 asked her for direct answers that could not be tele- 
 graphed. 
 
 My letters afforded a kind of research which I 
 found intensely interesting and very revealing in 
 many directions, and it struck a truer balance in 
 some cases where I had judged rashly or in igno- 
 rance. There were stacks of Captain Nashe's letters 
 preserved with the care they richly deserved. What 
 an ardent, a brilliant youth I I believed better of his 
 motives, too, when it came to the story of his Italian 
 campaigns written in haste, without premeditation, 
 with passion and plain sincerity, and with surpris- 
 ingly little vanity. It seemed when he really had 
 done things he had not boasted. I saw that papa, no 
 doubt, had been as much pained as we young ones 
 were disgusted with his old friend's deterioration. A 
 splendid figure, of the days when his own life had 
 been full of enthusiasm and illusion and hope, come 
 to the very rags and dregs of romance. I should 
 never though be able to understand his wanting the 
 captain for a companion on that last journey, unless 
 it were simple magnetism, the force of a vitally strong, 
 self-willed man acting upon one whose will was slack- 
 ening, whose trust in his own physical powers had 
 passed into a longing for another's strength to lean on. 
 
 255 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 And Aunt Essie! Before the winter was far ad- 
 vanced I had come with consternation upon the cause 
 why her hands went up and she had cried, *'Over 
 my dead body !" — It was her living heart I had be- 
 fore my eyes, in certain old letters of her youth which 
 papa had carelessly, inexcusably preserved — or not 
 destroyed. If mamma by any possibility had ever 
 opened his letters, or could have suspected what 
 these were, she would have burned them years ago. 
 . . . Here I read, in her own reckless words to a be- 
 loved brother, before his own marriage, when she 
 was his most intimate friend, what had been the 
 "idea" she took, — "the wrong one, of course"; 
 what had been the "madness, the cowardice" of her 
 choice, — refusing to believe she could meet a certain 
 decision as it deserved. She could say, if it were any 
 comfort to her now, " * When I was fair and young a 
 poet sang of me.' " A poet young himself, not yet 
 come into his kingdom, but long since crowned while 
 in his prime as one of the immortals. He had never 
 married, and she had married wealth and Uncle 
 Charles. I cannot believe she had not known the 
 true prince, that she had a natural preference for jig- 
 tunes and the smell of the cooking-fires ; but all the 
 same, "Alles ist weg, weg, wegl" 
 
 I seemed to see it all, the bland years of childless 
 luxury, her kind and patient consort seated opposite, 
 suspecting, perhaps, but never resenting the contrast 
 forever in her thoughts. This might explain if it did 
 not excuse her secret irritation when the ghost of 
 her youth's madness would rise and rise, and would 
 
 256 
 
THE TWO ESSIES 
 
 not down. No one but herself was to blame ; but 
 I fancied in her a fatal, besetting humility in her 
 youth, which I had seen in papa sometimes when he 
 grew tired of himself and gave in to the cheaper side 
 of him like a willful child trying to be naughty. Those 
 gay, arrogant, worldly Bonhams might often have 
 shrunk from exerting their unexercised ideality and 
 courage (which they no less possessed) in the face of 
 some similar demand. 
 
 Aunt Essie never wrote me a word, but she did 
 not forget. She must have stepped into a bookseller's 
 once a week at least and ordered a rare bundle sent 
 up to me in my " farmhouse on the Hudson." I could 
 not overhaul letters in bed, but I could read — when 
 that household of children and tired servants and 
 the aged were at rest. Not all of them asleep — one 
 I suspected of waking, watching long hours uncom- 
 plaining in the night. It was useless to ask Mrs. 
 Aylesford if she had slept or if she felt well; she 
 made me the invariable answer which I knew im- 
 plied it did not matter. She was well, I think she 
 meant, in the sense that all was as well with her now 
 as it ever would be again. 
 
 I suppose we knew very little about one another 
 in those separate rooms where the sleepers lay, with 
 walls between that they could have spoken through. 
 I knew nothing, for instance, and never have known 
 anything worth mentioning, about that English- 
 trained nurse of the Billy-boy's who called herself 
 Roberts. It was part of her training that we should n't 
 know nor have to think about her personally so long 
 
 257 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 as she performed her duties, which she did much 
 better than any of us could have told her. I saw no 
 more and heard no more of Essie than if I had been 
 in Idaho, except now and then a box of candy from 
 Jack, and a promise at Christmas (with a pretty but 
 very cold dressing-sacque), from Essie, of a visit in 
 the spring. Casually she asked if I were doing any- 
 thing with papa's letters ? 
 
 I might as well stop here, with this part of my 
 story, for everything stopped and then went on again 
 on a lower key in a subdued monotone like the wind 
 you do not hear or the mill or the fountain — till it 
 ceases ; like the scents we breathe and no longer know 
 that we smell ; like the lights and dusks and moon- 
 rises that pass unreckoned when we see them, lost in 
 thought and alone. All by degrees make up an at- 
 mosphere of the spirit to which the insistent brain at 
 last submits ; as a sleepy child resists to the verge, 
 sleep that creeps over him, and then suddenly yields 
 all at once and is in a deep dream. In that dream we 
 passed our first spring anniversary, Nanny's mother 
 and I. There had been the same wet weather of a year 
 ago, the same freezing and thawing on the dreary 
 roads, the dingy snow-banks up the lane, the con- 
 finement to piazzas ; but it was so complicated with 
 the question of children's colds and exercise that I 
 spent no sentiment nor shivers of remembrance upon 
 it. Wherefore I knew that my mind was normal, at 
 least so far. 
 
 So these days passed and others that ushered in 
 the time of blossoms on the hillsides that we saw 
 
 258 
 
THE TWO ESSIES 
 
 looking across the river, of our own blossoms that we 
 went up the lane to see, of long days and soft spring 
 nights, and visits from the city. Essie and Jack were 
 our first guests, and they embellished the place almost 
 like the first garden-flowers themselves. It never 
 failed to amaze me how they kept so smart and looked 
 so prosperous on three children and scarcely any- 
 thing a year. Essie, when I glanced her over, senten- 
 tiously explained, "Aunt Essie — an Easter-card I a 
 sort of blotter that I flipped over rather scornfully, 
 and between each leaf, if you please, a ten-dollar bill 1 
 That was a great stroke, your visit." But this was a 
 side of my sister that I had never enjoyed. This was 
 the mother-hen scratching and clucking to her brood. 
 
 I liked better to hear her discourse of her children's 
 characters in her cozy, impartial way ; and I listened 
 eagerly to her comments on Phoebe, her ** darling " 
 looks and manners that did me credit, she remarked. 
 She saw the real distinction of her little face, already 
 so full of significance to my eyes. Essie's I knew 
 were keener and absolutely without glamour. 
 
 Aunt Essie had not missed the chance of Essie's 
 visit to send one of her own messages that she never 
 could bring herself to write. "She really wants you," 
 Essie urged. " She has taken an extraordinary fancy 
 to you. And she seems worried about the letters. 
 What a mare's nest I She says she must have a hand 
 in it herself." 
 
 "She can't possibly have a hand in it I There won't 
 be anything done if she does. If we can't be trusted 
 with our own father's letters they had better be 
 
 259 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 burned. But she might help us secure them from 
 everybody else — if she 'd only do that 1 " 
 
 "She'll do it. She'll do anything if you'll go and 
 live with her and make her. She 's just a spoiled 
 child. Why don't you come back into the family ? 
 You are n't an Aylesford ; you belong to us." 
 
 *'My dear Essie, you're a mother : you know how 
 a child takes hold of one. What should I do — what 
 should you think I could do — without this child that 
 you can see is the main thought with me day and 
 night. I live in her as you live — ■" 
 
 " You know I don't — live in my children like that I 
 I 'm doing a great deal better by them, I think, just 
 living my own life and leaving them alone a good 
 deal of the time. If you don't want to give up these 
 children here, why not go and stay with Aunt Essie 
 now and then — take a month off with her ? Why 
 give her up?'* 
 
 " Take a month off I Have you ever tried teaching 
 a child ? It 's only a little you can do each day, but 
 you have to keep it up ; you cannot lose the thread. 
 I should lose everything — I should lose my senses 
 — if I lived with Aunt Essie the whole of any month, 
 if I had to talk all the time about papa and mamma 
 and her theories of what life is, or ought to be. She 's 
 a good deal better than her theories, but she has 
 never discovered the fact herself." 
 
 When I go up in the air like this, Essie is calmer 
 than ever. What I say makes no impression on her 
 mind, but she is impressed by the fact that I 'm need- 
 lessly in earnest about something that is all a mys- 
 
 260 
 
THE TWO ESSIES 
 
 tery to her; but if it means ** Hands off I" that she 
 can understand and act upon perfecdy without pique 
 or fuss. 
 
 She merely asked, "Weren't you rather happy 
 that week you spent with her?'' 
 
 "Yes," I said. "That was a very necessary week 
 all around, but all the good it could do has been 
 done. It would spoil it all if she saw too much of me. 
 Aunt Essie can't stand very much of anybody for 
 long". That 's why she can't keep a secretary." 
 
 " But what about you ? Don't you ever expect to 
 visit anywhere? Don't you want anything yourself? 
 These nice old people here are bores compared to 
 Aunt Essie I " 
 
 " And the place is a bore, compared to New York. 
 But you see I don't compare them." 
 
 " What do you do ? What do you think about when 
 you sit here " (we were seated under the willows by 
 the mill on the old talking-stones) "and watch the ad- 
 mirable Roberts with her admirable mending sitting 
 by that baby sound asleep ? " 
 
 " I don't watch Roberts much ; she does n't need it." 
 
 " But, Edith, you 're getting thin I — you have a 
 cloistered look. Have you renounced the world in 
 any form ? " 
 
 " Yes," I derided, " in the form of cigarettes." 
 
 Essie had noticed that, without comment, though. 
 Now she asked practically : " What have you done 
 with Jack's case?" 
 
 "Jack's easel — you mean the Russian silver? — 
 Well, I like that I Is Jack an Indian giver ? " 
 
 261 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 " No ; but I am ! — and if it is n't doing you any 
 good — " 
 
 " When was it yours, I should like to know ? You 
 nearly boxed his ears about it, if I remember." 
 
 ** That's only part of the ceremony of gifts with 
 us. I always relent — " 
 
 " Especially when he gives the gift to some one 
 else!" 
 
 " It was all in the family ; but what did you do 
 with it?" 
 
 " Paid a debt of gratitude that was personal to 
 myself." 
 
 ** It must have been to a young man. ' Ladies/ I 
 suppose, don't smoke in Idaho ? " 
 
 "It was a young man," I said. 
 
 " Has he got anything to do with what you think 
 about in this place? Who was he, anyhow?" 
 
 " No one of the least consequence to you or to me. 
 His name 's Dick Grant. You can write to him — 
 I '11 give you his address — and say the case I gave 
 him was n't mine to give — " 
 
 " Bah, bah ! " cried Essie, quite herself. " I got a 
 rise out of you, anyhow. You 're not quite gone to 
 heaven if you have taken the veil. ... I suppose 
 you think about Nanny a good deal, here where you 
 were together? She was a haunting little thing." 
 
 " She rather haunts me," I said. 
 
 " Nanny was really the fatality of your life," Essie 
 pronounced, with one of her efforts at analysis. 
 
 " Oh, no ; papa was the fatality of all our lives. 
 He was the most helpless and the most powerful one 
 
 262 
 
THE TWO ESSIES 
 
 of the family. If he had n*t taken a notion that I could 
 paint, for instance, I should never have seen Nanny, 
 nor Idaho." 
 
 " Did you really like it out there, honestly?" 
 
 *'I hated it, and so did Nanny. But it 'haunted' 
 us both. It has tremendous force, concealed some- 
 how ; things may happen any time, but you don't 
 know what, nor where to expect them. It 's like a sea 
 sown with floating mines, innocent of its own terrors. 
 You may go safe a hundred times and then you may 
 strike something that explodes and you go out of 
 sight" 
 
 " Indeed 1" said Essie, eyeing me narrowly. "Did 
 anything explode with you out there?" 
 
 Essie can root anything out of me, if she really 
 tries ; also she is safe as the grave ; and she would 
 never by a thousand miles get the measure of this 
 that had happened to me, this explosion. 
 
 **If you give one guess, aloud," I said, "I shall 
 go into the house and not be alone with you again 
 till you and Jack go home." 
 
 " I should n't have to give more than one," she said. 
 "Not that I should think of mentioning it to you." 
 
 " If you ever mention it to a living soul it had bet- 
 ter be me I " 
 
 "That's all right — I know you trust me, though 
 I don't know why. I could tell you perfecdy well 
 what happened, and knowing you I know you must 
 have taken it too hard. But it 's better to be a goose 
 than to make your family ashamed of you. I don't 
 mind your taking it too hard 1 " 
 
 263 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 "That's why I trust you. But leave me and my 
 floating mines alone after this, please. Everything 's 
 exploded that can explode. I 'm in safe waters now." 
 
 " Safe fiddlesticks 1 Once a goose always a goose. 
 But a silly goose, not a stupid goose.'* 
 
 ** Living with Aunt Essie would not prevent any 
 of my natural silliness from overtaking me. Make 
 that plain to yourself, and make it plain to her if you 
 can. I like her a great deal more than you do — so 
 much, in fact, that I should n't dare to live with her." 
 
 " You '11 do as you please, of course. — Only, I 
 don't like nuns in the family, cloistered nuns." 
 
PART VI 
 MRS. AYLESFORD 
 
XXIV 
 
 Strawberries were ripe, raspberries still clung to 
 their white cones, but were turning pink and prom- 
 ised a fine crop. Mrs. Aylesford took more interest 
 in house matters now that the fruit-canning and pre- 
 serving season came on. I learned a new or a very- 
 old way of doing up strawberries in their own juice 
 under the heat of the sun. They were set out in large 
 crockery bowls covered by a pane of glass and ex- 
 posed to the hottest rays all day : no insects nor air 
 nor dust could get in. Drops of moisture collected 
 on the underside of the glass, but evaporation was 
 slow, and hour by hour, day after day, the delicious 
 fruit soothed and simmered and grew richer in flavor, 
 a distillation and a conservation, the very poetry of 
 preserving. Phcebe was discovered one day alone in 
 the garden, violating the sanctity of that pane of 
 glass, and popping a warm berry into her mouth in 
 hurried ecstasy. She was deeply chagrined. Her face 
 burned crimson with shame and the heat of the sun 
 where we stood. She eyed me shyly with one sweet- 
 ened finger at her lips. I could have fallen upon her 
 and kissed her ; instead I marched her in to her 
 grandmother to confess what she had done. It was n't 
 long before she came bouncing out again, by no 
 means covered with disgrace. She slipped one hand 
 in mine. I turned it over and examined it. 
 
 267 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 " It is n't sticky," she remarked. *' Grandma washed 
 it, and my face. She kissed me. And she laughed 
 and cried — that funny way. She said mamma did 
 that, too, when she was a litde girl. Took strawber- 
 ries. Was mamma naughty?" 
 
 ** She may have done it once, but she would n't do 
 it again. Or grandmother would n't have laughed." 
 
 "I'm not going to do it again," said Phoebe, quite 
 contented with herself. "I said so to grandmother." 
 
 It was the next day I saw grandmother with Phoebe, 
 and a spoon, slip off down the garden. I watched 
 them while she lifted the pane of glass herself and 
 Phoebe fished out a spoonful and gazed rapturously 
 at her fond confessor while the celestial morsel found 
 the longest way down. The road of repentance for 
 Phoebe would be a primrose path if grandmamma 
 could make it so. 
 
 That summer Mr. Aylesford missed his usual com- 
 panion, after supper, when he went out to see how 
 everything was getting on. Mrs. Aylesford's strength 
 was not equal to making the rounds of the place with 
 him — she sat wrapped in shawls on the piazza or 
 wandered very slowly up and down ; but it gave her 
 pleasure to see us go forth, Mr. Aylesford and I, with 
 Phoebe between us holding a hand of each. I learned 
 to know the vegetables that were only just above 
 ground, never having seen them except in market- 
 baskets or on the stalls. I studied my garden calen- 
 dar of dates for the flowers coming into bloom and 
 for the wild flowers we searched the fields and woods 
 to find. One afternoon Mrs. Aylesford and I were 
 
 268 
 
MRS. AYLESFORD 
 
 hulling strawberries for supper : she liked to do little 
 sitting-down chores for Mary Martin who was always 
 busy. 
 
 What was it, I ventured to ask, — out of this deep 
 sense of peace, — that had brought her back to life, 
 to the willingness to live and care for things again? 
 
 **Why, the children!" she answered as a matter 
 of course. ** When I heard Phoebe had scarlet fever 
 and nowhere to go but out on the dry land, in that 
 deserted place, why, it went through me like a knife. 
 I wasn't feeling much of anything then, but I felt 
 that 1 We never quarantined scarlet fever in my time. 
 I don't think it was called contagious like measles or 
 small-pox. But I knew what it meant to be packed 
 of! like that, in that wild place alone with only 
 strangers, afraid to go near you. We know it can't 
 be helped when people avoid us in sickness, but it 
 does hurt the feelings to be cut off — :it's very lone- 
 some. I 've been through it. You had to go through 
 all that alone and the work besides — up nights and 
 no one to rest you in the day. And this house doing 
 no good to anybody. Her grandmother — not even 
 knowing the child was dangerously sick I That 
 was n't your fault. It was because I had crept away 
 and people were taking care of me. I had n't even 
 offered the house she was born in to Nanny's mother- 
 less children — turned out on the bare land. It 
 shocked me almost to death. Perhaps it shocked 
 me to life. 
 
 " I got up next morning and wrote to you, and 
 made them send for father to take me home. He 
 
 269 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 used to come to see me at the sanatorium, but what 
 could he do ! — it was forlorn to see him ; and when 
 he was n't there he was alone with Jonas and Mary. 
 I saw all of a sudden how he was aged — and that 
 was another shock. But it did me good. Coming 
 home did me good, to find things that needed look- 
 ing after. . . . You see I am getting stronger all the 
 time?" 
 
 I did not see it. But I knew the thing now that hurt 
 her and took her strength was silent worry, not con- 
 nected with death, but with something in life that she 
 could not understand; something that came much 
 nearer to her than I somehow had imagined it would. 
 And I, who loved her so, had been fated to bring it 
 on her ! And I could never tell her why. 
 
 All that summer and all the fall till house windows 
 were shut and we no longer heard that lessening roar, 
 the great through trains went crashing past our sta- 
 tion. I should n't have taken the Chicago Limited, 
 the train that most expressly and haughtily thun- 
 dered by ; but any train would have done that was 
 bound West far enough to meet a vision of great 
 plains ringed with mountains and the smell of dust 
 and sage and the sound of the desert wind. Nuns 
 do fret at their narrow cells, and I can answer for 
 them, the second year must be the worst. It was my 
 second year. 
 
 Heretofore in our life there had been always the 
 chance of adventure, with a father whose mind one 
 could never predict except that it would change. All 
 
 270 
 
MRS. AYLESFORD 
 
 hope of change was over for me when I refused Aunt 
 Essie's offer of a home and a share in her adventures 
 — which I had never despised I She had broken up 
 her establishment in New York and gone abroad in- 
 definitely — and of course she never wrote. Tied to 
 two children and two aged folk, my journeys now 
 must be the famous migration from " the blue bed 
 to the brown," and my adventures those of the life 
 within one's self which cannot be revealed. 
 
 That winter we knew, by his letters, that Douglas 
 Maclay was in Chicago for a few days. The old people 
 grew excited, awaiting his telegram to say by what 
 train he should arrive. He did not come. His next 
 letter was from on board the Union Pacific westward- 
 bound. It hurt like a blow — my poor old dears I 
 Mrs. Aylesford seemed stunned. They held him in 
 their fond, loyal hearts almost as a son ; his two chil- 
 dren were under their roof, whom he had not seen in 
 over two years — two years in the fall I What did it 
 mean? To me the sight of their consternation, which 
 they were too proud to speak of, was simply ghastly. 
 I had prepared for myself the spectacle — long drawn 
 out — of a death-in-life withdrawal these simple hearts 
 could never understand. Their daughter's husband, 
 the father of her children, had shaken them off — 
 and the children — like a last year's suit of garments 
 good enough for the poor. They were the poor, but 
 they were proud. 
 
 As time went on and the situation did not clear up 
 to a mind so direct in its cognizance of duties and 
 ties of blood as hers, I began to fear the perplexity 
 
 271 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 of it would impair in a manner permanent and seri- 
 ous what little strength dear Mrs. Aylesford had left. 
 Easy as her flow of words could be on any simple 
 subject she was not shy of, discussion of conduct 
 in those she loved, or subtleties of her own relations 
 with them, I conceived would be impossible to her. 
 I hardly imagined that she and Mr. Aylesford said 
 more to each other than she said to me. . . . 
 
 Another year might have passed before she said 
 anything at all that I can remember, on this wearing 
 subject that was always between us — wearing her 
 out before my eyes. I think it was now four years 1 
 — can it be believed ? — yet the bitterness, the dead- 
 lock was not mine. I must suppose he meant me to 
 feel that I had created it in him. But what could I do ? 
 
 That day she said to me with effort, but straight- 
 forward as she always was : — 
 
 **Has Douglas Maclay changed, I wonder? He 
 used to make a great deal of Phoebe. I thought he 
 was a good father. And his letter to me about the 
 children coming here was so kind and affectionate I 
 I have kept it all this time — it is very long ago ! It 
 makes me sad to read it. He writes to father now and 
 then on business ; he does n't explain anything why 
 he does n't come, but he sends messages to me just 
 as if he had n't acted so strange ! I never heard any- 
 thing like it — I never did 1 There 's death in families 
 and disagreements, but he doesn't seem put out 
 about anything? Can you think what it could mean, 
 Edith?" 
 
 I groaned in my heart as I lied to her — but it was 
 272 
 
MRS. AYLESFORD 
 
 not all a lie : "I know him no better than you do, 
 dear Mrs. Aylesford.*' 
 
 "Why, it's dreadful the way the children are go- 
 ing to forget him. Little Billy would n't know him 
 if they met on the road — even Roberts would n't 
 know the father of the child she is taking care of." 
 
 " Phoebe will not forget him," I said. ** They are 
 great friends in their letters, you know." 
 
 " I don't know much about Phoebe's letters, any 
 more. She never shows me any. I don*t know if it 's 
 an accident or if you think she had better not show 
 them?" 
 
 These letters of Douglas to Phoebe had, it is true, 
 become an embarrassment between us, in a manner 
 most natural, if anything could be called natural in 
 his relations to us and to his children. When he first 
 began to write, he tried to stoop his mind and style 
 to hers and I could feel a man's diffidence in the 
 attempt, conscious of a grown person looking over 
 the child's shoulder, as it were. Phoebe at that time 
 could not read " writing " — not her father's writing. 
 He did not do it well, and I pitied him. After a while 
 he seemed to limber up to his work, and the letters be- 
 gan to show some ease and pleasure in the perform- 
 ance. At this time they were treated as family letters. 
 So few things happened to any of us that anything, 
 even a letter, that happened to one was shared as far 
 as possible. But by degrees, Phoebe's father had 
 gained proficiency in a way of writing to us both — 
 to me as well as to Phoebe — accepting the fact that 
 I was always looking over her shoulder. It was very 
 
 273 
 
EDITH BONHAM ' 
 
 delicately done, but not so obscurely that no one 
 else could have seen that they were no longer letters 
 to be passed from hand to hand. This is saying more 
 than would seem necessary about anything so simple 
 as the " Dan and Trinket stories," as we called them, 
 which contained the gist of the whole matter. It was 
 about this time, however, that I ceased to remind 
 Phoebe that she had not shown grandmamma papa's 
 last letter. Grandmamma, of course, had craved to 
 see it and had observed the omission. I was accus- 
 tomed lightly, at table when Mr. Aylesford was pres- 
 ent, to retail interesting parts of their contents. Mrs. 
 Aylesford had noticed all this in silence ; it must have 
 piqued her and worried her also. 
 
 So I took a sudden resolution : whatever the effect 
 of the letters themselves, it could not be worse than 
 this brooding and speculating over the reason why 
 they were withheld. Also I was curious to see if she 
 would see what I had thought that I could see. I 
 brought her the whole packet (saved by Phoebe) be- 
 ginning with the first of the Dan and Trinket stories. 
 I made no explanation of why they had not been 
 shown except one that was a subterfuge and not 
 sincere. 
 
 " You see he has become a story-teller," I prefaced. 
 " I hope he won't feel shy if his audience is enlarged. 
 He is used to me always looking over Phoebe's shoul- 
 der," — I repeated this idea, — *' I 'm hardly more of 
 a grown-up than she when it comes to these stories." 
 
 Mrs. Aylesford looked at me in surprise. " A story- 
 teller ? I never supposed he had much imagination." 
 
 274 
 
MRS. AYLESFORD 
 
 ** That 's why I think he might be shy about trying 
 to use what he has : like any one who begins a story 
 made up for a child, when grown-ups come and 
 listen." 
 
 **I don't think he would mind me," said Mrs. 
 Aylesford. 
 
 Dan and Trinket were the names of his saddle- 
 horses which he used alternately, Dan for long, hard 
 trips, Trinket for riding about the mines. He had 
 developed the habits of each of these animals and 
 his own relations with them into almost a set of 
 fables — to our bursts of applause in Phoebe's words 
 in her answering letters. " More, more, please, about 
 Dan and Trinket, papal" 
 
 These letters I had encouraged Phoebe to save, for 
 they were becoming valuable in themselves : pictures 
 of the high trails and the mountain-pastures up near 
 timber-line in sight of the snow-capped peaks of the 
 Saw Tooth Range. Some of them were quite heart- 
 breaking in the middle, and we had to look ahead and 
 reassure ourselves as to the end before we could go 
 on without tears. But in all the stories of the pastures 
 or the camps or the trails. Trinket was the star-lady 
 and Dan supported her in the leading male r61e. His 
 was more of a character-part ; he was not represented 
 as a hero. He was the horse the other man rode 
 when his master went off with a companion and 
 camp-mate on one of his long trips. No one ever 
 rode the star-lady but himself ; she was never to be 
 sold, never loaned to any one (this we were repeatedly 
 assured of). She was the kind of creature only one 
 
 275 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 person should handle — because she had an organ- 
 ization which whoever rode her needed to study ; as 
 fine as a woman's and more sensitive than most 
 women's. There was nothing like her in the Terri- 
 tory. Not that she was n't a trifle shrewish — she was 
 out of her proper element in a rough mining-camp. 
 The altitude got on her nerves. Dan got on her 
 nerves ; not so much on the trails, where they traveled 
 single file and she did not have to see his ugly old 
 nose poking on ahead of her ; she could n't keep up 
 with his stride on a walk, and his long, slinging trot 
 mile after mile, when they traveled together, nearly 
 broke her heart. She was held in from the smooth 
 run which was her flight in equivalent. None of his 
 gaits — he hadn't many — suited hers. She knew 
 herself faster than he, but she was n't allowed to prove 
 it in the work they did together. The roads that were 
 his roads were not meant for her. He annoyed her 
 even when he minded his own business on the trails, 
 but still more when, as occasionally happened, they 
 were driven in harness together. (It was an indignity, 
 but sometimes a necessity.) He would offer to pull 
 more than his share of the load on a long, stiff grade, 
 which is a tactless thing to do to a proud lady trav- 
 eling beside you. The well-meaning Dan got snapped 
 at, he got pushed out of the road, and they both had 
 to have reminders from the whip — his fault I Still, 
 Dan had nerves too ; he had affection and memory. 
 He went of! his feed if left alone to graze in the pas- 
 ture where they were commonly turned out together. 
 Instead of munching for a living like a sensible beast, 
 
 276 
 
MRS. AYLESFORD 
 
 he would spend his time running back and forth the 
 length of the fence, watching for his field-mate, and 
 if he beheld her coming led by the halter, he lifted 
 up his voice in loud trumpetings of joy. But some- 
 times he waited long and actually grew thin. . . . 
 Here, I had to stop, and Phoebe, swallowing hard, 
 said, ** I wish Trinket liked Dan a litde better. Don't 
 you wish she did. Aunt Edith ? " 
 
 "These things can't be forced, you know, with ani- 
 mals any more than with people." 
 
 " But people can try to be nice to each other — you 
 have told me so — if they have to live together. She 
 ought to be polite to Dan when he 's doing his best 
 to please her." 
 
 "Yes," I agreed ; "she ought to be polite to him, 
 instead of being whipped into it, and getting him 
 whipped too." 
 
 It was the horseman's rapture, of course, that gave 
 such a thrill to the terms in which Trinket was glori- 
 fied by the master who wrote of her. She was a thor- 
 oughbred ; she had pure Arab blood back in her sires 
 in England. She was a foolish fine lady, difficult to 
 handle if she were not understood, but she was a 
 jewel, a darling, in spite of all her nonsense. She had 
 fire and endurance and spirit, and she never shirked 
 her work. She tried a man's patience, but she was a 
 beauty, and she was mightily beloved. She was a 
 creature like some women whom you want to look 
 at all the time. And there were good hours, some- 
 times whole days, on the long roads, when her mood 
 matched your own, when to travel with her was like 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 music and you wished the road might go on for- 
 ever. 
 
 I had hung around more or less, uneasily, while 
 these stories were being read by my dear old friend, 
 intensely curious, I may as well own, as to what she 
 would or would not see in them. For there might 
 not be anything there I All the trepidation on my 
 part about having them read might be founded on 
 pure imagination of a kind not to be proud of. 
 
 She read them slowly, and with many a pause. 
 At length she laid the last one down. She sat some 
 time in silence, and then she said : — 
 
 ** I understand why you did not show these letters. 
 They are not written to Phoebe ; they are written to 
 you. If you can't see his meaning all through them, 
 you must be very blind." I was silent. " Would you 
 be willing to tell me if you do see it, Edith?'* 
 
 " If there is any meaning there, he has covered it 
 up, and we must leave it so, I think. He is not a man 
 who cannot say what he means — if he has anything 
 to say." 
 
 " What he means is friendship of a very beautiful 
 kind, and a sad kind, if he has to hide it from you 
 in fables. Have you ever said anything to him to 
 make it hard for him to speak any plainer ? Did you 
 part good friends in Idaho ?" 
 
 " Not exactly," I said. 
 
 "I was afraid of it," she sighed. "I Ve wondered 
 often if that might not account for some of the things 
 we don't understand. I know it must have been a 
 difficult time with you both. You would never quar- 
 
 278 
 
MRS. AYLESFORD 
 
 rel, — you are too sensible for that, — but there might 
 easily be a misunderstanding." 
 
 "There was," I agreed, — "a quite serious mis- 
 understanding. But other things, we decided, were 
 more important than what we thought of one an- 
 other, — so we let it go. That was not the point be- 
 tween us." 
 
 " It seems to be the point now, with him. There is 
 deep feeling under these little stories. They almost 
 make me cry. Are you going to be silent, Edith? 
 Don't you ever write anything to him but business ?" 
 
 ** It is not my place to write anything but business. 
 He asked me, when we said good-bye, to write to 
 him about Phoebe, and he would answer — to Phoebe. 
 Now, if he wants to say anything to me, he must do 
 so, and I will answer as I can. It would be absurd, 
 indelicate, to notice these stories to Phoebe as if they 
 were messages to me." 
 
 I had grown quite excited, and I could see my dear 
 Mrs. Aylesford shrink into herself. But presently she 
 found courage to say : — 
 
 **If he ever should write, Edith, and offer you 
 friendship as true and unselfish as — as poor Dan's, 
 could n't you behave a little better to him than that 
 pettish little Trinket ? I could think of you quite dif- 
 ferently. There must, indeed, have been a ' misunder- 
 standing,' if that 's his idea of you I " 
 
 "Mrs. Aylesford!" I cried, "you must not — in- 
 deed, you must not confuse me with — I wish, I wish 
 you would not think of it at all ! " 
 
 I got down on the floor in front of her chair and 
 279 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 reached my arms to embrace her waist, her heavy 
 old woman^s waist, thin and shrunken as she was in 
 flesh, in face, and hands that caressed me. ** Let us 
 leave it as it is. If it ever comes in such a shape that 
 we cannot leave it, then is time enough for talks like 
 this. I don't want anything to happen — anything 
 more I '' I cried. 
 
 "But we can't prevent things happening — to 
 him I" — and now I saw uncovered the heart of her 
 great fear which was my own. " Have you ever 
 thought what his life out there must be ? He is not 
 too old to be thinking of — of another home. I should 
 be a very selfish mother if I wanted to keep him all 
 his life locked up in memories of my own child. He 
 is a living man, not a woman's tomb. Such lives of 
 constancy are beautiful, but they are very rare, and 
 they must be more possible when a man's thoughts 
 are taken up apart from women. But he has one 
 woman always in his mind. He never thinks of 
 Phoebe, but he thinks of you. He writes to you when 
 he writes to her ; that is as plain to me as if he said 
 so. I can imagine how difficult it would be to say 
 the first word to you alone, but that word will come. 
 And it ought to come! And, oh, my dear, when it 
 does come — think how safe and sure we should be I 
 Think of a strange woman coming into Phoebe's life 
 — a third mother I And he is to me like a son almost. 
 He was brought into this house almost a corpse — 
 nearly gone, that night of the storm on the river. I 
 watched his face for hours before he came to him- 
 self. I liked his face and I trusted him, and father 
 
 280 
 
MRS. AYLESFORD 
 
 trusted him. I think we know him perhaps better 
 than you do, or could — in such a wild, hard summer 
 as you had out there. He speaks of the altitude get- 
 ting on the nerves of a horse — I can see how every- 
 thing must have got on your nerves. Be kind to him, 
 dear, be kind I That is the only wisdom old people 
 have to spare — be kind ! " 
 
 After this outburst (which left us both in tears) 
 Mrs. Aylesford literally took to her bed. I suppose 
 never in her life before had she dared so greatly in 
 words and in a case so nearly affecting those whom 
 she loved most. It completely prostrated her. 
 
XXV 
 
 I WAS not really as anxious about the prostration as 
 about the restlessness that followed, after she got up 
 and began to go about the house as usual. She took 
 her breakfast in bed and dressed slowly as she felt 
 like it ; she was quite an elaborate dresser in an old 
 lady's way. After that she did bits of sewing or read, 
 or I read aloud to her if there was time, mornings 
 being my own busy part of the day. At eleven o'clock, 
 Phcebe and I walked to the post-office in the village. 
 I usually went through the form of asking if she had 
 any errands, or letters to mail. Jonas did the errands, 
 and Mrs. Aylesford wrote very few letters. Writing 
 letters she said tired her. Well ; during this time of 
 restlessness I speak of, she seemed to be writing 
 letters or something a great deal of the time ; but 
 strangely little came of it except tiny torn bits of pa- 
 per in her waste-basket. So close we lived together, 
 acquainted with each other's smallest habits, even a 
 thing like this could not escape observation. 
 
 There was something on her mind which with diffi- 
 culty and many false starts she was endeavoring to 
 transfer to paper in a manner exactly suited to her 
 idea. There was something on my mind, too, and in 
 the hypnotic connection between our two minds bear- 
 ing on this one subject the awful notion came to me : 
 suppose I had communicated my own idea to her un- 
 
 282 
 
MRS. AYLESFORD 
 
 consciously, and she with greater courage than I had 
 had was "putting it through.'^ So far, however, I be- 
 lieved she had accomplished little besides failures. 
 No letters of hers had gone out of the house unless 
 she had mailed them privately which was too absurd. 
 What I had been thinking was something like 
 this : If he would come back and say to me now, so- 
 berly and sanely, such words as she expected him to 
 say, such words as she saw coming, — if he should 
 offer marriage on the basis of friendship and our 
 mutual love of Phoebe, — I believed I should have 
 to take him : for Phoebe's sake, for Phoebe's grand- 
 mother's sake, for the way it would devastate my own 
 life if I should have to give Phoebe up to a stranger. 
 I must not be the dog-in-the-manger to him : neither 
 eat myself nor let another eat. It was human food ; 
 if I could not away with it I might starve, but I need 
 not quarrel with another applicant for my place. It 
 was not a good simile and it broke down, but it came 
 near enough to my meaning. I would have taken 
 him if he had come home then ; I should have been 
 afraid not to take him. But his coming was a very 
 different thing from his being encouraged to come 
 by some person in this house. If Mrs. Aylesford, 
 with the courage of her cause, in the most delicate 
 form words can take, had done this thing, — alas for 
 Douglas, alas for me I — in our dead-lock where one 
 must speak first; but if that first word should seem to 
 have come from me, or prompted by me through an- 
 other, the very thought would destroy me I Yet that 
 was what I feared. 
 
 283 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 Phoebe and I were just starting for our walk and I 
 had gone up to ask my perfunctory question, also to 
 tell her grandmother we were starting (we held our- 
 selves responsible to each other for every hour of the 
 day). Mrs. Aylesford always inquired next where 
 Billy was ; and I told her that he and nurse Rob- 
 erts had other fish to fry — Roberts was a rather 
 masculine type of person well adapted to the care 
 of a lively boy. This being disposed of, I asked her 
 about letters or anything for the post-office. Her deli- 
 cate face seemed smitten, as it would be if she had 
 anything to hide from me and was trying to do so. 
 She answered hurriedly with averted eyes, " No, no ; 
 I have no letters to go." 
 
 We were nearing the village when Jonas passed us 
 in the light two-seated wagon. He drew up. " Want 
 a ride ? " he drawled. " I put in the extry seat thinkin' 
 I 'd overtake ye. It's pretty warm walkin'." Phoebe 
 was always ready for a ride, so we climbed in. As we 
 entered the village I told Jonas, if he had other er- 
 rands, I would take any letters he carried to the post- 
 office, as I was going anyhow. 
 
 " I got one," said Jonas. ** The old lady give it to 
 me early this mornin'. Called me upstairs to give it 
 to me. Most always it's Mr, Aylesford who writes 
 out West ; hes anything happened out there ? " 
 
 Jonas's position in the household warranted a cu- 
 riosity that was only friendly. The letter he gave me 
 was in Mrs. Aylesford's hand, addressed to Douglas 
 Maclay. 
 
 One does n't tamper with the United States mails, 
 284 
 
MRS. AYLESFORD 
 
 but I felt quite ready to do so. And I almost wished 
 I had, after reading the letter Phoebe received that 
 day from her father. She opened it as we were jog- 
 ging along home, and she jumped up and down on 
 the wagon-seat with joy, crying, " Oh, goody, goody, 
 there 's another Dan and Trinket story I Is n't that 
 word * Trinket ' ?" Phoebe still had difficulty with her 
 father's writing : it was not clearly legible like a busi- 
 ness man's — really almost a temperamental hand. 
 The word was "Trinket," and that settled it; we 
 could afford to wait. 
 
 It had been long since we had heard of Dan and 
 Trinket. Either the stories had been told to Phoebe 
 alone and their author had begun to think she might 
 be getting too old for them, or, if they had conveyed 
 a subtler message, there had been no response, hence 
 silence! However it was, there had been no more 
 fables for humans in the manners and customs of 
 equines. The last story, we were told, was literally 
 true, and to my mind it was one of the saddest of 
 the series, pointing to a conclusion as needless as it 
 was ironical and bitter. 
 
 He had been on a fishing-trip, taking a man along 
 whom he called his "swamper," who made camp and 
 took care of the horses while he was following, up- 
 stream, the course of fisherman's luck. The horses 
 had been turned out on a high bluff where the wild 
 pasture was good, but as they were inclined to hang 
 around camp at night the man had thrown a few 
 pine boughs across the narrow defile leading up to 
 the bluff, shutting them back about their business of 
 
 285 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 grazing. The bluff in front was high and steep above 
 the river, but by going back to the head of the trail 
 and following it down, animals or creatures that had 
 made the trail came to the water through a side- 
 caiion much lower than the bluff. This the horses 
 had been expected to discover for themselves; but 
 Dan and Trinket had not seemed to even try. They 
 depended on the human help they were used to, when 
 the need came, and could not understand why they 
 were forgotten of man I At night the swamper went 
 up to see if all was right, and found them hanging 
 around the barrier ; there they stood, the stupid 
 things 1 He drove them back with sticks and re- 
 turned to camp. By the second day they had ceased 
 to eat, having no water. By the third, when it was 
 time to start for home, the thing had nearly become 
 a tragedy — and I was forced to stop reading and 
 comfort Phcebe. Their master, in telling the story, 
 blamed Dan, who was more of a "rustler" than 
 Trinket. No "States horse" like her could be ex- 
 pected to know the ways of the ranges. Dan must 
 have been a bone-head (another of his terms of re- 
 proach) to have got himself and her into such a 
 scrape. They were hollow with want of food, gaunt 
 and sick for water, when their state was at last dis- 
 covered. They would probably have hung around 
 the barrier till they dropped, if the fishing-trip had 
 gone on much longer. 
 
 " I hope he scolded the man ! " had been Phoebe's 
 comment at the time, — "I don't blame Dan a bit. 
 He was n't a wild horse, he was a human horse." 
 
 286 
 
MRS. AYLESFORD 
 
 " Half-human," I suggested. " That 's so much 
 more difficult than being all-wild or all-tame." 
 
 After this true story, that sounded like allegory, 
 we had heard no more of Dan and Trinket ; hence 
 to-day's excitement at their reappearance. Eager as 
 Phoebe was to hear what was coming next to our 
 liorse friends, I perhaps was almost as bad — as fool- 
 ish. What did come came like a shock. Trinket, on 
 account of her condition as a result of the altitude, 
 had been sent down to Boise Barracks where she 
 would be given expert care and a change of feed, 
 and be exercised by the sister of the commandant's 
 wife. Miss Blair, who was a finished horsewoman, 
 who rode like a trooper. That was all I . . . Phoebe 
 looked blank. 
 
 ** Papa said nobody at all should ever ride Trinket. 
 Who is Miss Blair?" 
 
 Who was Miss Blair! How should we know? 
 There might have been long chapters of his life out 
 there and undercurrents we had never suspected. I 
 had not heard of Boise Barracks for years ; Isabel 
 Forth and I did not correspond regularly — only 
 through her could I have heard of army orders and 
 who had succeeded them at the Boise Post. Unless 
 Douglas had chosen to speak of them, we could not 
 have known of these new friends — it was not con- 
 ceivable that he would send a horse like Trinket 
 away, with permission for any one to ride her who 
 was not a pretty close friend — whose riding he knew 
 all about — a man does not always mention whom 
 he rides with. The hospitality of the Post in itself 
 
 287 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 was unusual, implied considerable intimacy back of 
 it. And I had just mailed to him a letter from my 
 dear, deluded friend, based, I felt certain, on those 
 risky words between us as to these — oh, these ter- 
 ribly misunderstood poor little stories ! My face 
 burned, my blood boiled and froze with shame. . . . 
 I, to be thinking of him waiting at the barrier, dry, 
 wasted, lacking the sweet springs of life because of a 
 little misunderstanding about finding the way I He 
 was a good "rustler" after all — he had found the 
 way — back and down by the accustomed trail. It 
 was only I who stood alone dumb with puzzled wait- 
 ing, land-locked, inland far — Here I saw that Phcebe 
 was mutely weeping, or trying not to weep. 
 
 " Fm afraid papa will sell Trinket to that Miss 
 Blair ! and Dan won't ever see her any more. He '11 
 grow thin — he won't eat — " 
 
 " Dan will forget about Trinket in a little while. 
 They do — horses do. That 's one good thing about 
 being a horse, isn't it?" 
 
 " But ze/^'ll never see Trinket I I thought papa would 
 take us out there some day and perhaps he 'd let us 
 ride her. But we don't know Miss Blair 1 " 
 
XXVI 
 
 It took five days then for a letter from us to reach 
 Boise ; six or seven, adding the stage-trip, to Silver 
 City. There was nothing for it but to wait. Meantime 
 a telegram dated New York came from Dick Grant 
 asking if he might pay me a call between trains. He 
 owed me nothing, not even a call. I had heard from 
 him last in a very sweet, generous love-letter offer- 
 ing me once more what I had already twice declined. 
 This time I repeated the refusal as firmly as I knew 
 how, advising that we break ofT writing to each other 
 as the surest cure for what could never be changed. 
 It had proved so, as this visit was to witness. 
 
 We lunched together, young and old, Dick mak- 
 ing a conquest of Mrs. Aylesford and making eyes 
 at Phoebe at one and the same time. Phoebe made 
 eyes back again quite as unembarrassed as he. He 
 looked at her constantly and affectionately — it did 
 one good to see him ; and it did me good to hear 
 him praise her when we three rambled off after 
 luncheon; she sometimes beside him holding his 
 hand, or skipping on ahead, her eyes afar, her lips 
 moving slightly, half-smiling to herself in one of her 
 dreams which the gallant presence of our visitor and 
 his talk about the West inspired. 
 
 " But, see here ! '' he turned to me : — "I came to 
 see you particularly. Are n't we to have a little time 
 to ourselves ? I really want to speak to you." 
 
 289 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 His manner was a trifle shy, but his eyes meeting 
 mine were not the eyes of a lover — not my lover. I 
 suspected at once the nature of this impending talk. 
 Phoebe was told to run into the house and see if 
 grandmamma was all right (it was her custom to lie 
 down after luncheon, but she did not sleep), and to 
 ask if she would join us at tea before Dick left for 
 his train. Phoebe, suspecting a ruse, hung about 
 reluctant; but she went when my eye informed her 
 there must be no trifling with orders, relying on the 
 presence of a guest to escape compliance. 
 
 *'Now, Dick, be quick," I said, "with your talk, 
 for Phoebe is so charmed that she '11 be quick for fear 
 of missing any more of you than she has to." 
 
 " I '11 be quick," said Dick. — "Ah, she^s charm- 
 ing I" 
 
 " Who 's charming?" I laughed at him. 
 
 ** Phoebe," said he shamelessly. " I left a little girl 
 like that in New York when I went to Idaho ; the 
 * little girl next door.' I hardly had thought of her 
 since. Last month I came home, — and, bless gra- 
 cious I she was a woman — a woman of eighteen. The 
 woman for me ! . . . And now she 's mine. Was n't 
 that ' quick ' ? — yet not quick at all. It took eight 
 years to find her — and to find myself, I guess. So 
 slow, it might just have never been 1 " 
 
 " That 's beautiful news, Dick ! It 's the right news 
 for you, and for her too, I have n't a doubt. But you 
 won't hurry her, will you ? Eighteen is awfully young 
 for marriage, and the West too." 
 
 " She 's not going West I 've come home to stay. 
 290 
 
MRS. AYLESFORD 
 
 My father died last fall, you know ? They need me 
 at home ; the business needs me." 
 
 ** I 'm sorry I did not know you had that sorrow, 
 Dick. I should have wanted to write to you." 
 
 ** I did n't write to you," said Dick. " It happened 
 while I was still in Idaho — I was sure you'd have 
 understood, though — just as sure as if you had writ- 
 ten. We 've stood a few things together." 
 
 " We have," I agreed ; " and I think you are lovely 
 to come and tell me this news yourself. Some day 
 you will bring her. But you won't hurry her? Eight- 
 een is very young." 
 
 *' I shall hurry her. I 'm not young. What do you 
 say to thirty-one I " 
 
 " What do you say to thirty-three 1 " 
 
 ** You don't mean it — not you I " 
 
 " I shall never see thirty-two again. Don't say I 
 don't look it — I feel it; that 's the main thing.'* 
 
 *' But — how long is this to last? It 's very comfort- 
 able and home-like here, but it 's not a bit like you.** 
 
 ** How do you know what 's like me ! " 
 
 ** What 's narrow is not like you. This place has n't 
 grown any in the last hundred years." 
 
 " The children are growing very nicely." 
 
 Dick looked at me gravely. ** You speak of these 
 children as if they were your own." 
 
 *' I wish they were my own," I said. 
 
 ** Yes ; if they are so much to you, it *s a pity they 
 are not. Do you hear from their father often?'* 
 
 ** Phoebe hears once a week," I said. 
 
 " Then of course you know — *' 
 291 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 " What ? " — my heart stopped. 
 
 " That he 's coming on. I only heard it by acci- 
 dent — in the company's office. He had telegraphed 
 them to expect him — I think very soon." 
 
 " How strange I " I breathed. 
 
 " It may have been quite sudden. Still, there was 
 some talk of his going East when I left there a month 
 ago. They were up at Silver City then, Mrs. Finley 
 and Miss Blair; and Mr. Blair's private car was sit- 
 ting out in the sagebrush all ready for the party to 
 go aboard — " 
 
 "At Silver City! Is there a railroad — " 
 
 " No, no ; at Boise," said Dick. "The Short-Line 's 
 through to Boise. The town turned out regularly 
 to watch the car-crew dust her out and wash her 
 down — the first magnate's car they'd ever seen. I 
 understood Mr. Maclay expected to come on with 
 them." 
 
 I prayed that Dick did not see how the blood had 
 left my face. "Who," I asked, "are Mrs. Finley and 
 Miss Blair?" 
 
 " Well ; he 's a curious man ! " Dick ejaculated. 
 "If you don't know that, what do you know ?" 
 
 " Nothing," I said, " about him apparently. I sup- 
 pose he thinks we are n't interested." 
 
 "Well; Boise, you know, is always interested. 
 Mrs. Finley is Major Finley's wife, the new command- 
 ant at the Barracks. Miss Blair is her sister, quite a 
 beauty and a superb horsewoman. Mr. Blair is a great 
 gun in the mining way. He 's said to have the mines 
 at Silver bonded for his syndicate ; Maclay, of course, 
 
 292 
 
MRS. AYLESFORD 
 
 would n*t speak of that — . And he 's going to buy 
 the mesa — build a big house out there. The ditch 
 has gone through, not the old Eastern Canal, but 
 one just as good and big enough for the mesa. 
 All the valley there will blossom like the rose." 
 
 **Dick," I gasped, "just wait till I get my breath I 
 Has any of this got anything to do with us — here? 
 I don't mean mines and things — with Phoebe ? What 
 does it mean about Miss Blair, and coming East with 
 her father?" 
 
 " It may mean only business. Mr. Blair is in big 
 business, and Maclay is not far behind when there 's 
 any chance of a good deal. The gossips, of course, 
 have it they 're engaged. They were up there just be- 
 fore I came away, the whole party, Mr. Blair looking 
 at mines. Maclay entertained them ; they rode. Miss 
 Blair rode, — he showed them around a bit. He was 
 their host, of course. He was n't in the big house then, 
 but he took them over it. I saw that myself. And 
 the riding everybody saw. Miss Blair is a peach on 
 horseback. She rode that dandy little mare of his — 
 showed off her paces like a circus-queen. Then, as 
 I say, they went all over the house — which made 
 me rather hot I " 
 
 ** What house?" 
 
 " How you cross-question 1 " said Dick. " You make 
 a fellow afraid he 's telling lies." 
 
 "Well, you know what house it was?" 
 
 "It was his house, the one he started — />^<?y started 
 — to build, you know. It's up now, finished and fur- 
 nished all through. A fine house for Silver City; 
 
 293 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 rather big for one man to eat and sleep in. But you 
 know all that?" 
 
 " I should n't ask you if I did. You make me feel 
 ill! You must know what this means — " 
 
 Here Phoebe came towards us, running down the 
 lane. She was in blue, sunlight through pale willow 
 boughs sifting over her. Her hair in large, loose 
 waves tumbled over her shoulders, the front lock 
 turned aside and tied with a scarlet ribbon. There 
 was little rose in her complexion, but the sun neither 
 browned nor freckled it, only creamed it to the color 
 of ivory. A little nose, a mouth with curly corners 
 and a lovely pout to the upper lip which, with the 
 steady regard of her dark gray eyes, gave the proud 
 look to her face of intelligent innocence. Perfectly 
 unconscious as yet, but capable of an effort to please 
 as natural as the perfume of a flower. 
 
 •* Look at that ! " I said. " I am to lose that child. 
 Five years I 've had her for my own. No one in the 
 world knows so much about her — five years ! Dick, 
 you kill me. If this is true — " 
 
 "Edith, I'm an assl" Poor Dick was dreadfully 
 disturbed by this outbreak. I was utterly reckless of 
 his presence, as in fact I always had been. " Forgive 
 me and don't think any more about it. You know 
 what gossip is I " 
 
 "I know nothing. The fact that it's been kept 
 quiet, — even the house ! — writing to us every week, 
 is all the proof I need that this thing is hanging over 
 us. You have warned me in time. No one else shall 
 see what you have seen." 
 
 294 
 
MRS. AYLESFORD 
 
 I don't know what Dick thought he saw in my 
 agony. It did n't matter. He might be at times 
 whatever he chose to call himself, he was always a 
 gentleman. He loved me for the sorrow he had seen 
 me bear, for the sorrow he believed I had still to 
 bear. He took my hand and squeezed it hard. 
 
 ** You are a great woman, Edith. It 's cruel if it 's 
 true. But it 's all for the best. You have given too 
 much. Such love as you have given these children 
 ought not to be at the mercy of any man — except 
 he were your husband. It 's time that it ended." 
 
 ** I shall never suffer for anything I 've given, nor 
 regret anything I have n't got for what I 've given." 
 I tore away my hand, then I took his in both mine 
 and returned the friendly grip. ** Thank you, my 
 dear Dick. I 'ni going to see about tea. Come to 
 the house with Phoebe — not too soon I" 
 
 "You blessed girl I I'm an awful ass," he insisted, 
 " but I love you." 
 
 " * Now we'll put on our feathers again,' said the 
 plucked bird." This I remarked to myself with bor- 
 rowed irony, on my way back to the house. Quota- 
 tions were wasted on Dick. Men who can swear (I 
 don't mean Dick), and women who can wail and 
 rage, have an outlet that is denied to some of us. 
 There remains the comfort of the right word. It 's gen- 
 erally another's, but men's oaths, though "strange," 
 are not often original. And the prophets of lamenta- 
 tion are very old. 
 
 The mesa going into the hands of Mr. Blair, and 
 about to blossom with his money like the rose I 
 
 295 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 There were other stabs meaner and smaller, there 
 were wounds that went deeper, but that one fact — 
 the mesa sold and no word said — that covered a 
 great deal of history I Trinket, of course, must have 
 been bought for Nanny : there was quite a history 
 here, too, and some of it wretchedly misread. And 
 now a lady who rode like a circus-queen was show- 
 ing off her paces on the trails we had learned to 
 know in those letters that we had taken as our ex- 
 cuse for silly castle-building. Riding, it so happened, 
 was one of the things I had envied the so-called 
 " rich." It is certainly not for the daughters of poor 
 artists in New York. Nanny had cantered over her 
 country roads on the well-broken farm-horses, but 
 she was no circus-queen. Nanny was better at plan- 
 ning houses — for strangers to live in. I had planned 
 nothing, except a tombstone once — well ; it was all 
 of five years ago. It was even going on six. 
 
 Was I really fallen as low as this ? Could n't I for- 
 give the man his happiness ? No ; but his silence 
 was the insult that made all the rest so estranging. 
 Why, even Dick had flown to me with his news ! He 
 had n't suspected me of grudging vanity, the sour- 
 ness of the supplanted. He had n't even apologized 
 to himself for the little fact that he had more than 
 once proposed to me, and that I was not his first. 
 
 Shall I ever forget that tea I Mrs. Aylesford, peace- 
 ful and smiling, ignorant of this blow ; myself trying 
 to pretend I was a "sport" and a good loser, after 
 the exhibition I had made ; Phoebe joyous (on the 
 eve of a new mother) and unconcerned except with 
 
 296 
 
MRS. AYLESFORD 
 
 the nature of the layer-cake Mary had sent in — if 
 the dark streaks were chocolate or blackberry jelly. 
 And then our walk with Dick to his train and the few 
 minutes' wait till the accommodation from Pough- 
 keepsie came hooting out of the tunnel and slowed 
 down. Dick on the rear platform of the last car 
 waved his white straw hat to us ; he looked young 
 and gay in his Eastern clothes that fitted a happy 
 man who has divorced the grimy West and given 
 up spurs and Stetson hats, and fallen into step on 
 the pavement. I knew he would never forget my 
 frightful "give-away," but I was safe with Dick — 
 though he was to marry a school-girl. The world of 
 the young and happy closed its doors as the train 
 swept out of sight. Phoebe and I went up the hill to 
 hear grandmamma chat about Dick and ask ques- 
 tions about our friendship out West when we had 
 seen so much of each other. I wondered what she 
 would say if I should suddenly break out and tell 
 her of his passion for Nanny, or, for that matter, his 
 later passion for myself I Instead I told her he was 
 going to be married and treated the happy event as 
 if it had been the first of the kind in his young career. 
 Thus we tried to amuse each other in this house that 
 lived in the past or in a future beyond our control, 
 from which we must hide our private hopes and peril- 
 ous imaginings. The only safety lay in the fact that 
 Miss Blair also was young and gay and might not 
 care to be cumbered with a big girl like Phcebe, an- 
 other woman's child. A father who had not seen 
 her in five years could not miss her much in reality. 
 
XXVII 
 
 The question now was, whether to prepare Mrs. 
 Aylesford? I dreaded her false happiness when the 
 telegram should come saying that he was on his way 
 to us at last. Dick had endeavored to discount his 
 news as gossip, but any one could see what Dick be- 
 lieved. Should I leave her to take it as it came ? I 
 knew how astounding and quick Douglas could be 
 when he had made up his mind to declare some pro- 
 posed action which he looked at from his own point 
 of view. Here again I was entangling myself with my 
 point of view. In no one's eyes but ours would this 
 announcement be held astounding. He would be sim- 
 ply and heartily congratulated by almost every one 
 he knew except ourselves. He had waited a decent 
 time ; he was normal — we were the cloistered, 
 wrapped in dreams. Mrs. Aylesford herself could not 
 call it unseemly or pretend to think it too soon. 
 Hadn't she offered him to me? Pray Heaven she 
 had not offered me to him I It was this fear that de- 
 cided me to sound her, through the effect of my later 
 news, as to what she might have written. If my sus- 
 picions were correct, I knew her face would confirm 
 them ; the helpless confession of her manner would 
 tell me the truth. There might be time to forestall 
 or nullify that letter which never should have gone. 
 I did prepare her. I was as careful as I dared be, 
 298 
 
MRS. AYLESFORD 
 
 for I must not minimize too much. I drew no conclu- 
 sions ; here were certain facts — she must judge for 
 herself how much they meant, or if they meant any- 
 thing at all. 
 
 She wilted under them like a frosted flower. She 
 paled and grew faint. The whispered words escaped 
 her : " What have I done ! " It was enough. She was 
 past the power to speak, though not actually uncon- 
 scious, barely breathing, white as the wall. And again 
 her strength left her for days ... for all the days be- 
 fore his telegram which came at last. He was in New 
 York ; he would be with us by the afternoon train — 
 that same day. 
 
 1 shall not go far into the details of our meeting, 
 after those five and a half years — so long looked 
 forward to, so ghastly in the realization. But there was 
 the children's unconsciousness to save us : Phoebe's 
 beautiful, shy joy and dawning remembrance, Billy- 
 boy's sturdy looks of distrust at the stranger who 
 stared so hard, and boldly took him on his knee. 
 Billy was like his mother, but more gorgeous, a devel- 
 oped rose in his richer blondness and his features of 
 a young Protetis. Nanny had not given him those 
 regular features; still he had her firm jaw and he 
 stuck it out manfully at the stranger's liberties. One 
 could have laughed at those two, the man and the 
 man-child, measuring each other with steady eyes. 
 I think I did laugh, and then I left the room. 
 
 At this time he had not seen Mrs. Aylesford who 
 could only welcome him in her bed. She had been 
 trembling all over with the excitement of keeping 
 
 299 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 up ; she wished to be made neat, as she called it, but 
 I knew she meant fine : her very best cap ; the dainti- 
 est of her little bed-wraps about her shoulders ; the 
 pillow-cases fresh that she was propped against. So 
 I dressed her as a lamb for the sacrifice, jeering at 
 my own thoughts. And then I told him she was ready. 
 He, of course, would tell her first. 
 
 As to his manner to me — I had not looked close 
 enough to observe. He was deeply stirred, but there 
 had been plenty to stir him. This visit went to the 
 very roots of the past he had come to bury, to part 
 from decently leaving a few flowers of regret upon 
 the grave — bearing away our living flowers, leaving 
 us the regrets. I was an insane recluse to see so mucl? 
 tragedy in it. 
 
 My own private tragedy I took out of doors to the 
 old place ; under the willows on the wayside stones. 
 All was silent in the lane, the willows' light leafage 
 barely stirred. And yet I dared not sit there and 
 think. I must command myself for my own turn on 
 the rack. It was coming — he was coming ; and be- 
 cause Phoebe was not with him, I knew that it was 
 coming. I rose and went to meet it. 
 
 His eyes were difficult to sustain as they sought 
 mine. Obliged to look at him, it seemed there were 
 fresh traces of sorrow in his face since I had seen it 
 last, the ravages of loneliness, of the slow, drudging 
 years. It softened me a little : why should I be so 
 hard to this poor human man, with half his life be- 
 fore him, homeless, wifeless, a concentrated, unsocial 
 mind. 
 
 300 
 
MRS. AYLESFORD 
 
 I asked, to gain time, how he had found Mrs. Ayles- 
 ford — how did she look to him ? 
 
 He thought her looking very frail ; she struck him 
 as very much altered. ** You did not give me the im- 
 pression in your letters that she had failed so much.'* 
 
 She hadn't, I said, until the last month or so. 
 
 " Has she had anything like a stroke?" 
 
 I knew what sort of stroke he meant, but I played 
 on the word bitterly. " Yes ; she has had something 
 very like a stroke. . . . Did she bear the meeting 
 with you pretty well ? " I trembled to ask. 
 
 "She seemed to," he said, "but she struck me as 
 very nervous, very much excited. I did n't stay with 
 her long." 
 
 Then he had n't told her I He had n't dared to 
 tell her, — to strike a grandmother when she was 
 "down." 
 
 " I 'm afraid you have n't come for long, Douglas," 
 I urged him recklessly. " If you have come for any 
 special reason, let us get it over with." 
 
 He drew his breath in hard. Well I remembered 
 that sign in him that took the place of words under 
 strong emotion ! This man could not get things over 
 with as easily as Dick. " Do you not know why I 
 have come, Edith?" 
 
 " I may have guessed," I said. " But you have left 
 it all to guessing." 
 
 " Have I ? " he retorted. " Could n't you read any- 
 thing between the lines of my letters, all these years? " 
 
 " Reading what is not written in letters is n't a 
 very safe thing to do, when the writers are as far apart 
 
 301 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 as we have been. I did not look for anything be- 
 tween your lines." 
 
 ** You were silent enough I " he said in a tone that 
 sounded bitter too (why should he be bitter!) "I 
 don't know that I should ever have come but that I 
 must come — I have to come ! We must get it over 
 with, as you say. 1 have waited five years and longer 
 
 — isn't it enough?" 
 
 ''Enough — for what!" I cried, — "for whom? 
 What have I to do with your waiting those five years I" 
 
 He repeated the words slowly : ''What have you 
 to do with those five years I If you have guessed 
 why I am here, why do you torment me ? Why have 
 you been so silent ? I laid out my heart to you as a 
 man can who is denied the right to speak like a man. 
 You might have foreshadowed your answer, at least, 
 
 — given me a hint one way or another. Where do I 
 stand ? Is there to be nothing more between us — 
 nothing but silence?" 
 
 " If there is anything more you will have to speak 
 plain, Douglas. I don't know what you have got on 
 your mind — not from any words of yours." 
 
 " Then, to speak plain, — God help us, — I ask you 
 once more to be my wife." 
 
 "Thank you," I said. " Before I answer, I must ask 
 you this : did you get a letter from Mrs. Aylesford 
 before you came East this last time ? " 
 
 " I have not been East before this — one winter I 
 was as far East as Chicago. I dared not come here 
 then — " 
 
 " I asked you a question." 
 302 
 
MRS. AYLESFORD 
 
 "You appear to know that a letter was sent? I 
 never imagined, of course, that you could have known 
 its contents. As Mrs. Aylesford did not tell you what 
 she wrote, do you think I should?" 
 
 *'I think you must," I said, ** before we go any 
 further. I have reason to suppose that letter was 
 about me." 
 
 " It was much more about me." 
 
 ** Did it bring you on here to ask me to be your 
 wife — in the fear of God?" I taunted. 
 
 He was stung by that, but he made no retort in 
 kind. 
 
 " It gave me courage to come — the courage you 
 have steadily denied me, crushing my hopes as fast 
 as they grew. You know I was not looking for a 
 wife when I spoke to you on the mesa ! I was not 
 speaking to Any Woman, but you implied just that 
 
 — when you said you were glad to share the * insult ' 
 (with my wife) rather than have it go to some other 
 woman who might not answer me as I deserved. 
 Edith, if I could forgive that, you ought to be able 
 to forgive the rest ! I thought you were the one 
 woman who could understand ! It was the highest 
 trust I could show you. I put our case in your hands, 
 knowing how you loved my child, how you felt about 
 her mother — There we were between the devil and 
 the deep sea : would you take the plunge with me ? 
 
 — the sea at least was clean. I thought you could 
 face it with a breadth like that of the dead, if death 
 is what we think it is. . . . I was wrong, of course. 
 I was mad. You gave me a horrible lesson. Since 
 
 303 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 then you have never been out of my mind. I have 
 lain awake nights hounded by your speeches. I have 
 waked from sound sleep pursued by things you were 
 saying to me in dreams that literally made me sweat 
 — your words burned scars into me that I shall carry 
 all my life. Never did a man see himself so hideous 
 in a woman's eyes ; and such a woman — such a 
 woman I 
 
 ** Now that is done ! Now I offer you my five years' 
 humiliation, my unceasing thought of you and sense 
 of your injustice. You were wrong, in a woman's 
 way, — not wrong as to the principle — wrong as to 
 me. I must have either loved you or hated you. How 
 could I not love you I I have not a young man's love 
 to offer — will you take the love of my forty years?" 
 
 I was dazed. *' Wait ; let me think." His face con- 
 tracted with a spasm of pain. Had I said those words 
 to him before ? — they had a strange, deadly familiar- 
 ity — I went on hastily to cover them. 
 
 " A year ago, if you had come and asked me to 
 marry you, I believe I would have taken you, with- 
 out any love — for Phoebe's sake, and to keep the 
 children in the family — without any love of yours or 
 mine. Just a sane, respectable marriage such as the 
 world approves. I could have given you my sincere 
 friendship and a larger faith than we need speak of 
 now. Now, I demand more — and I have less faith. I 
 must examine this love of your forty years. What do I 
 know of you, Douglas? What do I know of your life 
 which I should have to share ? I don't know even the 
 names of your friends who are your guests — in the 
 
 304 
 
-.fes^ ■■'■ -- 
 
 MRS. AYLESFORD 
 
 house you have built which I suppose you intend me 
 to live in? You have been writing to us every week, 
 and it is Dick Grant who comes to pay me a call 
 who tells me casually this house is built and furnished, 
 and that you are taking your friends over it — " 
 
 "Damn Dick!" 
 
 That was all he said ; — he left me in the road 
 where we had been talking and turned his back on me 
 and went towards the house alone. And once more, 
 when it was too late, I heard my own words as he 
 must have heard them. I did not wait for his return ; 
 I knew he would not return. I had insulted him again 
 and for the last time. I sprang up and followed till I 
 caught up with him and could lay my hand on his 
 arm. 
 
 " Douglas," I cried, breathless ; " if you still care 
 for me, after what you heard me say, here I am I — 
 Won't you look at me ? " 
 
 He looked, and his eyes were hot with pain, — the 
 indignant, wounded look which also I remembered. 
 
 ** Oh, you woman of words ! Do you mean any- 
 thing by what you are saying, or is it more of your 
 damnable torment ? " 
 
 ** I mean — if you will only believe me — will you 
 take the love of my thirty-three years?" 
 
 He stared and stared ; he hardly believed me even 
 then. "Is it finished?" he demanded, without com- 
 ing nearer. " Is there any other test you want to put 
 me to?" 
 
 " I don't know what more I can say," I answered. 
 
 That was the end of words between us. . . . What 
 305 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 followed was my first sample of the love of his forty 
 years. It left me with a sense of insufficiency. This 
 evidently was not the woman's hour, not when the 
 woman is thirty-three. As moonlight unto sunlight, 
 as water unto wine, did not fully meet the case. I did 
 not believe I was a "Cousin Amy.'' No; it must be 
 that I had made the grand mistake. I did not love 
 the man after all. Should I even be able to endure his 
 love? 
 
 These chilling reflections I recall for the benefit of 
 any sister-spinster who has postponed her betrothal 
 kiss as late as I did mine — her thoughts taken up 
 meanwhile with other things. And, since the poets 
 speak for us on these occasions, there is another poet 
 who says : — 
 
 "Weep no more ! oh, weep no more! 
 Young buds sleep at the root's white core." 
 
 The seasons take care of themselves ; all we need to 
 do is to see that the root be sound and clean. But I 
 was thinking just then of my own sad season when 
 romance has had its day. I felt so much more like 
 crying than being kissed. I did cry — on his manly 
 breast in womanly fashion, and that seemed much 
 more like what to myself I called the real thing. I 
 liked his awkward arm around me and his rough coat 
 (smelling of cigars) next my cheek, and the man's 
 heart pounding beneath it. That great power-house 
 of passion filled me with wonder and a sort of awe. 
 How could it be mine? — and how came it to be 
 mine? — and when did all this begin? If this were 
 
 306 
 
MRS. AYLESFORD 
 
 bliss, its neighbor easily was pain — pain that did not 
 even dissemble itself as bliss. 
 
 How strange to be thinking like this, detached, in 
 his very arms while he was simply, honestly feeling I 
 How poverty-stricken seemed all this petty analysis ; 
 had I lost the power to lose myself? I ached thinking 
 of my girl days gone, of those sad, stern "forty years" 
 that belonged to Nanny, robbed by death. She had 
 earned them ; she had given them to me, and the 
 child of her pain and care. I must keep these treasures 
 preciously, and share them and pass them out and 
 on — Perhaps this is what is meant by the love that 
 seeketh not its own ? If there is any such human love, 
 the name of it on earth is Friendship. 
 
PART VII 
 OURSELVES 
 
XXVIII 
 
 This was but the beginning, the anguished, half- 
 stifled, hurried birth of our love so long maturing 
 blind and silent, according to nature's law. We had 
 three days, three marvelous days as long as many 
 years, before he left us to complete the arrangements 
 for our wedding which for practical reasons had to be 
 very quick, almost immediate. We went very shyly 
 into the depths, but we found no bottom. I no longer 
 feared to sound him. I looked all around him as far 
 as I could see, and still he remained a mystery. But 
 I could laugh in weak joy over some of his self-reve- 
 lations — so boyish, so unbelievably ingenuous — this 
 man I had called hard ! How little they live inside, I 
 thought, compared to us; how blessedly objective 
 they are I 
 
 We had long evening talks with the elders, and 
 walks by ourselves when they were in bed. We dis- 
 cussed the children and plans for their futures which 
 should involve the fewest wrenches. Mr. and Mrs. 
 Aylesford stoutly claimed that they had no claims I 
 nor were they going to feel the wrenches. All must 
 be done from the children's side of the question, 
 though Mrs. Aylesford did not forget their father so 
 long deprived. Phoebe would go with us, and Billy- 
 boy was to remain with nurse Roberts under the 
 grandparents' roof. The farm was his best school- 
 
 311 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 house for some time to come, with Jonas for his tutor 
 in its various branches of nature-study. Phoebe would 
 learn to ride (and I should learn to ride, and be able 
 to test my theory that I had an affinity for horses). 
 And the lessons would go on, with many a joyous 
 interlude such as **out West" affords. 
 
 And then I was his wife — after a quiet wedding, 
 only the family present. I 'm obliged to own that my 
 dear Essie, and Jack whom I like so much, were the 
 only fiat-notes — very tactful but somehow inade- 
 quate. It was not an occasion for irony, even implied, 
 and presented from the side of humor. 
 
 But on our way back from our short wedding- 
 journey, we saw them again in New York and all 
 went merry as it should with such a merry pair as 
 they and such a happy pair as we. Essie and I spent 
 a morning appropriate to my character of stepmother 
 rather than bride, going over a Children's Emporium 
 to choose Phoebe's outfit for the West. I had only to 
 give her age and select the style of garment : — she 
 was so symmetrically made and so normal physically 
 that she simply stepped into her new suits and "be- 
 came them," as Roberts said, as if they had been made 
 for her. 
 
 And then one night at ten o'clock, we went aboard 
 the Pacific Limited (the train that hooted past us at 
 Lime Point and saw us not), where most of the Pull- 
 man passengers were already in their berths. We 
 passed down the curtain-lined aisle to the little 
 "drawing-room" where Phoebe and I were to keep 
 house with papa next door for our favored visitor. 
 
 312 
 
OURSELVES 
 
 And oh, what a happy child it was 1 It was a happy 
 journey, but few journeys of a new-married couple 
 have that element added. It was beautiful to us both 
 to watch Phoebe's joy, her father recovered after his 
 long, mysterious absence ; her remembrance of him 
 not clouded, only saved up — They were happy to- 
 gether as in our best days on the mesa ; those eve- 
 nings when they played *' store" on the parapet, and 
 I watched them from the steps till bedtime came. 
 She was no longer litde "Rappacini's Daughter." 
 She could sit in his lap and dress him up in weirdly 
 unbecoming head-gears and examine him as her 
 property, till Aunt Edith (I was to remain "Aunt 
 Edith ") interrupted and sent him away to the smok- 
 ing-car. She chattered while she undressed, delaying 
 things as always when she was happy ; not talking 
 to any one in particular — just twittering as birds 
 that nestle for the night. 
 
 When she was safe launched on the tide of dreams, 
 we would sit by the window, our lights out, and 
 watch the world fly past us mile after mile. Its own 
 lights were enough to see it by, — long stretches of 
 country under the moon or stars or sinking into 
 dusk ; hamlets with scattered house-lights, single 
 rays from lonely homes ; then the cities we clanged 
 through, where we shrank back from the glare of 
 station-lights and arc-lights, and crowds staring at 
 the train with its long line of closely inhabited sleep- 
 ers, a train made up of sleepers, for the nights and 
 days of a continental journey. Distance and space 
 do count. 
 
 313 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 We talked like sober married folk, and these to 
 me were the most wonderful talks that most recalled, 
 without their fears, my best days on the mesa when 
 we discussed the common things. He talked of ** our " 
 mines which Mr. Blair would probably buy — the 
 whole group — for his syndicate. The mesa had not 
 been sold, but — here my husband hesitated: "You 
 know you said — " 
 
 " I remember what I said I — and I take it back. I 
 do want to see the place again. It would be the thing 
 I should love best to go back there with you and 
 Phcebe, and to have you ride out as you did, and 
 give your call, and not to be afraid of each other. 
 And to sit on the bluff when Phoebe is in bed — and 
 one thing more I You won't laugh ?" 
 
 "Am I likely to laugh I" he groaned. Apparently 
 he wasn't quite sure even yet that we could talk in 
 this careless fashion — about the mesa. 
 
 " I want to go up the windmill ladder sometime 
 when Phoebe can't see me, or she might want to do 
 it too. I should like to sit up there on the platform 
 in the moonlight and see what can be seen, and 
 * consider from thence.' " 
 
 ** You won't see much if you wait for moonlight." 
 
 " I shall feel what can't be seen. It must be won- 
 derful ! Will the sails sweep us off?" 
 
 "I'm glad to hear you aren't going up alone! 
 No; we'll unship the rudder and the sails will be 
 still." 
 
 " Ah, much better I I should hate a noise up there. 
 Are you laughing at me?" 
 
 3M 
 
OURSELVES 
 
 He did not laugh. I knew we should do it some 
 day and many other things as foolish. It might be 
 foolish to sell the mines and go back to the mesa 
 and put the money in the ground again. But this is 
 what he proposed. Because, he said, Silver City was 
 too high — women and children, and horses, did not 
 do well if they remained there many years. And as 
 we had waited so long (!) we must not waste time 
 now in separations. There were great possibilities in 
 a tract of a thousand acres like the mesa, with water 
 upon it. 
 
 So, perhaps, some day it may blossom like the 
 rose — blossom for us and the children. 
 
 Aunt Essie's letter accompanying her wedding- 
 present, which we received a month later, is almost 
 worth quoting as a last word from my own side of 
 the family. It is mostly about myself, or Aunt Essie's 
 fancies about me at the time of writing. It suited her 
 mood, having just heard of my marriage, to treat it 
 in this picturesque vein. She is also rather thrilled 
 when any of the family does anything to support her 
 theory that we are all a trifle mad I 
 
 Her present was quite mad. She boasted of the 
 fact. It was a sixteenth-century bedspread of Byzan- 
 tine lace over a hand-loom silk of the same period. 
 ** Royal dukes have slept under it," she wrote, " with 
 their duchesses (or ladies not their duchesses) — hor- 
 rid deeds I 've no doubt have been plotted under it 
 by those who could n't and did n't deserve to sleep. 
 Use it in your pine-board cabin if you have one, or 
 
 315 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 in your tent It 's just as appropriate to your mode 
 of life as you are to the American frontier I 
 
 "I'm not surprised, of course. Places like that 
 Hudson River farm are fatal to imaginative girls. 
 You are a Telemachus, supposing he had - had the 
 soul of his father which he might have had, in spite 
 of Homer and Tennyson — I can think of you on 
 your shut-in shore watching the lights on boats loaded 
 with passengers for the city, thinking of the liners at 
 their docks waiting to cast off. You wanted a com- 
 rade to fly with — it 's much the same as if you had 
 jumped into the river. You are mad, but it 's no new 
 madness. You are as mad as Essie, yet somehow I 
 love and pity you more. 
 
 *'I've been making my will — the amusement 
 proper to my years. Your Uncle Charles has been 
 very decent, but in any case I think I shall probably 
 outlive him (I feel doomed to go on forever). I have 
 left Essie one third more than you, but I leave you 
 enough love — though you don't care for it — to 
 make up. Essie has those children, and she will have 
 more I If I were to wish for you I should pray that 
 you may have no children of your own. You would 
 manage a mixed family, I dare say, better than most 
 women, but it 's a thankless task. Your life will * com- 
 pose ' better, as your poor father would say, if you 
 stick to the stepmother sacrifice as you have begun. 
 Confine yourself to the children you married for. 
 Essie thinks that is the whole reason — I do not. 
 
 ** Farewell, sweetest, dearest, cleverest, and mad- 
 dest of all the mad Bonhams. I really in the bottom 
 
 316 
 
OURSELVES 
 
 of my heart love your madness, but don't carry it too 
 far 1 " 
 
 I carried my madness certainly as far as to have 
 children of my own, though we have n't laid much 
 emphasis on the possessive, in our " mixed family," 
 as Aunt Essie would call us. For obvious reasons 
 Billy, across the continent, could not be as close to 
 my arms and thoughts as my own two sons, nor as 
 near in any sense as Phoebe. But he was nearer to 
 Mrs. Aylesford, and dearer than any of her grand- 
 children, including my Bonham and Aylesford (named 
 for her), whom she counted as her own blood. Those 
 dear people ! — they made it so in their wills, di- 
 viding the inheritance that was Phoebe's and Billy's 
 into four equal portions in favor of my children. Of 
 course we think we can count on our boys to put that 
 right when they are of age. The recognition is more 
 than any legacy to me. 
 
 Though Mrs. Aylesford had always looked so much 
 the frailer of those two, he went first, by nearly five 
 years. She passed those years with many hours of 
 silence, at peace with the fact of waiting, at peace 
 with all that goes with it at her age. She accepted 
 her loneliness, her almost total deafness ; she bore 
 with the infirmities of old servants whom she would 
 not replace. She devoted her time to the petty cares 
 connected with the property which she already re- 
 garded as "the children's." She was patient, wistfully 
 patient, under the little misunderstandings that result 
 from deafness and forgetfulness and failing powers. 
 
 317 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 But there was no failure when it came to a decision 
 of the heart. 
 
 It was a fact we had known for some time, but 
 could not bring ourselves to speak of, that the old 
 home was not the best place any longer for Billy, 
 who was a big boy in the First Form at St. Paul's. 
 We thought she did not see it, but she had seen it, 
 as soon perhaps as we did. She made up her mind 
 slowly as old people do, reluctant to face the change ; 
 she gave him up of her own choice, though with him 
 went the last of her motherhood, and her active in- 
 terest in life was ended. She wrote carefully, explain- 
 ing all those reasons we had known — why he must 
 not come back that year for his long vacation, nor 
 any year as an understood thing. A simple, wise, and 
 beautiful letter which I shall keep for those who come 
 after us to show the heart of a perfect grandmother. 
 
 That heart, so strong in the workings of affection, 
 no longer functioned well as a means of life for her. 
 She had nights — not every night, but sometimes 
 many in succession — when each breath she drew 
 lying down, or even half-lying propped on pillows, 
 was an effort she might well have wished could be 
 her last. A little cushioned frame had been made for 
 her on which she leaned her head and arms in a sit- 
 ting position ; she rested so, when she could rest, for 
 hours in the night, dozing at intervals, while the nurse 
 slept sound beside her bed. She was always unwill- 
 ing to keep any one awake who had earned and 
 could enjoy the blessing of sleep. 
 
 On one of those cold winter mornings, on the 
 318 
 
OURSELVES 
 
 Hudson, the nurse slept on till broad daylight. She 
 saw the shawled figure in the familiar attitude, the 
 tired head bent down on the arms crossed beneath 
 it — silent, but so still I Troubling no one, asking no 
 assistance, the dear woman had gone as she would 
 have wished to go. 
 
 Of all the beautiful lives I have known, hers I 
 think was the sweetest, the most selfless, through 
 and through, the most innocent of blame. Her pass- 
 ing was like the cold, sweet withering of an autumn 
 rose. To the last she was still a rose. 
 
 In thinking over what I have written of Nanny — 
 of our friendship, which I have made so much of — 
 I wonder if I have idealized it beyond what will seem 
 real ? There may be those who would say there never 
 was a friendship so brief, so young, that could so take 
 hold on the imagination as to aflect and even alter 
 the entire life of the one who survived its close. I 
 can only say that close was not the end. Its flower 
 was brief — our friendship here — but it did not die 
 when the flower faded. Fruit of the soul it meant to 
 me. How it has gone with her beyond the bounds of 
 silence, who knows ? Perhaps she looks back on her 
 few years here with us and wonders at these tributes 
 we render on our knees, who loved her so frankly 
 and humanly : laughed with her and at her, disputed 
 her views, put her up to little ways of the world, as 
 I used — discussing the fashions and the men and 
 women of the world she scarcely knew — almost, one 
 can fancy the tender derision of our beloved dead. 
 
 319 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 They cannot have lost their humility nor their humor. 
 And perhaps they would ask us, if they could, to for- 
 get them a little more, to spare them excessive re- 
 grets and a too uplifted worship of their human 
 memory, or exaggerated importance given to their 
 place left vacant, knowing as they must the unimpor- 
 tance of any one's place and the endless shifts of fate. 
 
 No ; I am willing to concede that my girl friend 
 was perhaps as other girls, as I was myself, when 
 we chose each other at sight, disdaining estimates 
 and comparisons ; no less it was a marriage of true 
 minds, such minds as we had — and then Death took 
 it suddenly and set it in the stars beyond the reach 
 of commonplace and of petty disillusionments. It 
 outlasted death and I believe it would have outlasted 
 even life — even if we had both lived to learn each 
 other's faults and forgive them as women — to have 
 parted, as we must, for long periods, keeping our 
 love alive through intensive thinking and in letters 
 constant and intimate as those of sisters — more con- 
 stant and much more intimate than mine and Essie's. 
 That sound, good human friendship was denied us ; 
 its incorruptible part was left, my part, which I be- 
 lieve, as nearly as it can on earth, matches her part 
 — wherever she is in this long silence. 
 
 If that does not seem real to those who are in the 
 busy life of the world, it was real enough to me in 
 my solitudes, in a round of cares centered in her chil- 
 dren (of the man she loved) whom her love could not 
 reach, but mine could — If I have been able to keep 
 faith in that way, Nanny dear, our love indeed has 
 
 320 
 
OURSELVES 
 
 been an " ever-fixed mark that looks on tempest and 
 is never shaken." 
 
 No; there was not the slightest possibility for 
 Douglas and me that our marriage, impossible as it 
 seemed, could have turned out to be a mistake, with 
 that beginning, or that our children should have 
 come into the world to mark it a failure. Of them I 
 could be only too happy to talk I But herein lies a 
 distinction that brings in the oneness of the relation ; 
 I could say anything I wished, of Billy and Phoebe, 
 but when it comes to my ** own" there comes too the 
 touch of self-consciousness. 
 
 And so of the man who is so close to one. I have 
 said a great deal in these pages about my husband, 
 before he was my husband — I handled him freely 
 once and with words to spare. Lightnings and thun- 
 der come with the storm, and words are torn from 
 us in the tempest-times of our lives, and dead words 
 we wish had died unborn choke the old paths of 
 memory and mark with waste the track of the storm 
 that is past. But, when the clear, dark nights of stars 
 return, — our stars that we see from that "top of the 
 world," as we call the mesa, — or the white nights 
 that steep the earth in moonlight; when the long 
 days of summer's fruition are with us again and the 
 shortening days bring back the ancient sadness of 
 the harvest-burdened year, we do not complain of 
 these seasons of blessedness that they are not prolific 
 of sound. And so my story, that began late as a love- 
 story, must end as the happy love-stories do end — 
 in silence : as life shall end for us all at last 
 
LATER WORDS, BY PHCEBE 
 
 This is the record as our Beloved left it. She never 
 spoke of it to me but once, and then deliberately, as 
 if she wished to explain — perhaps to herself also — 
 how it had come to be written. 
 
 *' I meant it for you, I think, as a legacy," she said, 
 " from my private life to yours. I wanted you to know 
 some day, so far as I know it, the story of your two 
 mothers, of the bond between them, and how your 
 father came into it — had to come — which made us 
 just the family we are. But," she added, ** it would 
 never have been written except under the pressure, 
 day after day, of those first years at Lime Point. What 
 we call the tides of life had risen high just before that 
 sudden check that left me full of towering recollec- 
 tions and thoughts that, in that house, were literally 
 unspeakable I The contrast between your dear grand- 
 mother's reveries in those days and mine I So I talked 
 to myself on paper — hours, alone — as people who 
 are going out of their minds talk aloud when there 
 is no one there. I talked to you and fancied you 
 were the woman I knew you would be some day, 
 who would understand. 
 
 "The greater part — all the hardest part — was 
 written that first winter, before I could have known 
 what was the truth. Afterwards I had to finish or de- 
 stroy what I had done. Nothing is true, you know, 
 till it is finished — till we are finished." 
 
 322 
 
LATER WORDS, BY PH(EBE 
 
 She smiled and, after thinking, added : ** I wonder 
 if it is true I I was reading over my dear father's let- 
 ters at that time, and they were another human docu- 
 ment — very human 1 They were exciting and stimu- 
 lating, but they were most disturbing. They irritated 
 me in a way that strikes me now as funny I — con- 
 sidering what I had then attempted to do myself. It 
 really annoyed me very much that my own father 
 who was so clever did not seem to have been clever 
 enough to tell the truth, exactly, about any person he 
 was speaking of, or any circumstance he related, or 
 any place he was supposed to describe. I remem- 
 bered some of the persons myself, and had seen a 
 good many of the places. 
 
 ** He was one of the sincerest men that ever lived ; 
 he must have believed he was telling the truth, but 
 he never by any chance did tell it, — the whole truth, 
 things in their right proportions, — so that any one 
 could gather it from what he said at the time. The 
 time and the mood had so much to say to him. And 
 he had such an overflowing fancy of his own, a 
 petted fancy that had always had its own way. 
 
 **Now, I wonder, Phoebe dear," — she smiled at 
 me, deep into my eyes in a quiet, candid way she 
 had of looking at us she loved (oh, the beautiful eyes 
 we shall never see again 1) — "I wonder," she empha- 
 sized, " whether when you come to read my ' remains' 
 you will have that teased sense of inaccuracy almost 
 willful — certainly needless — that used to provoke 
 me to contradict my dear father in his grave ! — Partly 
 for his own sake ; his moods and fancies were not 
 
 323 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 the best part of him. Well ; I was the victim of moods 
 and fancies, too, as you will see. If there is anything 
 you would like to contradict when you read me — I 
 that was so critical of my own father — do so, dearl 
 I shall be thankful. Who would n't be, to be spared 
 doing an injustice in one careless sentence, perhaps, 
 when just adding another sentence or changing the 
 emphasis a little would make it nearer right? 
 
 " * If this be error and upon me proved,' " she threw 
 in with her beaming smile, "then deal with me and 
 my document accordingly I You must spare me the 
 hurt of hurting others when it 's too late for me to 
 alter anything I have said, or had better not have 
 said." 
 
 Her mind to the last found its best companionship 
 in the words of the old poets of her youth that she 
 knew by heart (that she taught to my little mother) 
 — old quotes that used to make her "greet" as she 
 would say, smiling. And they were her mental toys 
 in lighter speech, when she wished to hide emotion 
 she no longer dared to trifle with. As she grew older, 
 and became absorbed in public events, her reading- 
 appetite craved whatever was written of importance 
 bearing on the political tendencies of the nations that 
 were drifting towards this vortex. Many of her friends 
 were more lately traveled in those countries, but she 
 saw them, I thought, in a larger way, reflectively, 
 and she had her own words for describing them. 
 France, she said, has always been spoken of in meta- 
 phors because she fires the imagination. She was the 
 bright light of Europe passed from hand to hand and 
 
 324 
 
LATER WORDS, BY PHOEBE 
 
 shaken in the wind, but now the flame pointed up- 
 ward and burned still and clear as the candles on a 
 shrine. England she scolded as we scold the one we 
 love best of all — the one we cannot bear should go 
 wrong I When England had made the great choice in 
 this war, she said, " Now we can trust the end 1 In 
 saving her own honor and herself, she has saved the 
 world.'* What she prayed for next was our own tes- 
 timony — which never came I She died, alas, in the 
 war's darkest year and in the depths of our own 
 quibbling neutrality. 
 
 The profound emotions of the war had seemed to 
 act at first as a tonic ; she was distinctly stronger, 
 less indifferent, than at any time since her widow- 
 hood. But then came the steady heart-grind, the lists 
 of the dead, the sorrows of her friends abroad, the 
 unimaginable suffering, our own lost opportunity 
 that wore on her — the low number we were to take 
 in the Great Examination. I think it hastened the 
 end for her. She overtaxed her mind in proportion 
 to her feelings. She read — she devoured — every- 
 thing about the war, turning from the subject sud- 
 denly and burying herself in the past, only to come 
 upon it there, in clairvoyant sentences that sound to- 
 day like prophecy, weird warnings that were treated 
 as rhetoric, menaces that we played with. 
 
 On her bedside table were always one big ancient 
 and one big modern. She read them in the long 
 hours of her wakeful nights — those nights of her im- 
 measurable grief I What else she did in those lonely 
 vigils we could only guess by her delicate white face 
 
 325 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 and ravaged looks in the morning. Yet she said she 
 was glad to know — to suffer in his footsteps, though 
 not for long — what he had suffered in his youth and 
 strength, when he lost my mother ! 
 
 Could one woman honor another's memory more 
 than that? Can dignity and generosity of a ** second 
 wife" towards her husband's ** first," go any fur- 
 ther! That was Aunt Edith — "mother," queen of 
 all mothers, perfect in love, in friendship, in magna- 
 nimity, the soul of friendship, which came as natural 
 to her as vanity and selfishness to smaller natures. 
 
 It is not for me to discuss them, to take stock of 
 their different qualities and capabilities — my two 
 mothers, now that both are gone. Each would have 
 shrunk from the thought of such comparison. But I 
 know that my own mother would have said that her 
 friend was incomparably the greater person — and 
 for herself she would have asked no praise beyond 
 the fact: "Edith loved me as I am." ... It is 
 enough, and it does n't matter. But of course that 
 is one of the self-evident truths Aunt Edith would 
 never have recognized and could not have brought 
 out in her own story. 
 
 Also, in one part of the narrative — that part which 
 must have been " hardest to write" — she has left an 
 impression most natural at the time, but I think she 
 herself would have straightened it if she had not 
 been so reluctant to go back over those pages. It 
 concerns the little town that used to be called " The 
 City of the Desert Plains." It really is very much 
 of a city now and the plains are no more a desert. 
 
 326 
 
LATER WORDS, BY PHCEBE 
 
 Boise was our home address for the nine happy 
 years we lived on the mesa. Father disposed of his 
 mining interests very soon after we went back to 
 Idaho. We moved down to the mesa in the opening 
 spring. The years that followed, of its resurrection as 
 a home, the re-sowing and re-timbering of the land, 
 which to a child of my age were as one long holiday, 
 must have been to Aunt Edith, with all the happi- 
 ness, a time of care and stress. Her life was never 
 easy, never idle, but in those years she was occu- 
 pied in very vital ways : it was then she became 
 "mother" — Bonham and Aylie, the two dear brothers 
 she gave the family, were both born on the mesa, 
 very close to each other. And there was another boy 
 baby who only lived a short while. It was after I 
 was married and a mother, I first learned what that 
 time had meant to her. She had to go away, I re- 
 member, to get well ; and I was struck by a new 
 look in her face when she came back to us. But I 
 had never really seen her with fresh eyes before — 
 eyes of a child old enough to know how beautiful 
 she was. Such deep, sweet acquiescence in every- 
 thing. — Is it Hkely she would have wanted to hold 
 up to scorn the place that was made so sacred to 
 her — where, on the little hill beside my mother, her 
 own baby child, the last she was to bear, was laid ? 
 
 There could not have been much time for what is 
 called social intercourse with the town, three miles 
 away. Yet so little ** intercourse" is needed when 
 people feel right towards one another. She felt that 
 way to everybody ; she had outgrown all small re- 
 
 327 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 sentments, if she ever had any. You saw it in her 
 face. Father and she picked and chose as to friends, 
 but one does that everywhere, and I am sure they 
 found the stuff of long friendships there. 
 
 It was a town of mixed periods of settlement and 
 many mixed elements, and the dregs I suppose were 
 still at the bottom, but they were not spilled all over 
 us as they seem to have been over her, that first dif- 
 ficult summer when she was so defenseless. The 
 place, as she has left it in this part of her story, quite 
 understandably, seems like a sink of ignorance and 
 narrowness and gossip of the crudest kind. But that 
 is not our Boise ! 
 
 It is a forward-looking, a brilliant little center for 
 a country waking up — you would hear of enter- 
 prises now that sound like fairy-tales. They were 
 conceived and worked out by men of unusual parts 
 at various times separated by long intervals of har- 
 rowing patience. There is always a fund of general 
 capacity to draw upon in these little towns that were 
 so far ahead, in their dreams, of any possible reality ; 
 that have gazed on poverty and loneliness and failure 
 and hopes in ruins, and learned to do everything 
 while they waited except give up. The town has 
 kept on with its fight for homes in the desert, and 
 all manner of lesser fights have been lost and won 
 in between the physical fight with nature — some of 
 them very great little victories on questions of prin- 
 ciple that strike hands with good citizenship the 
 country over and the credit of the whole nation. But 
 that story does n't come into the present one and is 
 
 328 
 
LATER WORDS, BY PHCEBE 
 
 far beyond the power even to suggest, of one who 
 was only a child, growing up on the mesa. 
 
 What v/e did was to look across at sunset when 
 the town was half-lost in colored haze and say, ** How 
 pretty 1 " and point to the foothills like crumpled vel- 
 vet piled up in soft light behind it. Prettier still after 
 dark with its lights pricked out on the distance, — more 
 and more lights behind trees hiding the river, more 
 and more single, straggling lights along the roads and 
 sprinkled over the valley. We children mourned I be- 
 cause the farms were crowding out our beloved sage 
 — our old dusty desert lap rising in perspective as we 
 looked off — the yellow curtain that hung like a flag 
 of quarantine once between our sickness and the 
 town. Now it was such a checkered curtain I 
 
 We growled I But mother said, " It 's one of these 
 facts, you know, that the water we could n't live here 
 without brings them too, and their little new-shingled 
 houses are just as beautiful to them as our big bare 
 windy shelf is beautiful to us." 
 
 How we fought — how they fought — for those free, 
 simple lines, in the teeth of every professional gar- 
 dener they tried ; Aden, who was not strong in tech- 
 nique, but knew something of the soil and of us and 
 what we wanted, looking on in satiric silence. They 
 had a succession of obstinate, soulless Germans who 
 knew everything I who wanted to plant everything, 
 specially bulbs, in platoons and lay us out in flower- 
 beds. And what they were n't allowed to do when 
 the parents were on the ground, they did do, firmly, 
 — because they knew they were right, — as soon as 
 
 329 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 their blessed backs were turned, and were "fired*' 
 in consequence feeling misunderstood and deeply in- 
 jured by the ignorance of their idiotic employers. 
 Those German gardeners alone could almost make 
 one understand this war I 
 
 But now our lawn has kicked its German flower- 
 beds off the edge, so to speak, — nothing is allowed 
 thereon but the shadows that belong, our time-keepers 
 and sentinels that march across the bluff; — shadows 
 of the new house (it was new a good many years 
 ago), and of the poplars that soar above the roofs and 
 usher you into the court the house is built around. 
 It opens towards the east, and on three sides the 
 upper story projects the width of a corridor sup- 
 ported on pillars swathed in rose-vines, which gives 
 us our cool, shady cloisters beneath ; where little Bon 
 used to go to sleep wheeled softly in his baby-car- 
 riage; where father used to smoke on moonlight 
 nights when there was too wild a wind in front ; walk- 
 ing with our dear one at his side — tall in her white 
 dresses, lovely, oh, so lovely! the little dark classic 
 head I how she belonged to courts and moonlight — 
 the house he built for her, the house of their romance. 
 Father felt, I think, though he never said such things, 
 that she was of an older world than ours ; she kept 
 it in the background, but you felt that she had it, the 
 memories of historic places and a richer human past 
 than we could gather around us. And yet the real 
 romance of that house was founded on the time when 
 she was mothering me out there alone in the heat 
 and dust and grime ! 
 
 330 
 
LATER WORDS, BY PHCEBE 
 
 Beauty was the breath of life to her — she brought 
 it by her very presence wherever she went ; but her 
 thoughts could make any place beautiful, and she 
 accepted as her lot anything life offered at the hands 
 of love and experience. 
 
 If you live in a great bare land of sunshine you 
 learn the value of shadows. Our shadows on the 
 mesa had the reality for us, when we were children, 
 of members of the family. They made their rounds 
 of the lawn and the house as if they had taken the 
 ** job " for life. At night, when the moon rose big over 
 the back-lands, a fresh group filled the court who were 
 periodical visitors and brought with them the spirit 
 of romance. Then the little cloistered place was like 
 "a queen's secluded garden"; and there was one 
 poplar that stood just within, slender as a cypress, 
 and cast its reflection across the pool, and the moon's 
 face looked out from behind it on the sleeping water. 
 We called it the *' Little Princess Poplar," and her 
 three brothers kept guard outside and lent their 
 shadows to make the whole mass of the house-shadow 
 look as if we had a minaret shooting up from the 
 north gable. 
 
 The shrub-planting was kept very cunningly below 
 the bluff, not to break its outline from the house. You 
 saw nothing different from the old view till you went 
 to the edge, and there was all that beauty down 
 below ; solid masses at the bottom, climbing in lighter 
 growths, with nooks and spaces for tucking in a pet 
 flower to spread its blossoms shyly till it was sought. 
 There was room along the whole scarp for so much 
 
 331 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 beauty 1 — and none of the natural lines interrupted. 
 I must tell, just to plague the German gardeners, 
 how her bulbs found their home at last. They simply 
 took possession when invited of the hollow below the 
 old windmill, all smothered now in Clematis pani' 
 culata up to the dizzy platform and the sails. There 
 is always a little leakage here to freshen the grass 
 which is never touched with a scythe till the last of 
 the imperial family of Japanese iris has spent its bloom. 
 (They had such names as ** Smoke after Battle," or 
 "Clouds before Dawn.") 
 
 The new house was in the nature of things : one 
 can be hardy and even perennial and still need a few 
 bathrooms. But those wise parents kept the low lines 
 of the old house, which was only low of necessity, 
 and the studio-lighting mother loved was repeated 
 in a more finished way in the two rooms facing west 
 which would have been shaded by the veranda roof. 
 It gave distinction to the dining-room, as a high wain- 
 scot does, with band-windows near the ceiling and the 
 very curtains you would wish strung across the keen 
 sky-blue : as she chose the curtains there was no mis- 
 take made as to their color. 
 
 But in the library — the room which spoke of her 1 
 — there were wonderful windows of glass-painting 
 that transformed the light into a strange, flowing 
 design carrying from space to space crossed by the 
 lead lines — cool, opaline colors with here and there 
 the opal's heart of fire. You knew, if you knew any- 
 thing of glass, that a master made them. Our mas- 
 ter, when he was young, had been a protege of her 
 
 333 
 
LATER WORDS, BY PHCEBE 
 
 father's whose perspicacious eye saw the genius in 
 his work when all New York, except Frederick Bon- 
 ham and the judgments he controlled, were laughing 
 at it. And here it was in its priceless maturity 1 It 
 would have taken a good deal of mother's affluence 
 (that came to her from her Aunt Essie who had her 
 husband's money at her disposal after his death) to 
 have paid for those windows. It was intended, I 
 know, that they should be an order, but their artist 
 superbly insisted they were (and had been from the 
 first) a gift — to the room itself 1 and would have 
 them to be a gift. He said nothing, for he was a sen- 
 sitive person, about indebtedness to her father for 
 sympathy — and perhaps some more substantial form 
 of help — at a critical time in his young struggles. 
 He had come out there one summer on his way to 
 somewhere else and stayed a fortnight (apparently 
 to his own surprise). There were oceans of talk, like 
 the talk I heard in Italy when I went abroad with 
 mother and we visited her astonishing Aunt Essie 
 in a great sixteenth-century villa where you moved 
 among terraces and frescoed chambers with ceil- 
 ings you could not see, as if you were in a Hall of 
 Dreams. 
 
 Our mother could drop her household speech and 
 enter into any other fashion of words her company 
 demanded, but when the guest was gone it was gone, 
 — that intoxication, as it must have been, of the old 
 brilliant atmosphere. Father, I observed, enjoyed it, 
 though he sat silent and was manifestly out of the 
 game. He was never in spirit out of any of her 
 
 333 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 games that for want of practice he could take no part 
 in. And she had the sweetest, humblest respect for 
 that want of practice. She knew the cost of inordinate 
 skill in words ; its dissipating mental effect and its 
 dangers to human intercourse. In all these ways, for 
 a woman so clever as she, so experienced in all soci- 
 eties, that humility, that sober, qualifying power was 
 to my mind the most remarkable thing about her, 
 the highest proof of her training. 
 
 She had her own little sudden ways of petting us 
 and showing us we were adored. She always made 
 it somehow impersonal — of that art she was past- 
 mistress I 
 
 "Sit there a moment, Phoebe," she said one day 
 and pointed to a chair at the library-table. It stands 
 under those jeweled windows a little out from the 
 books, facing the room. I sat as bidden and felt, as 
 you do feel color almost palpably, the splendor stream 
 over me and saw it in spots and splashes on my hands 
 and arms resting on the table. She stepped off a little 
 and looked at me with her happy eyes and mur- 
 mured some words from the *' Paradiso" : — 
 
 " O perpetual flowers of the eternal gladness, — " 
 
 "Phoebe!" she cried, **you look this minute as if 
 angels were scattering those flowers on your head, 
 dear child!" 
 
 She had this joy in things on which she set her 
 own values that had nothing to do with price. If she' 
 had waited for grand occasions to wear her beautiful 
 things, we should not have known her in them : — she 
 
 334 
 
LATER WORDS, BY PHOEBE 
 
 would put on "Aunt Essie's pearls," or some old 
 trifling chain of curious workmanship, spoils of the 
 studio-days, with equal contentment, whichever suited 
 her mood. Our windows, that were entirely as well as 
 literally " over the heads" of most of our visitors, she 
 liked to think were nothing but genius and sunshine 
 — which is cheap on the mesa — and scraps of lead 
 and lumps of glass. They made a poem of that room 
 for her. They bloomed in their unfading splendor in 
 all the lights, in all the hours of our happy days. In 
 moonlight they were marvelous, like sea-deeps lighted 
 through the waves. They scattered those imperish- 
 able flowers — 
 
 "0 perpetui fiori eterna letizia — " 
 
 upon the heads of us all, upon her head the dearest ! 
 I can see her at that table, her profile with the beauti- 
 ful eyelid dark-shaded underneath. She might have 
 been checking up bills; — she looked like a goddess 
 who has given away her immortal youth and beauty 
 and consented to human weariness and motherhood 
 and housekeeping and gray hairs. 
 
 How much more I have said than I meant to say I 
 It seemed most difficult at first to add my words to 
 hers that were her last. But having started I find my- 
 self rambling on for pure love of the memories which 
 are all we have left of her now. 
 
 I am restless here in New York when I think of the 
 adorable place out there alone. There are precious 
 reasons why I should love it — **top of the world," 
 
 335 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 she called it. It was there I reached the summit of a 
 girl's happiness. But that was long ago I 
 
 Jack — Jack Landreth — and I are not in the least 
 related, though I have always heard of his father and 
 mother as "Uncle Jack and Aunt Essie." He had 
 taken his medical degree at Johns Hopkins and he 
 was in Paris studying, the last year I was at Dieu- 
 donne, a school a little way out of the city. There 
 were three other American girls, all as homesick as 
 we could be. His mother came out to visit him (and 
 get some clothes) and she paid me a visit, of course, 
 as she is my step-aunt; and she gave us all, the 
 Americans, a tea — the most splendid little affair she 
 could make it. She came down again on purpose to 
 cast a motherly eye over my school-girl wardrobe — 
 dissatisfied, I could see she was, though she made 
 not a single comment, and she dressed me for that 
 tea, hat and all, as you would turn your hand over I 
 There was a bouquet with Jack's card, but as it went 
 with my dress exactly, and as he had never seen me 
 in his life, I concluded he had n't had much to do 
 with it. 
 
 He lounged in, however, quite thrown in the shade 
 by one or two very fine personages who had con- 
 sented to grace the occasion — our own Ambassa- 
 dress for one. He gathered us all in with his strange 
 eyes with long corners, the aloof yet penetrating look 
 of a born doctor, or a born artist. Our dear one said 
 he was exactly what her father, his grandfather Bon- 
 ham, might have been if he had been spared the artist 
 temperament. I am thankful Jack escaped — though 
 
 336 
 
LATER WORDS, BY PHCEBE 
 
 every time I visit his family I wonder how he'man- 
 aged to. I thought, as soon as I saw him, that he was 
 like her — our mother — more like her than either of 
 her own sons ; the same supple lengths defying age, 
 the small, beautifully poised head and fine dark hair, 
 the finest — that ruffles a little at the edges like fur. 
 The eager, Spartan profile, every scrap of tissue 
 eliminated from those delicate, stressful features, and 
 the long, splendid eyes I And even her manner — 
 gentle and deliberate that sets you at ease ; that man- 
 ner most necessary to a doctor. 
 
 He came boiling out to see us the summer after we 
 both got home; he was awfully thin, overworked, 
 underweight — a few things had happened in Paris 
 before his mother left. He said it was done — he was 
 done — right there and then. But it was the mesa 
 that finished me. 
 
 I must not let myself dream and dote. He is cer- 
 tainly (now that she is no longer here) the ** dearest, 
 sweetest, cleverest," but I wish he were not also one 
 of the " maddest of the mad Bonhams," born to win 
 hearts and to break them. But if my heart must break, 
 at least it will be proud ! He has gone to France, my 
 boy who has a boy of his own as old as I was when 
 this tale began — began, I mean, on the mesa. Jack 
 is older than my father when he married the sec- 
 ond time ; and still he is a boy, if that means he is 
 ready, as youth is ready, to give itself to a beautiful 
 idea. 
 
 I made, I am ashamed to say, one little plea — he 
 looked at me surprised ! 
 
 337 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 ** Why, dear, who is to go, if not fellows like me 
 whose children have mothers like you, and all of you 
 safe from want I It 's that hob-goblin money of Great- 
 Aunt Essie that sets me free." 
 
 So there it is again — that bewitched money ! — 
 that's always trying to justify its existence in a fam- 
 ily where it doesn't belong. Was "Uncle Charles" 
 so infatuated with her? I thought her, I must say, a 
 dreadful old creature with her powder and low gowns 
 and jewels, and eyes like jewels in a strange setting 
 of pale, wrinkled eyelids, and the tiniest feet and the 
 highest slippers — the feet of a Fairy Godmother. 
 Perhaps he was ironical, as to say : ** Here it is, the 
 money you married me for. Take it all and do with 
 it what you dare I " She dared give it to her own 
 nieces — in return for not being a better aunt to them, 
 perhaps, when they were young motherless girls 
 struggling with cares beyond them. 
 
 Or, he might have loved them himself — they must 
 have been so charming ! They had the graces of their 
 poverty — the graces poverty can't afford not to have. 
 And he knew there was greed without grace on his 
 own side. Mother thought that, kind as he was, he was 
 lazy too, tired of his great wealth, bored with think- 
 ing how to divide it and not sow quarrels amongst 
 his shoals of relatives. So he left it all to her who 
 had no conscience about kin, especially his kin. 
 
 I must not offend her ghost or she will haunt me 
 with dreams of what that witch-money may do to 
 me. . . . Ah, last night I had a dream 1 It might 
 have been herself, for it was a goblin visit. Can any 
 
 ,1^8 
 
LATER WORDS BY PHCEBE 
 
 one imag-ine a woman asleep in her bed in New 
 York seeing clear across to France — some of the 
 sights her husband — does not dream of — has — be- 
 fore his eyes I Only, in my dream, it was the mesa, 
 and guns — German guns — were shelling us from 
 the Army Post across the valley ; they had swept 
 that up with one hand I Their flag flew on the sky in 
 place of ours, and their aim was us — our home and 
 the bench of land we stand on, three miles away. A 
 perfect range, but scarcely a military necessity. I saw 
 that even in a dream. I laughed I 
 
 "That must be revenge," I said to myself craz- 
 ily, ** for insulting their flower-beds. Those are our 
 German gardeners — they 've not forgotten ! " They 
 were planting shell after shell where no shadows 
 would ever rest again ; they were tearing out the 
 heart of the hill in great gobs — the house must go 
 next, I thought. It went. One crash like a thunder- 
 bolt in the front face and our beautiful windows were 
 gone. The dwelling stood in two pieces, a ruined 
 thing, and stared into its own grave. I saw clear 
 through it into the court where the galleries were 
 on fire, and the rose-vines hung in blackened strings. 
 The pool was as red as blood. A wind stormed over 
 the hill and shook the poplars — they stood up pale 
 in awful light and rocked distracted, and the greatest 
 of them heeled over and went head down into the 
 gulf that was our lawn. 
 
 There seemed then to come a pause. I heard no 
 more near explosions, only booming far off down 
 the valley. ** More homes," I thought, " are going. 
 
 339 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 They will take all the farmers^ stuff, they will ruin 
 the ditches — the whole country will be a desert as 
 it was before." Then I looked again and we were as 
 we were before I Thirty years were gone in an hour. 
 There was nothing there. Only the windmill, the 
 bare derrick, standing out against the sky alone. 
 The sails buzzed faster and faster till the wind rose 
 too strong, and then they clamped themselves and 
 were still. And I heard that sound I used to hear in 
 my bed at night when I lay sick out there in the 
 fever, and thought it was footsteps, hundreds of 
 frightened footsteps running round the house. There 
 were no longer fields and orchards where ours have 
 been since I was a little girl ; all the back-lands were 
 the old desert, and in the weird moonlight which 
 showed this picture of the past, I heard the cries of 
 the desert's children at night, the coyotes' hunting- 
 call. 
 
 I was awake now, but the dream was before my 
 eyes much clearer than I can tell it. I said : " But 
 that was n't the mesa — the mesa is safe enough — 
 that is France, gone back to desert, that is Belgium, 
 after their thousand years of culture. That is the least 
 of what has happened over there. They had homes 
 they loved and hoped to leave their children, little 
 homes they made themselves, and old, splendid 
 homes the centuries made and their fathers' fathers 
 lived in. Great old trees and lovely roofs and towers 
 and priceless windows. They saw them go like that, 
 and it was no dream. And the cries — " 
 
 340 
 
LATER WORDS, BY PHCEBE 
 
 . . . But Jack is over there, doing his blessed work. 
 I was not quick to answer, but I have given much. 
 He is a heaven-born doctor — he is in his prime; 
 and slender as he is he is very strong ; he can work 
 long hours without sleep or rest. He has found for 
 souls like his the only rest. 
 
 And I am not the only American woman by many 
 thousands, thank God, who has been privileged to 
 give, out of her very being, to the side we belong on 
 in this war. It would be meanness, in the case of our 
 men who have gone to the fronts, to scrutinize mo- 
 tives or compare the gifts each had to give. Some of 
 the lightest lenders went through, caught up in a 
 sudden holy joy, and finished the sacrifice. And all 
 have in some sense found their wings, and a higher 
 path than safety out of the chicken-yard we seem to 
 have become under a clucking administration. . . . 
 Though any day, while the struggle lasts and no one 
 can say their chance is gone, we may be called on to 
 reverse our present judgments, we shamed and bitter 
 ones. God grant we may ! 
 
 Meantime, poor America, count thy jewels ! They 
 are ours and they are humanity's too — they seem 
 many of them to have been born and to have waited 
 for this hour. The fliers, struck down from those cold 
 and lonely heights, the ambulance-drivers on the 
 shell-torn battle-fronts, those who fought typhus in 
 Serbia and hunger in Belgium : men and women 
 with reputations and a finished technique to give 
 to the work, men with nothing but themselves who 
 threw down the job and slipped into the ranks of the 
 
 341 i 
 
EDITH BONHAM 
 
 Allies to drop unnoticed beside their war brothers, 
 under a flag not theirs. 
 
 We might thank them for helping to save our face 
 as a nation, but if we praise them ourselves, let it not 
 be done as to Americans ! They are the Frenchmen 
 who fought for us when our national history was 
 made ; they are the Englishmen who gave their swords 
 and fortunes to Greece in her tormented uprisings ; 
 they are the English and French who bled for Italy, 
 when E. B. B., that great lover of Italy, heard a little 
 child go singing "'neath Casa Guidi windows by the 
 church, — 
 
 " ' O bella liberta, 
 O bella ! ' " 
 
 Which takes us back to an earlier chapter of this 
 story, and to poor old Captain Nashe, of damaged 
 memory. And almost as if she followed my words, 
 I can fancy our mother saying: "Spare him a flower, 
 wherever he lies forgotten! He was one of them 
 once — he gave his life. It was n't his fault that he 
 missed the good fortune to lose it." 
 
 And if he had ! If Fate had been kind enough to 
 take him, young, with Garibaldi's kiss fresh on his 
 dying face, — what would it have done to her, our 
 Dearest? — who might never have been ours if he 
 had not crossed her path in his shabby days and 
 parted her from her father. 
 
 The difference, to us, is utterly incalculable, but she 
 would have been the same. Wherever she had lived, 
 in whatever society or circumstances, the greater 
 
 342 
 
LATER WORDS, BY PHCEBE 
 
 love, the greater understanding, would have been 
 hers, the wrath for " a wrong not thine " and, in due 
 time, the greater forgiveness. I remember her quot- 
 ing once, " * Pardon is a fruit that we must not gather 
 green. We must wait till it falls from the tree.' 
 
 > tt 
 
 THE END 
 
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