THE SPINSTER 
 
 Bf 5 SARAHS N 
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THE SPINSTER 
 
 A NOVEL WHEREIN A NINETEENTH 
 
 CENTURT GIRL FINDS HER PLACE 
 
 IN THE TWENTIETH 
 
 By 
 SARAH N. CLEGHORN 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 1916 
 
Copyright, 1916, 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 Published March, 1916 
 
 THE QUINN A BODEN CO. PftCAt 
 HAHWAV, M. J. 
 
m 
 
 C65Lf 
 
 S 
 
 My brother 
 
 CHARLES DALTON CLEGHORN 
 
 and his wife 
 
 SUSAN PINDAR EMBURY CLEGHORN 
 
 this book is affectionately dedicated 
 
 3552G9 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I The Midnight Train i 
 
 II Tory Hill and Wakerobin 4 
 
 III The Tarantula, and Other Religious Experiences 18 
 
 IV Young Ideas 29 
 
 V Fleshpots 41 
 
 VI But the Heart Must Often Correct the Follies 
 
 of the Head .......... 55 
 
 VII Deep Waters 74 
 
 VIII Growing Weather 90 
 
 IX Susan 104 
 
 X A Farewell to Verse Writing 118 
 
 XI Callers in Audubon Street 134 
 
 XII The Young Man Whose Name Mrs. Ray Forgot . 153 
 
 XIII Dust Begins to Gather on the Desk in the Cubby- 
 
 Hole .... - 171 
 
 XIV Down the Valley 189 
 
 XV The Waning 208 
 
 XVI December 222 
 
 XVII A Muse in Sunbonnets 236 
 
 XVIII The Last Trip to the Sea 250 
 
 XIX Business Is Business 265 
 
 XX Christianity in the Arena 277 
 
 XXI The Call to the Colors 291 
 
 XXII The Muse Forswears the Sunbonnet . . . 308 
 
 XXIII Another Letter 323 
 
CHAPTER I 
 THE MIDNIGHT TRAIN 
 
 The New York and Montreal Express regularly pulled 
 into the Tory Hill station at the same hour in 1892 that 
 it pulls in at now : which means that there was never much 
 left of the night when passengers had descended from the 
 train, ascended the stage, and been driven (some three 
 miles) through the two long straggling villages of the 
 New Street and the Old Street. The sleeper, in short, 
 favors Tory Hill at half-past one a.m. 
 
 It was on time, and into the rainy blackness two ladies 
 in bustled black henrietta dresses and large crape veils 
 climbed down, followed by a thin, fair, stooping gentle- 
 man with a black band on his sleeve, and two children, 
 whom other parents of that day might have dressed in 
 mourning, but their father and aunts had not. The seri- 
 ous, plain, but fresh-complexioned girl of nine wore a 
 box-pleated cashmere dress of dark crimson : the good- 
 looking little boy had on full dark-blue kilts, and a Scotch 
 cap on his head. They had come almost direct from 
 their mother's funeral to live henceforth with her two 
 single sisters in the ancestral Vermont village where 
 those sisters owned a small brown house which they 
 called Wakerobin. 
 
 Jolting along in the stage through the wetness and 
 blackness, Ellen strained her eyes, dizzy after the long 
 journey of two days and three nights, to see, if she could, 
 
2 THF SPINSTER 
 
 the mountains she had heard so much about. In Minne- 
 apohs there were bluffs : but she understood that moun- 
 tains were Hke inverted cornucopias, only more slim and 
 pointed: for a picture of such Gothic mountains had 
 hung on their wall in Minneapolis. Why couldn't it have 
 been moonlight, and she could have seen these Green 
 Mountains her mother had talked so much about ? 
 
 "Where are they, Aunt Fran?" 
 
 " Right over there, dearie." 
 
 " Oh dear, I can't see anything." 
 
 " Wait till morning." 
 
 Father patted her shoulder with such exceeding tender 
 pats that she tried to get hold of his hand : but little Jim 
 at the same moment got hold of it, as he sat jogging up 
 and down on Aunt Fran's plump lap. But Aunt Sallie, 
 the young aunt, took hold of Ellen's hand. 
 
 Father was going back to Minneapolis on Monday. 
 He had an office in the Hennepin Building (" Investment 
 Broker — Commercial Paper "), and had taken a room in 
 a boarding-house instead of the small house on the lake- 
 side where Mother and he had planned to move this 
 spring. The lease had been all but signed. Then Mother, 
 who was never sick, whom Ellen and Jim had never 
 even seen in bed, she was always up so early, giving them 
 their morning baths and stripping beds and opening 
 windows, — Mother suddenly got sick and was queer and 
 didn't know them. Father had wanted Ellen to tell all 
 over again how Mother had changed places with her 
 that day in church when there was such a draft blowing. 
 (It was Lent, and Mother went to church every after- 
 noon, often taking Ellen. Father only went on Sun- 
 days.) 
 
THE MIDNIGHT TRAIN 3 
 
 Mother had pneumonia. She was only sick a week. 
 Sometimes she talked to them, when they went in to say 
 good-night, and once she thought Ellen was little Sarah, 
 who had died. It made Ellen shiver all over, that look 
 out of Mother's eyes, that didn't know who she was. 
 
 Ellen had had some ideas of her own about things 
 grown-up people thought children never considered, such 
 as death. But all she felt at her mother's funeral was 
 blankness and numbness. Aunt Fran and Aunt Sallie 
 had taken her to sleep with them, and every time she 
 had waked up in the night after the funeral. Aunt Sallie 
 had hold of her hand. Jimmie slept that night with his 
 father. He said Father kept waking him up, turning 
 over and turning over; and finally he asked if Father 
 had a stomach-ache ; because he thought he had one, him- 
 self, he felt so queer, and sort of sick; and Father said, 
 so did he. 
 
 These things went back and forth in Ellen's mind 
 as the stage jolted slowly up the long hill between the 
 New and Old villages, and the rain blew gustily by, and 
 searching clean cold air whiffed through the flapping 
 rubber curtains. 
 
 "Where arc the mountains, Aunt Sallie?" 
 
 " Right in front of you, dear child." 
 
 " I wish I could see them ! " 
 
 The driver called *'Whoa!" and tipped the stage 
 down, side-wise, into a driveway, before a lamp shining 
 out of a window. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 TORY HILL AND WAKEROBIN 
 
 The Old Street was the court end of Tory Hill : the 
 porticoed, shuttered, wide-clapboarded, elmed, and lawny- 
 part. The New Street took its revenge by having the 
 bank, the station, and the dentist. No trolley or train 
 profaned the dignified and thinly-peopled Old Street. 
 In the middle of it were the church and the store, coeval, 
 colonial, solemnly facing each other across the tiny com- 
 mon like equals. Both were of cream-colored brick, with 
 white fluted cornices, and white pillared porches. They 
 even were alike in having at the end furthest from the 
 sidewalk, the one a pulpit, the other a pulpit-like plat- 
 form, where old Mr. Barnhaven seemed to be always 
 making up enormous ledgers, standing at his desk, like 
 a pillar of black broadcloth. In the windows of the 
 store, sun-faded miscellaneous goods dozed away the 
 decades, unsold and unadvertised, beneath ancient indigo 
 shades that rusted on their rollers. In the church, echoes 
 of tuning-forks, rustles of forgotten hoops, were im- 
 prisoned in the stale, warm, wood-smelling air, like sea 
 murmurs in a shell. Throughout the week, solemn, 
 steady " trading " was done at Willets and Barnhaven's 
 store, by farmers who stuck to an old reliable " stand " 
 in preference to the garish shops always starting up, or 
 selling out, in the New Street. On Sundays these same 
 
 4 
 
TORY HILL AND WAKEROBIN 5 
 
 substantial freeholders came to church, where Willets 
 and Barnhaven, in partnership as deacons, passed the 
 plate to them. 
 
 Ellen's aunts also traded at Willets and Barnhaven's, 
 and Ellen had often to wait, on some buxom summer 
 morning, for Mr. Willets to grind the coffee and argue 
 the while in incessant politics with Mr. Barnhaven. Mr. 
 Willets was a black Democratic sheep in the white Re- 
 publican fold of Tory Hill. His father had been a 
 Copperhead: and once, the children all said, Mr. Wil- 
 lets had made a bet that he would trundle Mr. Barnhaven 
 in a wheelbarrow the whole length of the Old Street, if 
 Harrison were elected: " and he had to do it too! " the 
 story always ended triumphantly. The Willetses lived next 
 door to Ellen's aunts, and Jennie Willets soon became 
 an inveterate playmate of Ellen's and when boys were 
 scarce, of little Jim's too, though he preferred any size 
 or variety of boy to a petticoat. 
 
 Ellen's really bosom friend, however, was Julia Olden- 
 bury. Julia was an orphan. She lived an enormous dis- 
 tance away down in the deeper depths of the valley, 
 where the river ran. These remote lowlands were al- 
 ways called " the valley," as if everything between Wind- 
 ward Mountain on the west and Hemlock Mountain on 
 the east were not the valley! The frosts were always 
 harder down at Julia's. The may-apples and the wild 
 strawberries came later. Ellen hardly ever got down to 
 see Julia, and Julia hardly ever got up to see her, and 
 yet they were bosom friends. They became intimate 
 after seeing each other a very few times; not because 
 they were distant cousins, nor because quaint, slender 
 Julia, with her dark-red hair in a net, and her immeasur- 
 
6 THE SPINSTER 
 
 ably old-timey white stockings, was decidedly a pet with 
 the aunts. It was because JuHa Hked hymns and poems, 
 and knew a lot of them by heart, and could glow and 
 fraternize over them. With her Ellen could doubly enjoy 
 splendid battles in history, and noble sentiments in the 
 Readers : Patrick Henry and Abraham Lincoln and Rich- 
 ard Cceur de Lion and Joan of Arc. Jennie Willets 
 cared no more for poetry and history than Jim did. She 
 just picked out the shortest hymns on Sunday to learn, 
 and sometimes she learned an old one over again. Ellen 
 played with Jennie, however, every ordinary afternoon 
 of her life, squat-tag, cross-tag, cudgel, relievo, duck- 
 on-a-rock, one-old-cat, dolls, house, store, and doctor. 
 Propinquity united them. They caught hitches together 
 on lumber sleds in winter, and hung may-baskets on door- 
 knobs in spring together; — confections of tissue paper 
 and birch-bark, with adder-tongues and hepaticas and 
 curly ferns inside. 
 
 Wakerobin was a house with an ell. It had two short, 
 narrow marble paths, deeply bedded in grass full of 
 dandelions and plantains, running, one from the front 
 porch and one from the ell porch, out to the slate side- 
 walk. It had a wineglass elm and a sugar maple in front, 
 beside a clematis vine on the ell porch, which Aunt Sallie 
 and one of her young men had dug up in the woods. 
 There were eight apple trees in a row round the garden. 
 All the eight were climbable. Every child living near this 
 end of the Old Street had one of the Misses Mowbray's 
 apple trees for his or her " house." Downstairs there 
 was a little bit of a parlor, with Victorian superabun- 
 dance of ornament, even to two fans crossed on the 
 wall, tied with a ribbon. There was an upright piano in 
 
TORY HILL AND WAKEROBIN 7 
 
 this parlor, where Ellen had to "practice"; but for- 
 tunately there were also some mildly interesting books 
 on the marble-topped tables, which she could stand on 
 the music rack and read while she did scales. The 
 dining-room was in the ell; the ell porch ran across the 
 front of it. To this day, in many towns, Ellen has never 
 seen, and never hopes to see, so pleasant, summer-like 
 and hospitable a dining-room. Especially at Sunday 
 night tea, when biscuits and honey and lettuce and to- 
 matoes and one-two-three-four cake and Aunt Fran's 
 tutti-frutti jam were all on the table, country fashion, 
 together; and when neighbors, or one of Aunt Sallie's 
 young men, came in from the ell porch, and gave that 
 O so pleasant company air to everything. 
 
 Wakerobin was really a very small house. Upstairs 
 there were only three bedrooms, a storeroom peopled with 
 trunks, and two "cubby-holes " in the corners of the 
 hall, in one of which Ellen kept her playthings. How 
 occasional guests, three or four at a time, were ever ac- 
 commodated here, even with much bandying of threats 
 to put the fattest ones to sleep in the barn, Ellen could 
 never remember, any more than she can now figure out 
 how she and Jimmie ever set up a complete croquet set 
 in the tiny square of front lawn between the two dimin- 
 utive marble paths. Both were accomplished somehow. 
 
 Though after their one very quiet summer of 1892, 
 the aunts began having tea parties and whist parties, and 
 entertaining the Shakespere Club, their new dresses, 
 spring and fall, were still black, and the crape veils were 
 only taken off and folded away in one of the trunks in 
 the storeroom, to be replaced by still longer ones of nuns- 
 yeihng. Aunt Sallie's personable young men, home from 
 
8 THE SPINSTER 
 
 Bennington and Rutland for Sundays, came down and sat 
 for hours making pleasant frolicsome talk on the ell 
 porch, and sometimes stayed to tea. Summer people, 
 too, from the high-priced but old-fashioned Windward 
 House, used to come in roving bands, with cigars and 
 parasols and walking-sticks, in flannels and blazers. 
 Sometimes Aunt Sallie went out with them in the even- 
 ings and rang staid citizens' doorbells and ran away : but 
 this was carefully concealed from the children at the 
 time. And still amid all this cheerfulness, there were 
 older people who sometimes came, distant cousins from 
 up the state, or old friends who hadn't seen the aunts 
 for a long time : and they would exclaim over Jim and 
 Ellen, and say, *' Well, well, are these poor Mary's chil- 
 dren?" At such times Ellen used to hear the sad details 
 of her mother's short illness all gone over again. She 
 grew to know exactly what to expect when the visitor 
 said, " I haven't heard any of the particulars." But she 
 never became accustomed to the particulars, nor ceased 
 dully to dread hearing them. Whenever she heard them, 
 a singular cloud — it was not of grief, it was not of fear, 
 but a sense of something weird, stealthy, and super- 
 natural, crept over her horizon. Then she would think 
 a good deal for several days together, about death, and 
 would be more timid than ever about illness. If Jimmie 
 had a coated tongue and Aunt Fran gave him aromatic 
 syrup of rhubarb, Ellen was uneasy. If she herself 
 had a cold, the family prayers before breakfast had 
 a tragic sound about them. Many happy years did 
 not take away the mold and cavernousness from her 
 thought of death, or turn it into something normal anci 
 friendly. 
 
TORY HILL AND WAKEROBIN 9 
 
 Nor was there ever, in those conversations about her 
 mother which she overheard, any cheerful and matter-of- 
 fact reference to the Hfe to come. Heaven was men- 
 tioned, with decent vague solemnity. She heard them say 
 that her mother was " better off," " far happier," but 
 they said it too solemnly to make it seem believable. 
 
 A cold in the head once or twice a year was all she 
 had to build her immediate fears of death upon; and Jim- 
 mie's occasionally inspected tongue was the only excuse 
 Aunt Fran ever had to administer rhubarb. But still 
 Aunt Fran loved to say, " My sister's children have deli- 
 cate constitutions." She gravely assured visitors that 
 " When these children are sick, they are very sick." 
 Visitors suppressed their smiles as the stalwart children 
 ran in and out of the warm, overdecorated little parlor. 
 They murmured that " the mountain air would be good 
 for them." 
 
 Not only the mountain air was good, but the beauty 
 and strength of the mountains were good for them; 
 good for any children who had the luck to live in Tory 
 Hill, Tewkesbury, Green Hollow, or any other of those 
 comely and sturdy towns along the Ballantyne. The 
 sharp line of Windward Mountain, like a headless lion 
 or tiger crouching, was beautiful; the long folds at the 
 southern end, Cock Hollow and Stratton Glen, were 
 poured full of dark-blue shadows, like blue glaciers, after 
 sunset; and the narrowing north end of the valley, where 
 Bald and Mother Mountains closed in toward each other, 
 left a wedge of pale blue distance between, — a slice of 
 ten-mile-thick hazy air, which was an eternal invitation 
 to an adventurous eye to follow and dwell beyond. Ellen 
 once found a poem reprinted in Littell's Living Age (a 
 
10 THE SPINSTER 
 
 dingy cover which sometimes rewarded the persevering 
 omniverous young reader) with a stanza about moun- 
 tains which she greatly Hked : 
 
 " Pearly are the skies in the country of my fathers: 
 Purple are thy mountains, home of my heart." 
 
 They were purple, often, in just that dreamy weather 
 when the skies were pearly, and pearly clouds came down 
 on Windward, and shut out the wide scars of the 
 avalanches. But beyond being beautiful, this country 
 was sturdy and democratic above most of the New Eng- 
 land states. There was always in Vermont an odd free- 
 dom from ancestrally professional families, and espe- 
 cially from ministerial families. The proudest boast of 
 family which Ellen ever heard in Tory Hill came from 
 Mr. Barnhaven, at the Shakespere Club. He boasted 
 of an ancestor who had entered the profession of law, 
 and had given it up because his conscience could not 
 brook legal customs. " He went back," said Mr. Barn- 
 haven grandly, " to work on his uncle's farm." Old 
 ladies used to recount, with nodding relish, the reminis- 
 cence of the Governor's lady, who entertained city 
 visitors at the same table with the hired men. The 
 story ran that Governor Chittenden's wife stood at the 
 back door ringing the dinner bell for the farmhands to 
 come in; and one of the city visitors remonstrated, 
 saying : 
 
 " Surely you don't seat your farmhands with your 
 family!" 
 
 " Well — I do," Mrs. Chittenden replied apologetically; 
 " but when I think of the hard work they do, and the 
 appetites they have, I feel that I ought to serve them 
 
TORY HILL AND WAKEROBIN ii 
 
 first, and wait myself, with my friends, for the second 
 table." 
 
 At the co-educational seminary, at the far end of the 
 Old Street, were always boys and girls who were work- 
 ing for their schooling, waiting on table, filling the lamps, 
 and sweeping the dormitories of their schoolmates: and 
 often these very girls were the belles of school society, 
 and these boys, having hung their overalls up in the shed, 
 became the favorite partners at the holiday dances. At 
 church socials Mrs. Black, who came to wash for the 
 aunts every Friday, was sometimes seated at the min- 
 ister's table, while Mrs. Barnhaven waited on her: and 
 when the Barnhaven children had a party, the Black 
 children were always invited. 
 
 Aunt Fran and Aunt Sallie had, however, more sense 
 of social grades than most people in Tory Hill. Aunt 
 Fran, in fact, once read a paper on " American Caste " 
 before the Shakespere Club, which was very warmly dis- 
 cussed, and indeed prolonged the meeting very late. 
 Ellen woke up when the aunts came in, and as they 
 talked a little louder than usual, she listened and heard 
 Aunt Fran say to Aunt Sallie that she had " stirred up 
 a hornet's nest." Ellen hoped that didn't mean that 
 anybody's feelings were hurt. It was always a perfect 
 nightmare to her, — the idea that she had ever hurt any- 
 body's feelings, or that anybody belonging to her could 
 possibly have done such a murderous thing. If Aunt 
 Fran had in any way hurt Mrs. Black's feelings, it 
 would be up to Ellen to make amends somehow when 
 Mrs. Black should come to wash next Friday. She 
 thought impatiently: 
 
 " How could Aunt Fran imagine she could write a 
 
12 THE SPINSTER 
 
 paper about who ought to look down on whom, without 
 hurting somebody? " 
 
 At the same time, she always had in the back of her 
 own mind the complacent notion, " Of course, I'm a. 
 lady." Especially was this notion basking and preening 
 itself in her mind on Sunday mornings when she went to 
 the Congregational church and sat among others dressed 
 in less good taste, or speaking less correctly than her- 
 self; or whose fathers, so far from being "investment 
 brokers," drove the butcher cart or took away the gar- 
 bage can. 
 
 Though Miss Frances Mowbray, to suit the imperious 
 whimsicalities which made her such an interesting char- 
 acter, might write papers on Caste, and scandalize the 
 idealistic democrats of the Shakespere Club, nobody 
 could suit herself in a more untrammeled manner in 
 the invitations to those large tea parties which she and 
 Aunt Sallie gave every spring and fall. She perhaps 
 regarded her social position in Tory Hill as so adaman- 
 tine that she could take what liberties she chose with it, 
 without in any sense setting an example or a precedent for 
 either herself or others. She issued an occasional in- 
 vitation to a Tory Hill nobody so socially obscure that 
 even the church society had not found him out. These 
 invitations went forth like mandates from a monarch. 
 They seemed to create a sort of rank in the recipient, 
 by the very fact of their issuance. 
 
 The parties at Wakerobin were built on the general 
 foundation of escalloped oysters and celery salad. These 
 were party dishes inviolate, and were seldom served, 
 except as party leftovers, to the family. There was a 
 special company jam, too: thick syrupy pineapple, 
 
TORY HILL AND WAKEROBIN 13 
 
 "pound for pound." Tea parties usually brought on 
 (beforehand) one of Aunt Sallie's sick headaches. The 
 sweeping and dusting above and below stairs in prepara- 
 tion for a party were " one too many," as she said, for 
 her. The house was scrubbed from cellar to storeroom. 
 Instead of sympathizing with Aunt Sallie when she went 
 dizzily to bed, at about three o'clock in the afternoon, 
 Aunt Fran only said : 
 
 " My idea of a good time is to clean house all day and 
 go to a ball in the evening." 
 
 The aunts knew every soul in Tory Hill Old Street. 
 They knew not only all the grown-ups, but every child : 
 and not only all the children, but all the horses, all the 
 dogs, and many of the cats. " Ponto Barnhaven, you've 
 run away again," Aunt Fran would say reproachfully to 
 the old Irish setter that came scouting round the gar- 
 bage pail; and she did not, like Aunt Sallie, encourage 
 the doctor's big black cat in coming to the woodshed door 
 for cream. Aunt Sallie loved cats, and had had eleven 
 when she was small. Ellen drew some eclat from this 
 circumstance, and could always puncture any incipient 
 superiority in other children by means of it. Even when 
 the fathers of other children marched with the Civil 
 War veterans, she could regain the respect of all by 
 saying : 
 
 " Aunt Sallie had eleven cats when she was my age." 
 
 Both aunts had a singular trait of character in their 
 immense longsuffering toward animals. Keturah and 
 Tabbie, the old tiger cats, regularly walked over the pan- 
 try floor immediately after it had been painted, and left 
 their velvet footprints. Larkum, the cross little barking 
 terrier, was never punished. He v^as tenderly washed 
 
14 THE SPINSTER 
 
 and scrubbed as soon as possible after his encounter with 
 the skunk. Ellen herself willingly carried out the con- 
 demned tub to the foot of the garden where the wretched 
 and mortified Larkum was in exile. 
 
 Not only had the aunts this consistent compassion for 
 all friendly beasts, but they had a natural respect for 
 the interests of animals as such. Toads hopping up the 
 lawn were regarded as having rights, and as doubtless 
 knowing where they were bound for, and why. The 
 chipmunk's holes were not filled up, for an animal's house 
 was not to be lightly destroyed. In sweeping the ant- 
 hills off the sidewalk the children learned to be careful 
 not to choke the entry to those invisible labyrinths below. 
 The inevitable line was drawn, it is true. No considera- 
 tion was shown to spiders' webs (though spiders and ants 
 were always carefully extricated from the dustpan). 
 The house was not free from mouse-traps and fly-catch- 
 ing devices. Ellen knew a trick worth ten mouse-traps, 
 however. She regularly sprung them, on the sly, and 
 left the bits of cheese to be consumed in perfect security. 
 She spent many a careful minute rescuing living flies 
 from the fly-paper, until she found out that they were 
 still helpless and could not wield their sticky legs and 
 wings. Jimmie, when he attained to knickerbockers, be- 
 gan to go fishing. Ellen discouraged him as far as in 
 her lay: but their father was a seasoned fisherman, and 
 sent his son an expensive jointed rod. Jimmie caught a 
 few dace and bull-pouts: but at least he killed them 
 cjiiickly, and did not leave them gasping on the grass. 
 His sister managed to continue to enjoy bread-and-but- 
 tcr-and-sugar picnics on the shores of Stratton Pond, if 
 Jimmie would only (and so pleasant was his disposition 
 
TORY HILL AND WAKEROBIN 15 
 
 that he sometimes would!) bait his hook with dead June- 
 bugs, and let her tip out the whole canful of angleworms 
 to wriggle away happily in the grass. 
 
 By Stratton Pond, and in the Ledge Woods, where 
 they had other bread-and-butter picnics with the Wil- 
 letses and Barnhavens, or strawberrying in the pasture 
 round the big rock, Ellen would often find herself drifted 
 away from, and had nothing to blame for it but that 
 mooning, day-dreaming habit of hers which caused the 
 aunts so often to clap their hands and exclaim : " Come, 
 Ellen, come back! " She had a great habit of indulging 
 grandiloquent and egotistic fancies. They were always 
 lying in wait for her. While other children, with 
 healthier objective interests, were observing tree-toads 
 and meadow-mice, learning how the chippy built, and 
 where to find the lady-slipper, she was lost by the half- 
 hour in vain pretentious conceits of her own future. 
 Sometimes she contented herself with the notion of being 
 a mere Lady Bountiful, but oftener she would be a Joan 
 of Arc of sorts; not a soldier, quite; but a martyr, 
 grandly dying for some great cause, and having a monu- 
 ment erected, like the one to Ethan Allen on the little 
 common in front of the church, to her undying memory. 
 Physically brave she most certainly knew herself not to 
 be, though she would rather have been brave than any- 
 thing else in the world. She was always trying to think 
 she was getting to be braver, and hoping somebody else 
 would notice it. Aunt Sallie was so fatuous and fond 
 that she would always play up to this sly, transparent 
 fishing. Particularly was this true after a visit of the 
 children to the dentist. It was Aunt Sallie's greatest 
 ordeal to take them there. Once, when Ellen had had a 
 
i6 THE SPINSTER 
 
 loose tooth pulled, Aunt Fran heard her expatiate so long 
 on it to the young French-Canadian girl who was at 
 that time their maid-of-all-work, that she herself went 
 into the kitchen and said : 
 
 " Ellen, don't you think you've talked long enough 
 about that tooth?" 
 
 It was not in human nature to laugh promptly and 
 whole-heartedly at her own expense. Nor did she even 
 try, in those young years, to imitate the frank, insensi- 
 tive view of himself which Jimmie for example took. 
 Jimmie, whom Ellen regarded, with the purblind eyes of 
 an elder sister, as a mere fat, bewitching big baby, with 
 lovely silky red cheeks; and who was all the time form- 
 ing his cool, sane, Tom-Tulliverish opinions about her ! — 
 It was exceedingly easy to mortify Ellen. She was thor- 
 oughly mortified about this matter of the tooth; and 
 yet her hunger for Marie-Louise's praise of her forti- 
 tude in not crying when it was pulled continued unabated. 
 She even angled at Marie-Louise a few times, cautiously, 
 skipping out of the kitchen if Aunt Fran came in. Aunt 
 Fran was too brisk and wholesome a corrective not to 
 make Ellen shrink and wince (as in fact far older vic- 
 tims did) when she turned on the shower-bath. 
 
 Greatly desiring to be brave, without taking any 
 definite steps in that direction by deliberately sticking a 
 needle under her finger-nail, or taking off a hot lamp- 
 chimney, as she did later, Ellen went on being a wist- 
 ful and cowardly little girl, whose passion was to be safe 
 W and to safeguard everybody and everything else from any 
 danger to life, limb, or discomfort. She would have 
 suffered something to make the world a cotton-wool 
 world, placarded all over with warnings, " You might 
 
TORY HILL AND WAKEROBIN 17 
 
 fall in ! You might fall out ! " But after all her secret 
 hero was Perseus, in " Tanglewood Tales," when Pallas 
 Athene told him to throw himself into the air, off the 
 rocky cliff, and there would suddenly appear wings on 
 his feet. That story was crammed with meaning to her. 
 It fed her inward ferment of " cold fear with hot de- 
 sire." 
 
 Dawning perspicuity in little Jim began to show in 
 the occasional application, when goaded, of the epithet 
 " old maid " to his sister. He used it one morning in 
 front of the post-office, before several other children. 
 Ellen at first thought he only referred to having beaten 
 her at a hard contested game of Old Maid on the previ- 
 ous rainy afternoon. When she quite took in the 
 brotherly insult (which she had invited by publicly but- 
 toning up her brother's coat in full view of larger and 
 less sister-ridden boys) she was indignant, and worse 
 than indignant, for tears arose in her pussy-willow- 
 colored eyes. Her inconvenient feelings were hurt. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE TARANTULA, AND OTHER RELIGIOUS 
 
 EXPERIENCES 
 
 The fact was that she did look old-maidish, in the 
 square-tabbed brown velveteen jacket, made over from 
 one of Aunt Sallie's, and starched brown chambray skirts 
 standing out, stockade-like, round her stalwart long legs. 
 And yet her clothes were in no wise quaint. They con- 
 formed to the juvenile modes of that good year 1894. 
 Her shoes were trim, her calves well rounded and 
 snugly stockinged; her clover-trimmed hat was a pretty, 
 childlike piece of country millinery, bought at the young 
 milliner's in the New Street. It was her old-maidish 
 way of wearing her clothes, and something in her ear- 
 nest, unhumorous face that suggested spectacles. 
 
 Saddled with the reverberating epithet " old maid " 
 she went home and crossed into the pasture beyond the 
 schoolhouse, where she knew all the arts of hopping 
 into the safe center of cinquefoil or " prairie-weed " 
 bushes which formed bristling oases between gulfs of 
 bottomless black cow-trampled mud. She was looking 
 for the pale long-horned violets and the wee fairy white 
 violets that grew there. She meant to make a wreath of 
 them for her doll. 
 
 She was just going to hop on a big flat stone which 
 diversified the prairie-weed, and in the cracks of which 
 
 18 
 
i 
 
 THE TARANTULA 19 
 
 some sweet little ferns, that would be charming on a 
 doll's hat, were sprouting, when 
 
 " Oh, my soul and body! " 
 
 There was an enormous, ominous black spider, un- 
 doubtedly a tarantula, such as came in bunches of ba- 
 nanas, and if they bit you, you died within an hour, — 
 there was a tarantula, right on that stone, that would 
 have bitten right through her low yellow ties, without 
 turning a hair, if she had taken the step one stout long 
 leg was raised to take. She froze back into the prairie- 
 weed bush and looked with charmed glazed eyes at the 
 deadly creature. For some time she looked fixedly at it, 
 and then backed, with charmed eyes still upon it, with 
 infinite slowness and pains, from oasis to oasis in the 
 mud : clawing with one foot behind her before each step, 
 lest she miss the dry safe middles of the bushes. At 
 length she turned a palpitating back and fled with long 
 hops to the pasture fence and across the street to Wake- 
 robin. 
 
 What an escape! The danger was still too near to 
 dwell upon. Luckily there was her doll to be dressed, 
 and a wreath would have to be made of johnny-jump- 
 ups, as the smallest flowers now obtainable. Jennie came 
 down with her boy-doll in a sailor suit, and they had a 
 wedding, and a wedding breakfast, on dolls' Brittania 
 dishes, of clover quills pulled out of the heads; — an 
 infinitesimal drop of honey secreted in each. 
 
 Jennie had to go home at four, however. She was the 
 eldest of the Willets " tribe," and had to pick up all the 
 playthings, as well as learn her lessons for district school, 
 before supper. Ellen was left alone with one newly wed 
 while Jennie took the groom home with her. 
 
20 THE SPINSTER 
 
 Jimmie had gone to the New Street, in the stage, with 
 the aunts. Marie-Louise had toothache, and was sit- 
 ting with her feet in the oven and a shawl over her head. 
 
 What an awfully early hour for Jennie Willets to have 
 to go in! Why couldn't she pick up the playthings after 
 tea? There was nothing to do for an hour and a half : — 
 nothing, at least, that one could be interested in, after 
 the excitement of the wedding. St. Nicholas for May 
 had been read through, and so had Harper's Young 
 People. What if she were to go up and ring the Wil- 
 lets' doorbell and ask if Jennie couldn't come out and play 
 a few minutes more ? The thought was not entertained 
 seriously. Mrs. Willets always said the same thing on 
 such occasions : 
 
 " No, I don't think best for Jennie to go out and play 
 any more this afternoon." 
 
 Beside, Jennie would soon be out of her own accord, 
 if she were allowed to be. 
 
 Well, there was nothing to do, and nowhere to go. 
 It was a horrid thought, too, as the sun began to " draw 
 water " up the mountain, and the woods darkened, and 
 the glaciers of blue shadow began to glide down Cock 
 Hollow and Stratton Glen: — a horrid thought indeed, 
 that the tarantula was still there in the pasture ! Lying in 
 wait on the flat rock, the murderous insect would bite 
 the first person who stepped within his reach. It might 
 be — oh no, not Jimmie, for she could warn him, and 
 even withhold him by force. She could tell the aunts. 
 Oh yes, and she could tell Jennie, and all the other Wil- 
 lets children, and all the Barnhavens could be told. She 
 could keep all the children in the neighborhood from 
 going there. There was no earthly need for her to go 
 
THE TARANTULA 21 
 
 back herself to kill the tarantula. But she knew now 
 that she should have scrunched it at sight, instead of 
 backing away. What had prevented her from doing so ? 
 Perhaps partly her careful habit of avoiding stepping on 
 ants and angleworms : but chiefly, she knew too well, 
 plain panic fear, " the black godmother." And now the 
 pasture would never be safe again, for man or beast. But 
 of course she could warn everybody. She could even 
 warn all the district school children at recess tomorrow, 
 though she wasn't allowed to play over there at the school. 
 
 Oh yes, she could keep everybody out. Larkum and 
 Keturah and Tabbie never went there, either. But she 
 did wish she had scrunched the tarantula. Somebody's 
 dogs or cats might go ! She couldn't warn animals. It 
 would be her fault, whoever or whatever got bitten. She 
 was the only person in Tory Hill who knew where to 
 find the monster. Even the selectmen didn't know, and 
 couldn't have done anything. 
 
 Drawn, at a snail's pace, to the pasture fence, with 
 dread and shrinking she climbed it. God would take care 
 of her. Well, of course! . . . but perhaps it was a 
 little foolhardy to come. The sun had set over Wind- 
 ward Mountain, the blue glaciers were spreading and 
 streaming among the dark unleaved woods. . . . She 
 had not gone very far into the pasture. She came back. 
 
 It was too late to be out, anyway. It was time to 
 change her dress and shoes and stockings, and wash her 
 face and hands for tea. When she had put on her after- 
 noon dress, she sat down by the dining-room stove and 
 read " Tanglewood Tales " all over again. 
 
 But when she said her prayers that night, she was sur- 
 prised to find that she really wanted, in a way, to go back 
 
22 THE SPINSTER 
 
 and look for the tarantula. The tide seemed to be set- 
 ting the other way in her heart. The tide of courage 
 had begun coming in. Would it rise to the required 
 point, she wondered? Probably not. She went to sleep 
 wondering. . But on the next night she found herself 
 plugging away at it again. 
 
 It took several nights to bring it to high tide. High 
 tide was the point from which, as she found, her cour- 
 age could endure the daylight ebb, and still be high 
 enough. Lamplight courage was always higher than day- 
 light courage. 
 
 On that final morning it rained, and she had to take 
 her umbrella and wear her rubbers. This however only 
 made the adventure more interesting. When the tide 
 was full, nothing could stop the explorer. 
 
 She went into the pasture, and hopped over to the flat 
 rock. The tarantula was not there! This contingency 
 the baser elements in the explorer had foreseen, and it 
 had provided a sort of shamefaced comfort, all along. 
 Still she knew the explorer to be an honest and leal ex- 
 plorer. With increasing light-heartedness she searched 
 all that quarter of the pasture, staying even beyond Aunt 
 Fran's imperative call from the window. 
 
 " Ellen Graham, come right straight back home ! 
 What are you up to, over there in that soaking wet pas- 
 ture?" 
 
 The search was thorough, but in vain; and yet by no 
 means in vain; for in her singular mind she felt as con- 
 fident of having safeguarded the community as if she had 
 scnmched the monster and its mate and all their progeny 
 under the heel of her rubber. That night she had that 
 most lovely dream, which she had had two or three times 
 
THE TARANTULA 23 
 
 before, apropos, usually, of nothing in particular — the 
 dream in which she went up in the Ledge Woods on a 
 Sunday afternoon and found some new, large, lovely 
 blue and pink flowers, such as never grew on sea or 
 land. 
 
 On both sides, the Grahams were Episcopalians. In the 
 Old Street, however, there was nothing of their persua- 
 sion but a chapel of ease, open during the summer only, 
 where divinity students conducted service for the benefit 
 chiefly of the hotel guests. All the rest of the year the 
 beautiful old Congregational church, standing opposite 
 the beautiful old store, ministered to all the Protestants 
 in town. The Catholics drove down by stage to Tewkes- 
 bury. 
 
 Little St. Mark's, then, the brown shingled summer 
 chapel, away down at the Seminary end of the Old 
 Street, was tended and decked in July and August by 
 the affectionate fingers of Aunt Sallie. She swept the 
 aisles, and dusted the chancel and choir, and put flowers 
 and ferns in the altar vases, and polished the bronze 
 cross and lectern with putz paste, and played the melodeon 
 and sang. Ellen loved to go to church there among the 
 dainty foulard dresses and plumy hats of the summer 
 ladies from the Windward House; and to hear the mighty 
 hymns shake the fragile walls of the little church: 
 " Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty," " The Church's 
 One Foundation," and " The Son of God Goes Forth to 
 War." At Evening Prayer, at five o'clock, when the sink- 
 ing sunshine came through the colored glass in the win- 
 dows, and made scarlet and purple spots on people's hair, 
 
24 THE SPINSTER 
 
 it was sweeter than honey in the honeycomb to hear the 
 lovely canticles, 
 
 "God be merciful to us and bless us and show us the light of 
 his countenance," 
 
 and 
 " Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace." 
 
 Ellen delighted in going to church. It was like a bath, 
 so refreshing and regenerating. Going home from five 
 o'clock church she sometimes felt in a beautiful mood 
 of holiness. Fresh from the delicious church bath, she 
 resolved to keep perfectly clean until next Sunday. Not 
 only would she avoid coarse horrid crimes, but the small- 
 est peccadillo; she would keep perfectly innocent, even to 
 cleaning her finger-nails before each meal, and brushing 
 her teeth three times a day. This Sunday, or amateur, 
 Christianity never lasted over into Monday afternoon; 
 but sometimes throughout Sunday evening and the whole 
 stretch of Monday morning, an air of noli-me-tangere 
 surrounded her : her piety was of a thickness that could 
 have been cut with a knife. Priggish as these endeavors 
 were, however, there was that element of life in them, 
 V that religious emotions were expected to connect at once 
 with conduct, and even to connect with it rather violently 
 and dramatically. 
 
 That hymn " The Son of God Goes Forth to War " 
 was a great love of Ellen's. It was her first love in 
 poetry. It was the first poem she had ever read, and it 
 made the small red hymnbook, which somebody had 
 given her away back in the dim Minneapolis days, more 
 prized than even Longfellow's Poems, or ** Tanglewood 
 
THE TARANTULA 25 
 
 Tales." Whenever they sang that hymn in church, she 
 thrilled all over at the thought of the martyrs, who, 
 
 " — Met the tyrant's brandished steel, 
 The lion's gory mane, 
 And bowed their necks the stroke to feel." 
 
 Loathing and longing together, she saluted a possible 
 martyrdom in far-off, grown-up days, when she sang 
 
 "Who follows in their train?" 
 
 " I will," she thought. " I would be afraid to meet 
 a tyrant's brandished steel, a lion's gory mane, but still — 
 I will follow in their train. Sometime I will." It was 
 the old Joan of Arc notion all over again with a Sunday 
 tinge. Goodness knew how long she had had that no- 
 tion. It dated further back than memory. 
 
 This was the stuff of which missionaries are made, 
 out of otherwise quite common clay. Ellen never heard 
 much missionary talk at home, nor were there any mis- 
 sionary books or papers lying about on the marble-topped 
 tables. If there had been, she would have stood them, 
 instead of various tame essays, on the music-rack 
 while she was practicing, and would certainly have 
 offered herself for the foreign field in the course of 
 time. 
 
 Saying her prayers was very real. It always had been. 
 It was quite practical, too — morally utilitarian. She 
 went to her prayers very much as one would go to Wil- 
 lets and Barnhaven's store, to get fresh supplies. There i 
 was a difference of course in the use you wanted to put 
 your prayer supplies to. There was somebody more 
 interested in your having enough, than you were your- 
 
26 THE SPINSTER 
 
 self. And then it made you feel in a sort of sweet and 
 solemn mood, to lay them in. And then, of course, you 
 didn't have to economize them, because you didn't have 
 to pay for them. It v^'as more like getting seeds from 
 the Government, than like going to Willets and Barn- 
 haven's. 
 
 Of course people never talked about such things, it was 
 embarrassing: and curiously enough, it was more em- 
 barrassing, generally, to talk about them with your own 
 family, than with other people^ — Julia Oldenbury, for 
 instance. Jennie Willets never talked about anything 
 really very interesting. She never went on talking about 
 any one thing more than a minute at a time. She asked 
 you what dress you were going to wear, and if you had 
 got your spring cleaning done, and such things, all sepa- 
 rate and comparatively uninteresting. With Julia it was 
 entirely different. It never seemed very embarrassing 
 even to talk about saying your prayers, and such things, 
 with Julia. You could be as romantic and intimate as 
 ever you liked. 
 
 Julia was good to be intimate and secret with. It 
 was awfully nice to go down and spend a day at the 
 Oldenburys'. They were very far-away cousins of the 
 aunts, but still they called them " Cousin Frances " and 
 " Cousin Sarah." Aunt Fran was most particularly fond 
 of them. She would put on one of her clean flounced 
 black-and-white muslins, and hoist a black parasol and 
 walk the two miles down to the valley on the sultriest 
 August day, to see the Oldenburys. There were, beside 
 Julia, two grown-up single sisters, and two long, lank, 
 grown-up bachelor brothers, who worked their legs and 
 arms almost off, and yet never " got ahead." They never 
 
THE TARANTULA 27 
 
 even got abreast. Still no one ever heard of the Olden- 
 burys being in debt. Their beautiful, unprofitable farm 
 and sugar bush were mortgaged, but not twice. They 
 were not extravagant, either. The sisters wore old- 
 fashioned-looking dresses, with quillings and pipings and 
 fringes and " bugles," out of their garret, when they 
 wished to dress up. For every-day they wore gingham 
 dresses, often ready-made, and when they went rasp- 
 berrying, or strawberrying, or digging dandelion greens, 
 they wore sunbonnets. 
 
 The only extravagance they had was talking. An 
 Oldenbury could always stop, perhaps with a milk-pail in 
 one hand and a stick for an expiring stove in the other, 
 to talk all over the President's message, or the plot of a 
 novel they had had out of the small beginnings of a 
 library in the New Street. They took their talk seri- 
 ously. Exchange of ideas and criticism of life and peo- 
 ple were more important to them than crops. An Olden- 
 bury would not interrupt a brother's or sister's views to 
 say, " Well — tell me some other time — the cows are 
 waiting to be fed." He stood and listened with all his 
 heart, and the cows were fed very late. 
 
 The Oldenburys had conversation. All the hard over- 
 work of the brothers without and the sisters within the 
 shabby, paint-peeled, creviced, sagging old house was 
 sweetened and illuminated by it. It lent an enchant- 
 ment to the threadbare, book-cluttered sitting-room. A 
 surprising number of callers dropped in at the Olden- 
 burys'. 
 
 Aunt Fran liked to talk politics with them, especially 
 township politics. But Ellen and Julia went up to the 
 attic, or out to the orchard, where, after shaking the 
 
28 THE SPINSTER 
 
 trees for apples, they forgot to eat them, reading and 
 talking, incessant poetry, egotism, and sentiment. They 
 spouted favorite pieces, and showed each other their own 
 faint imitations of Moore, sickishly sweet and haltingly 
 melodious. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 YOUNG IDEAS 
 
 The district school was considered, by the lady who 
 wrote " Caste," too rough, wild, and democratic for these 
 superfine Grahams. They had home lessons every morn- 
 ing, on the ell piazza or in the dining-room, according to 
 the season. These consisted of the French verbs, which 
 Aunt Fran imparted by the same head-on method she 
 had learned them by in Madam Emma Willard's famous 
 Troy Female Seminary; a history of the United States 
 which featured all the dismal geography possible, 
 Ellen thought; Dickens's " Child's History of England," 
 which suited her entirely; Greenleaf's Mental Arith- 
 metic; and a particularly hopeless and disgusting 
 geography, worse even than the United States History. 
 These lessons they shared : but Ellen was also instructed 
 in two beguiling little books called respectively Keight- 
 ley's Mythology and " First Steps in English Literature." 
 Beguiling Keightley was, but exceedingly literal. From 
 him Ellen formed an impression of the pagan gods and 
 goddesses as an indecent and childish collection of Sub- 
 mortals. Luckily this contemptuous notion was cor- 
 rected a little by " Tanglewood Tales," which showed 
 aspiration and tragedy shining like candles through the 
 colored glass of legend. 
 
 Out of lesson hours she read a quantity of good, bad, 
 
 29 
 
30 THE SPINSTER 
 
 and indifferent poetry. Her head was always chiming 
 and reverberating with it. When they went up to get 
 the mail she embarrassed young Jim to an intolerable 
 degree by singing and chanting, in a monotonous and 
 tuneless fashion, all the way. It was all right when she 
 was dusting the parlor: let her sing and roar all she 
 liked, then: unless poor Aunt Sallie, distracted, called 
 out, " Please, Ellen, dearie! I'm writing a letter." But 
 the idea of shouting out " Curfew shall not ring to- 
 night! "' or " Roderick vich Alpine, dhu, ho, ieroe! " all 
 along in front of people's houses! She knew by heart 
 the whole Battle of Ivry, and when in her chanting she 
 came to the thousand spurs striking deep, the thousand 
 spears at rest, the glory in her mind was far beyond 
 her brother's power to repress. 
 
 Such glory, inexpressible by any other method but a 
 combination of skips and singing, came on apparently 
 from a variety of quite incalculable causes. It blew 
 where it listed. It was oftenest. perhaps, a fit of super- 
 health; the peach and flower of feeling well. At any rate 
 it required better tongues than her own to express. If it 
 were left unexpressed, she might have burst with it. 
 The name she had for it in her own mind was " the blue 
 sky." When it came on, she used to wonder if heaven 
 could be any more delightful, any more enchanting, than 
 this mood. Curious that it should probably be the mere 
 blossom of utterly perfect digestion. 
 
 Jimmie may or may not have felt the blue sky. At 
 any rate, he never chanted on the street to express it. 
 Perhaps certain supererogatory monkey-shines may have 
 been the means of letting out, for him, the bursting bliss 
 of being alive. 
 
YOUNG IDEAS 31 
 
 Aunt Fran liked the children to go everywhere and do 
 . everything together. She was always calling one back 
 to wait for the other, and she made them go to bed at 
 the same hour, despite their two years' difference in age. 
 It was natural therefore that she should try to prepare 
 them for entering the Seminary the same year. But 
 Ellen would go on faster than Jim. She was ready for 
 the Seminary at thirteen, when he was only eleven. 
 Julia Oldenbury too was going: and reluctantly Aunt 
 Fran concluded by the spring of 1897, that in the fall 
 of that year, Ellen might enter the old school. 
 
 O. and O. Seminary had its double name from the 
 joint benefactions of one Owens and one Owsley, by- 
 gone worthies, who lay buried side by side in the Old 
 Street cemetery, with a high, two-legged monument over 
 them. It had long been a favorite subject for " Rev- 
 eries " and " Reflections " by female students, either in 
 prose or verse, in the Seminary weekly paper, this double 
 grave of the generous old merchants. The school itself 
 was a frowning stone fortress, built for eternity, on the 
 windy tamarack cobble at the far end of the Old Street. 
 Its shutterless, unwinking windows commanded the whole 
 valley like a panorama. Without and within, it was 
 unmitigated, bare, plain, strong, sound, democratic, puri- 
 tanic, and as bracingly challenging to the imagination as 
 the bare stage scenery of Shakespere's time. The big 
 boys and girls who went there appeared superior beings 
 to the children of the town. The wit and badinage of 
 their Class Day speeches appeared the last word in bon 
 esprit. Ellen was not more envious of the long skirts 
 and worldly-wise airs of the Seminary girls, and their 
 romantic absence from parents and home, than Jim was 
 
32 THE SPINSTER 
 
 of the heroes of the ball team, for whom, like all the 
 other little boys in Tory Hill, he was proud to field at 
 the daily practice. In recompense they sometimes called 
 him " kid " and gave him a chew of the communistic 
 spruce gum they tossed from base to base to lubricate 
 their mouths on hot and dusty afternoons. One of the 
 tallest of these youths did Jim the honor to drink, with- 
 out being invited, a quart or two of sap out of the pail 
 the little boy had hung on the maple tree in front of his 
 aunts' house. To this youth, accordingly, he had un- 
 obtrusively attached himself, and now he squared his 
 shoulders and walked with a sort of bounce or spring, as 
 " Peanuts " Edwards did. 
 
 Ellen had no particular patron among the Seminary 
 girls. She looked, however, with rather dreamy and 
 idealizing eyes upon them all, and so did Julia Olden- 
 bury. To wear those longer dresses, to walk in a pro- 
 cession to church on Sundays, to be away, for months at 
 a time, from home, — it would be wonderful. To be sure, 
 Julia and Ellen never could aspire to be boarders. They 
 were of the vastly inferior class of day scholars. Julia 
 had one advantage over Ellen. She would carry her 
 lunch to school, and sit on the side steps nibbling it 
 among the other girls. Still, with all deductions, it 
 brought on the blue sky every now and then, just to know 
 that she was going to Olympus, and at this time next 
 year would be an Olympian, entitled to wear a little yel- 
 low silk pennant on her jacket, with two black O's linked 
 together on it. 
 
 Meantime, on a certain August Friday, the fishman 
 who traveled weekly through the valley vending middle- 
 aged cod and halibut, and as some whispered, contraband 
 
YOUNG IDEAS 33 
 
 liquor from beneath a false bottom of his smeared and 
 scaly cart, came to the back door at Wakerobin with a 
 limping, laboring, sweating horse which seemed about 
 to fall and die on the cindery driveway. Aunt Fran, 
 coming out with the house pocketbook to buy a cut of 
 cod, stopped, looked, and asked sharply: 
 
 " What's the matter with your horse? " 
 
 " Why, now, ma'am, he's a leetle lame." 
 
 "Lame! I should think so. Ellen, go and call your 
 Aunt Sallie. This horse is in no condition to be worked." 
 
 Aunt Sallie took on that sick look of hers as she stood 
 in the kitchen doorway. 
 
 " Have you driven that wretched creature all the way 
 up from Bennington?" 
 
 " Why — ee, yes, ma'am. He's just a leetle lame. 
 Why— ee, a leetle stiff." 
 
 "Twenty miles with a broken hip!" 
 
 " Oh no, ma'am, not broken. Kinda stiff. Kinda 
 lame. Why, I wouldn't drive no horse with no broken 
 hip." 
 
 " What can we do, Frances ? " 
 
 " Well, there's one thing we can do, Sarah. We can 
 have salt codfish picked up with potato for dinner to- 
 day. Here, Ellen, you can take my pocketbook into 
 the house. I don't care for any of your goods this 
 morning. You needn't stop here next Friday, either." 
 
 Larkum, who had followed the family to the kitchen, 
 heard the belligerence in Miss Frances Mowbray's voice, 
 and began to bark in the shrill staccato of a little 
 dog. 
 
 " I wouldn't sell ye no fish, not if you was both starv- 
 ing, and them two ugly young ones o' yourn too," replied 
 
34 THE SPINSTER 
 
 the fishman vindictively as he drove away his wretched 
 beast. 
 
 Miss Sarah Mowbray telegraphed to Bennington and 
 found there was a Humane Society there. She tele- 
 graphed to the Humane Society, and the Humane Society 
 telegraphed back that when the fishman returned his 
 horse should be taken away from him and shot. 
 
 But Miss Sarah thought a good deal about those extra 
 twenty miles the ancient slave must travel to reach the 
 heaven death would be to him. She thought so much 
 about it that she ended by putting a notice in the Tory 
 Hill Gacette that week, setting a certain night on which all 
 the people of both Streets were invited to meet with the 
 Misses Mowbray to decide whether to form a Humane 
 Society. 
 
 " Put in some more chairs, please do. Aunt Sallie," 
 urged Ellen, full of pleased importance, when the speci- 
 fied evening came. " We've only got chairs for about 
 fifteen ! " 
 
 Miss Sarah Mowbray smiled. 
 
 " I think there'll be plenty of chairs," she said. 
 
 There were plenty of chairs. Vermont, once the Wild 
 West of New England, had grown very conservative 
 since the day when Matthew Lyon sat alone with folded 
 arms in the House of Representatives because he would 
 not demean his constituents by going to the White House. 
 Vermont was very cautious and conventional in the nine- 
 ties, (though it has grown rather radical, again, since) ; 
 and the idea of a Humane Society was somewhat new, 
 queer, and (perish the thought!) sentimental, perhaps. 
 
 One embarrassed clergyman came, and sat on the edge 
 of his chair : an earnest woman or two (one of these with 
 
YOUNG IDEAS 35 
 
 knuckles red from cleaning all day, and a very tired back, 
 for she kept a boarding-house in the New Street) ; 
 and one or two others who came had over-frizzled 
 hair and over-trimmed basques. The leaders of well- 
 established old movements: the chief business men and 
 their wives : most of the clergy and professional people, 
 and all the officers of the Ladies' Benevolent Society, 
 were absent. The New Street was better represented 
 than the Old. 
 
 Ellen cringed at the frosty air of the meeting. She 
 smarted at the absence of all the representative people, 
 and forgot the Ashman's agonizing horse. Indeed she 
 was rather sorry her aunts had called the meeting. It 
 made them queer, to be associated with all these queer- 
 ish people. Aunt Sallie, however, calmly proceeding, 
 read the Constitution and By-laws of the Bennington 
 society; and the sense of the meeting was, on the whole 
 (and on the part of the tired lady of the boarding-house 
 enthusiastically so) in favor of organizing. Thus the 
 Tory Hill Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Ani- 
 mals was formed. Ellen half-heartedly became a mem- 
 ber. She saw her young aunt that night through a 
 tnist of as mean, low, snobbish thoughts as ever a good 
 girl had; and the real Aunt Sallie of that evening, all in 
 gleaming armor and riding a snow-white war-horse, she 
 never saw at all. Of so little use to her were all those 
 Joan-of-Arc ideas, to open her kitten-blind eyes to a real 
 Joan of Arc! 
 
 What blinded her was largely the absorption of her 
 mind in the prospect of going to the Seminary. A sort of 
 passion to be like other girls, a mortification, intense and / 
 almost moral, at being different from them, was always 
 
36 THE SPINSTER 
 
 somewhere present in her consciousness in these days. 
 Next month the Seminary would open. She saw school 
 life ahead flowing with milk and honey. Only to be 
 really a part of it, one must not, above all, be queer or 
 solitary. It was now, for the first time, that she wished 
 she belonged to the Congregational church. Most of her 
 future schoolmates went there. They went to the socials 
 and chicken-pie suppers in the church parlors. They had 
 little delicate ways of talking, many of them, delicate 
 young-ladyfied ways of eating ice-cream, of putting fas- 
 cinators over their heads. Boys escorted them home. 
 . . . They lived in a world she panted to enter and 
 ^ conform to. 
 
 When the day of the school opening came, she put 
 on a blue " French calico " with white rings. It was 
 the longest of her dresses. Still it was a little shorter than 
 she quite liked to wear to the Seminary. It showed an 
 inch of black stocking above her shoes. Her efforts to 
 grow up faster were always being obstructed by her 
 father and aunts. She did really need a longer dress, 
 because she was rather a bean-pole. Though sturdily 
 built, and to that degree comely, she was neither well 
 rounded nor alluring in form. Her waist was flattish, 
 or rectangular. Otherwise she looked quite presentable 
 to herself in the glass that morning. Her hazel eyes 
 were clear, and so was her florid fresh complexion. 
 Her expression was ordinarily open and honest, though 
 subject to mauvaisc honte. A large, heavy mouth 
 spoiled her modest pretentions to being pretty, of which 
 her abundant fine light hair was the most striking. She 
 paid for it, however, by taffy-colored eyelashes which 
 were almost invisible, and gave her eyes a bald look. 
 
YOUNG IDEAS 37 
 
 Her excellently fat, solid braid was looped up under- 
 neath and tied with a wide black taffeta ribbon. Her face 
 had been washed with soap, and shone accordingly: but 
 not with soap alone. 
 
 She had the blue sky as she walked up the hill with 
 Julia Oldenbury, who still looked quaint, in spite of hav- 
 ing long since exchanged her white stockings for black 
 ones, and left the net off her hair. Julia talked in that 
 ultra-refined, slightly down-Easterly manner which Tory 
 Hill people called " over the mountain." Ellen had never 
 noticed it until this morning. Now she remembered that 
 all the Oldenburys talked that way. She noticed it be- 
 cause of a habit she had, when about to enter any new 
 company, of looking and listening with their eyes and 
 ears rather than her own. Now she looked at Julia with 
 Seminary girls' eyes, and noticed a variety of new char- 
 acteristics : how she leaned forward from the hips, deli- 
 cately swaying, like a lily or a hollyhock, for example. 
 
 The blue sky continued, all over and through these 
 surface thoughts, until she and Julia, as they reached the 
 Seminary hill and began to ascend it, almost ran into 
 young Martin Holt, feebly pacing back and forth in 
 front of the old Holt house. He had a stick and seemed 
 to lean on it as he walked. His thin legs seemed lost, 
 like poles, inside his loosely flapping trousers, and the 
 concavity of his chest left great wrinkles in his waist- 
 coat. 
 
 Everyone knew that he was far gone, poor boy, with 
 consumption. Ellen herself had often seen him before, 
 and felt sharp pangs of pity, but never before when the 
 blue sky was on her. He struck across the heyday of 
 ^er youth and strength like a paralysis. 
 
38 THE SPINSTER 
 
 The Puritans are popularly supposed to have frowned 
 on beauty: but whoever has seen a long, one-streeted, 
 elm-arched, grass-swarded New England village, with 
 Inigo Jones's own houses, and Christopher Wren's own 
 church and Town Hall, will be unable to acquit our 
 forefathers of a deep feeling for the beautiful. Owen 
 and Owsley Seminary dated back not quite to Puritan 
 days. The building itself, of gray stone, faced with 
 blue marble, with a blue marble belfry, was not very 
 comely. It was, in fact, almost piteously plain and blank. 
 But its site, at least, had been chosen with the Puritan's 
 keen eye for beauty. It stood on the round top of the 
 hill, and looked over a girdle of woods across and up and 
 down the valley. At the rear. Windward Mountain ex- 
 tended its sugar woods almost to the ball-field. 
 
 In the bare, untempered, sun-flooded old north school- 
 room Ellen and Julia sat together, perfecting their former 
 acquaintance into an intimacy. Two greener, more senti- 
 mental young damsels never walked down the long Old 
 Street and up the windy hill. 
 
 Of all their half-dozen studies they liked Latin best. 
 They liked the formal, inlaid sentences, the resounding 
 heavy words. It was taught, besides, by an ambrosial 
 young man fresh from Middlebury, who was very par- 
 ticular to make all his scholars call Caesar Ki-sar, and 
 Veni Vidi Vici Wayny Weedy Weeky. English litera- 
 ture was taught by a middle-aged lady who sympathized 
 with their young delight in melodious madrigals of 
 sound unburdened by sense, and left them alone to en- 
 joy such poetry, without harping on the idea that poets 
 ought to think industriously as well as scan deliciously. 
 United States History was to them the forlornest of 
 
YOUNG IDEAS 39 
 
 studies. The book had evidently been chosen for its 
 dreariness. Everything possible was chopped into mu- 
 tually exclusive little paragraphs, and each paragraph 
 was numbered like an equation in algebra. The thrilling 
 voyage of Magellan himself, which Fiske made fairly 
 lyric, was drearily and joggingly described by this his- 
 torian, whom may God forgive. Triolets and rondeaus 
 of Austin Dobson, pieces of delicate, intricate rhyming by 
 Bliss Carman, exchanged by their indefatigable pencils, 
 beguiled away the history hour. One famous day Julia 
 brought up to school the " Dark Rosaleen." She brought 
 the whole nine stanzas in her head, and wrote them out 
 in Ellen's Algebra. Ellen went half mad over it. She 
 chanted " O the Erne shall run red " all over the house 
 until her Aunt Sallie, who had a few nerves, was frantic. 
 Not a lesson did she know on the day after Julia had 
 bestowed the " Rosaleen " upon her. 
 
 The Seminary filled her life quite full this year. 
 Above all, there was the excitement of writing for 
 the school weekly, the Mountain Mirror. She was al- 
 ways having verses and flowery prose articles, rhapsodi- 
 cal descriptions or wiseacre moralizings, in the Mirror, — 
 something every week. Thursday evenings were 
 " Lyceum nights." The Mirror was read aloud from the 
 half-moon platform in the north schoolroom, the boys 
 debated, and a girl or two played the piano or sang. 
 Ellen loved the debates and longed to be in them. It 
 was her secret belief that she could debate better than 
 any of the boys. 
 
 The Seminary, in short, was altogether satisfactory 
 that first year. The very sense of being in a bunch of 
 girls and boys, after all her individualized home school- 
 
40 THE SPINSTER 
 
 ing, was delicious to Ellen. She liked standing up in 
 the aisle and marching out of the schoolroom in a row 
 with other girls. Sometimes this was so freshly pleasant 
 to her that she smiled all over her broad florid face as 
 she walked out of the worn and barren old north school- 
 room. There was a tang, there was a zest, there was a 
 bloom in everything. In October there was always a 
 school holiday, for the purpose of climbing the mountain. 
 It was called Mountain Day. Up Windward through a 
 long torch-light blaze of flaming pink maples, Ellen 
 tugged herself, short-winded, panting, ineffably enjoying 
 herself. She was almost ashamed of enjoying herself so 
 much. It seemed childish. Other people looked soberer 
 and duller than she felt in these onslaughts of happiness. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 FLESHPOTS 
 
 But in the second year, when she was about fifteen, a 
 faint hazy discontent began to gather, Half-consciously 
 she nourished a grievance against the Seminary. It was 
 not quite keeping its contract with her. It was slyly dis- 
 criminating against her in favor of other girls. She, 
 and Julia too, were being sent, by imperceptible degrees, 
 along the road to Coventry. 
 
 For almost all the girls at the Seminary had boys 
 " crushed " on them. Ellen wanted one. She felt that 
 Julia also needed one; though in a way it was comforting 
 to have a bosom friend in the same plight as yourself. 
 Ellen's own ambition flew rather high. Sooner than any 
 of the big boys, even of the senior class, she would have 
 chosen a teacher. She cast, in fact, bashfully greedy 
 eyes upon her Latin teacher. It was still the ambrosial 
 young Middlebury man who had been here last year. 
 This good-looking young man had dark and soft eyes, 
 and a mellow, though rather expressionless, voice, in 
 which he seemed tenderly reproachful to the girls who 
 did not grasp the ablative absolute. Ellen found it quite 
 sweet and abashing to be reproved by him. Among the 
 boys he was not so popular, perhaps because, with par- 
 donable satisfaction in his own elevated tastes, he used 
 to sit reading Homer under the tamaracks in front of 
 the Seminary on Sundays. 
 
 41 
 
42 THE SPINSTER 
 
 Ellen developed varying devices, some of which in 
 her innocence she thought original with herself, for 
 falling back and deserting Julia when this young teacher 
 came down the hill behind the released scholars in the 
 afternoons. Once or twice she even succeeded in get- 
 ting him to join her and walk with her as far as the 
 post-office. But often she lagged back and then was too 
 bashful and green to put the coup over when the time 
 came. Sometimes she overdid her labored unconscious- 
 ness of his nearness while she was tying her shoe, or 
 looking for violets. She dreamed of his coming down 
 to call; and on winter evenings when the dead clematis 
 vines beat a tattoo on the piazza at Wakerobin, she 
 often thought it was a gentleman's step at the door, and 
 forgot what was trumps in the hope that the door-bell 
 would ring. 
 
 The evening games of whist and grabouge were un- 
 disturbed, however, by calls from Mr. Scott. Nobody 
 else, either, offered to escort her home from Lyceum, or 
 socials and suppers at the Congregational church. Once 
 she thought a quite young boy, a contemporary of Jim's 
 (who was in the Seminary now himself, and hoping to 
 make the ball-team) was going to escort her, and she felt 
 a warm, grateful glow of affection toward him, until 
 she saw out of the tail of her eye that he had closed into 
 the congregation with a chit as young as himself, and 
 had already, before they were out the church door, offered 
 her his arm. 
 
 What in the world was the matter? Did it have any- 
 thing to do with Julia and herself being bluestockings, as 
 Jim said ? Jim said she and Julia were " grinds " and 
 that they " bootlicked the profs." 
 
FLESHPOTS 43 
 
 Ellen wondered and wondered. It was a sign, per- 
 haps, that her intimacy with Julia was bookish rather than 
 personal, that they never talked about this. Or, at least, 
 they only interlarded, among their marginal poems, some 
 occasional insipid remarks about the ambrosial teacher. 
 
 " Did you see Mr. Scott look daggers at me just now ? " 
 
 " Mr. Scott nearly took my head off for not having my 
 indirect discourse written out." 
 
 The most that was said by word of mouth between 
 them was said by Julia one blue and white February day, 
 when Ellen, after school, walked with her a little way 
 along the tightly frozen, squeaky snow of the valley road. 
 Apropos of nothing, Julia remarked : 
 
 *' I don't think you'll ever marry, Ellen. You, some- 
 way, aren't that kind." 
 
 To sugar-coat it a little, she added : 
 
 " You're too hard to suit." 
 
 Ellen's feelings were obscurely but deeply wounded, 
 and she made no reply. She was by nature too careful 
 of other people's feelings to make the obvious reply: 
 
 " I don't think you'll ever marry, either, Julia." 
 
 However, she chewed the bitter cud of this for some 
 time. She was growing analytical enough to notice that 
 she was disposed to give the lie to Julia's prophecy, if 
 possible. She found that she wanted to defy and outwit 
 Julia's opinion of her. 
 
 That very term a bearish cousin of Jennie Willets' came 
 down from Ox River to the Seminary. Ox River was 
 distinguished as the smallest post-office town in Vermont. 
 It had only about six families, aggregating twenty-six 
 or seven souls. Webster Willets was rather handsome, 
 in a rough, wild, scowling style of his own. He had 
 
44 THE SPINSTER 
 
 coarse, black, picturesque, Hibernian hair all brushed up 
 in an angry-looking range along his scornful forehead. 
 His brusque unmodulated voice conveyed a certain 
 amount of crude magnetism. He was just enough whim- 
 sical and defiant of other people's ideas to wear a bright 
 cravat of Roman stripes, and to look at a beauless girl 
 like Ellen Graham because nobody else did so. There 
 was also a certain fine, upstanding, pioneer wholesome- 
 ness in him. 
 
 As soon as Ellen found that he was certainly asking to 
 bring her home from Lyceum on a slushy, rainy night 
 in March, she consented, in a voice full of pleased, half- 
 motherly gratitude. The gratitude was not lost on Web- 
 ster Willets. He flung the slushy spray high from his 
 enormous boots as he hoisted her umbrella over her, 
 and demanded bluntly: 
 
 " Say — be I the first feller that ever saw you home 
 from anywhere? " 
 
 The question was deeply mortifying, and therefore 
 Ellen hastened with painful eagerness to answer: 
 
 "Yes! You are!" 
 
 Then she was half afraid her fierce truthfulness would 
 repulse him; and so she added gratefully: 
 
 " It's certainly awfully nice of you ; and on such an 
 awful evening! " 
 
 " Wawl, that just suits me. I don't want no other fel- 
 ler's leavin's." 
 
 This Oriental statement did not at once disgust and out- 
 rage Ellen. Instead the female bear in her answered to 
 it. And the fact of being chosen in itself was tempo- 
 rarily heart-satisfying. Until now she had hardly real- 
 ized what an outsider she had been at the Seminary. 
 
FLESHPOTS 45 
 
 Now she could hold up her head. She not only had a 
 boy, but a big, stalwart, self-sufficient fellow, who neither 
 ground at his books nor " bootlicked the profs." The 
 only thing was, that Julia had not yet secured a beau. 
 On the next morning after the Lyceum, somebody among 
 the younger scholars so far reverted to district school 
 etiquette as to write on the blackboard in a fine flowing 
 hand: 
 
 " Webster Willets and Ellen Graham." 
 
 Ellen professed to see this for the first time when Julia 
 nudgingly pointed it out to her. She professed extreme 
 indignation and lofty scorn, and in the most maidenly- 
 hypocritical fashion hid and hugged the lively pleasure it 
 gave her. 
 
 Her cheeks were quite scarlet. 
 
 Jim showed, in a way, that he considered her vindi- 
 cated. He consulted her about his part in the debate on 
 the next Lyceum night. This was a famous night for 
 Ellen. Jim made a spirited plea for arbitration. The 
 aunts were both there and saw him in his glory. The 
 burning flush of joyful excitement came up in Ellen's 
 cheeks, and in her heart eclipsed that old dewy cool sweet- 
 ness of the blue sky. Over and over, like strophe and 
 anti-strophe, sounded in her inward ears : 
 
 " Jim is debating splendidly ! 
 
 " Webster Willets will see me home ! " 
 
 The fly in her amber was the sight of Julia, in her blue 
 best dress, sitting all alone, gentle, uncomplaining, show- 
 ing even a mild pleasure in the debate, though she had 
 no brother there winning applause, and no boy to see her 
 home. 
 
46 THE SPINSTER 
 
 She did wish Julia had somebody. Rudimentary ideas 
 of a matchmaking character began to float through her 
 mind. Art and skill in drawing other people together, 
 however, she not only had none, but she lacked the very 
 conception of such a thing, and she lacked also the essen- 
 tial boldness for such an attempt. It came down at last 
 to an attempt to persuade Jim to be Julia's escort " every 
 once in a while " as Ellen vaguely phrased it, to church 
 suppers and Lyceum. 
 
 Jim, however, not only refused, he stared and won- 
 dered. 
 
 " What' re you talking about? " he cried. 
 
 " Jim, I do wish you would ! Julia never has any- 
 body to take her home from anywhere." 
 
 " What's the matter with Romeo? " 
 
 " Well, she'd like it better if it was somebody else 
 than her own brother. Besides, Romeo might like to see 
 some other girl home. Besides, he's nowhere near 
 Julia's age." 
 
 "Age! Age your grandmother! If she wants a fel- 
 low let her find one for herself. I'm not going to be 
 tagged around by any girl, and especially not by one 
 that's got two brothers of her own." 
 
 Ellen had had small hopes of him, anyhow. But now 
 there began to rise in her mind some doubts about the 
 great desirability of having a boy crushed on one. It 
 had a few drawbacks, and even was unpleasant, in cer- 
 tain aspects. There were times when she was thor- 
 oughly weary of Webster. He did not speak very good 
 grammar. Aunt Fran didn't like him. Aunt Sallie was 
 afraid of him. She was afraid, that is, that Ellen would 
 become " interested " in him. She had not said so to 
 
FLESHPOTS 47 
 
 Ellen, but to Aunt Fran one night when Aunt Fran had 
 an attack of acute indigestion, and lights were burning 
 all night. Aunt Fran had said Aunt Sallie was a fuss- 
 budget. Ellen had overheard them. 
 
 Curiously enough, this excessively unromantic experi- 
 ence did her good; and something connected with it 
 added a little beauty to her looks. Her hazel eyes had 
 always been candid and kind, but now they had a sweet- 
 ness in them; perhaps it was a species of humility. More 
 and more she found Webster's cocksure, overbearing per- 
 sonality unattractive; less and less did she admire his 
 masterful talk. It was only when the eyes of the school 
 were upon them that she was able now to take real pleas- 
 ure in his attentions. Alone with him she found him 
 decidedly a burden. 
 
 Exactly how much damage to the blue sky he had done 
 was a question there was no particular reason for think- 
 ing of at this time. 
 
 The damage was slyly done, if at all. He did not 
 come back the next term ; and the pleasantest thing Ellen 
 had to think about him was : 
 
 " Well, I've shown that I could have somebody." 
 
 In her third winter at the Seminary, when she was 
 studying Roman history and reading Cicero, girls be- 
 gan to be included in the Lyceum debates. Her old, con- 
 fident ambition to join the boys in debating gave way 
 suddenly to what Jim called " cold feet" when she dis- 
 covered that she was down on the programme for the 
 next Thursday evening, as a principal in the proposed 
 debate on woman suffrage. Aunt Fran was delighted; 
 and luckily Ellen was assigned to the popular side. 
 Though who among the carefully brought up girls at 
 
48 THE SPINSTER 
 
 O. and O. could be found to defend the unpopular side, 
 and " make themselves masculine " by asking for the 
 vote, the teachers were still trying to arrange. 
 
 Jim said : 
 
 " Better come up and hear 'em, Aunt Fran. You 
 like a shindy. 'Twon't be very parliamentary, I bet. 
 Instead of saying ' My honorable opponent,' they'll all be 
 pulling hair and sticking their tongues out at each other." 
 
 When Ellen came home next day she said the subject 
 for the debate had had to be changed, because Jennie Wil- 
 lets's mother wouldn't let her take the suffrage side, 
 and none of the other girls that were eligible were 
 willing. 
 
 " What's the subject to be then? " asked the aunts. 
 
 " Vivisection." 
 
 " Oh ! " said Aunt Sallie suddenly. 
 
 " And Ellen was lucky again," said Jim. " She's 
 on the side in favor, where everybody wanted to be." 
 
 " In favor, Ellen ? " asked Aunt Sallie, with a look 
 a little like that sick sort of look she had had when the 
 fishman's horse leaned against the shafts and panted. 
 
 Ellen then remembered that ever since the Tory Hill 
 S.P.C.A. had been formed, at that dismal meeting of 
 nonentities, and Aunt Sallie had been made secretary 
 of it, humane societies and anti-vivisection societies had 
 been sending her packages of leaflets and little magazines ; 
 the old red desk upstairs was bulging with them. She 
 said: 
 
 " I don't see how you, or anybody else, can be against 
 vivisection, Aunt Sallie. Why, if human beings' lives, 
 and especially children's, can be saved by killing ani- 
 mals ■" 
 
FLESHPOTS 49 
 
 "Torturing, Ellen!" 
 
 Ellen paused a moment over that ugly, melodramatic 
 word, of which she felt skeptical, in spite of Aunt Sal- 
 lie's evident belief. Her convictions, however, were 
 strong, and she finally said, with a sense of conceding 
 something unnecessary to concede (most unlikely that 
 there was really anything you could honestly call tor- 
 ture!) : 
 
 " Even by torturing, then; still I think it's right." 
 
 Aunt Sallie said nothing further, to Ellen's disappoint- 
 ment, for she loved to argue on and on, hot, flushed, and 
 edgy as it always made her. Aunt Fran inquired: 
 
 " Who took the opposition side? " 
 
 " Why, Jennie Willets was willing to take it; said her 
 mother wouldn't care, and she'd just as lieves : the teach- 
 ers needn't draw : but what do you think ? Julia Olden- 
 bury spoke up and said she'd like it! I never was so 
 surprised." 
 
 "Julia Oldenbury, hey? " said Aunt Sallie. 
 
 Ellen saw her young aunt, an hour or two later, seated 
 at the red desk, sorting over those humane society and 
 anti-vivisection pamphlets, and cutting clippings out of 
 them. 
 
 In the evening Ellen got out the last volume of the 
 Encyclopedia Britannica, and took notes for the de- 
 bate. The teachers had also furnished her with a maga- 
 zine article or two, and one or two statements in 
 pamphlet form, issued by medical bodies. One of these 
 described vivisection as involving mere pin-pricks, al- 
 ways done under anaesthesia : the typical experiment was 
 described as " a scratch on the tail of an etherized mouse." 
 Ellen felt that this disposed effectually of any echoes of 
 
50 THE SPINSTER 
 
 Aunt Sallie's sick word, "Torture!" which might still 
 be reverberating in her mind. How silly dear Aunt 
 Sallie was, to make such a fuss ! 
 
 " Where are you going, Sarah? " inquired Aunt Fran 
 that evening of Aunt Sallie, who was pinning her hat on 
 in the hall. 
 
 " Up street." 
 
 " Oh. What have you got in that package, for good- 
 ness' sake? " 
 
 Aunt Sallie made no answer. 
 
 Aunt Fran had a tigerish way of jumping at con- 
 clusions and striking them amidships. 
 
 " Sarah Mowbray, have you gone and made up a 
 package of information to help Julia Oldenbury in that 
 debate?" 
 
 " Yes, I have." 
 
 " I think that's a pretty mean way to treat our 
 Ellen!" 
 
 " No, it isn't, Aunt Fran — you go ahead and send 
 'em. Aunt Sallie. Oh dear, I almost wish they'd never 
 put girls into the debate at all ! " 
 
 "Oh, Ellen! If you were only on the other side!" 
 Aunt Sallie said wistfully. 
 
 " That's all very well," cried Aunt Fran, " but she 
 isn't on the other side. She's on the side she's on. I 
 should think you'd hate to work against her, poor mother- 
 less child ! I should think you'd think of your poor sister 
 Mary in her grave, and take your coat and hat off, and 
 put that stuff away in your desk again ! " 
 
 " Don't you do it, Aunt Sallie — you go ahead and 
 send it to Julia. I respect Aunt Sallie all the more, Aunt 
 Fran, for sticking to her colors." 
 
FLESHPOTS 51 
 
 " Yes — uphold her in it if you want to," said Aunt 
 Fran bitterly. She would say no more: and Ellen's 
 heart ached worse for her than for Aunt Sallie, 
 
 "Well, Ellen " Aunt Sallie began, and then 
 
 stopped. Ellen got up from where she sat before the 
 stove, and held her young aunt's coat for her. Aunt 
 Sallie's slender arms trembled so that she could hardly 
 get them into the sleeves. Aunt Fran, seated deep in 
 the sleepy-hollow chair in the corner, trembled too : Ellen 
 could see her stout body shake. 
 
 " Why didn't you give that package to me on the q.t., 
 Aunt Sallie, and I'd have handed it to Julia in school?" 
 Ellen asked her young aunt next day. 
 
 Aunt Sallie only shook her head, with tears in her 
 tender, shadowy gray eyes. 
 
 Ellen rehearsed in the barn every afternoon, trying to 
 sharpen her points and boil down her periods. Both 
 aunts said they were going up to hear her: but when 
 the evening came. Aunt Sallie had neuralgia in her teeth, 
 and stayed home. Aunt Fran said, what was more true 
 than kind, that whenever anything special was going on, 
 her sister always became ill. Aunt Sallie was occasion- 
 ally subject to neuralgia. The only queer thing was 
 that tonight she didn't, as usual, lie down on the sofa and 
 put the hot-water bag under her cheek. 
 
 The female debaters did not pull hair, or call out, 
 " Shut up ! " and " That's a lie ! " as the boys had largely 
 bet on their doing. More Seminary money would have 
 changed hands if there had been more takers. Aunt 
 Fran sat there looking portly, handsome and motherly, 
 and for the time being lost her own convictions, which 
 were not Ellen's, in beaming pride. 
 
52 THE SPINSTER 
 
 " Resolved, that vivisection of animals for the pur- 
 pose of saving human life is justifiable." 
 
 Ellen made a good appearance on the half -moon plat- 
 form of the bare old north schoolroom. She recapitu- 
 lated the elaborate precautions against pain described in 
 the magazine articles with which the teachers had fur- 
 nished "her; the almost invariable and complete anaesthesia, 
 the grateful affection the animals showed for their kind 
 experimenters; and she asked, with a show of dramatic 
 feeling (which she really felt, for she thought of Jim) 
 how many mothers present would let their children die, 
 out of mistaken sympathy for a rabbit which suffered 
 not half as much as those same children suffered when 
 they had their teeth pulled? 
 
 Julia Oldenbury gave some terrible accounts of dogs 
 whose backs were broken, whose paws were crushed, and 
 burnt, under incomplete anaesthesia, in the Bunsen flame. 
 She said the eyes of animals were purposely inflamed, 
 and ulcers cultivated in them. 
 
 Ellen and her assistants, in rebuttal, quoted some Har- 
 vard Medical School professors to the effect that such 
 "lists of atrocities" "never existed"; and sat down 
 amid applause. 
 
 In surrebuttal Julia and her assistants said that the 
 cruelties they had quoted were described in print by the 
 experimenters themselves. They went on to tell some 
 ghastly things which had been done by French and Italian 
 scientists; but the feminine part of the audience began 
 to put its fingers in its ears. When they told of some 
 of the implements used in laboratories, they held up hor- 
 rible pictures and said they were copied from the ex- 
 perimenters' own illustrations. There was evidently a 
 
FLESHPOTS 53 
 
 revulsion of feeling. The tide wavered toward the anti- 
 vivisection side: but Ellen, in her closing speech, con- 
 ceded the bare possibility " in rare, very rare cases " of 
 extreme and prolonged pain : even perhaps, to highly 
 organized beings such as dogs : only adding, in a low 
 and honestly trembling voice : 
 
 " Which of us would hesitate to save a life which was 
 very dear to us, even at that cost? " 
 
 It was perhaps that exaggerated solicitude she always 
 felt about illness, and the true and terrible feeling it gave 
 her voice, that won the debate. She was cheered and 
 complimented, and was full of hot, splendid, proud, and 
 feverish joy. She knew that her soft, fair cheeks were 
 always beautifully red when this burning blood surged 
 in them. Her hands were as cold as ice. The gold de- 
 bating medal was pinned on her dark dress. The kind 
 English teacher smiled, and praised her, though she had 
 seen Ellen looking much nicer and happier on quiet days 
 in class. 
 
 Jim was certainly pleased in his taciturn way. Ellen 
 sensed his feeling when he gave her, next day, some 
 snow apples he had gone a considerable distance to 
 steal, and shinned up a spruce tree in the Ledge Woods 
 to get her some gum. 
 
 That Friday afternoon Jim was scheduled to paint the 
 kitchen steps before he went up for the mail. He tossed 
 off some smeared and spotted newspapers and catalogues 
 which had been covering the paint pots, in the bay of the 
 barn : and they fluttered loosely among the oddments of 
 lath and moldings heaped there miscellaneously to be 
 broken up for kindlings. One paint-spattered page blew 
 out into the orchard, where Ellen was picking up green 
 
54 THE SPINSTER 
 
 greenings for apple sauce. It fluttered into a choke- 
 cherry thicket, whence her omniverous bookworm's eye 
 and hand reclaimed it, to see what it was about. It was 
 entitled in large letters : 
 
 "GUIDED BY SCREAMS." 
 
 It went on to say in somewhat smaller headlines : 
 
 " rabbit's scream of pain the index where 
 to cut the nerve." 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 BUT THE HEART MUST OFTEN CORRECT THE 
 FOLLIES OF THE HEAD 
 
 Well, so this was one of the fairy-tales, such as JuHa 
 had quoted. Queer that people should invent such hor- 
 rors, out of whole cloth. But some people's imaginations 
 ran to such things. Besides, they wouldn't need to manu- 
 facture them quite out of whole cloth, either. They 
 would only need to cut out here, and put in there. There 
 were asterisks in this very pamphlet : — no doubt where 
 anaesthetics had been mentioned in the original ! Only — 
 it quoted some professor — who had become an adept in 
 this experiment, or so the pamphlet claimed, — as advis- 
 ing students to perform it without anaesthetics, because 
 the shriek of pain was a good guide. That part must 
 have been made up out of whole cloth, naturally! No 
 professor surely ever advised young men to do things 
 like that. 
 
 Of course she had said in the debate, that even if 
 
 vivisection did involve torture " But I didn't figure 
 
 out to myself what kind of torture," thought Ellen, per- 
 plexedly. " Now that I come to think about picking out 
 one particular cat or dog or rabbit, saying to myself, 
 ' Well, I guess we'll turn over this one to be tortured,' 
 and then choosing what particular place on its body to 
 hurt first " 
 
 How soul-satisfying it would be to find out for sure, 
 
 55 . 
 
56 THE SPINSTER 
 
 rock-sure, that there wasn't a word of truth in this ghastly 
 tale! And by the way, there was one thing she could 
 do: write to the professor who had done it — or rather, 
 who hadn't. She could get her letter in by five o'clock. 
 By Monday morning she could hear, if the professor 
 were prompt about answering. 
 
 " Aunt Fran, I'm leaving those apples, because I have 
 to write a letter and get it in the evening mail." 
 
 " All right. Stop in at Willets and Barnhaven's and 
 bring me a yeast cake." 
 
 She wrote her letter and started for the post-office. It 
 seemed a considerable step to take, somehow, this going 
 to headquarters to get your own material for your own 
 original thinking. All the stars were twinkling out in 
 the early autumn evening. She looked at them, and not 
 at the lights in Willets and Barnhaven's store. 
 
 Across the street, before you come to the post-office, 
 old Dr. Temple's side door, the office door, was open : 
 somebody was just going in. Why wouldn't Dr. Temple 
 know about this professor, and this experiment — whether 
 it were true or not? 
 
 Somehow Ellen shrank a little from opening the sub- 
 ject with the doctor. She crossed the street, however, 
 instead of going to the post-office. A little while she 
 stood and pondered before the side door, with its 
 scratched and flaked gilt letters, " A. V. Temple, M.D." 
 When she did ring, the door was not at once opened. 
 Murmurs of conversation continued for a time. Then 
 the doctor came and let her in, and introduced her to 
 his other caller, a younger man, with a frank and friendly 
 eye, who wasn't a patient, it appeared, but another doctor, 
 from Rutland. 
 
HEART MUST OFTEN CORRECT HEAD 57 
 
 Ellen burst out with her errand, to get it over with. 
 
 " Dr. Temple, did you ever hear of Merwin Hood, and 
 did he, do you suppose, ever divide the fifth nerve of 
 animals, and advise medical students to do the same 
 thing, without anaesthetics ? I must know because I won 
 the debate^ " 
 
 " What've you been getting into, hey, Ellie? Anti- 
 vivisection? " 
 
 " Sounds like their stufT," said the younger man. 
 
 "Yes," said Ellen. "Is it true, do you think? Or 
 don't you know? Do you know?" she added, turning 
 to the stranger. 
 
 " Merwin Hood's retired long ago," said the stranger. 
 " That's old stuff you've come across. Though I sup- 
 pose the A-V's keep an old charge going till it drops dead 
 of old age." 
 
 "Then he did say it? And do it?" pressed Ellen 
 anxiously. 
 
 " Oh, I hardly think," began Dr. Temple, " why, Ellie, 
 I hardly think so. Hood was a very humane man. Re- 
 search workers generally are. You can trust the doc- 
 tors pretty generally, you'll find. / certainly never saw 
 any of these atrocities when / was in medical school. I 
 never take much stock in 'em." 
 
 " What was your medical school ? " inquired the other. 
 
 " Albany. I graduated in the class of 1870 " 
 
 " But can't either of you tell me for sure, one way or 
 the other?" interrupted Ellen desperately. She turned 
 her honest, baffled face again to the stranger. 
 
 " Why — as I say, I've never had any occasion to use 
 that text-book of Hood's. It's all out of date." 
 
 " Well, how am I going to find out? " 
 
58 THE SPINSTER 
 
 She did not ask this question aloud, but it was clearly 
 spoken in her expression of perplexed perseverance, as 
 she turned away toward the door. The younger man sud- 
 denly got up and crossed the room. He took down a 
 book off Dr. Temple's top shelf and came and laid it 
 open on the table. 
 
 " Here's Hood's book — let's look and see," he said. 
 
 Ellen's dark-red color rushed into her face. She pulled 
 the paint-smeared pamphlet out of her pocket. 
 
 " Where's it tell us to look ? Oh yes, Chapter Five, 
 page one-twenty-nine." 
 
 On page one-twenty-nine were directions for dividing 
 the fifth nerve of rabbits, and students were advised not 
 to use anaesthetics. 
 
 All the time Ellen and the strange doctor were verify- 
 ing the quotation, Dr. Temple stood still by his desk, 
 ruffling his long, Lincolnish, untidy hair. 
 
 " Well," said the strange doctor, " there it is." 
 
 There was a little silence, Dr. Temple gravely regard- 
 ing the lamp, the book, and the two faces. Ellen not 
 only felt that he was waiting for her to go, but also 
 suddenly remembered the yeast cake, and that Willets 
 and Barnhaven might be shut up by this time: and it 
 seemed to her, with that absurd confusion of values our 
 " practical " philosophy instils, that she had been repre- 
 hensibly trifling away time which should have been spent 
 in the stern business of life. 
 
 Dr. Temple followed her into the hallway. " Better 
 let the vivisection business alone, Ellie," he said, with 
 that beautiful gentleness so welcome to the weak, so irk- 
 some to the strong, and to those who think themselves 
 strong. "Vivisection has come to stay: it's one of the 
 
HEART MUST OFTEN CORRECT HEAD 59 
 
 disagreeable things of the world, like slaughtering hogs. 
 You like ham? There may be abuses," he went on, not 
 waiting for Ellen's reluctant, prompt, " Yes, I do." 
 " We doctors will try to get those corrected, at the 
 same time that we work the animals for all they're worth, 
 to get at the secrets of Nature and the cause of sickness. — 
 And the cure. The whole thing's our business — you trust 
 us. Don't bother your — head (plainly he had been going 
 to say 'little head') about it. You're too young. Go 
 after the fur trade : — there's something anaesthetics never 
 get used in ! " 
 
 He turned back to the waiting-room, and his other 
 visitor there, before Ellen had shut the door tight. Her 
 sleeve caught on the framework of the lock, which tore 
 it a little. She let herself half in again, to disentangle 
 it, and heard Dr. Temple saying: 
 
 " Well, you've robbed the child of a night's rest, Dun- 
 bar." 
 
 " I couldn't disappoint her. Dr. Temple. We talk a 
 whole lot about the disinterested search for truth, and 
 then when we see a kid like that fairly burning up to 
 get at the truth, we try to jolly her away from it." 
 
 " I oughtn't to listen," said Ellen perfunctorily to her- 
 self, making no move to go. 
 
 " Do you want research in this country hampered as it 
 is in England, Dunbar?" 
 
 " No! / want it absolutely free, whatever pain it in- 
 volves. H boiling dogs alive will help cure cancer, / 
 say, go on, boil dogs alive. (I'd shoot my own dog first, 
 of course, and I'd specialize in something else myself.) 
 But by the same token I say, let the public in, let 'em 
 know all about it " 
 
6o THE SPINSTER 
 
 " And let 'em stop it, perhaps ! " put in Dr. Temple. 
 
 " Stop it if they want to: it's their business. If they 
 don't want to be cured by anything but S.P.C.A. methods, 
 let 'em say so." 
 
 " I mustn't listen," thought Ellen again, " and I must 
 get that yeast cake." But she waited to hear Dr. Temple's 
 reply, which made her smile : 
 
 " Let loose on the adult public then, Dunbar, but 
 don't go exciting children's nerves." 
 
 She went down the steps tearing up the letter she had 
 written to Professor Hood. 
 
 It was one of the really great events of Ellen's life, 
 the next greatest after the hunt for the tarantula, this 
 finding of the soiled pamphlet in the choke-cherry bushes, 
 and what it led to. Approaching changes of mind, while 
 they had to fight all the ingredients of her leathery con- 
 stancy — not to call it obstinacy — received from her 
 imaginative and kindling disposition a sort of welcome, 
 nevertheless. They gave her also a pleasurable excite- 
 ment and self-importance. They were opportunities to 
 take yourself seriously ad lib. whereas the aunts had 
 got into a great habit lately of advising her not to 
 take herself so seriously, and not to look so wise and 
 old. 
 
 It was, however, rather a nauseous dose to come round 
 to the side of your elders, and acknowledge that thirties 
 and forties had been right where cocksure teens had been 
 wrong. Would it be, perhaps, a bad precedent to set to 
 thirties and forties? Parents who hesitate about ac- 
 knowledging that they have been mistaken forget the 
 force of example. Little do they reflect that young 
 people hesitate about the same thing from precisely the 
 
HEART MUST OFTEN CORRECT HEAD 6i 
 
 same reason, and obscurely and instinctively argue, on 
 their side, in the same way. 
 
 " Next time I disagree with them, perhaps they'll 
 throw this up to me, and say I'd better not be so sure, 
 since I've changed my mind before." 
 
 This was of course the most repugnant point about 
 the whole matter. But it was only a part of the whole 
 unpleasant business of admitting you had been wrong. 
 Though not so difficult to admit to the school as to the 
 aunts, still it would be difficult and disagreeable to admit 
 it to the school. There was no use talking, it was all 
 disagreeable. How were you ever to be sure about any- 
 thing? " I was so perfectly sure about vivisection, and 
 here I've got completely unsettled, just from finding 
 out how sickening it is. All the arguments are just the 
 same they always were! The only thing is that I can't 
 possibly stand for it another minute!" Intellectually 
 the sensation of being blown about by every wind of 
 doctrine seemed to be as prostrating as palpitation of the 
 heart is to the body. 
 
 Well, anyway, if you did change your mind, you might 
 as well admit it. What would be the use of keeping it 
 covered up? If it was changed, it was changed. There 
 was no more use in keeping it to yourself than there was 
 in silly old ladies not telling their age. It couldn't make 
 them a minute younger, to have people not know how old 
 they were. 
 
 So much was settled by tea-time. Ellen's eyes were 
 dark, fixed, and brooding at tea. She was holding up 
 the pamphlet before herself as Moses held up the brazen 
 serpent in the wilderness. Aunt Fran, turning with 
 fond, fatuous pride to look again at the debating medal 
 
62 THE SPINSTER 
 
 which Ellen, as winning chief, was entitled to wear for 
 two weeks, missed it from the flat front of the plaid 
 dress. When she said, " I hope for Heaven's sake you 
 haven't lost it, Ellen," Ellen pushed away her plate and 
 said : 
 
 " No, but I don't know but what I wish Julia had won 
 the debate after all." 
 
 Soon she excused herself and went upstairs to her own 
 room. " Why don't I read the Bible? " she wondered, 
 looking dully at her Bible on the whatnot. " It might 
 help." All the time the dry voice inside of her kept 
 saying, " ' Facts are the angels of the Lord.' Facts are 
 a Bible. If you have to change your mind, you have to. 
 No amount of sneaking and skulking round it can make 
 you think the way you thought before. You wish you'd 
 never found the paper, eh? What good would that do? 
 The rabbits would have been tortured just the same 
 whether you'd found the paper or not. A great deal of 
 help it would have been to them, wouldn't it, if you'd 
 never found the paper?" 
 
 The dry voice would sometimes stop, and at last 
 she did begin reading the Bible. An obscure inspiration, 
 as usual, gradually growing clearer, came out of its 
 pages. Thousand-fold familiar passages took on a sym- 
 bolism and applied directly to her small case. The mighty 
 metaphors, the grand language, did not tickle a mis- 
 directed sense of humor as applied to herself and her 
 affairs. She could take St. Paul's majestic verses for 
 her adolescent moral problems without any sense of in- 
 congruity. The deep utilitarianism of her religion made 
 the Bible not at all " too bright and good " for all and 
 any of her needs. 
 
HEART MUST OFTEN CORRECT HEAD 63 
 
 "Who follows in their train? I will." 
 
 Extremely earthly considerations, according to their 
 custom, now threw in their weight. The school would 
 stare, but it would admire. People would certainly re- 
 spect her for giving back the medal. In some ways, it 
 would be finer than winning it. Dimly she felt perhaps 
 a moral rehabilitation in having tried to decide to give 
 the medal back before she had considered what her 
 schoolmates would think of her. With that two-edged 
 imagination of hers and habit of looking through the eyes 
 • of others, she felt a need for such rehabilitation. It 
 now gave her a sense of reality, of being, she hoped, true 
 blue, fast blue, instead of the chameleon colors of her 
 schoolmates' spectacles. 
 
 By morning light she decided not to tell the aunts un- 
 til afterward. There would be nothing very dramatic in 
 telling them, to atone for the lameness of the admission 
 that she had changed her mind and embraced their opin- 
 ions. Then, too. Aunt Fran might say she hardly thought 
 it wise to give the medal back. Her resolution did seem 
 fast blue, but she had a wholesome fear of having cold 
 water thrown on it. And then one could tell things a 
 great deal better at tea, or after tea, than at breakfast. 
 
 At the hasty family prayers on Monday morning, 
 when Jim (it was his week) read the Psalm that says 
 " My tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth," Ellen 
 thought it an apt description of her own situation. She 
 had resolved, however, in any case, on handing the 
 Principal a note, rather than making a small speech to 
 him and the school. She had used her best monogrammed 
 paper. On the envelope she had written with her bold 
 stub pen, " Immediate." 
 
64 THE SPINSTER 
 
 Now that the time had come, the excitement was really 
 rather pleasant than otherwise. The color came up blaz- 
 ingly in her cheeks when the wondering Principal read 
 her note first to himself, then to the school. She thought 
 on the whole, it sounded quite striking in literary form 
 as well as morally noble. It read : 
 
 " Since the debate on Thursday night I have changed 
 my mind about vivisection. I regret that my opponents 
 did not win. Having discovered that there is intense 
 cruelty connected with vivisection I would not defend it 
 for worlds. I have become an anti-vivisectionist, and I 
 am determined to fight against the torture of animals in 
 the name of science so long (how like Ellen this flourish !) 
 so long as my life shall last." 
 
 Inclosed in the note was the debating medal. 
 
 " Probably I feel a little bit like Cranmer when he held 
 his hand in the fire," she thought. Following this idea 
 the Joan of Arc notions all came back, as big as life. 
 Some brave, dangerous, desperate action she would do, 
 some day, for some great cause. Perhaps for this ! 
 Telemachus had leaped into the arena and ended the 
 gladiatorial combats. A person who gave her own body 
 to be vivisected might in like manner forever end vivi- 
 section. "Who follows in their train?" It would be 
 a good many years away, of course, this fearful but 
 beautiful martyrdom. She would have time to cultivate 
 her courage. The martyrs of Cranmer's time had nour- 
 ished each other's resolution by lending each other books 
 in which they had underlined passages that helped a man 
 to think steadily of the fire. 
 
HEART MUST OFTEN CORRECT HEAD 65 
 
 " Ellen Graham will please go to the board and demon- 
 strate the next four equations." 
 
 It took much more than equations to oust the Joan 
 of Arc ideas from Ellen's mind this time. It took a 
 combination of Jim's stoop, and shamefaced sidewise 
 cough. (Sometimes in walking through the cemetery for 
 a short cut, she came unawares on Martin Holt's damp 
 sunken grave, where the white violets grew in the grass 
 in the spring.) 
 
 Often at breakfast Aunt Fran would say, with a poor 
 attempt not to speak anxiously: 
 
 " Another egg, Jim ? " 
 
 " No place to stow it away, Aunt Fran." 
 
 ** Why, where's your appetite ? " 
 
 " Appetite's all right, I guess." 
 
 A few such conversations as this disposed effectually 
 of Ellen's own hearty breakfast appetite. Jim's collar, 
 she thought, looked loose round his neck. How he did 
 stoop ! Aunt Fran had mixed up the old iron, potash, and 
 glycerine tonic which the children had both taken after 
 whooping cough and measles; but it didn't seem to help 
 very much. Dr. Temple, moi-e heavy faced, frowning, 
 and deliberate than ever, felt Jim's chest and back with 
 his coarse, deft, gentle hands, and said he was all right, 
 but would better take Scott's Emulsion for a few weeks. 
 The name of this excellent tonic was in itself enough to 
 alarm Ellen to an agonizing degree. She thought it very 
 strange, though fortunate, that her brother did not him- 
 self bestow much thought on his ailment, but followed the 
 college football in the Censor with his usual absorption, 
 and merely sickened at the taste of the Emulsion, gulp- 
 ing it down with horrid grunts. Ellen lay awake in the 
 
66 THE SPINSTER 
 
 middle of the frosty autumn nights for two or three 
 hours, regularly, sweating with fear. All the pomps and 
 colors of the autumn, the season she liked best, went by 
 unseen. Or at least they were only seen on those occa- 
 sional days when she did not notice Jim coughing at all, 
 and when he ate two eggs for breakfast. Then she tossed 
 every ghastly foreboding into a bonfire, and enjoyed to 
 the full the intoxicating weather of the mountain fall. 
 One reason why she had always liked the autumn 
 weather so much perhaps was because a poignant sense of 
 the coming absence from home always enhanced it. It was 
 in winter that the aunts shut up Wakerobin and went off 
 to New York for that inevitable exile of a month or six 
 weeks, by which they seemed to set so much store. 
 Regularly in December a seamstress came to furbish up 
 the three feminine wardrobes for this purgatorial trip. 
 She brought fashion magazines with her, and stayed 
 night and day, for a week at a time, handing out seams 
 to be overcast, braids to be sewed on hems, and sleeves 
 to be stitched in. Thank goodness the fiber chamois 
 skirt linings were out of fashion at last; but the enor- 
 mous pleated sleeves, two yards round, had gone back 
 to skin-tight ones, or bishop's (so called), which bulged 
 grudgingly, as if allowing for wrists to be swollen by 
 hornets' stings. It was a welcome distraction this year, 
 having the seamstress come. It was a rest to center one's 
 mind, even for a few hours, on clothes, and get it out 
 from under that millstone of trouble about Jim. Ellen 
 took up the latest issue of " Style " to choose a pattern for 
 her new winter dress : but forgot the dress entirely in an 
 interesting article at the back of the magazine. She sat 
 down on the sewing-machine cover and read it : an illus- 
 
HEART MUST OFTEN CORRECT HEAD 67 
 
 trated account of life at various girls' colleges. She had 
 heard of Wellesley and Smith and Vassar and Bryn 
 Mawr, but not much of Barnard or Radcliffe, with which 
 this article also dealt. All these pictures of girls in cap 
 and gown were very attractive. She had hardly thought 
 of college until now. It seemed very alluring. In a 
 year from the next June she would have finished her Sem- 
 inary course. Radcliffe was the feminine Harvard, and 
 the great names of early American literature over- 
 shadowed it. It would be well to find out something more 
 about Radcliffe; among other things, how near it was to 
 the fabulous gates of Harvard. 
 
 When Jim came in that afternoon, he was coughing. 
 He looked extra slender in his dark-blue suit : or did Ellen 
 punish the traitorous interest she had taken that day in 
 Radcliffe by thinking so? At all events, she felt a hor- 
 rified remorse and a sharpened anxiety. When she went 
 to bed, instead of regularly saying her prayers, she at- 
 tempted to bargain with the Almighty. 
 
 " Let me not ever go to college, and let Jim get 
 well." 
 
 This seemed so poor an offer for the prize of Jim's 
 recovery that she changed it on the spot. 
 
 " O God, let me be disappointed in love, and let Jim get 
 well." 
 
 After all being disappointed in love did not seem much 
 of a bid, either; especially after that usual ghastly imagi- 
 native rioting in charnel houses from twelve to three. 
 She must make the stakes a good deal higher. Accord- 
 ingly when she said her prayers next morning she 
 prayed : 
 
 " O God, let me die of cancer, and let Jim get well." 
 
68 THE SPINSTER 
 
 (" And anyway," she reflected, " I can commit suicide 
 if I suffer very much.") 
 
 " Ellen's getting to be very viewy," remarked Jim one 
 day. " She'll be out for women's rights soon, cutting off 
 her hair and putting on bloomers and going on the lecture 
 platform." 
 
 " I am NOT in favor of women's rights, either ! " 
 shouted Ellen indignantly. 
 
 " Well, she's been going round getting people to sign 
 that anti-vivisection petition, and telling everybody she 
 doesn't believe in hell," Jim amplified, addressing his 
 remarks to Aunt Fran. 
 
 " Tennyson didn't believe in hell, and neither did 
 Whittier," said Ellen. " But then, I gave up believing in 
 it before I knew they didn't," she added with rather 
 priggish satisfaction. 
 
 " Well, it's all right if she doesn't make herself con- 
 spicuous," conceded Jim in a middle-aged tone. 
 
 Ellen was rather viewy, and suspected herself of being 
 so, hard as she might kick against the conviction. She 
 couldn't help making up her mind as soon as possible, 
 on one side or the other, about every moral question that 
 came her way. Until her mind was made up, she would 
 be fidgety and restless within, and almost physically out 
 of sorts. And even after she had come to a decision, 
 she was inexpressibly uncomfortable, if she did not dare 
 to speak out and champion her beliefs against all comers. 
 And yet she could not argue without faceburn, and 
 spinal shivers, and other disconcerting signs of excite- 
 ment. 
 
 These beliefs of hers, too, were generally radical. She 
 had been in the throes of acquiring a new one this very 
 
HEART MUST OFTEN CORRECT HEAD 69 
 
 summer. But it was one she did not dare say very much 
 about. It was more serious than giving up beheving in 
 hell. 
 
 The succession of daughters of a single prolific French- 
 Canadian family, who had in turn filled the kitchen at 
 Wakerobin, was over. The last and youngest of them 
 was married. In her place had come a gentle, refined, 
 rather brooding young colored girl. Marie-Louise, 
 Sophie, and Zaidee had had plenty of young company, 
 plenty of dances and picnics to go to : and Ellen at their 
 successive weddings had glimpsed a gayer, brighter world 
 than even the frolicsome, talkative set Aunt Sallie moved 
 in. With Carrie it was sorely different. There were 
 colored bell-boys at the hotel, colored coachmen during 
 the season, who brought their wives and families to 
 town : there were colored children in the district school, 
 and one or two at the Seminary. Carrie, however, had 
 no callers: and would often sit dreaming (none too 
 happily, to judge by her great brooding eyes) over her 
 sewing. 
 
 Ellen used to linger and look at her sometimes, and 
 wonder, with a sense of awe, whether Carrie could have 
 been disappointed in love. There never seemed to be 
 any opening for her to say anything: but once she re- 
 sorted to her father's old expedient of pats, and patted 
 Carrie on the shoulder softly, as she passed her. Turn- 
 ing, with the white sweeping-towel pinned round her 
 closely-fastened hair, showing the fine outlines of her 
 head, which the towel Orientalized, Carrie looked for a 
 moment at Ellen's honest, troubled eyes, and smiled un- 
 certainly. There was something immediately established 
 between them, some vague footing of friendship above 
 
70 THE SPINSTER 
 
 and beyond the usual good-natured status between maid 
 and young people in a household. The thing that ampli- 
 fied this small beginning was, oddly enough, Ellen's 
 provoking habit of being often a little late for dinner. 
 On a fine September morning, when school had only been 
 keeping a week, she had gone up into the woods with 
 Julia Oldenbury after school : and forgetting the time in 
 a more unprincipled manner than usual, found the table 
 cleared when she got home, the dishes washed and put 
 away, and a cold bite left for her in lonely fashion on 
 the pantry shelves. She felt aggrieved at the solitude, 
 and her woodland appetite began to dwindle away. How 
 she hated eating alone! — Even a knife to spread her 
 bread had been forgotten. She picked up a steel pantry 
 knife from the table, idly thinking, " This is Carrie's 
 knife." Almost as soon as she had picked it up, she 
 laid it down. A horrid thought ran all over her like 
 fire in prairie weed. 
 
 " A thousand meals a year all alone at the pantry table ! 
 If I mind one so much, what must a thousand be to 
 Carrie!" 
 
 She seemed to see, as in a new sort of composite 
 photograph, Carrie eating all at once her thousand yearly 
 solitary meals; — a thousand slices of bread, a thousand 
 balls of butter, consumed in ticking solitude in the lonely 
 pantry. There she was herself at the pantry table, eat- 
 ing those thousand solitary meals. She saw Carrie's 
 pantry knife and fork and cup and chair through Car- 
 rie's liquid, pensive eyes. And all at once, as if in a 
 burst of second sight, it seemed to her intolerably vul- 
 gar, intolerably small-minded, to have Carrie, or Sophie, 
 or Zaidee, or anybody, eat all alone in the pantry. 
 
HEART MUST OFTEN CORRECT HEAD 71 
 
 She remembered, too, how unaccountably startled Car- 
 rie was when steps or voices came suddenly up on the 
 kitchen piazza, and how she had laughed at certain 
 queer fancies Carrie seemed to take seriously. One of 
 these was that she had seen Aunt Fran's face growing 
 smaller and smaller, and then larger and larger, as she 
 stood beside the range. Another was that there were 
 steps along the garret rafters in the middle of the night; 
 and that whenever she heard them there, tin pans and 
 dishes would be on the wrong shelves in the morning. 
 Perhaps these notions came from being so much alone; 
 for people said prisoners often went insane in solitary 
 confinement. 
 
 At any rate, there ensued two or three of those days 
 Ellen was getting to know so well, when a disturbing 
 moral question cut across her usually quiet mind, and 
 she had not yet found any action possible to take to 
 dree its weird. It was not a deep, sick sorrow like her 
 fear for Jim; it was only a ferment working anxiously. 
 Aunt Fran, with her paper on American Caste before 
 the Shakespere Society; — Aunt Sallie with her blazer- 
 wearing, tennis-playing friends from the hotel, and her 
 pleasantly indolent, gentlemanly young men on Sundays 
 and holidays — they would give short shrift to a proposal 
 to have Carrie in at the dining-room table at least once a 
 day! 
 
 There seemed nothing better to do about it than the 
 remote resolve, " When I am married and have a house 
 of my own, I shall have the maid sit down with me 
 and my husband and children at the dining-room 
 table." 
 
 At first this resolution wore rather a severe and grim- 
 
72 THE SPINSTER 
 
 jawed look. It wouldn't be very cosy to have the maid 
 always at the table. 
 
 " But it would be cosier," she said to herself deter- 
 minedly, " than to think of her out in the pantry, all 
 alone, as if she had smallpox." 
 
 Gradually, however, it grew into a very rosy, pleasant 
 notion, a vision of old-timey rural America redivivus, 
 without either imported or home grown caste. In her 
 dreams of herself as the mother of a big, jolly family 
 of children, she saw a warm and generous household, 
 where nobody was left out of anything. 
 
 A better idea came one evening when the aunts had 
 gone to tea with Mr. and Mrs. Barnhaven. Jim was con- 
 sulted, and said he had no particular use for doing any- 
 thing that you had to do on the q.t. Why not leave 
 things alone, anyway ? Why be always doing something 
 queer, that nobody else ever thought of? Ellen took 
 time to reconsider her idea, but ended by sticking to it. 
 It was better, she vaguely knew, to deceive the aunts, than 
 to let Carrie keep on being so lonely and getting so 
 fanciful and scary. She went out to the kitchen before 
 tea and said: 
 
 " Carrie, you come right in and have supper with Jim 
 and me in the dining-room." 
 
 " Oh my mercy, no, Miss Ellen! " 
 
 ** Yes, sir, you come right in. I won't have you having 
 supper all alone, when I'm in charge of this house! " 
 
 " I rather not, Miss Ellen. I rather have my supper 
 in the pantry, honest and true." 
 
 " What makes you so obstinate, Carrie ? " 
 
 " I 'fraid Miss Frances fine out." 
 
 " No, she won't either. You come right in." 
 
HEART MUST OFTEN CORRECT HEAD 73 
 
 " I rather not, honest and true, Miss Ellen." 
 
 " Well ! all right then. Jim and I'll come out and 
 eat with you." 
 
 Snatching a tray off the shelf to go and bring out 
 the tea things, Ellen was surprised to find Carrie sud- 
 denly kissing her. 
 
 " Carrie tells me," said the elder aunt to the younger, 
 a few days later, " that she'll stay with us another year. 
 I told her I was very glad she was so sensible. She can 
 save her money and have a comfortable home. At first, 
 do you know, Sarah, I thought she was inclined to want 
 a little more companionship. I was afraid she might 
 get too lonely. I even thought of making her a little 
 more one of the family; and then I thought, ' No, Frances 
 Mowbray, don't begin anything like that. It only makes 
 trouble in the long run.' Now you see she's quite con- 
 tented and perfectly satisfied with her own place in life." 
 
 Jim coughed less and ate more, as the winter advanced. 
 He certainly was better. But the doctor said to keep on 
 with Scott's Emulsion through the spring. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 DEEP WATERS 
 
 Carrie went to New York when they did, all leaving 
 together on the early train, which meant a frosty stage- 
 ride before sunrise. The long snowy top of Windward 
 turned from gray to white, and from white to the pink 
 of wild roses, as they drove along on wheels, over snow 
 too drifted for runners. Sometimes the road had a 
 scraped, sandy look, and sometimes folds of fine, dry 
 snow ran across it, sifting in after them and obliterating 
 the marks of the wheels. This wild-rose sunrise made 
 Ellen tenderly homesick for a while, — a feeling she had 
 had a good many times before, driving down to the 
 station on early winter mornings. 
 
 In New York Carrie went to her married sister on San 
 Juan Hill, and the aunts and children went to their usual 
 boarding-house on a street near Madison Square. Fel- 
 low-boarders changed, individually, from year to year, 
 but there were almost always some young journalists or 
 magazine writers in hall or skylight bedrooms, a young 
 lady or two studying art or music, and a dowager in the 
 first floor front. Sometimes this oldish lady wore a 
 scratch in front, and plumpers in her cheeks; sometimes 
 she was aesthetic and rose late and wore watteau-backed 
 tea-gowns : sometimes she desperately endeavored to wear 
 out her too durable stuff dresses of a bygone fashion. 
 
 74 
 
DEEP WATERS 75 
 
 Ellen, in New York, always formed her impressions of 
 people largely by their looks, and still more largely by 
 their clothes. Perhaps she did so in the country, too, 
 to a certain extent, and on first acquaintance. These 
 fellow-boarders remained permanently in the stage of 
 first acquaintances. They came into her world " like 
 shadows, and so departed." 
 
 Her own clothes always seemed fearfully stodgy and 
 countrified when she first arrived in New York, but 
 she did not care very much until Aunt Fran would look 
 at them and say so. Then she felt acutely their short- 
 comings. But it was really her way of wearing them 
 that was at fault. It didn't matter much what Aunt Fran 
 wore, she always looked stylish. Aunt Sallie, too, who 
 was less stylish than Aunt Fran, had that same aristo- 
 cratic way of looking as if she didn't care how she looked, 
 which Jim and their father had. 
 
 Their father's winter visit this year had been delayed 
 past Christmas, but now he came and stayed with them 
 at the boarding-house for three weeks. Jim and Ellen 
 always felt younger, more like children, when their 
 father was there. He still used the old nursery words 
 " high jinks " and " monkey-shines " about the times they 
 had together. He was childishly fond himself of sweets 
 and soda, and with him they owned to a childish love of 
 them too. He was a famous companion, full of the grav- 
 est, most unegotistic humor. He took them, aunts and 
 all, to Dockstader's Minstrels, and they all went too to 
 the Natural History Museum, and saw (what Mr. 
 Graham loved!) the curious leaf-insect, and walking-stick 
 beetle, and the meteors, and petrified trees, and all such 
 things. He hunted up a famous Russian picture, in a 
 
76 THE SPINSTER 
 
 saloon away down town, and they all went to see it with 
 him. 
 
 That was the first time Ellen ever saw into rows of 
 tenements, and smelled the garbage, which happened to be 
 melting in a warm, unseasonable January sun, as it lay 
 heaped in long frozen mountain ranges between the gut- 
 ters. It was apparent that the streets where the well-to- 
 do lived were cleaned much better than the streets where 
 the poor lived. Curious how the poor seemed to get the 
 rough end of everything, from taking their meals alone 
 in pantries, to having garbage left under their windows ! 
 Little children, bow-legged, dirty, f rowsled, struggled up 
 and down over the garbage mountains, with soiled petti- 
 coats hanging out in untidy loops below soiled dresses 
 and greasy coats. It was pleasant to escape from so 
 many, and such dirty, children, into the orderly, quiet, 
 comparatively refined saloon. 
 
 The big Russian picture was wonderful — a company 
 feasting in twilight in a great barbarous hall. But they 
 came back through that same sickly street to the Elevated. 
 Mr. Graham, who loved pictures even better than he 
 loved curious insects, was in a merry mood. He gave 
 pennies to some of the dirty little children, and took 
 others with him into a candy shop and bought barber- 
 pole sticks for them, calling them " his Sunday school 
 class," which made them stare. He took off his hat 
 with a flourish to old women with shawls over their 
 heads; and on the Elevated train, in a voice just pitched 
 high enough to agonize Jim and make him think the 
 other passengers would hear, he announced, " Oranges, 
 biscuits, ginger-beer, and lemonade ! " This was an old 
 joke of his. Jim did not seem to mind it as much as 
 
DEEP WATERS 77 
 
 usual. He smiled indolently at it. Perhaps he was out- 
 growing his very youthful father. Generally Ellen, who 
 had inherited something of her father's simple-hearted 
 youthfulness (without his humor) found this old joke 
 funny, but today she was out of tune for it. She fastened 
 her eyes, like leeches, on the wall of the car, above the 
 people's heads and below the advertisements, thinking 
 of those garbage mountains and those soiled, bow-legged 
 children, and seeing into dark hall after dark hall, ex- 
 haling the sordid smell of poverty. 
 
 " That was the smell of dirt and cold potatoes," Aunt 
 Fran would have said. 
 
 Their father's visit ended, within a day or two after 
 this, with their all going out to dinner and to see the 
 School for Scandal at the Lyceum Theater. He took 
 away with him two wax cylinders to be put through the 
 phonograph, into one of which Ellen, and the other Jim, 
 had talked, and Ellen had sung in her thin fervent voice, 
 " Jock of Hazeldean." As her father packed these 
 precious cylinders away in his trunk, Ellen saw him ar- 
 range them alongside the little brown Prayer-Book he 
 always carried East and West with him, and the card 
 photograph of her mother, in that quaint Shetland shawl 
 and bonnet with morning-glories. 
 
 A week after Mr. Graham had gone, Jim got up very 
 languid one morning when the aunts were dressed for 
 a shopping tour in Twenty-third Street. He dropped into 
 a rocking-chair after breakfast and went to sleep. Aunt 
 Fran, looking worried, told Ellen to try to keep him 
 awake while she and Aunt Sallie went downstairs to find 
 out from the landlady who was the best nearby doctor. 
 Ellen couldn't keep Jim awake. He kept relapsing into 
 
78 THE SPINSTER 
 
 dozes. When the doctor came, he said Jim's tempera- 
 ture was one hundred and four. Jim waked up long 
 enough to undress, and Aunt Fran put him into her 
 own bed. Immediately he went to sleep again, but rest- 
 lessly moved and coughed. By evening there was a 
 nurse in the room. The strange doctor came again at 
 nine and said, on being asked about sending for Mr. 
 Graham, that he would better be telegraphed for at once. 
 Aunt Sallie rushed out and sent the telegram, and in the 
 morning received an answer: 
 
 " Leaving midnight. Wire me Buffalo boy's condi- 
 tion." 
 
 It still took thirty-eight hours to come from Minne- 
 apolis to new York. 
 
 Jim had pneumonia. He had " probably been run- 
 ning down for quite a while." He was " just in the 
 condition," the doctor said. Jim dozed and dreamed and 
 tossed about all night. The telegram sent to his father 
 at Buffalo said, " No change." Mr. Graham, when he 
 arrived in New York, had the telegram still unopened 
 in his pocket. " If he was better I could wait, and if he 
 was worse I couldn't," said Ellen's poor father, look- 
 ing gray and cadaverous, with the soot of the journey 
 deepening the sleepless circles round his eyes. 
 
 The nurse went up every afternoon to Ellen's small 
 skylight room on the top floor, to rest. She was pretty 
 tired by one o'clock. The aunts took care of Jim from 
 one to four, and Ellen sat usually all that time in her 
 father's room, where by two o'clock they began to watch 
 out the window for the doctor. When he only came 
 once a day, he came between two and four. Jim's fever 
 came up in the afternoons. When the doctor had gone, 
 
DEEP WATERS 79 
 
 came the report of how high the fever had been that 
 day. This was the event for which Mr. Graham spent 
 the rest of the day consciously and systematically brac- 
 ing himself. Ellen was too young and idle-willed to do 
 so. She drifted from mercurially depressed to unrea- 
 sonably hopeful moods, according to a hair-breadth's im- 
 provement or retrogression in the temperature. At this 
 crucial hour, in the middle of the afternoon, when the 
 doctor came, she always had a longing to shut the Vene- 
 tian blinds and forget the unsympathizing sunshine 
 which shone in from the southwest. On the contrary, 
 it depressed her father to darken the room. She sat 
 with him in dreary idleness, and watched the careless- 
 looking people scattering through the square, or stream- 
 ing along Twenty-third Street. She used to think some- 
 times, if Jim didn't get well, she would jump out that 
 window, perhaps. Her father used to walk up and down 
 the narrow hall-room, every now and then stopping be- 
 side his own bed, and saying, with an angry look: 
 
 " How can I lie here every night in comfort and know 
 the boy is tossing and burning up with that infernal 
 fever down there ? " 
 
 When they saw the doctor come round the corner of 
 the square, the tortured man used to think busily aloud. 
 
 " I won't expect a good report. I'll expect a poor 
 one. Now how can we get some comfort ready, Ellen, 
 for a poor report? Suppose his fever has risen a little? 
 Suppose he is a shade weaker? Many a poor boy has 
 been through the same thing, and yet made old bones. 
 He has youth on his side. He has good steady nerves. 
 Always led an outdoor life," etc., etc., unwearying, un- 
 resting. 
 
8o THE SPINSTER 
 
 And when the examination of sputum was being made 
 by the Board of Health, and there were twenty-four 
 hours to be got through somehow before they could 
 know whether, in case of Jim's recovery, his lungs would 
 be " affected," Ellen helped her father plan how he 
 could " get the boy away to Colorado, and live there 
 with him two or three years, business or no business," 
 
 Fellow-boarders were kind and brought flowers, and 
 lent gas stoves; the landlady was kind: the kind cook 
 sat up half the night to send him broth. There was on 
 the top floor where Jim and Ellen had had small sky- 
 light rooms, a wizened, dark, muttering chambermaid. 
 She came one day to Aunt Fran's door and plucked her 
 by the sleeve, asking how was the bye ? and adding : 
 " They do be praying for him at St. Joseph's." 
 She came again the next day but one, and asked : 
 " How is the bye? I had Father Swift pray for him." 
 " God bless you ! " said Aunt Fran, weeping. 
 " I'd like to look at him, mahm." 
 " Come in — he's asleep," whispered Aunt Fran, tak- 
 ing her in on tiptoe, where the three single women, 
 mothers by adoption and grace, gazed at the sick boy. 
 The old chambermaid gazed long and muttered some- 
 thing, and went out, having temporarily satisfied the 
 beautiful, pitiful hunger of childless old hearts for the 
 young. 
 
 The Barnhaven boys wrote anxious, daubed, ill- 
 spelled letters to know about Jim. Mr. and Mrs. Wil- 
 lets, who were in New York buying goods for Willets 
 and Bamhaven's, came to inquire. At home in Tory 
 Hill Ellen had never especially liked Mrs. Willets, who 
 in childhood days had so seldom " thought best " for 
 
DEEP WATERS 8i 
 
 Jennie to come out and play : but now she freely kissed 
 the kind, anxious, fat face, and held on gratefully to 
 Mr. Willets's freckled hand. 
 
 Aunt Fran and Aunt Sallie never went out. They 
 went down to meals, but hurried back, shrinking from the 
 inquiries in the dining-room. Whether the nurse was 
 present or not, they watched their son's illness with un- 
 resting eyes. 
 
 One dreadful day Aunt Sallie took Ellen up to Jim's 
 small room, beside Ellen's own, and together they si- 
 lently emptied the bureau drawers, and brought down 
 the terrible limp clothes in armfuls. 
 
 Never until that day had anyone disturbed the weary 
 nurse in her short afternoon rest. But today to bear the 
 hideous listlessness before the doctor came, even with 
 her father's help, was beyond Ellen. All her impatient 
 hopefulness was ebbing away. He had been sick two 
 weeks and three days, and the fever had not turned. 
 That very morning, when she had gone into the room in 
 hat and coat to get the nurse's orders, he had broken 
 her heart by saying feebly: 
 
 " Wish / was going out." 
 
 What good had that famous doctor, called in con- 
 sultation last week, done? Only pound and pummel Jim's 
 thin shell of a chest and shoulders and then go down- 
 stairs and talk to the other doctors, and say Jim had 
 " a good deal of fight left in him yet," and kept '' a stiff 
 upper lip, and that was worth a whole lot," and perhaps 
 if he were moved to Atlantic City or Lakewood 
 
 And then the other doctor had said he was too weak 
 to be moved : it would be madness. 
 
 Jim's mother had died of pneumonia. 
 
82 THE SPINSTER 
 
 Ellen woke up the nurse by her knock : and that matter- 
 of-fact martyr, who was to die within her seven allotted 
 years, pulled Ellen down on the edge of the bed and 
 talked about Jim's recovery as if she knew he was going 
 to get well better than she knew her own name. She 
 kept on saying things, little things, about his getting 
 well, being well, the first time he would go out, the time 
 he would be well enough to go home, the good the moun- 
 tain air would do him, the milk and cream and eggs and 
 butter he'd eat and grow fat on, the long nights with 
 open windows that would broaden his chest and build up 
 his lungs. Over and over she repeated images of health 
 and activity for Jim, until her iteration won upon Ellen's 
 desperate mood and eased her foreboding. 
 
 All of a sudden, from who knew where? the garbage 
 street of tenements came back into Ellen's mind, and im- 
 paled her relief like a butterfly on a pin. 
 
 " Do you know. Miss Carey, I went through such an 
 awful street a week or two before Jim was taken sick! " 
 
 "Oh dear! yes, the town's full of them." 
 
 " They have cases of pneumonia there, I suppose, like 
 everywhere else ? " 
 
 " Yes, — but then, of course, they're taken to the hos- 
 pital." 
 
 " That's a relief! " cried Ellen gladly. 
 
 " The worst of it is, of course, the hospitals can't 
 keep them through their convalescence; but somehow 
 most of them pull through, I guess," said Miss Carey 
 cheerily. 
 
 '' They don't get any change to mountain air, though," 
 said Ellen in a brooding voice. 
 
 " No, I'm afraid they don't. Not many. Of course, 
 
DEEP WATERS 83 
 
 though, they've never seen the mountains. They don't 
 know what they miss." 
 
 Ellen scarcely heard. With fixed eyes on the empty 
 wall she was relentlessly dragging out of that wretched 
 street those brothers of other people, who would not 
 have country milk and cream. 
 
 " They won't have fresh butter and lots of eggs," she 
 went on, thinking aloud. 
 
 " Poor child, don't worry about what you can't help. 
 You can't take the whole world on your shoulders." 
 
 " If their lungs are affected, they can't go to Colo- 
 rado and live there two or three years ! " 
 
 Miss Carey said nothing; and Ellen, sitting on the floor 
 in her old crumpled dress, relapsed into a staring reverie. 
 She looked like a cataleptic, the nurse thought. 
 
 " Put it out of your mind, my dear child," said Miss 
 Carey, her extreme weariness veiled by sincerest kind- 
 ness. 
 
 " I don't want to put it out of my mind," said Ellen 
 somberly. " What good is it to put horrible things out 
 of your mind? There they are going on just the same. 
 If people have to live in such a street, the least I can 
 do is to think about it." 
 
 " Well, well, then, think if you must! " 
 
 " And I must talk to somebody ! I can't talk to 
 Father about it, or Aunt Fran, or Aunt Sallie, they're so 
 worn out. I have to talk to you." 
 
 It was only dully that the young, brutal egotist in 
 Ellen saw the tired humor in the nurse's patient, pretty 
 face. But after all she was not quite selfish enough to 
 take any more of the nurse's too brief resting time. Nor 
 did she need to talk to anybody about it. The facts 
 
84 THE SPINSTER 
 
 were perfectly clear. She only needed to soak herself 
 in thought about those bald, brutish inequalities between 
 the sick poor and the sick rich. It is curious that she 
 never tried to shelve the difficulty of reconciling her- 
 self to living in such an unreasonable world, by trying 
 to think it was reasonable that poverty should be penal- 
 ized, because poor people were so on account of laziness 
 and shiftlessness. Or perhaps it did occur to her to an- 
 swer herself in this way, and perhaps her head was 
 temporarily satisfied or mystified; but something else in 
 that case must have taken up the cudgels for those all- 
 too-vividly imagined sick brothers of other sisters, who 
 were to die of " afifected " lungs, or undernourished con- 
 valescence in garbage streets, because their fathers were 
 not industrious and efficient. 
 
 All those other young brothers like Jim were clamor- 
 ing at her heart all the time she sat by her father's win- 
 dow waiting for the doctor's report. She was all their 
 sisters; she saw them die in smelling rooms of the gar- 
 bage street, and died with them, over and over. When 
 the doctor went down the steps at five o'clock, one of 
 those superstitious thoughts she was subject to went like 
 a flashlight through her mind : 
 
 " God will let Jim get well if I will never forget those 
 other boys, and I never will." 
 
 " He stayed a long time," her father muttered, watch- 
 ing the doctor get into his cab and drive away. Ellen 
 started at the hollow, almost gasping, look of suspense his 
 face wore. In violent reaction from the wretchedness she 
 had felt when she and Aunt Sallie were bringing down 
 those armfuls of mutely foreboding clothes, she was in 
 a mood almost light-hearted. She took hold of her fa- 
 
DEEP WATERS 85 
 
 ther's hand and walked up and down with him, happily 
 thinking some of her cheer, which was far too illogical 
 to speak about, might flow from her fingers into his 
 fingers, and into his heart. 
 
 Aunt Fran came up to the door and told them that the 
 crisis seemed to have come; the doctor would come again 
 at midnight and again at six in the morning. 
 
 At six in the morning, in the strange city dusk, they 
 were all up and dressed, waiting for the doctor. But they 
 already knew the temperature was down; and when the 
 doctor came there was little more, really, that he could 
 tell them, except to warn them that it might come up 
 again; it was likely to fluctuate for a day or two. Ellen 
 listened with respect, but in her sanguine heart she was 
 confident that the temperature never would come up any 
 more. In an instant of time she whisked Jim through, 
 his whole convalescence, fattened and bronzed him, and 
 had him bat out the glorious championship game of the 
 Seminary ball team next year. The shadowy loads of 
 last autumn's anxiety, the sweating midnight hours, all 
 rolled off her back. She went down to the table the 
 moment the breakfast bell rang, and ate heartily, smil- 
 ing at all the boarders and telling them Jim was a great 
 deal better. 
 
 All the more like a thundercloud in her too bright 
 sky was the sharp rise of Jim's fever that afternoon. It 
 shot up again like a rocket. Yet the nurse smiled as 
 she took out the thermometer; and Aunt Fran and Aunt 
 Sallie nodded, resolutely throwing off their anxious looks, 
 which had crept back, and saying: 
 
 " The doctor told us it would." 
 
 Mr. Graham was still cautiously hopeful, jealous of 
 
86 THE SPINSTER 
 
 his hope. Ellen gradually recovered her own dashed 
 spirits, in an atmosphere where no one else was dashed. 
 All that second night Jim's head rolled about weakly on 
 the pillow; his complete exhaustion was amazing to be- 
 hold. His wiry, sturdy constitution, however, weathered 
 through : his heart ticked along feebly but steadily. In 
 due time the temperature fell again. And this time it 
 did not rise. 
 
 It was nineteen days he had been fighting the dim, 
 desperate battle. But now the fellow-boarders began to 
 make cheering jokes about him, in the dining-room. 
 They made Aunt Fran and Aunt Sallie almost laugh. 
 Ellen laughed and cackled at all they said, in light- 
 hearted glee. The old chambermaid came to the door and 
 looked in again at the bye and went away crying and 
 sobbing, and had thanks said in St. Joseph's. Aunt Sal- 
 lie's young men called and brought calves-foot jelly, 
 Carrie came and brought Jim a cravat that looked like 
 a valentine, all embossed with lacy, papery gilt brocad- 
 ing. Jim had it put on over his night-shirt and smoothed 
 it down with a very idiotic grin he knew (to Ellen's 
 delight) how to make. He made Carrie laugh ruefully; 
 but Ellen cackled loudly. She felt, in these days, as if 
 she could drink up, at one gulp, the whole flood of Feb- 
 ruary sunshine that engulfed the frozen Square. 
 
 She vowed to herself, with curses if she ever forgot 
 the vow, that never again would she refuse to do any- 
 thing, or go anywhere or to play any game, that Jim might 
 propose. Never would she speak one cross word to him 
 again, as long as she lived. When he threw his coat, 
 lining downward, on the wet grass at ball games, she 
 would brave everybody's jeers by going down where the 
 
DEEP WATERS 87 
 
 players sat, and turning it right side out. Her heart 
 toward him, inside her big seventeen-year-old body, was 
 inveterately childish. 
 
 Never would she forget either, those brothers in the 
 garbage street. Out of her small allowance for clothes 
 and pin-money it would not be much that she could do 
 for them. But she could do this much; she could refuse 
 to be resigned to a world that perpetuated such murderous 
 inequality and unfraternity. She could be one person 
 who wouldn't quote, " The poor you have always with 
 you," as a text to offset that other text that nobody ever 
 quoted, " Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor." 
 Somewhere, sometime, there would be something more 
 than this to do for them. Back came the Joan of Arc 
 ideas, riding their snow-white chargers. 
 
 After aeons came a day when Jim walked down one 
 flight of stairs, with very weak knees doubling up like 
 jack-knives on each step. Before that there had been 
 days when he had sneezed : he had coughed a few times, 
 and confessed that it hurt him, and Aunt Fran had flown 
 off the handle and privately, to Aunt Sallie, had said 
 that if the doctor couldn't prevent the poor child from 
 having that pain, there were other doctors in New York. 
 And once the glands of his neck had swelled, and Aunt 
 Fran had flown off the handle again, and said it was all 
 nonsense, this staying in the city another minute: she 
 should just bundle the child up and take him back to Tory 
 Hill and mountain air, and a good old country doctor. 
 It was Aunt Sallie's cue to calm her down. She had to 
 calm Ellen down, too, when the doctor, for the third 
 time, put off the return to Tory Hill to " next week." 
 
 Meantime Mr. Graham said good-by to them all, and 
 
88 THE SPINSTER 
 
 went back, lonely and thankful, to " Investment Loans — 
 Commercial Paper." And after cycles of waiting, they 
 went home to Tory Hill; Jim and Aunt Fran driving to 
 the station in a closed carriage, of which Aunt Fran had 
 made the windows air-tight by tucking cotton-wool all 
 round them. Ellen, Aunt Sallie, and Carrie went by the 
 street cars, up Fourth Avenue to the Grand Central. 
 They were laden as usual with bags, packages, umbrellas, 
 and extra coats, and could hardly walk. When fellow- 
 passengers tripped over these, Ellen giggled with irre- 
 pressible glee. 
 
 The Green Mountains were still brown with leafless 
 maples where they were not black with evergreens. It 
 was early April, and the expiring blasts of snow, hail, 
 and whirlwind trailed dark gray veils across them, and 
 hid the hollows in clouds for days at a time. Those 
 winter sunrises of wild rose were past. One or two 
 girls in school had found arbutus and hepaticas, and 
 pinned them on their dresses. The streets melted into 
 rivers and froze into glass and melted again. The 
 spring was so backward that there was a second small 
 run of sap. Jim began getting up to breakfast : and then 
 one morning he walked up to Willets and Barnhaven's 
 and got weighed. A few days after that he came up to 
 school to see the fellows. It was a tough climb for his 
 twig-like legs in their loose trousers : his knees were not 
 very dependable yet. Aunt Fran had made him wear a 
 newspaper under his coat, it was so windy on Seminary 
 Hill. She had tried to make him wear her black woolen 
 " sontag." 
 
 Julia Oldenbury seemed to have grown ever so much 
 older and prettier in the fourteen weeks Ellen had been 
 
DEEP WATERS 89 
 
 away. Her beautiful red hair was darkening, and she 
 wore it in becoming clusters round her ears and temples, 
 different from everybody else. She had a whole barrel- 
 ful of new poetry, while Ellen was bankrupt, and had to 
 live on Julia's charity, accepting reams of verses, with 
 nothing to give back but enthusiasm. It was largely 
 Rossetti and Swinburne. There was something about 
 this kind of poetry that made you feel thoroughly grown 
 up; perhaps because you could see at a glance that it 
 wasn't any kind of poetry that would appeal to children. 
 Beautiful its mysterious melancholy, its intense sophis- 
 tication, seemed. Its haunting, shadowy sinfulness was 
 very appealing to minds freshly aware of being grown 
 up. Moods of causeless melancholy came over Ellen 
 sometimes, to her great satisfaction; especially as she 
 got further and further away from the novelty and trans- 
 port of Jim's recovery, and relapsed into normal life. 
 With doses of "The House of Life" and " Laus 
 Veneris " to encourage them, melancholy fits could be 
 brought to quite a pitch, on gray days when the wind 
 was not blowing. It was easy then to write verses ut- 
 terly resigned to unmentioned (by implication unmen- 
 tionable) sorrows and losses. It was not so easy when 
 a fresh breeze was blowing. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 GROWING WEATHER 
 
 Tory Hill was turning into a cottage summer place. 
 The old Windward House, so white, sedate, and comely, 
 behind its two great centenarian elms, was losing the pre- 
 eminence which it had held for fifty years. There were 
 livelier dances in the new clubhouse on the edge of 
 the newly laid out eighteen-hole golf course. There were 
 also tennis courts round the clubhouse, and so they 
 called it the Country Club. Still the hops at the Wind- 
 ward House continued to be lively and pleasant, and its 
 long pillared piazzas and shady lawns were well filled 
 with rockers, smokers, and talkers. Prices, in fact, went 
 up at the Windward House after the new street, Hem- 
 lock Terrace, was cut through the meadows above the 
 golf course. Hemlock Terrace was all built up with 
 renting cottages. From June to October it was brilliant 
 with dresses and elaborate gardens and lawns; Tory 
 Hill citizens of middle age were bowed over the lawns, 
 trimming the edges with shears, or cutting out plantains 
 from between the cracks of the sidewalks. The cottagers 
 brought as much money into town as the Windward 
 House. 
 
 Ellen went occasionally to the hotel hops and cottage 
 teas and clubhouse dances. Her one evening dress of 
 black net over washable white silk was well-worn, and 
 
 90 
 
GROWING WEATHER 91 
 
 had often to be mended, in the flounce especially. But 
 it was not her dress, so different from the toilets of 
 most of the guests, that made her bashful and gauche at 
 gatherings of young summer people. It was the light, 
 feathery, top-of-the-wave sort of talk, starting nowhere, 
 and ending in mid air. She couldn't talk unless she talked 
 about something! These other people could. Anybody 
 could begin, anywhere! They had jaunty bits of slang, 
 always the dernier cri, which spiced and seasoned what 
 they said. And then they were always in such frolic- 
 some spirits ! These girls who danced so much, halving 
 all their dances, were heard always laughing over their 
 shoulders, always merry and v/ide-awake and change- 
 able and pleased with life. It was awfully hard to talk 
 with them. And yet they were always so nice. Nobody 
 could be pleasanter or more polite. They verbally 
 pushed and pulled their partners toward Ellen every 
 once in a while and secured a dance for her, as it were, 
 by main force. 
 
 For one thing, — and Ellen was aware of it herself, — 
 she was growing up slowl}^ She graduated from the 
 Seminary in June of her nineteenth year; but that only 
 seemed to leave her with the feeling that she had out- 
 grown one shell, like a crab, and the new one hadn't 
 hardened about her. Some people said it v/as the aunts' 
 fault that Ellen Graham matured so slowly. She ought 
 to have been sent to boarding-school. Others said it was 
 a Scotchy characteristic she had inherited from her 
 father. Others again said she was too honest to be a 
 social success. And none of them were right. Ellen 
 knew herself what it was, better than any of them. It 
 was just plain heavy-mindedness. She knew where she 
 
92 THE SPINSTER 
 
 would have been a thousand times more at home than in 
 Tory Hill teas and clubhouse dances; and that was in 
 the Methodist or Congregational ministry. 
 
 Or if such a thing existed as a social world composed 
 of Julias, she would have fitted into it, she thought, suc- 
 cessfully. She seemed to rest and expand whenever she 
 went down the valley to see Julia. Julia's treatment of 
 a person's ego was very gentle. All the talk that had 
 been bottled up at the dances for fear of sounding seri- 
 ous and being shunted off by a bit of frolicsome slang, 
 and interrupted by the blast of music for the next dance — 
 all the notions so long hidden away from contemporaries 
 that they fairly blinked in the unaccustomed light of day, 
 came out and were aired and reinvigorated by seeing 
 Julia. The relief of talking to her was so great that 
 Ellen scarcely realized how sickish a strain of sentiment 
 ran through their talk together; though Rossetti and 
 Swinburne had begun to pall on her, and she had found 
 Matthew Arnold's shorter poems on a book shelf where 
 she had thought there was nothing but books of travel 
 and French grammars. She couldn't interest Julia in 
 these to the same extent as herself, though Julia would 
 bend her beautiful red head over the Scholar-Gypsy. 
 It wasn't the Scholar-Gypsy that Ellen loved particularly. 
 It was the more moralizing poems, like the one frankly 
 called "Morality," for instance; the ones that differed 
 most from Rossetti and Swinburne; the ones that, so far 
 from making a sweet sort of mystery about some vague 
 sins or other, sweated and wrestled to get rid of them. 
 They tasted of the fresh air, and made the " House of 
 Life " seem stuffy. 
 
 Julia and Ellen sometimes talked about college to- 
 
GROWING WEATHER 93 
 
 gether. Ellen was very anxious to go for one year's 
 special study. She had kept Radcliffe in the back of her 
 mind ever since she had read about it in " Style " a year 
 and a half ago. It was simply a question of expense. 
 Her father had it under consideration. There was a cer- 
 tain small fund her mother had left in a savings bank; 
 it might be managed out of that perhaps. Every now 
 and then, when one of the aunts casually referred to 
 the possibility that she might not go to college, Ellen 
 was startled to find how very much she wanted to go. It 
 was always somewhere in her mind, lately. Even while 
 she read the piteous literature of that forlorn cause she 
 had embraced three years ago, she was thinking of 
 college. College would harden the new shell for the 
 shivering crab, perhaps ! 
 
 As far as young men went, her experiences in these 
 first two years of young ladyhood were of the most rudi- 
 mentary sort. The more she thought about college, the 
 less she thought about the young men she met at any 
 of these summer doings in Tory Hill. Sometimes on 
 the street, on their way to the Country Club, she met 
 some personable young man in tweeds or pink coat, with 
 a bag of clubs slung over his shoulder, who looked fresh, 
 clean, and inviting. Meeting him later, however, at some 
 golf tea, she would find that, to be quite truthful, he was 
 as dull company to her as she seemed to be to him. The 
 ease fully fitting clothes of such young fellows, their comely 
 tan, and fine athletic limbs, remained teasingly attractive. 
 In fact she would gladly have pleased them if she could. 
 Since she could not, it made for contentment in wall- 
 fiowerhood that they were so indubitably dull. Jim did 
 not find them so. He played golf with them and brought 
 
94 THE SPINSTER 
 
 home yards of sporting news and talk about the matches 
 and tournaments, quoting bright repartee from the hps 
 of those very young men. 
 
 It is true that at those trying sorts of entertainment 
 where people stood round, supposed to be busily talking, 
 Ellen sometimes caught the eye of a bashful man, and 
 shot out a glance of fellow-feeling to meet the glance of 
 fellow-feeling which he shot out at her. Even so much 
 as this would give her a sense of being companioned by 
 one of the opposite sex. If things went further and they 
 approached a piazza settle or deserted cosy-corner to- 
 gether, and found that they shared some liking, in litera- 
 ture or life — or better still, if they shared some hearty 
 and unreasonable dislike! — they would talk happily with 
 each other for an hour, or so much of the evening or 
 afternoon as remained. Such a man was usually only 
 spending Sunday in Tory Hill. He was apt also to be 
 near, or in, his forties and to take a half fatherly tone. 
 Sometimes she met someone, whether man or woman, 
 who was congenially indignant over festering steel traps 
 of fur-gatherers, or the still countenanced aigrette. Then 
 indeed she would kindle, and people would stare and say : 
 
 " Who has that Graham girl got hold of ? she's really 
 having a good time. For heaven's sake don't anybody 
 disturb them! She's got such a lot of color, I declare 
 she really looks awfully pretty." 
 
 Only once or twice in a whole season would she meet 
 any man who seemed to like her, mysteriously, on her 
 own account, irrespective of any congeniality of tastes. 
 Such a person would regard her with a cockle-warming 
 smile, and lead her on to talk a good deal about herself. 
 She got so far as to feel a little bit of a flutter some- 
 
GROWING WEATHER 95 
 
 times. These flutters, being rare, she took semi-seriously, 
 and tried love poetry on them, once or twice, to see the 
 effect. It was not very good. Poetry seemed high- 
 flalutin in the dryish light of her experiences along 
 this line. If any of the likes of these were even the be- 
 ginnings of love affairs, then farewell to the poets. 
 Aside from looking forward, confidently, if implicitly, 
 to emotions that she could really connect with poetry, 
 she was an objective lover, for the mere sake of their 
 beauty, of certain impassioned lyrics about love. At the 
 back of Mrs. Browning's poems was printed a transla- 
 tion from the German, which she found very satisfactory. 
 It was one of the few love poems that might have been 
 said by a woman. Its chief charm was in its disem- 
 bodied warmth and fervor. It had nothing to do with 
 
 -a coral lip 
 
 Or a rosy cheek- 
 
 — (was that the reason a w^oman's passion could be ex- 
 pressed by it?) — but it said that when the Judgment 
 should call, and the souls rise up and " dance in airy 
 swarms," they two would 
 
 "stay still where the grave- shade falls, 
 And I lie on in thine arms." 
 
 There might have been a distinct idea that at college she 
 might meet such a not impossible Him as she could feel 
 this poem's fervor for. 
 
 In the midst of all this natural and wholesome young 
 self-absorption, she did think of the garbage street, which 
 had come to symbolize a great deal of social waste and 
 brutality in her mind. At night particularly she woke 
 and thought of it, dully wondering what she could do, 
 
96 THE SPINSTER 
 
 vowing to herself what she ivould do, some day, about it. 
 On one such night she had been to hear a missionary 
 preach about the Indians ; and he had preached better, she 
 thought, than any Bishop or clergyman she had ever 
 heard before. He had asked everybody there to help 
 him ; but not with money. Let them do better than send 
 money: let them "Agitate, agitate, and agitate!" the 
 red man's wrongs. It was moving to hear him; but the 
 application to her own case was made in the small wake- 
 ful hours afterward. She woke up, as it were, primed 
 with it. It was on her lips : some dream, already for- 
 gotten, had left it there. " Agitate, agitate, and agitate ! " 
 She would agitate the garbage street. One of Aunt Fran's 
 queer, interesting old gentleman friends had once said in 
 Ellen's hearing that he was a " professional agitator," 
 That was what she would be, then, a professional agi- 
 tator. Here, among the summer people, the very people 
 who needed to be prodded about such matters, she would 
 speak up, bear witness for the poor people, who always 
 seemed to get the rough edge of everything. It was 
 considerably easier to think you would do it, when you 
 were lying awake, — a good deal easier to think then that 
 you would speak up, than it was actually to speak up 
 when the time came and you were sitting on somebody's 
 piazza, after dining with them, and all their talk was run- 
 ning on golf and bridge and violinists and actors; — to 
 bolt headlong into the conversation then, with a some- 
 what impassioned reminiscence of the garbage street, 
 was not so easy. The subject had to be lugged in by 
 the ears, and held there by main force. " If I only 
 had tact — if I knew how to lead up to things! If I could 
 feel my way, and prepare the ground, and all that ! " 
 
GROWING WEATHER 97 
 
 thought Ellen despairingly. Her voice, too, would al- 
 ways tremble when talking about it, as it trembled when 
 she talked about the experiments in wounding doves, 
 and in grafting cancers on animals. " Practice makes 
 perfect," she thought grimly. 
 
 The way in which her introduction of poor people and 
 their rough edges into the conversation was received 
 was generally a surprise to her. People agreed with her, 
 as a rule, that there was a great deal of undeserved hard- 
 ship among poor people generally. They always quali- 
 fied, however, by saying that of course "those people" 
 didn't feel hardship as " we " would. The assumption 
 seemed to be that poor people were really made of dif- 
 ferent clay from the well-to-do. It was too bad, but of 
 course they were " used to it." " I'll tell you, Miss 
 Graham," said many worthy ladies, " I'll tell you whom 
 I do pity. I don't pity the poor half as much as I do 
 women of refinement whose incomes are cut off. They 
 don't know what to do to earn money : they suffer every- 
 thing before they'll ask for help. They can't stand rough- 
 ing it." 
 
 " They're what we'd call inefficient and shiftless, I 
 suppose, if they were working people," Ellen once an- 
 swered. 
 
 Her hostess stared, and let the remark go unexplained. 
 
 Ellen tried very hard to fathom this seeming idea that 
 there was some radical, even some physical difference, a 
 difference of nature, between the poor and the well-to-do; 
 but she only ended by deciding that it wasn't a real idea 
 at all. It was nothing but a catch-word, a convenient 
 form of letting one's self out of a discussion one wasn't 
 very deeply interested in. With youth's easy arrogance 
 
98 THE SPINSTER 
 
 she decided that the well-to-do didn't care enough to think 
 about it. They could make those few with whom they 
 personally dealt comfortable and even sleek. About the 
 others, she decided, they made a deliberate and success- 
 ful effort to forget. And yet how could they? How 
 could they possibly forget that this subject they dismissed 
 from their minds was life and death to their fellow- 
 citizens? How could they? — "Why just as I do!" 
 cried Ellen to herself. " Most of the time / forget it. 
 I only spasmodically talk about it to Mrs. Greenleaf and 
 Mrs. Dana when I get a good opportunity : and then 
 for a week I won't mention it. Half the time I'm afraid 
 to mention it, just because I think it'll sound too viewy 
 and pugnacious in me." 
 
 It was really the fact that none of the summer people 
 ever took offense at her for talking about the rough edges 
 poor people had, which led her first to conclude that they 
 couldn't greatly care, one way or the other. For some- 
 times she would come home from dining at one of the 
 cottages so excited with argument that she could not 
 think, for hours, about going to sleep; and she would 
 wonder if Mrs. Greenleaf would ever invite her to din- 
 ner again. And next day she would meet Mrs. Green- 
 leaf at the post-office, and Mrs. Greenleaf would say: 
 
 " My dear, you were so interesting and original last 
 night! You worked up the most interesting discussion 
 I've heard for years." 
 
 Yes, that must be the explanation. Cold people, hun- 
 gry people, men out in heavy rains without uml)rella or 
 overcoat, old women scrubbing floors, in stations or 
 offices, that looked ready to drop, weren't real people at 
 all to Mrs. Greenleaf and Mrs. Dana. They were only 
 
GROWING WEATHER 99 
 
 subjects for interesting talk — unless they worked for 
 Mrs. Greenleaf herself, and then they would be snugly, 
 humanly cared for. The point simply was that Mrs. 
 Greenleaf had no imagination — and yet she could spend 
 March in Florence every year! Perhaps this was 
 why! 
 
 Moods of such a sort as this were only occasional 
 with Ellen, in those last school summers. She reverted 
 from them to a healthy, if puzzled, absorption in her 
 own affairs; to thoughts about college, love, poetry, and 
 her own family. It was perhaps a sufficiently significant 
 commentary on her thin ideas about poetry, that she 
 never, in those years before she met Susan Redwood, 
 made any connection whatever in her mind between her 
 vague economic convictions and the verses she was al- 
 ways trying to write. Poetry she thought of as descrip- 
 tive, beguiling, fairylike, or else resignedly moralizing 
 upon one's individual case or the immutable facts of 
 life in general; — never once did she think of it in those 
 days as a militant cry to right injustice, or " bid the 
 weak be strong." 
 
 It was decided that her mother's savings bank account 
 should be dipped into to pay her expenses for a year at 
 Radcliffe. From hours upon hours of poring over the 
 catalogue of studies, she had chosen three courses in 
 English and one in Philosophy; and she went down to 
 Cambridge in late September. 
 
 In that autumn of 1902 there were perhaps a few more 
 twigs and branches on the Washington Elm than now. 
 There were many pleasant windows in Fay House from 
 which you could look out on the Elm, and the salmon- 
 colored maples on the Common, and the rich blues in 
 
lOo THE SPINSTER 
 
 the stained windows of Shepard Memorial Church. Old 
 brown Fay House was still the heart of Radcliffe, as it 
 had been in the old days when Radcliffe was Harvard 
 Annex, or even before that, when it was the Society for 
 the Collegiate Instruction of Women. The new gym- 
 nasium, with the glorious swimming-tank, was the pride 
 of Freshmen. The theater was yet to be built; the 
 swashbuckling Idler plays were still held in the Audi- 
 torium on the ground floor of Fay House; and there, too, 
 were danced the hot, frolicsome Idler dances, with a 
 bowl of cafe-frappe on a table in the ante-room for 
 refreshment. 
 
 Sitting on the steps of the winding, white, crimson- 
 carpeted staircase of Fay House, on the first day of col- 
 lege, Ellen was asked her name by many other fresh- 
 men and specials, and asked them theirs in turn. The 
 new shell seemed cosy to the crab, already. She had a 
 homelike feeling here. These colleagues on the stairs 
 pointed out college celebrities to her as they passed 
 through the halls. They told her something about the 
 clubs, too; and some, who had elder sisters in upper 
 classes, could tell her all sorts of interesting points about 
 the playwrights most in favor in the Idler, and the 
 actresses who took men's parts best, and the tennis cham- 
 pions. One or two girls were pointed out as having " got 
 into " the Atlantic. 
 
 Ellen looked at all these, and especially the writers, 
 with immense interest. They were quite ordinary- 
 looking girls: except perhaps one, about whom there 
 was something pervasively attractive, she thought. It 
 was a short, rather thin young woman, with dark curling 
 hair, every hair curling separately. She had clear, rea- 
 
GROWING WEATHER loi 
 
 sonable, grayish-blue eyes. Ellen coukln t lU'iiI^' vliat 
 picture, or pictures, this girl reminded her of. 
 
 She saw her again from time to time in the halls, and 
 at dances; and sometimes when they passed, Ellen would 
 fasten her leech-like gaze quite shamelessly on this Susan 
 Redwood, feeling a sort of slaking of some obscure thirst 
 within herself while she gazed : at least, that was the 
 nearest she could come to describing her sensation. Was 
 it what college slang called a crush? If so it was a very 
 modest one. Somewhere she had certainly seen photo- 
 graphs of pictures in foreign galleries that this girl 
 always reminded her of. She teased herself by trying 
 to place and ticket the resemblance. No other effort to 
 come nearer she made. 
 
 And in fact it was only when she happened to see Miss 
 Redwood that she wondered at all about her. For the 
 rest of her time was all taken up with other sensations. 
 Coming to Cambridge was for her like a miniature trip 
 abroad; so much older, so much fuller of history and 
 art were the environs here. One didn't think of local 
 history in New York. It was coming to Boston that 
 first made her realize that there was local history in New 
 York. Or perhaps it was because she knew New York 
 first, that coming to Boston seemed more like going to 
 Europe, and less like going to the city. 
 
 What European travel can do as an anodyne, and why 
 people consciously use it in that way, was dimly ap- 
 parent to Ellen from her first walk in Cambridge. She 
 went up to Mount Auburn Cemetery. Looking at the 
 monuments of far-famed great writers there, she felt in 
 a miniature Westminster Abbey. Conscience and inward 
 strife of all sorts surrendered, temporarily, to the sense 
 
I02 THE SPINSTER 
 
 of enchantiiient,; — of having been brought through the air 
 on a magic carpet, to halls of fame like this. The in- 
 scriptions about old Boston, the stones in Copps Hill, 
 the belfry of old Christ Church affected her in the same 
 way, with a sense of intoxication. It was not very deep, 
 perhaps. If it were true, as physiologies in school had 
 said, that we had three layers of skin, this only soaked 
 through the outside one, perhaps. Certainly it was not a 
 through and through feeling, like the blue sky. But it 
 was a delicious sensation, nevertheless. There was an 
 excitement in it, like what it must be to ride in these 
 new " horseless carriages " people still came to their 
 windows to watch. At the fair in Tory Hill in Sep- 
 tember there had been a horseless carriage, that took 
 in passengers for fifteen cents a ride, round the fair 
 grounds. 
 
 The statues and tablets, the old look of old squares 
 and monuments in Boston, the Copley pictures in the Fine 
 Arts Building, the quaint names on the street cars run- 
 ning out to the suburbs, all soaked through Ellen's outer 
 consciousness, and drugged it a little. The incredible 
 fact that she was at college, was studying the art of writ- 
 ing under Harvard professors, drugged it yet more. Vic- 
 torian feelings about art of all sorts, that it was some- 
 thing outside life, a special cult in some way restricted to 
 a few to practice, and not for all even to expect to enjoy, 
 hung about Ellen. To love beauty was natural to her, 
 but she would not have thought it probable that it was 
 natural to the average man or woman. Far less could 
 she think the average man or woman endowed with any 
 powers for creating beauty. Except of course moral 
 beauty ! Flere one breathed a freer air. Here one could 
 
GROWING WEATHER 103 
 
 be an American, a Christian. Unacknowledged, in deep 
 eddies of her thinking lurked the conviction that life 
 mattered, but art was fooling, — fooling which everybody 
 took seriously, beautiful, enchanted fooling! She could 
 not speak with bated breath of the destruction in war of 
 monuments " graven with art and man's device," but the 
 thought of one common soldier's wounded body swarm- 
 ing with vermin, decaying with gangrene, made her, 
 physically and morally, revolt with passion. Other peo- 
 ple talked so seriously of art, however, it must be more 
 important than she thought it. Here in Cambridge, or 
 in Boston, it w'as easier to take their valuation of art 
 than it had ever before seemed possible it could be. 
 Almost, at times, she managed to take all people said 
 about art quite seriously. Though it wasn't morality it 
 might be important. Old painters, great Italians, had 
 painted for wicked Popes and blood-thirsty kings, to deck 
 their licentious walls withal, most pure and beautiful 
 Madonnas. Only it couldn't, in the last analysis, be as 
 important to paint Madonnas (if you could paint them 
 for wicked and worldly Popes ! ) as it would have been to 
 shout " Murderer ! Beast ! " at your patron, and then die 
 in one of his dungeons. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 SUSAN 
 
 In her large, low bedroom under the eaves, at her 
 boarding-place on Audubon Street (up Massachusetts 
 Avenue), Ellen used to think of all these, and other, mat- 
 ters, and plan beautiful fairylike descriptive verses and 
 themes which she could never at all transfer from her 
 fancy to her ten-cent writing tablets. There was a par- 
 ticular hour of the afternoon, especially, when the sun 
 went down, very yellow, behind three dark pines far 
 away in the region of Fresh Pond somewhere. It was a 
 time to think romantic and ambitious thoughts about art. 
 It was a time to plan a very beautiful novel, to be written 
 some day, all one long purple patch. Every word in it 
 should be a beautiful word, chosen like a jewel for a 
 mosaic of jewels. Solitude in her boarding-house left 
 these fancies free to expand unridiculed and unopposed. 
 Her landlady was an elderly though an active lady, with 
 an old dreamy husband, who pottered about curio shops 
 in Boston all day long looking for Revolutionary and 
 colonial fenders and andirons. They liked to talk about 
 their grown-up, absent children, and Ellen capped their 
 talk with endless reminiscences of her home and of her 
 family. She talked at meals with gusto on these topics, 
 but not of her ideas; and even read aloud some of her 
 aunts', or Jim's, letters, saying gravely, " You know I 
 
 104 
 
SUSAN 105 
 
 told you about our little terrier — do you know, my aunt 
 says here that Larkum caught a baby chipmunk the other 
 day." 
 
 There was, however, an audience where she did talk 
 of her ideas, sometimes. It was the corner of Room Q 
 in Fay House, where she sat during most of her Eng- 
 lish courses; that big room upstairs which reminded her 
 a little of the north schoolroom at the Seminary. There 
 were three or four girls with red hair who sat in this 
 corner habitually, in all the same English courses that 
 Ellen had. There was enough cleverness in theme-writ- 
 ing among them and their colleagues at neighboring desks 
 to warrant Mr. Barry, the Instructor in English Fifty, in 
 christening it the Red-Haired Corner. 
 
 With these vivacious-minded neighbors she would 
 often occupy the interval of Mr. Barry's frequent late- 
 ness by a lively confab on the art of writing, on realism, 
 on preciousness, on the adjective, the three-decker Steven- 
 son sentence, or the four running verbs of Mr. Kipling. 
 Every one of the girls near her in room Q intended to be 
 a writer. Some of them reviled the Faculty for not 
 giving a course in playwriting this year, as it had been 
 rumored last year they would do. Some were content 
 with Mr. Barry and what he could teach them of the 
 short story. All seemed to Ellen very clever, very 
 sophisticated in their talk : but their writing usually was 
 not much better than her own. Fantastic, delightful, 
 absorbing conceptions, like her own, they had in plenty; 
 but they would always evaporate, like frosty breath, 
 from the point of the pen. 
 
 Everybody knew it was no fault of Mr. Barry's. 
 Sometimes the Red-Haired Corner would spend its talk- 
 
io6 THE SPINSTER 
 
 ing time, its choral prologue to the lecture, in panegyrics 
 on Mr. Barry. Genius was certainly the name of that 
 fair, nervous young instructor, with the pale eyes and 
 prematurely gray mustache, hurrying in, always late, 
 with pencil poised above the armful of books whence he 
 culled passages to point his lucid lectures. 
 
 " You can imagine him in a monastery in the Middle 
 Ages," one of the red-haired thought, " illuminating 
 Thomas a Kempis." 
 
 " Or Omar Khayyam ! " 
 
 " Or Montaigne." 
 
 "Or Peacock!" 
 
 " To me, do you know, he always seems like a sort of 
 ghost — or no, more like a medium, raising the ghosts of 
 words, making them come to life." 
 
 " Exactly! I know exactly what you mean. He lives 
 in a world of words, not people. When we come to his 
 lectures he takes us down underground into the world 
 where words come alive." 
 
 Ellen said: 
 
 " He's like an ambassador from them to us." 
 
 " In conference, do you know," said another of the 
 red-haired, " he always seems to me to have a kind of 
 secret understanding with the English language. He 
 pulls off all the folds and pads you wrap around your 
 ideas to make 'em look pretty, and keep 'em warm, — I 
 always feel as if my poor little themes were shivering 
 with the cold when he hands them back to me." 
 
 They all went on for awhile, talking about Mr. Barry's 
 ways with words, and how under his hand words seemed 
 to marry and divorce, conspire and quarrel among them- 
 selves; how they developed all sorts of queer, illegitimate, 
 
SUSAN 107 
 
 oblique, subsidiary meanings, undertones and overtones, 
 like music, distances and thicknesses of air like painting. 
 And from that they began to talk about color in letters, 
 and to quote lines of poetry that seemed to them blue, 
 or brown, or gray. The one with the reddest hair of all 
 scoffed, and said the only reason 
 
 " Breaking the silence of the seas 
 Among the farthest Hebrides " 
 
 sounded blue to Ellen, was because the sea was blue. The 
 others exclaimed that Wordsworth had made the lines 
 full of sibillants because sibillants were blue, and he was 
 painting the sea. To test the question the reddest haired 
 one (who was a sophomore, very blunt and sincere, 
 for which Ellen liked her) proposed their taking some 
 famous lines and voting by ballot, as to what colors they 
 suggested. So they took : 
 
 " Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawns, 
 The moan of doves in immemorial elms, 
 And murmuring of innumerable bees." 
 
 Six of them cogitated, and wrote down the colors; Ellen 
 promptly writing " brown." But some had said " sil- 
 very," and some "green," and one said "merely 
 shadowy." The doubting sophomore jeered, and buried 
 herself in " The Virginian " to wait for Mr. Barry. 
 
 When Mr. Barry called Ellen, in alphabetical turn, into 
 conference, she found her returned themes labeled 
 almost monotonously "Thin," "Diluted," "Pallid," 
 " Homeopathic." He said there was something amiss 
 with her. Evidently she was not letting herself go. 
 " To use a very hackneyed expression greatly in vogue 
 six or eight years ago," he said, "your themes aren't 
 
io8 THE SPINSTER 
 
 ' inevitable ' enough. They want body, fervor, earth, 
 sun. What's the matter, Miss Graham? " 
 
 He was hke a bhndfoldcd person who gets very warm, 
 but walks away, after all, from the thimble. Ellen only 
 felt bewildered. He advised her to read Stevenson 
 plentifully, and to lengthen and diversify her sentences; 
 to try to cultivate a sense of humor; and not to be too 
 brief. She did all this industriously, and got her next 
 theme back marked " Watery, — unreal." 
 
 Late in the autumn term the sophomore who had 
 sneered at the notion of colors in the alphabet, and 
 whom Ellen had come to like, in a dry sort of fashion, 
 quite well, carried her off to the Auditorium to a meet- 
 ing of the Radcliffe Woman Suffrage Club. Undoubt- 
 edly she had hopes of getting Ellen to join the club. It 
 met in the late afternoon, and by ill-luck, there was a 
 rainy bank of clouds blowing up over the Charles, and 
 shortening the short November day ; the early lights, too, 
 blinked a little, as if disparaging the poor attendance. 
 The attendance was very poor indeed. Scattered among 
 the front seats were two or three dozen girls only. 
 Ellen's sophomore seemed worried, and cast sidelong 
 glances at her as if to see whether she looked luke- 
 warm. 
 
 " I'm ashamed of the college," she said vehemently 
 at last, as Ellen and she sat down together, well in front. 
 " I hate to have Radcliffe tag along at the tail of the pro- 
 cession ! " 
 
 " It's the storm, don't you think? " 
 
 " Storm — what's a storm ? Fair-weather suffragists ! " 
 
 "The cause wouldn't keep them from catching cold, 
 though." 
 
SUSAN 109 
 
 " That's just where you're wrong, young woman. 
 People that are really interested in what they're doing 
 don't catch cold. Didn't you ever hear that old proverb, 
 Bridegrooms and travelers are never ill?" 
 
 " It's nothing new to me, anyway," said Ellen. " I'm 
 used to sparse meetings of things I'm intensely interested 
 in. There's our village Society for the Prevention of 
 Cruelty to Animals, that my dear little aunt founded 
 years ago in a perfect frost of a meeting; and even yet, 
 if ten people (including none of the honorary directors!) 
 come out to the annual meeting in the Town Hall, we're 
 astonished to see such a crowd. None of the ministers 
 ever think of coming. They invariably all have engage- 
 ments." 
 
 " Oh, well, then, you know what it is to try to get 
 people out," said the sophomore, with a somewhat re- 
 lieved air. 
 
 " Rather I do ! I've been to anti-vivisection meetings 
 in New York, too, in parlors, where there were a lot of 
 empty chairs." 
 
 " Anti-vivisection meetings — what took you there, may 
 I ask?" 
 
 " Why, I always go when I can." 
 
 " Don't tell me you're one of that God-forsaken 
 crowd! " 
 
 " Look here. Miss Marvin ! I used to think they were 
 a God-forsaken crowd too, though my own aunt be- 
 longed to them; I used to take generalities about anaes- 
 thetics for granted, and all that; but when I found out 
 what it really was, it turned my stomach pretty thor- 
 oughly, I can tell you." 
 
 " You don't mean to say you believe all that rot the 
 
no THE SPINSTER 
 
 anti-v's circulate ! Why, that's nothing but bad 
 dreams in print," said the other with an air of amiable 
 contempt. 
 
 " You may well call it rot ! " cried Ellen. " It certainly 
 looks rotten to anybody with a sense of justice, or a 
 sense of decency, or anybody that's read their Bible, or 
 believes in evolution ! Torturing our poor relations just 
 because it's cheap and safe — we'll never get rid of cancer 
 or consumption that way, by infecting mice and dogs with 
 them — low-lived filthy business! " shouted Ellen, making 
 the other stare and laugh, as people turned and looked at 
 them from far across the aisle. 
 
 " And if you don't believe our pamphlets, go over to 
 the Boston Library and look up the references we give — 
 I've been and looked up a lot of them myself " 
 
 " Here, here ! You might pitch your eloquence an 
 octave or two lower. Miss Spitfire!" 
 
 " Well — you just go to a big library and look 'em up, 
 will you, please? " 
 
 " I will, if you'll read Mary Wollstonecraft's ' Rights 
 of Women.' " 
 
 " That's a bargain, then. You get nothing on me 
 there! I've been wanting to read it a long time." 
 
 The dispute was amicably over when at length the 
 chairman opened the meeting by calling for the minutes. 
 While the routine was going on, Ellen asked herself why 
 she was always having to change her mind about ques- 
 tions. Back at school the suffrage debate had had to be 
 given up because nobody would take the suffrage side. 
 And here she was convinced already that at least some 
 women ought to vote; and she felt an upheaval in her 
 mind about whether all women ought not. Changing 
 
SUSAN III 
 
 convictions was ticklish business. It gave one a kind of 
 intellectual vertigo. 
 
 " I have the pleasure," the chairman was saying, " of 
 introducing Miss Redwood. President of the English 
 Club." 
 
 "Well!" said Ellen aloud. 
 
 " Didn't you know Sue Redwood was going to 
 speak ?" 
 
 " No. I've got beginner's luck, I guess." 
 
 " You sure have." 
 
 Miss Redwood threw her head back, tilted up her chin, 
 and smiled in that instant, confident friendliness of hers. 
 She had on a gray dress, and a little fall of lace from 
 the open, rolling collar. She began by saying the ten- 
 minute limit of speeches just permitted her 
 
 " Take fifteen! " bawled a stout girl in the rear, 
 
 " Take twenty! " called Ellen's sophomore. 
 
 Miss Redwood bowed and laughed, but went on : 
 
 " — Just gives me time to tell you about my Great- 
 aunt Jane's experience with the duck-pond." 
 
 " Cut along and tell us ! " bawled the stout girl again. 
 
 " Great-aunt Jane is very fond of all kinds of poul- 
 try," said Miss Redwood in a very matter-of-fact tone. 
 " She has very good success too, with it; but being very 
 fat and old, she has to employ a man, or at least a boy, to 
 manage for her. A year or two ago, she took, partly 
 out of kindness, the son of an old acquaintance; a rather 
 simple-minded boy he was, as you will see. The very 
 first morning he was there, he began lugging great arm- 
 fuls of lumber out of the barn, where the carpenter had 
 left it after building the new bay-window. Great-aunt 
 Jane stuck her head out the window and asked him 
 
112 THE SPINSTER 
 
 what in the world he was doing. He didn't make any 
 answer at all at first, but after Aunt Jane had nearly 
 screamed herself hoarse, he laid the boards down and 
 came up to the sitting-room window and said: 
 
 " ' What say, ma'am ? ' 
 
 " * I say what in the name of sense have you got all 
 that lumber out there for ? ' 
 
 " ' Why, you haven't got no fence around the duck- 
 pond ! I'm going to build ye one as quick as I can.' 
 
 " ' What for? ' screamed Aunt Jane in a frenzy of im- 
 patience. 
 
 " ' Why, to keep the hens out of the water, of course ! ' 
 
 " ' Hens ! Why, hens don't go in the water ! ' 
 
 " ' Just what I was a-telling ye ! It hain't right for 
 'em to go in the water. That's why ye need a fence,' per- 
 sisted the boy. 
 
 " * But they won't go in the water ! 'Tisn't hen nature 
 to swim ! ' Aunt Jane was nearly apoplectic. She was 
 wheezing and blowing like everything. 
 
 " ' Of course, 'tisn't hen nature to swim,' the boy ex- 
 plained patiently. ' That's why I'm buildin' the fence 
 round the duck-pond. It wouldn't never do, as you say, 
 to let those hens get into the water.' 
 
 " ' Who ever heard of a hen trying to swim ? ' screamed 
 Aunt Jane. She told me she felt as if she were going 
 crazy. 
 
 " The boy just shook his head and agreed with her. 
 
 " * As you say,' he said, ' it wouldn't never do. Who 
 ever heard of such a thing? I'll hurry up and build the 
 fence as quick as I can, ma'am.' 
 
 " Aunt Jane just gave up. She saw that she had to. 
 He would build the fence, and he did build it, and the 
 
SUSAN 113 
 
 hens stopped scratching to watch him, and wonder why 
 in the world " 
 
 Miss Redwood paused, and tilted up her chin and 
 smiled. 
 
 " — Why in the world," she went on reasonably, " if 
 he was really sure women couldn't go into politics, be- 
 cause Nature and God had decided they shouldn't, he 
 thought it necessary to fence them out." 
 
 There was a moment's chuckle all over the room, and 
 then a wave of exuberant applause, which made the two 
 or three dozen sound like two or three hundred. 
 
 "Do you know Miss Redwood personally?" Ellen 
 asked her friend the sophomore as they came away from 
 the meeting. 
 
 " Yes, I know her more or less well." 
 
 "What's she like?" 
 
 " What's she like, eh ? Well— Sue Redwood's the best 
 girl to talk to that ever came down the pike." 
 
 " Wish / knew her," said Ellen. 
 
 " I wish you did, Freshie. I hope you may. She's 
 A I, true blue, yard wide, all wool." 
 
 Ellen was thinking of this characterization as she 
 walked up Massachusetts Avenue toward Audubon Street 
 in the rainy dusk. She was thinking how Julia had 
 been for a long time the best person she knew to talk to, 
 and wondering if she still was; or, if she had Julia down 
 here in Cambridge, whether she would not seem a little 
 sentimental. She hardly formulated this notion, but it 
 was vaguely vivid. Julia's tender beauty, and soft voice, 
 and deprecating objections to the vote for women — how 
 would they seem now, this afternoon, walking up from 
 college after the suffrage meeting? 
 
114 THE SPINSTER 
 
 These half-clarified ideas were in her mind as she 
 passed an old brown house a little way above the com- 
 mon. It had a narrow grass terrace and a great lilac 
 bush in front. She only noticed it because, just as she 
 was passing the front door, Susan Redwood came out 
 and smiled and nodded and fell into step with her. 
 
 "Didn't I see you at the suffrage club?" Miss Red- 
 wood asked. 
 
 " Yes, I was there, and I clapped and pounded as loud 
 as anybody. I tried to be the loudest," said Ellen. 
 
 "Are you a suffragist, yet?" 
 
 " I believe I am ! I think you finished converting me." 
 
 "Well, if that's so, I'm the proud woman! Aunt 
 Jane didn't suffer in vain." 
 
 " Have you really got an Aunt Jane, who has a duck- 
 pond?" 
 
 " Why, of course I have. The only thing I invented 
 was the persistency of the boy. As a matter of fact, 
 Aunt Jane withered him up in a minute, half-witted 
 though the poor fellow was." 
 
 " I supposed you made it all up ! " 
 
 " Why, you see, I don't have to make things up — do 
 you? Life furnishes plenty of pointed morals. Don't 
 you think so? " 
 
 Ellen considered. 
 
 " Life didn't convert me to woman suffrage, though, 
 with its pointed morals. Miss Redwood ! " 
 
 "What did convert you. Miss ?" 
 
 " Graham. Ellen Graham. Why, * Richard Feverel ' 
 began it, and your speech seemed to finish it." 
 
 " ' Richard Feverel ' ! " 
 
 " Yes. First Mr. Barry recommended us all to read 
 
SUSAN 115 
 
 it — English Fifty, you know. Well, I got it out of the 
 library, and I felt as if a high wind were carrying me 
 along, up-hill and down-hill, all through the book. And 
 yet all the time there was something angry and protest- 
 ing in my mind. It was Lucy! I couldn't stand Lucy. 
 She was thrilling, she was wonderful, I was carried away 
 with her; and yet all the time I knew she wasn't a real 
 woman. She didn't have any thickness. She didn't have 
 any sides. She only had two dimensions ! " 
 
 Susan Redwood looked interested, waiting for more. 
 
 " She wasn't a daughter, or a sister, or a friend, or an 
 inhabitant of a town, or a member of a church, or a neigh- 
 bor, or anything else in the world but a sweetheart and 
 a wife! " Ellen went on. 
 
 " Evidently, Miss Graham, you've read the book the 
 way Meredith wanted it read." 
 
 "What did you say, Miss Redwood?" 
 
 *' He must have had you in mind when he wrote it." 
 
 " Why — why, I thought he loved Lucy, himself ! He 
 described her as if she were his complete ideal." 
 
 " That's his art. You've never read any of his other 
 novels ? " 
 
 " No. But I can't get this through my head, quite ! 
 You say he didn't — you say Lucy wasn't " 
 
 " Well, I'll tell you in one word. Meredith is a very 
 strong suffragist, not to say feminist." 
 
 Ellen stood still, fairly floored by this. 
 
 " You didn't know George Meredith was a suffragist? " 
 
 " No ! All I know about him is that he's an anti- 
 vivisectionist." 
 
 "And / didn't know that!'' 
 
 " Oh yes, most writers are a-v's. Practically all poets, 
 
ii6 THE SPINSTER 
 
 except Kipling." Ellen paused, embarrassed, and then 
 blurted out, with that childishness so painful to herself, 
 so quaintly pleasing to others, so utterly sincere: 
 
 " Miss Redwood ! That loud talking in that argument 
 before the suffrage meeting opened — that was me!" 
 
 Susan Redwood turned a warm, glowing face, and 
 tilted her chin, and smiled. She took hold of both Ellen's 
 hands and shook them and pressed them. 
 
 " Where do you live. Miss Graham ? I'm coming up 
 to see you some day." 
 
 This sudden warmth stiffened something in Ellen's 
 back; her New-Englandishness, or Scotchness, or some- 
 thing compounded of the two, whispered to her : 
 
 "She'll never get up to see me." 
 
 She was sorry now that she had thought of Julia as 
 sentimental; for here was this Miss Redwood acting as 
 if she felt such a warmhearted interest in strangers — 
 fresh specials — as everybody would know she couldn't 
 feel. So why pretend ? She said, awkwardly and rather 
 stiffly : 
 
 " Nineteen Audubon Street." 
 
 And she added, still more awkwardly : 
 
 " I'll be very glad to see you, — if you do come." 
 
 "Of course I shall come! Well, I turn ofif here. 
 Good-by, Miss Graham. It was just my luck to meet 
 you this afternoon!" 
 
 She seized and pressed both Ellen's hands again. Her 
 manner was Gallic in its warmth and ease and grace : 
 and precisely because Ellen had never known before a 
 Gallic personality, she stiffened New-Englandishly, and 
 thought : 
 
 " That's all polite gush, shaking hands with both hands, 
 
SUSAN 117 
 
 and looking so much in earnest, and so forth. I'll bet 
 twenty cookies she never comes up to see me ! " 
 
 But how charming, how inconceivably winsome, sup- 
 posing it all were sincere, the kindling, cordial light in 
 those gray-blue eyes, the sweet warmth of voice and 
 manner ! She found herself, eventually, piecing together 
 all the impressions of their walk up the Avenue, and 
 feeling again that singular sense of thirst being slaked, 
 which she had had several times before. The final re- 
 sult of her thinking was an impression of someone emo- 
 tionally warm, intellectually cool, against whose com- 
 bined force and charm Scotch and New England blood 
 together reared their stiff ramparts of distrust in vain. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 A FAREWELL TO VERSE WRITING 
 
 Among those themes which Mr. Barry had been hand- 
 ing back so inexorably marked " Homeopathic," " Not 
 significant," " Lacks substance," etc., had been one or 
 two rash attempts at verses. One piece in particular, in 
 which she had essayed a description of the Vermont 
 autumn, — an attempt to put down that sensation autumn 
 always gave her, of care-free enjoyment, almost Epi- 
 curean, — she had sent to the Harvard Monthly. It had, 
 however, been returned. She went on trying to de- 
 scribe, in her themes, the charm she felt in various spots 
 and times : in old Christ Church, on Garden Street, with 
 its scroll text in blue and gold over the chancel ; in those 
 black pines over by Fresh Pond, after the sunset; or 
 reading, in " Richard Feverel," the immortal scene be- 
 side the river; — even in being momentarily surrounded, 
 as she was sometimes, in Harvard Square, by a bevy of 
 athletes out running for an hour. She tried hard to put 
 on paper the sensation these sudden engulfings gave her, 
 of having entered for an instant into their clean joyous 
 striving and achievement; the sense of comradeship these 
 young men half lent her, and then withdrew. The main 
 current of life itself, her strifes of thought and act, she 
 never thought of as material for themes. She felt a 
 beauty in them, it is true: a soiled but sterling beauty, 
 with which art had no connection. Beauty in art was 
 
 Ii8 
 
A FAREWELL TO VERSE WRITING 119 
 
 something else, something static, clear, and separate from 
 the mixed, roiled, noisy, weekday life where moral 
 beauty, being hardier and stronger of stomach, could 
 thrive and do well. And all the time she strove to de- 
 scribe the other sort of beauty in her themes, she knew 
 in her heart that it was fooling, beautiful fooling at best; 
 not immortally worth while. 
 
 But on the day after her walk up the Avenue with 
 Susan Redwood, she found herself writing a theme dif- 
 ferent from any of the rest. It was a description of 
 Webster Willets, and of his manner of escorting her 
 home from Lyceum. She thought she could put in a 
 little humor, and she did manage to make a line or two 
 of the theme faintly humorous. But the fact was, she 
 could not even yet look back on Webster Willets with 
 complete equanimity. There was a certain wince in her 
 desire for self-approbation whenever she thought of him. 
 What had, in fact, obscurely worked on her to make her 
 write about him, she did not then at all understand. 
 That it was in any wise due to Susan Redwood did not 
 occur to her. Some sub-conscious impulse made her drag 
 Webster Willets out and air him in a theme. After she 
 had handed it in, she thought of several other subjects 
 along the same general line : subjects that would, she 
 thought, produce the opposite of beauty if written about. 
 They were basenesses, soiled spots — some very dark 
 ones ! — in her life. And yet she began to want to write 
 about them; or at least, to drag them out and air them in 
 talk with — somebody. She did not definitely think, with 
 Susan Redwood. 
 
 This theme was not yet handed back when the holi- 
 days began. 
 
I20 THE SPINSTER 
 
 It seemed to Ellen that she went back three or four 
 years, if not six or eight, toward childhood again, coast- 
 ing with Jim and her young fifty-nine-year-old father on 
 every afternoon of the holidays. She had never felt so 
 consciously young in her life as now, flying on bob-sleds 
 down Seminary Hill between the tamaracks. And yet 
 schooldays had never seemed so long ago and far away. 
 Jim was still in the midst of school. He wanted to go 
 to Princeton, though he had already made up his mind 
 to be a doctor, and it was a question whether their father, 
 out of his tenuous " Investment Loans " and " Commer- 
 cial Paper " could finance even the four years of Medi- 
 cal School. 
 
 After all, it was great to see Julia again. All the 01- 
 denburys came up for Christmas Day, and Julia too went 
 coasting with Ellen and Jim and the Barnhavens, all 
 Christmas evening. They stuck homemade pine torches 
 into the ground on each side of the road, for the moon 
 was not shining. Once Julia and Ellen sat out a few 
 coasts, letting the others whirl by on the bob-sleds, in 
 the weird flaring light of the torches, while they sat on 
 spread-out overcoats on the creaking bridge over the 
 frozen little stream that crossed the road at the foot of 
 Seminary Hill. Julia was saying that she didn't care as 
 much about poetry in these days as she once had; and 
 Ellen recognized something and said a little impatiently : 
 
 " Julia ! you've got that same old sentimental sag in 
 your voice ! Do cut it out ! " 
 
 " You can call me sentimental all you like," said Julia. 
 " If it's sentimental to feel that the greatest thing in life 
 is to be an inspiration to somebody else — to somebody 
 who — who — — '" 
 
A FAREWELL TO VERSE WRITING 121 
 
 "Are you engaged, Julia Oldenbury?" 
 
 Julia jumped at Ellen's sharp tone, and denied, with 
 soft violence, anything of that sort, adding: 
 
 " What's the matter with you, anyway, Ellen? You've 
 got such a dry, cold kind of way of talking! If college 
 does that to you, I believe I'm glad I didn't go." 
 
 Ellen tried to be sympathetic; but Julia kept going 
 back to those sentimental tones and poses, which Ellen 
 recognized as having been in vogue with both of them 
 in Seminary days; and making veiled allusions to some 
 afifair of the heart, with perfectly evident relish in 
 referring to it, and yet not referring to it openly. This 
 was some other Julia than the one who loved poetry and 
 who could talk about ideas. There was some man or 
 other who had mortgaged her individuality; that was 
 certain. 
 
 " Who is it, Julia ? Talk right out, do ! " 
 
 "Who is who? What do you " 
 
 " Now don't go and ask me what I mean, like a Ladies' 
 Home Journal heroine ! There's some man in your mind 
 — he's been there all this evening." 
 
 " Ellen, what does make you so crotchety? " 
 
 "Why, Julia, I'm not! I only — there. I won't talk 
 about it. Yes, I will too ! I'll say what I was going to. 
 To be really in love I think, of course, is fine, finer than 
 anything else except religion. But people in love that 
 way would be frank and cheerful, I should think. 
 If it was the real thing, they would. Now if you've 
 got, for instance, into a sentimental, moonshining habit 
 of thinking about somebody you want to be in love with, 
 and are trying to he in love with — — " 
 
 " Ellen, you take everything so seriously," said Julia, 
 
122 THE SPINSTER 
 
 in a half-scared sort of way, with one or two small laughs 
 that were almost giggles. " / don't know what you're 
 talking about. I really will be blessed if I do." 
 
 "Julia dear! let the half-gods go, and wait, if it's a 
 thousand years, until the gods arrive ! " 
 
 " What makes you think I have any half-gods? " 
 
 Ellen made no answer, but rose to join the other coast- 
 ers. Her heart was very full: of self-reproach for al- 
 ready respecting, if not loving, Susan Redwood better 
 than her old, dear Julia: of pity and shame for Julia if 
 what she surmised were true : of tender and angry 
 loyalty to Julia as against Susan. She would love Julia 
 best; her older friend should always be her dearer. She 
 would not love Susan best! not if Julia grew conscious 
 and sentimental over twenty young men whom she did 
 not love — not if she married twenty such men! 
 
 As they walked up the hill she thought she could fairly 
 hear Julia smiling a sly, transparent smile, and see her 
 swaying her slim shoulders in that spineless way of hers : 
 or was it only the general flaring, swaying effect the 
 torches gave? 
 
 Aunt Fran, on New Year's Day, heard a piece of news 
 which she hastened, at tea, to tell Ellen. 
 
 " Your old beau, Ellen, is paying some attention to 
 Julia, I hear." 
 
 " What, Aunt Fran ? You don't mean Webster Wil- 
 lets ! " 
 
 " So they say." 
 
 " Why, Aunt Fran, where did he see her ? Oh ! How 
 could Julia — how can she ? This is what it meant then, 
 all that sentiment — I see perfectly! She's trying " 
 
 Ellen broke off, unwilling to say aloud the shameful 
 
A FAREWELL TO VERSE WRITING 123 
 
 thought she had, that Juha wanted so much to be in love, 
 she was trying to be, even with a fellow like Webster. 
 
 Her aunt was saying: 
 
 " See her — why, he's been here half the fall, at the Wil- 
 letses. He's at Middlebury, supposedly, at college; but 
 he's been coming down here for Sundays more than 
 half the time." 
 
 "I simply can't have it so, Aunt Fran!" 
 
 " Oh well, I guess it would be a very good arrange- 
 ment. I understand, though, that the Oldenburys don't 
 like it. Romeo and Celia, it seems, were horrified to 
 find that he didn't know anything about the Punic Wars. 
 Celia said he was ' woefully ignorant.' Romeo said he 
 must have got into Middlebury on false pretenses; and 
 somebody went and told him. and he got into an awful 
 temper." 
 
 Ellen could hardly contain herself about this news, 
 until she had written a letter to Julia about it, telling 
 her how anxious she was that half -gods should not be 
 mistaken for gods. She did not dare to say how much of 
 a cave-man she thought Webster, for fear Julia had al- 
 ready managed to coax herself into an affection of sorts 
 for him. She had to leave almost immediately after 
 New Year's Day: the term opened at once. She had 
 been back in Audubon Street two or three days when a 
 letter came from Julia. It was very calm and forgiving 
 and delicately, affectionately patronizing as of the 
 woman selected toward the woman left. When Ellen 
 came to know, etc., etc., things colleges did not teach, 
 she would realize, etc., etc. 
 
 " Well, I've done all I could," said Ellen to herself, 
 with that old superstitious feeling of hers, that every- 
 
124 THE SPINSTER 
 
 thing was safe if you only did your best. " Curious to 
 think that I wanted so much, at school, years ago, to 
 have somebody pay some attention to Julia; and 
 
 now ! 
 
 That same day she got back her theme, handed in just 
 before Christmas, written about Webster. It was not 
 labeled "Watery" or "Unreal" this time. Instead 
 it bore the sacred word " Original." 
 
 " I envy you, Freshie," said her friend the sophomore, 
 deciphering the red ink, upside down. 
 
 "Don't envy a poor creature hke me!" cried Ellen. 
 " This is the first time I've had a compliment from Mr. 
 Barry." 
 
 " Well, I've never had one. Slams are all I get in 
 conference and out. Nevertheless, I intend to learn to 
 write. Mr. Barry's all to the good. I haven't a bit of 
 fault to find with English Fifty. More power to his 
 arm!" 
 
 " What worries me," confessed Ellen, " is my con- 
 nected theme. Have you got yours planned out?" 
 
 " Oh yes — after a fashion. Novelette, of course. Is 
 yours going to be a novelette? " 
 
 " Heavens and earth, I don't know ! I can't write 
 fiction! I used to try, for our school paper. I can 
 begin all right, and I don't mind conversation : but about 
 the middle I get stuck. I can't engineer that ' dynamic 
 change' that Mr. Barry talks about. The characters 
 all balk, and sulk, and sit down in the middle of the plot, 
 and wont go on ! " 
 
 The wild idea of attempting a sonnet sequence had 
 crossed her mind. But she could vividly see and hear Mr. 
 Barry's vials of sarcasm poured out on it. She thought, 
 
A FAREWELL TO VERSE WRITING 125 
 
 too, of a series of articles on woman suffrage, in which, 
 of late, she was becoming very much interested. But 
 she was too little informed to manage six fortnightly 
 themes, even of minimum length. One would have ex- 
 hausted her knowledge, to say nothing of her thought. 
 
 On the spur of the moment, as she walked homeward 
 up North Avenue, she turned and went up to the old 
 brown house of the Redwoods and rang the doorbell. 
 Could she see Miss Redwood a moment? Miss Redwood 
 heard her name, and ran downstairs and brought her into 
 a long, plain, homey living-room, which had an old- 
 fashioned stove in the middle, with mica windows all 
 aglow. 
 
 " Of course I've got time. I like to be interrupted. 
 Take off your coat! No? Let's sit down here on the 
 sofa, then, away from that barbarously hot stove," 
 
 " I just came on the chance. Miss Redwood, that you'd 
 have time, and be in the mood, to advise me about my 
 connected theme." 
 
 " How did you know my special weakness for giving 
 advice. Miss Graham? Connected theme, you say? in 
 EngHsh Fifty?" 
 
 " Anybody would know that eager tone of voice 
 couldn't possibly be sincere, so why put it on? " thought 
 Ellen, stiffening momentarily, though in vain, against 
 the bright charm of her companion. Nevertheless she 
 went on and told her perplexities in full, ending: 
 
 ** Would you try a piece of argumentative writing — 
 character sketches — or what? Or would you cross the 
 Rubicon and try the sonnet sequence ? " 
 
 " Miss Graham, see here ! — Why don't we go and see 
 father about it? " 
 
126 THE SPINSTER 
 
 " Professor Redwood — oh, I don't think " 
 
 " The more I consider it, the better plan I think it 
 would be. Let's see — is father in ? Wait till I run along 
 to his study and see. — Unluckily, he's out. But look 
 here. Miss Graham — couldn't you come round this even- 
 ing at about eight? I know he'll be in then, for I write 
 all his notes of acceptance, and make his lecture engage- 
 ments. — Why, no, of course he couldn't see everybody 
 from Radcliffe whenever they happened to drop in: but 
 for somebody who wants to write verses, and doesn't 
 want to write fiction, — for such an unusual person as 
 that, he'd break an engagement to be home." 
 
 Ellen stood irresolute, ashamed to tell the truth, and 
 say she really didn't want to beard the old professor. At 
 length she said : 
 
 " Why, I'm ever so much obliged, Miss Redwood. If 
 you're sure your father will really have the time to 
 spare." 
 
 " Good enough ! Bring some of your poems, too. Miss 
 Graham. Oh yes, you must ! " She laid a small, warmly 
 clasping hand on Ellen's arm. " Of course he'll want to 
 see them. I'm coming up to see you, too. Are you at 
 home late in the afternoons? " 
 
 All the rest of the way home, Ellen reflected on the 
 smallness of Susan Redwood's physique, and her singular 
 powers of persuasion. 
 
 " You do whatever she wants you to, and yet she 
 doesn't make you," was her final epitome of the matter. 
 
 Six was the number of the pieces of her verse she at 
 length sifted out of her bundle, trusting to instinct which 
 to submit to Professor Redwood. She dressed in her 
 new dark green woolen house dress, with wide em- 
 
A FAREWELL TO VERSE WRITING 127 
 
 broidered collar, scarlet tie, and black velvet girdle. She 
 took some satisfaction looking in the glass at her sleek 
 satin braids, and the clear bright color which came up, 
 at excited moments like this, tO' such a glowing pitch 
 that it made amends, temporarily, for her pale sandy eye- 
 lashes, and the slight retreat of her chin. Her chin 
 looked to be backing gingerly away from her small 
 upward-tilted nose. Her eyes were not very deep under 
 her brow, and seemed, at unbecoming moments, prac- 
 tically flush with her face. But a complexion as fine as 
 hers could, in its prime, make up for worse defects of 
 feature than any she had. 
 
 " I look comparatively pretty," she said to herself, with 
 satisfaction, tucking the manuscript under her arm. 
 
 Professor Redwood was at home. Certainly he would 
 see Miss Graham from Radcliffe. Miss Susan had 
 said 
 
 Miss Susan came out of the sitting-room, leaving the 
 door ajar, and making variegated voices audible, and 
 the bright mica windows of the old stove visible again, 
 with the two or three plain old engravings, brownly 
 stained, of the grass-grown Forum and Colosseum and 
 Pantheon of i860 Rome, which hung above the sofa 
 where she had sat with Ellen in the afternoon. Now she 
 took hold of Ellen's hand, child-fashion, and drew her 
 down the hall, beyond the stairs and hanging lamp, to a 
 door where she gave a nominal knock and instantly 
 walked in, still holding Ellen by the hand. 
 
 " Here she is, father dear," she said. " Did you bring 
 a lot of your verses, Miss Graham? I'm not going to 
 take myself off until I see you both comfortably settled to 
 talk. There, that's the very chair. Miss Graham — I al- 
 
128 THE SPINSTER 
 
 ways sit there, by the fireplace." In relinquishing Ellen's 
 hand she gave it a warm little friendly squeeze, and was 
 off. 
 
 " Good-evening, Miss Gray." 
 
 " Good-evening, Professor Redwood." 
 
 " Mister'll do. Well, Miss Gray, you're a poet, my 
 daughter tells me. She gave me quite a preface to you at 
 tea tonight. Let's see your poems the very first thing. 
 Did you bring them all ? " 
 
 " N-no, I only brought six. I tried to p-pick out the 
 best of them. I haven't written a great many " 
 
 " Oh! Let's see the six, then; but six is very few." 
 
 " I don't know whether you can read my writing. 
 Professor — Mr. Redwood." 
 
 " I can read anybody's writing. Miss Green. I can 
 read yours upside down. What's this on? Oh, Moun- 
 tain Autumn. Mmmmmmmmzzzzzzzz, oh yes. Let's 
 talk this over a little, Miss Gray. You've got larks in 
 it. Did you ever see a lark, Miss Green ? " 
 
 " I— don't " 
 
 " You don't know ? You probably don't have nature 
 study in your schools yet. I don't know larks when I 
 see 'em, either. Miss Gray; but I suspect, — I suspect a 
 lark's not an American bird." 
 
 " Well— I could change that " 
 
 " It's quite melodious, and you aren't afraid of exact- 
 ing meters, though you ought to be. However, don't be 
 afraid of any meter alive. You'll spoil the immediate 
 verses you're trying to write, Miss Green, every time 
 you tackle a different meter; but never mind that. When- 
 ever you find an immortal poem, or even an ephemeral 
 one, an un-idea'd one, that has a lovely sound, ' play the 
 
A FAREWELL TO VERSE WRITING 129 
 
 sedulous ape,' Miss Gray, * play the sedulous ape.' That's 
 how Stevenson says he learned to write, you know. 
 Here, let's see another. Mmmmmmmmmmm. I should 
 leave out that middle stanza. I should leave off the 
 last one too. Rough versification — rough ! It burrs my 
 tongfue; but — mmmmmmmmmm — that wouldn't so much 
 matter. Miss Gray — Miss Green, if it had an idea worth 
 writing about. But now, what is the idea? Or is there 
 any? Is it a first-hand thought, or is it a second-hand 
 thought? Mmmmm — the general idea seems to be — 
 seems to be " 
 
 " Despair," put in Ellen, with smothered indignation, 
 and not quite smothered pain. 
 
 The professor glanced up at her quickly. His fine, ag- 
 gressive bull head and rapid-fire eyes co-existed with a 
 warmer than normal heart. Ellen looked pretty, too, her 
 wholesome face suffused with bright color: and the gas 
 shone beautifully on her Dutch braids of taffy-colored 
 hair. 
 
 " You've only done in this poem, Miss Gray, what all 
 young poets do; tried to describe a state you don't know 
 — presumably — much about. Well — will you let the old 
 bear see the rest of your verses ? To be your age again, 
 Miss Green — Miss Gray, I'd gladly write young poems on 
 despair." 
 
 Ellen surrendered all four of her remaining poems. 
 He read them all, swiftly and quite silently this time. 
 Then he methodically rearranged all six, and handed them 
 back to her, at the same time hitching his chair forward, 
 nearer to her, in a manner that somehow reminded her 
 of a doctor at a bedside. 
 
 " Now, Miss Green, if you'll look at them in turn, 
 
130 THE SPINSTER 
 
 you'll see what I think the order of merit. A descriptive, 
 melodious, cheerful piece comes first. A cheerful, melo- 
 dious, descriptive piece comes second. A melodious, 
 cheerful, and descriptive piece comes third. The con- 
 valescent child picking the berries I placed fourth: and 
 after that, neck and neck, come the lovers' parting and 
 the lyric of despair." 
 
 Ellen succeeded in smiling, and endeavored to laugh, 
 but produced a sound which drew the professor's sudden 
 and penetrating glance again. 
 
 " I see that you love poetry, Miss Green. You love, 
 you understand, you could teach others to love and under- 
 stand it. You have read with advantage a good deal of 
 modern, and a respectable modicum of old, or at least 
 Elizabethan, poetry. The lyric on the convalescent child 
 is written in the same meter as Marvell's great poem on 
 Cromwell's return from the wars. You know that 
 poem? " 
 
 "Oh, I know it, and I love, I love it!" cried 
 Ellen. 
 
 " Teach others to know and love it, Miss Green ! Fit 
 yourself to do so; it is a great work. Your excellent, 
 your dignified, your aristocratic place in the world of 
 poetry. Miss Green, is to teach and criticise it; not, your- 
 self, Miss Green, — not — not to write poetry. There's 
 more in you than poetry is able to bring out. It doesn't 
 dig deep into you. It's on the shallower levels of your 
 life that you write it. But teach the next generation after 
 you to have a delicate ear like yours, an ^olian heart for 
 the greatest of the arts to play upon. And that's not all, 
 though that's enough for anybody. In your lifetime a 
 new poet will possibly, very probably, arise; come out 
 
A FAREWELL TO VERSE WRITING 131 
 
 and welcome him, understand him, circulate him, Miss 
 Gray; be John the Baptist to him." 
 
 Ellen took up her gloves and crushed the manuscripts 
 into her pocket. If she gave them a little dig, a little 
 shove and crunch as she did so, the surgeon resting after 
 the operation beside his table did not see it. His hawk- 
 gray eyes were misted over with backward thoughts. He 
 sat, frankly obese and elderly, leaning back in his desk- 
 chair, staring at his own young years. His trousers 
 strained over his plump knees. He was a largely-framed, 
 lion-chested man, an athlete still, despite his fat : a swim- 
 mer famed at his Nantucket summer home. 
 
 "Oh! Good-night, Miss Green," he started back to 
 life to say, as she approached the table. " You must 
 remember I'm not an infallible critic, after all. And then 
 I suspect you of not knowing which were your best 
 verses, and leaving better ones at home than these. Oh, 
 well ! I've passed along advice to you, Miss Green, which 
 was given to me a good many years ago by another old 
 codger like myself, at Dartmouth College : and which I — 
 which I — took." 
 
 "Oh! oh!" cried Ellen, touched to the quick, and 
 startled out of her young self-absorption. " I think, 
 I'm sure ! you oughtn't to have taken that person's advice. 
 Oh, I'm sorry you took it ! " 
 
 "Why, Miss Green?" 
 
 " Because Well, because " 
 
 " Because you're sorry for me, bless your heart. You 
 think my feelings were hurt. In which you're perfectly 
 right, my dear child; perfectly correct. They were very 
 badly wounded. But they recovered a long, long time 
 ago. Come here a minute, Miss Gray. I've looked at 
 
132 THE SPINSTER 
 
 your verses : now let me look at you. Folks are better 
 than books. Turn round; let me get the light on your 
 face. There ! well, you look to me like a good child, 
 even if you haven't elected any of my courses. What- 
 ever you write, Miss Gray, don't demean the great arts 
 of language by using words at all unless you have some- 
 thing to say. And if you have something to say, don't 
 look at the gallery out of the tail of your eye and then 
 say something else. Good-night, good-night." He rose, 
 and made rather a quaint bow. " Good-night, my child. 
 Be a good girl." 
 
 A thin and small hand, sliding into Ellen's just out- 
 side the study door, first wedged into her trance the 
 knowledge that Susan Redwood was alongside her in the 
 hall, and then awoke her to the fact that Susan was com- 
 ing out with her, was on the narrow porch, was coming 
 down the steps with her. Susan was asking something 
 about the connected theme, and whether she had got any 
 good ideas for it. 
 
 " Connected theme ? " asked Ellen blankly. 
 
 "Yes — didn't father make any suggestion about it? 
 He's generally very good to talk to." 
 
 " Why, Miss Redwood, I forgot to ask him about the 
 connected theme. You see, I didn't think of it. You 
 see — you see we were talking about my verses." She 
 swallowed once or twice. 
 
 " I think I'll see you home. Miss Graham. I mean 
 Ellen." 
 
 "Oh! Miss Redwood, I'd like to tell you It's 
 
 awfully good of you to walk along with me. But look 
 here! your feet! in those moccasins, this cold evening! 
 And no coat ! " 
 
A FAREWELL TO VERSE WRITING 133 
 
 " I've got a scarf. And anyway I don't feel any- 
 thing but a pleasant invigorating tingle in the air," 
 
 *' I oughtn't to feel anything but an invigorating tingle 
 in what your father said to me, I suppose ! But you see, 
 he said I'd better not write verses any more. He thinks 
 really I'm not fitted for it. I think I'll take his advice. 
 I don't think I'll probably ever write any more verses." 
 
 Susan Redwood said nothing, but continued to walk 
 along beside her all along North Avenue, and Audubon 
 Street; and when Ellen had let herself into her boarding- 
 house, and said good-night, and gone upstairs to her 
 eave room, she suddenly realized that she had been call- 
 ing Miss Redwood Sue and that Sue had several times 
 called her Ellen. 
 
 She found her room cold, and the gas sputtered and 
 flared as if water had leaked into the main. She drew 
 a chair up under the gas jet and laid her bundle of 
 manuscript on it, untying the string. Taking them one 
 by one, she held each of her verses in the gas flame until 
 the sheet was entirely consumed, except the corner her 
 thumb and finger held. She burned the poorest and old- 
 est of them first, and then the middling ones, so many 
 of which had been in the Seminary Mirror. Then she 
 came to the best. It was a little hard to burn up " Ar- 
 butus," " Indian Lane," and " The Last Mile Home- 
 ward " : but it was not at all hard to burn the six pieces 
 she had had with her that evening. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 CALLERS IN AUDUBON STREET 
 
 In the course of February, Ellen did think of a plot 
 for her connected theme. She put the Oldenburys into it; 
 laid it, in fact, at the delightsome, impoverished old farm 
 itself. It was very pleasant to arrange and rearrange the 
 plans for the six chapters, and dwell in imagination on 
 the intimate and fascinating descriptions she felt com- 
 petent to give of the Oldenbury family and the valley life 
 in general. To be sure, when she thought of the place 
 and people, she always saw them in still life. Often, too, 
 as she walked along Mount Auburn Street, or round by 
 Fresh Pond, thinking out the details, they arranged them- 
 selves in a set of versified pictures. She thought these 
 sneakings back toward verse-writing insignificant, and 
 indulged them accordingly. When she had lazily allowed 
 herself to complete the first of these versified vignettes, 
 which began : 
 
 " By Silver Water's westering turn, 
 
 Beneath the rocks of Windward Steep, 
 All lulled and lost in brier and fern, 
 A fabled village lies asleep," 
 
 she bethought herself that it would be rather interesting 
 to send it to the Harvard Monthly. When the next 
 Monthly came out, there was her name on the brown 
 cover : 
 
 Atlantis Town Ellen M. Graham. 
 
 134 
 
CALLERS IN AUDUBON STREET 135 
 
 It was said that the Facuhy themselves occasionally 
 perused the Monthly. A picture presented itself to Ellen, 
 of Professor Redwood rubbing his glasses and laying the 
 Monthly, face open, down on his desk at the page that 
 his daughter had marked for him to read, while he drew 
 a sheet of paper toward him and wrote her a note bid- 
 ding her not to take his advice too seriously; after all, it 
 might be that, etc., these verses were so much better than 
 any she had showed him. No such note came. She 
 might have spared herself the trouble of fancying what 
 she would write back, to the effect that she had thought 
 his first advice over, had decided it to be sound, and ac- 
 cepted it. The frantic dreams of ardent youth some- 
 times fly nearer the mark than the modest sobrieties of 
 middle age. Susan said long afterward that when 
 she showed her father " Atlantis Town " he read it 
 aloud at the breakfast table, and said with a great 
 chuckle : 
 
 " The idea of that impertinent young friend of yours, 
 Sue, going on writing verses! If I could suppose that 
 any advice of mine was ever mistaken — for certainly 
 there's a little thin feeling, a kind of pale imitation of 
 poetry in this; — but no! Better have a good EngHsh 
 teacher out of her, in some good stogey girls' school, than 
 a poor skim-milk poetaster, who gets into the Atlantic 
 once in fifteen years, and lives on that instead of a good 
 nourishing salary." 
 
 Meanwhile the first chapter of the connected theme 
 about the Oldenburys did score a modest sort of success. 
 The beloved unworldly cousins were laid on with affec- 
 tionate touches, and above all Julia — the Julia of long 
 ago quite lived on the foolscap pages. Mr. Barry and 
 
136 THE SPINSTER 
 
 his assistant both ungrudgingly confessed that they saw 
 and heard JuHa; saw her white stockings and quaint 
 child-dresses, saw her curtsey, heard her faintly sing, 
 to her big brother's fiddle, " My Grandma lives on yunder 
 little green," and " Where are you going, my pretty 
 maid?" She had described the heavy Milton propped 
 open on the drying milkpans at the side doorstep, while 
 the big sisters hulled field strawberries, and one read 
 " Paradise Lost" aloud; and how the big brothers sang 
 " Hark, hark, the lark " as they plowed and harrowed. 
 She told, too, how absent-minded they were, and how 
 they would lay down their pitchforks in the haying- 
 field when a thunder shower was blowing up, to discuss 
 the President's message. It was quite vivid and very 
 pretty. 
 
 But in the second installment the continued description 
 began to pall, and she felt herself that she must make 
 something happen. But what? Nothing would happen; 
 nothing, that is, like what usually happened in stories. 
 Such things as had happened to her, such things as she 
 knew vividly about, weren't the kind of things that hap- 
 pened in stories. She did not even think of her own 
 life, as material, to reject it; did not think of it as ma- 
 terial at all. She tried to make one of the Oldenburys 
 fall in love, but could not maneuver a single member of 
 that all-bachelor family into a love afifair that her imagi- 
 nation would so much as nibble at. And all the time 
 verses kept coming into her mind and had to be driven 
 out again. It would be so easy to write a lot of verses — 
 portraits of the Oldenlnirys. Mr. Barry returned the 
 second chapter with the bald query, " Where's your 
 plot?" A love affair for poor Cousin Ceha Oldenbury 
 
CALLERS IN AUDUBON STREET 137 
 
 was dragged into the third chapter, strugghng and kick- 
 ing, by the scruff of the neck. Cousin Ceha was wor- 
 ried by a stick-hke wooer through several pages. The 
 third chapter came back with the comment, " Your lov- 
 ers talk with wooden teeth." 
 
 Three fortnightly chapters since the end of February 
 had brought her to the middle of April. At about that 
 time came on some sickish-sweet weather, with sudden 
 hot sunshine, and clouds of winter-old dust blowing 
 into one's nostrils and throat along North Avenue. This 
 faintish weather came on just as she was getting thor- 
 oughly discouraged about her plot. She believed she 
 was a little bilious, anyway. This old dark-blue street 
 skirt she had worn all winter was getting rather shabby, 
 and she felt a spring longing for a new white lawn waist 
 or two. She believed she would go in to Jordan Marsh's 
 tomorrow. She had a little left of her father's last 
 quarterly check, in the Charles River Bank. Perhaps 
 it would be just as well to take a little nux vomica, iron, 
 and quinine for a week or two. Aunt Sallie's Wednes- 
 day letter hadn't come. Perhaps it would be in the letter- 
 box perched like a bird-house outside the door of the house 
 in Audubon Street. The Easter vacation had been so 
 short — three days — she hadn't gone home. It had been 
 rather a rainy and a homesick time. 
 
 No, there was no Wednesday letter from Aunt Sallie 
 in the bird-house box. Out of sight, out of mind in Tory 
 Hill, evidently! And then as she opened the door, a 
 scent of lilacs met her, and led her, softly strengthening, 
 up the first, up the second flight of stairs ; led her straight 
 to her eave room, and there sat Susan Redwood, in the 
 slanting sunbeams from the dormer window, with a 
 
138 THE SPINSTER 
 
 pitcher of lilacs, mixed purple and white, on the table in 
 front of her. 
 
 The fact was that there had been something dream- 
 like in the whole journey upstairs, led by the lilac smell. 
 Mrs. Ray, Ellen's landlady, was that sort of housekeeper 
 who keeps dark-green shades drawn down to the sill, from 
 the beginning of spring through Indian summer : whom 
 the fear of flies prevents from calling their souls their 
 own. Some people think dim halls and houses gloomy, 
 but Ellen loved a dusky light indoors; it seemed Ver- 
 montish and summer-like, like the dark blue-green gloom 
 of maple shade. Today especially, when the April sun 
 was so hot, and so unmitigated by leafage, it was delight- 
 ful to find the hall so dark, so cool, and smelling so 
 mysteriously of lilacs. Lilacs were the only perennial 
 flower that bloomed at Wakerobin. Next to hepaticas, 
 found in the woods out beyond the Seminary on spring 
 Sundays, Ellen delighted in lilacs. 
 
 " Bother it all, why didn't I take the car and get home 
 sooner? " she cried. 
 
 " Not at all, my dear Ellen ! I've only been here a few 
 minutes. I've been sitting with my eyes glued to those 
 pine trees over by Fresh Pond. What a view you have ! 
 Who'd have thought Audubon Street was up so high? " 
 
 Ellen gave Susan the rocker and took the straight- 
 backed chair herself, leaning over and burying her nose 
 in the lilacs, half smothering her thanks for them. 
 
 " You don't mind the smell — tisn't too strong for your 
 bedroom ? " 
 
 " I should say not — I'd like to stuff my pillow with 
 lilacs. I've got a special hanker for them : the smell of 
 them would do for dessert any day." 
 
CALLERS IN AUDUBON STREET 139 
 
 " But to think it's lilac time — the middle of April — 
 before I've got up here to see you ! I was away twice in 
 March, — I was a little tired with the settlement classes, 
 and the exchange lessons in English and Italian; and 
 father prescribed a wineglass full of Vermont air for 
 me." 
 
 "Vermont!" 
 
 " Why, yes. Don't tell me you're from Vermont, 
 Ellen?" 
 
 " Bennington County — — " 
 
 " Bennington County! Anywhere near Tewkes- 
 bury?" 
 
 " The next thing to it— Tory Hill." 
 
 " What— the Old Street or the New Street? " 
 
 " The Old." 
 
 " Well ! I— will— be— blessed ! " 
 
 " I thought your father came here from Indiana ? " 
 
 " So he did : but he went to Indiana from Ver- 
 mont." 
 
 "And you've actually been in the Old Street?" 
 
 " My goodness, yes. Why, my great-aunt lives in the 
 Evergreen House, in the middle of Tewkesbury." 
 
 "Your Great-aunt Jane?" 
 
 " My Great-aunt Jane." 
 
 "That had the duck-pond?" 
 
 " The surest thing you know." 
 
 " The Evergreen House — why, that's the old Olden- 
 bury homestead." 
 
 Susan nodded. 
 
 " Grandfather married an Oldenbury." 
 
 " Why, then you know Julia? " 
 
 " Of course I do — or did, when I was a little girl." 
 
140 THE SPINSTER 
 
 " And Cousin Celia and Cousin Miranda and Cousin 
 Romeo and Cousin Augustus? " 
 
 " Every Shakespearean one of them." 
 
 " Why — they never told me about your being here ! " 
 
 " Do you know why ? I guess they never knew it. It's 
 that silly old boundary feud. Our branch of the family 
 had some lumber land, that ran up Cock Hollow to where 
 it joifis the Stratton Glen, and of course the Tory Hill 
 Oldenburys owned all the other side of Cock Hollow; and 
 years and years ago, in Great-grandfather's time, there 
 was a dispute about a rod or two of land, and neither 
 side ever gave up. About once in so often a Tewkesbury 
 Oldenbury makes a legal snatch for it, and then there 
 are years of coolness between the families; and after 
 they've been friendly for a while, a Tory Hill Oldenbury 
 makes a legal snatch, and the coolness comes back again." 
 
 They both laughed indulgently over the absurdities of 
 their elders. 
 
 " Why, we ought to be old friends ! " 
 
 " We're practically relations ! " 
 
 " I believe I have heard of that old law suit," said 
 Ellen. 
 
 " Heard of it, — why, if you stayed at Evergreen 
 House, my dear Ellen, you'd hear of nothing else." 
 
 " But to think of your having been in the Old Street, 
 Sue!" 
 
 " And to think of your living right in front of Wind- 
 ward Mountain ! " 
 
 " And our both knowing Julia ! " 
 
 From this they got into a discussion of Julia, and 
 what she had grown up like, and what a great friend she 
 was of Ellen's. An instinct of protection made Ellen 
 
CALLERS IN AUDUBON STREET 141 
 
 forbear to speak of having seen Julia in the Christmas 
 holidays, or of her suspicions in regard to Julia and 
 Webster Willets. She told Sue how Julia was all the 
 time growing prettier and her dark-red hair more and 
 more plentiful and waving, and her complexion lily- 
 whiter. Sue was more interested to know what " Julia 
 herself " was like, and what she cared about chiefly in 
 the world, and what she intended to do. Ellen seemed to 
 look out across all the gulfs of difference between stand- 
 ards, as she answered : 
 
 " Why, I don't know what Julia does intend to do, 
 unless to teach school, for a few years." 
 
 " Why only a few years ? " 
 
 " Oh, I don't know — well, I suppose " 
 
 " She'll get married, you were going to say. But 
 what then? Wouldn't she keep on doing something, 
 even if she did marry? " 
 
 " Well, she'd probably have children to take care of. 
 Wouldn't that be enough ? " Ellen almost added, " for 
 Julia." 
 
 " It might be, for four or five years, — maybe seven or 
 eight years, while they were little, if she did everything 
 for them herself. But unless Julia dies very young in- 
 deed, there'll be a good many years when the children 
 are in school, and a good many after they're grown up." 
 
 Ellen considered, but exert her imagination as she 
 might, she could not see Julia bestirring herself in the 
 church, the Grange, or the Village Improvement So- 
 ciety. 
 
 " Julia'll just read poetry," she said, " and maybe write 
 some, herself, when the house is in order, and the chil- 
 dren are in school." 
 
142 THE SPINSTER 
 
 "Out of what?" 
 
 " Er — what did you say ? " 
 
 " What material will Julia Oldenbury have to make 
 poetry out of, if all she does in life is to write poetry? " 
 repeated Sue Redwood in her sweet voice, tilting up her 
 chin and smiling with delightful reasonableness. 
 
 " She can write out of motherhood, I suppose," said 
 Ellen solemnly. 
 
 Sue shook her head. 
 
 " Modern motherhood isn't exacting enough, taken by 
 itself, to furnish much poetry," she said. " You've heard 
 that old saying, ' If you don't know anything but the 
 Bible, you don't know the Bible ' ? " 
 
 A flash of that same feeling she had had before, with 
 Sue, of quenching a subconscious thirst, came over 
 Ellen. 
 
 " Give me a minute — let me think over this a minute 
 or two," she said. " You see, I've never thought much 
 about material for poetry — in either Julia's or my own 
 
 case." 
 
 " In your own case, Ellen ? Don't tell me with that 
 candid face of yours you ever expected to shut yourself 
 up and spin poetry out of nothing! " 
 
 " Well — I wouldn't quite want to shut myself up; 
 though I always looked upon writing as something people 
 did shut themselves up for. But I like to belong to 
 things. I like belonging to the Monday Club and 
 the Village Improvement, and I've been thinking lately 
 I'd join whatever woman suffrage organization they have 
 in Vermont. But I've always thought it would inter- 
 fere with writing, going into things — distracting your 
 mind " 
 
CALLERS IN AUDUBON STREET 143 
 
 " You were going into them in spite of wanting to be 
 a poet, then ? " 
 
 " Why, yes. To tell you the honest truth, Sue, I never 
 could be so solemn about art as other people are. The 
 Village Improvement Society has undertaken an anti- 
 tuberculosis campaign lately. I must say I think that's 
 a whole lot more important than writing poetry." 
 
 " What's the matter with doing both, is my motto." 
 
 " I supposed I just took a low view of art ! " 
 
 The smile with which Susan answered this was the 
 most appreciative, humorous, relishing smile one young 
 woman ever bestowed upon another. 
 
 In the same moment Mrs. Ray's grandfather's clock 
 in the front hall struck six. 
 
 " What, Ellen ! I only had ten minutes to stay, and 
 I've stayed twenty. Look here! Don't Vermonters al- 
 ways go into the woods on Sunday afternoons in spring? 
 Let's go, together, this Sunday." 
 
 "All right!" 
 
 " I wonder where," mused Sue. " We can't climb 
 Stratton Glen, or Cock Hollow. The best we can do is 
 to go and walk in the Fells. We'll see if we can find 
 any arbutus : though that isn't likely. But we can find 
 hepaticas, no doubt : or do you call 'em Mayflowers ? " 
 
 " Mayflowers." 
 
 " Of course." 
 
 " Addertongue and trillium," added Ellen. 
 
 " Spring beauty and Dutchman's breeches." 
 
 " Foam flower " 
 
 " Bellwort " 
 
 " Solomon's seal and sarsaparilla ! " 
 
 " We'll wear old dresses and take a bite of lunch; I'll 
 
144 THE SPINSTER 
 
 put up the lunch : faculty hoarding-houses aren't supposed 
 to furnish it." 
 
 " Well ! It'll be a picnic, then." 
 
 " The surest thing you know. You'll be ready at one 
 o'clock, my cousin? I'll call for you. Bring a basket." 
 
 Sue was gone. She ran down Audubon Street, her 
 gray merino skirt catapulting from her tennis heels, and 
 the Roman scarf on her straw hat streaming its fringes 
 widely. 
 
 Mrs. Ray rang the supper bell three times before Ellen 
 heard it. Mrs. Ray had bought strawberries, thus early 
 in the season, and was vexed to have them slighted. 
 When at last Ellen did hear the bell and go down, she 
 appreciated the strawberries. Everything contributed 
 tonight to bring on the blue sky. It was a long time since 
 she had had it before. There were golden lilies in a 
 circular bed on the lawn, which she could see from the 
 dining-room window. The unseasonably hot sun had 
 sunk, and left that revivifying coolness which is the ex- 
 cuse of sultry weather. Mrs. Ray got out the hammock, 
 and Mr. Ray hung it up, across the breezy corner of 
 the piazza : but Ellen thought she needed a walk, to 
 soak her lungs in the coolness. She went a new walk, out 
 toward Jamaica Plain. She could have kissed Mr. and 
 Mrs. Ray good-by — she could have come back from the 
 corner and kissed them, so desperately sorry she felt for 
 everybody who was old, who was practical, who was not 
 going to make material for writing out of the fishman's 
 lame horse and the Village Improvement Society, who 
 was not beginning a friendship so brilliant and incon- 
 ceivable. 
 
 Verses about Sue Redwood arranged themselves in her 
 
CALLERS IN AUDUBON STREET 145 
 
 mind several times, and were bounced out. Sometime 
 perhaps she would try them. She would try to describe 
 the curiously curling hair, the arched mouth and full 
 cheek line, if not the character, so briskly sweet, so 
 boldly warm ! This mood of many-coated happiness was 
 after all a little different from the blue sky. She knew 
 what had brought it on. It was the slaking of that hid- 
 den thirst, that thirst for reason and clarity she now 
 began to recognize and name. This happy mood had 
 come with a fresh draught of new ideas about art and 
 life. It had come from discovering a link and harmony 
 where one had presupposed cross purposes. She could 
 make verses of that, too; well, no, not verses : a daily 
 theme, then. 
 
 What if between Sue Redwood and herself there were 
 to be such a friendship as that between Montaigne and 
 Etienne de la Boetie? 
 
 She was late coming back from her walk, and in the 
 meantime something very interesting and unlucky had 
 happened. 
 
 The Oldenburys, who were blue-blooded, and had 
 Cabots and Endicotts and Delanos and Brewsters and 
 suchlike ancestors, had sent a letter to a Harvard senior 
 whose Pilgrim parents on both sides they knew. On 
 this circumstance Ellen was building extensive hopes that 
 she might be invited to the Hasty Pudding spread in 
 June. The gentleman, however, had not called upon her. 
 In desperation of leaving a stone unturned, she had sent 
 him, notwithstanding, a card to the Open Idler. On 
 heavy paper embossed in crimson letters " Concord 
 Hall " he had regretted; a previous engagement. All the 
 time, of course, he might have been at the Open Idler, the 
 
146 THE SPINSTER 
 
 guest of another girl, not bothering himself to meet 
 Ellen. Among the young golfing set in Tory Hill, such 
 brands of conduct, while warmly condemned, were not 
 unknown. Besides, he might have thought her sending 
 him the invitation quite unwarranted. She wondered 
 whether he thought her green, or too coming-on, or both ; 
 brazenly hoping, at all events, that by inviting him to the 
 Idler she had nailed an invitation for herself to the 
 Hasty Pudding. Secretly she might have doubts as to 
 the extreme enjoyability, for her, of going to any spread 
 at all. But, looking through other people's eyes, she saw 
 the achievement of being invited as a triumph — a tri- 
 umph, too, which would rather please Aunt Fran. 
 
 As to this Mr. Sayre's ever calling on her, she had 
 long since given up any such notion. She did know a 
 freshman or two, who had been known to call. But she 
 really had more sense of companionship when those col- 
 lege athletes in running-shorts overtook her in the square 
 than when these shy, dense youths, in Mrs. Ray's parlor, 
 revolved their hat brims on their knees and tried to talk. 
 A senior, however, w6uld naturally be a very different 
 kettle of fish; and she was sharply disappointed when, 
 on coming back from her walk, she was met by Mrs. 
 Ray advancing with a small card glimmering in her 
 palm. 
 
 " A gentleman to see me, you say, Mrs. Ray? " 
 " Two gentlemen. But only one left a card." 
 " Oh ! Do let me see it. I believe it must have been 
 Mr. Sayre." 
 
 " No — yes — let me see. ' Mr. Willis Bradford Sayre.' 
 The other one told me his name, but I declare I've for- 
 gotten. Something like Alderman or Baldwin — 'twasn't 
 
CALLERS IN AUDUBQN STREET 147 
 
 either of those. Well ! no matter. They had quite a 
 time laughing about it. This one that left the card, he 
 says to the other one: 
 
 " ' Where's your card, Frank? ' 
 
 "(There! That was his first name, anyway!) 
 
 " * Frank, where's your card,' says he. 
 
 " Thinkses I, don't ask me to remember no names ! 
 
 " ' Card ! ' says the other one, and he began to laugh. 
 ' I guess I left it in my gold cigar case,' he says. 
 * Madam,' he says, ' I'll spell my name out for you.' 
 He did spell it out, but I don't never remember names, 
 never did and never will. It's no matter, for of course 
 they'll call again. I invited them to. I said, ' Gentlemen, 
 call again, when Miss Graham's at home,' I said. They 
 thanked me. The one that left the card, he says to the 
 other, as they went down the steps, he said : 
 
 " * Duty performed is a rainbow to the soul.' " 
 
 " How did they look? " inquired Ellen, trying to laugh. 
 
 " The one that left the card, he looked kind of a swell, 
 but the other one, Frank as he called him, he looked kind 
 of shabby. At all events they were great friends. They 
 went off arm in arm." 
 
 This was on Saturday evening in the middle week of 
 April. Ellen had reason afterward, or thought she had 
 reason, to remember it. 
 
 Sunday morning was cloudy, fresh, and soft. She 
 went to Christ Church as usual, and as usual enjoyed 
 the hymns, and the blue and gold text, " Thine eyes shall 
 see the King in his beauty," over the chancel. It was not 
 such a perfect day for the woods as she had hoped. At 
 least it did not seem the regulation weather for picnics; 
 and yet, when she and Susan reached the Fells, at about 
 
148 THE SPINSTER 
 
 two o'clock, and began wandering in that sweet wilder- 
 ness, the cloudy light seemed lovelier than a dappling 
 sun coming through pine and hemlock, beech and birch. 
 Crackling innumerable twigs and bedded brown leaves 
 covering just such small chasms of hollow rock as 
 abounded in the Seminary and Sugar woods at home, 
 they came, just as they might have done at home at this 
 season, upon a little plot of blue hepaticas, or less prized 
 pink and white ones; flimsy little purple- veined spring 
 beauties, which came up, curly root and all, when you 
 tried to pick them : and ill-smelling crimson trillium, 
 with its ugly, vigorous Vermont name of " stinking 
 Benjamin." There were speckled plantations of the buff- 
 colored trumpet-bells of the addertongue, and ferny- 
 leaved, wax-white Dutchman's breeches. It was a true 
 home April ramble. Susan kept calling, coo-eeing across 
 some small glen, or plumping down suddenly on her knees 
 to pick some bashful darling of the forest: and some- 
 times she would sing: 
 
 " The flowers o' the forest are all wede away." 
 
 Ellen, who had often heard her Scotch father try to 
 sing it, joined in, a little off the key. They had met no- 
 body, and had the sense of having the whole vast wood 
 to themselves. They spread out their lunch on the rocks 
 as the afternoon began to wane; and when it was eaten, 
 they still sat luxuriously lolling on the rocks and talking. 
 
 "Are you going to write, Sue?" Ellen began by 
 asking. 
 
 " I hope so." 
 
 "What? Poetry?" 
 
 "Poetry's the very last thing I'd ever try to write! 
 
CALLERS IN AUDUBON STREET 149 
 
 I haven't a bit of enjoyment of poetry unless it expresses 
 an idea new enough to be worth while expressing: and 
 then I'd rather, nine times out of ten, have it in prose." 
 
 " But don't you read poetry at all for pleasure in the 
 form of it?" 
 
 " Well — I admit I like the sound of it when it has 
 plenty of sense to ballast it — when it's better said in 
 meter than it could be in prose; otherwise not. It's the 
 fault of my ear, I suppose." 
 
 " But take Swinburne, for instance," persisted Ellen. 
 " I don't read Swinburne as much as I used to, it's true. 
 And yet I feel all the beauty he packs into his lovely long 
 lines. Don't you like the chorus in ' Atalanta' 'When 
 the hounds of spring ' ? But all he says there is that 
 spring is a pleasant season, and that a lot of mythology 
 clusters round it. If you come right down to its skele- 
 ton!" 
 
 " I know. It's my ear, you see. It ought to hypnotize 
 my brain, but it can't." 
 
 '' Oh, what a lot of lovely sounds you miss! " 
 
 " But then, you see, I love music." 
 
 ** Well — yes. But I begrudge your missing Atalanta 
 in Calydon." 
 
 " Would you care to write lovely sounds without much 
 sense, Ellen ? " 
 
 Ellen thought this over. 
 
 " Before I met you. Sue, by jinks, I would! " 
 
 Sue shook her head. 
 
 " I don't believe you'd have been contented with such 
 poetry when it was done. You see I pay it the compli- 
 ment of calling it poetry." 
 
 " I don't know that I would have been quite con- 
 
150 THE SPINSTER 
 
 tented with it," said Ellen. " I'd want to speak for 
 somebody or something. I'm like those painters that 
 always wanted a human being in their landscapes. Only 
 I would be glad and proud to express the feelings of 
 animals. They get the rough edge of things, all right ! " 
 
 " You want to express the feelings of somebody or 
 something that's getting the rough edge of things, do 
 you?" 
 
 " I would, if I could. The trouble is, it's all such a 
 cauldron of indignation and disgust in my mind, I could 
 never make anything beautiful out of it; I don't believe 
 I could. The only way I could make anything beautiful 
 would be to go back to olden times, somewhere in history, 
 where I could feel that things were at peace." 
 
 " Fictitious spot! " cried Susan. " Things never were 
 at peace." 
 
 " Still there was an idyllic age in this country," Ellen 
 persisted. 
 
 " Slavery was going on, prisons and asylums and poor- 
 houses were filthy, unhealthy, — more so even than they 
 are now ! — and married women had no rights, and labor- 
 ers worked from sunrise to sunset. The death rate was' 
 pretty high in those idyllic times, Ellen ! There were 
 lots of funerals of babies ! " 
 
 " Still there was something idyllic about stage-coaches, 
 and hoops, and pantalettes, and bake-ovens, and so 
 forth." 
 
 Sue smiled. 
 
 " ' Farewell, Romance ! ' the cavei men said,' " she 
 quoted. 
 
 " Anyway, the old times fascinate me. I could read 
 about 'em in Mrs. Earle's books forever. Perhaps our 
 
CALLERS IN AUDUBON STREET 151 
 
 descendants will look back on steam engines just as 
 fondly as I do on stage-coaches; let 'em then; that's 
 only fair.-^What are you going to write? " asked Ellen 
 suddenly. "Novels?" 
 
 " Plain modern novels are what I want to write. Noth- 
 ing symbolic or mystic at all. Just plain everyday life. 
 Though of course I can't write about it in a state of 
 anarchy, the way it looks to the naked eye — I'll have to 
 have some connecting notion running underneath." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 " My goodness, Ellen, what a question." 
 
 " But answer it. Sue. Why not take a slice of life all 
 in a stew, as it is, and write it down?" 
 
 " You've just said yourself you'd have to go back to 
 a place where there was a little peace. You'd find it, you 
 think, in stage-coaches ; I think you're mistaken about 
 that; but no matter. I think I'll find peace enough to 
 work in, if I get a connecting idea under the welter. In 
 fact, I think I've got it." 
 
 " Still that doesn't answer the question. Why not 
 take a slice of welter and make a book of it? " 
 
 "Cuibono?" 
 
 " For art's sake." 
 
 " W^hat art is there in a phonograph ? " 
 
 " Well, Sue, I guess you've got me there. I guess 
 you're right. To tell the truth, I don't want to read 
 a book of welter." 
 
 " You couldn't find one, if you did, my dear woman. 
 Nobody ever looked at nature and tried to describe her 
 without tucking in a prescription for her complexion, 
 somewhere." 
 
 " What's your prescription, Sue ? You said you 
 
152 THE SPINSTER 
 
 thought you had one — or at least a connecting idea " 
 
 " Why, I suppose Reason." 
 
 "Oh!" 
 
 " What would yours be, do you think ? " 
 
 " Well, Kindness, I guess, if I had one." 
 
 " Not so worse ! " 
 
 " Every time I see you, you go and dig up the ground 
 of my mind to plant pome new notion in it, Sue." 
 
 " No, I don't. I just stroll round the garden to 
 see what's already growing there." 
 
 " I should very soon," said Ellen musingly, " get into 
 the habit of having to talk over every belief I have in 
 the world, with you." 
 
 " I never had a sister," said Sue. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE YOUNG MAN WHOSE NAME MRS. RAY 
 
 FORGOT 
 
 ** No use ! " Ellen addressed herself. " I capitulate. 
 I can't resist writing one more piece of verse." 
 
 She sat down on the floor by her desk window at 
 Wakerobin, and leaned out into the Vermont June. She 
 had been at home from college a week. 
 
 The teasing itch to try verses on Sue Redwood had 
 kept nudging her ever since their first meeting, after the 
 suffrage club. Once already she had yielded to it : namely 
 on that Sunday evening of their walk in the Fells. But 
 then she had tried to write an outward description. She 
 had not known how to penetrate, in verse, beyond a pic- 
 ture, with what it might convey, or hint, of force and 
 charm, of the mobile, clear face, lucid eyes, and blithely, 
 confidently, friendlily smiling mouth; the swift running, 
 and clear woodland calling, and all the light, brisk mo- 
 tions of the small, wiry body. As far as it went, it was 
 very pretty. She had finished it, and called it " Sylvia " — 
 because they had happened to be in the woods that day, 
 presumably. Now she wanted to write a very different 
 description. She wanted to put in the mind, the heart 
 and will, of her friend; the essential greatness of her 
 nature, as it seemed to show itself. Feeling a conquer- 
 ing power in these aspects of her friend's character, she 
 called the verses " Alexandra." 
 
 153 
 
154 THE SPINSTER 
 
 The afternoon of this day week had been the after- 
 noon of spreads; when the unknown Mr. Sayre had hved 
 up to his possibihties, and sent her a card for the Hasty 
 Pudding. She had a quite pretty white dress to wear 
 and had spent, what so often was the case, a fairly pleas- 
 ant time, of which, however, the best part was the realiza- 
 tion that she had achieved the Hasty Pudding. The 
 next best part of it, to be quite candid with herself, had 
 been the strawberries and cream. Mr. Sayre had a bevy 
 of guests. He had a bevy of henchmen, too, to beau 
 them about; but the henchman who beau'd Ellen about 
 was evidently 7iot the shabby stranger named Frank, who 
 had called on that Saturday evening in April. She looked 
 about the hall and wondered which was he. Remotely 
 she wondered how some girl with more assurance and 
 skill would have managed to ask Mr. Sayre if she 
 mightn't meet the friend who had called with him that 
 evening. But now, of course, she would never see that 
 shabby, laughing, rather interesting unknown man. 
 
 After all, the spread was really very pleasant, in the 
 usual mild degree of entertainments where people sat 
 round, or stood round, aimlessly. Of course one felt 
 always a little awkward, a little like a young calf. One 
 expected to. Time rather dragged, as usual, at inter- 
 vals. People had described " agonies " of bashfulness. 
 This was nothing like that. Still it was rather nice to get 
 home, and take off the pretty white dress and best pet- 
 ticoats, and find, with some relief, that they were still 
 perfectly fresh, and could be worn once more before 
 washing; and to know all the time that you had really 
 been at the Hasty Pudding spread, and that at this time 
 tomorrow you would be at home. 
 
THE YOUNG MAN MRS. RAY FORGOT 155 
 
 And here she was. 
 
 There was a desk now in her old cubby corner of the 
 hall, where she had once kept her dolls. It crowded the 
 wee place fearfully, but it was cosy beyond words. The 
 desk was a soap-order desk, a premium that came with 
 ten dollars' worth of Rising Sun laundry soap. On the 
 top shelf she had all the books of poetry she owned; ten 
 or fifteen Rolfe Shakesperes, a fat green Wordsworth, 
 and a thin brown Keats; second-hand copies of " Ata- 
 lanta " and " Laus Veneris," and three dark-blue 
 Canterbury Poets with white labels: they were 
 George Herbert, Matthew Arnold, and the Irish 
 Minstrelsy. 
 
 The second verses on Sue (refused by the Atlantic, 
 Scribner's, the Century, and others) were not the only 
 ones she wrote. As the summer went on, she found her 
 pen more and more balky at the crises of stories. She 
 sat every day at her desk and wrote, it is true. " Please 
 make an excuse for me, for I want to write," disposed of 
 the old ladies from far townships who were always driv- 
 ing in to call and ask for " Mary's Ellen." She was 
 suffused with a nebulous desire to write, and a visionary, 
 scattering imagination. With a sense of being very busy 
 and methodical, she would begin her desk-mornings by 
 looking over her notebook, trying, but sometimes in vain, 
 not to see every notion she had set down in it under the 
 guise of potential verses. She would meticulously alter 
 these jottings, and combine, piecemeal, two or three of 
 them into a thin small plot for a story — a plot always of 
 successive, complete, and never of tangled, events. A 
 long time she would enjoyably spend thus; and then 
 would draw her writing tablet toward her, and for the 
 
156 THE SPINSTER 
 
 fifteenth or sixteenth time elaborate the opening for a 
 story — intensifying the adjectives, and changing the 
 heroine's name to something more melodious and sym- 
 bolical — something more like " Clare Doria Forey." 
 Always she would bump her head in vain against the 
 stone walls of the crises she could always plan but never 
 write; always she would run into character after char- 
 acter, stupidly standing where last left, grinning like a 
 Cheshire cat. Helplessly and idiotically her characters 
 stood round; and when they had been standing, first on 
 one leg, then on the other, for a long time, she would 
 conclude that her morning's work was done, and with a 
 joyful sigh, would begin a letter to Sue. 
 
 Ambitions and opinions took up a great part of these 
 schoolgirlishly frequent letters. In the middle of that 
 summer a serial discussion of w^oman suffrage took place 
 between herself and Sue, in which she soon found herself 
 taking a far livelier interest than in her paralytic stories. 
 It was she who had begun it by telling Sue that, to her 
 delight, her Aunt Fran was becoming interested in woman 
 suffrage. 
 
 " Aunt Fran really has leanings," she wrote. " She 
 calls herself 'very opinionated' anyway; and lately she 
 wanted our village to bond itself, and own its own water- 
 works, and luckily for the cause, the men voted the other 
 way. Both my aunts went up to the village meeting 
 where it was decided, and Aunt Fran kept trying to 
 stand up and say something, and Aunt Sallie kept pulling 
 her down. I believe my Aunt Fran is something like your 
 Great-aunt Jane in Tewkesbury that had the duck-pond. 
 Anyway, she's beginning to think it's queer that an edu- 
 cated single woman shouldn't be allowed to vote, when 
 
THE YOUNG MAN MRS. RAY FORGOT 157 
 
 every ignorant day laborer, that doesn't own the spade he 
 digs with, can vote away her property ! " 
 
 Sue's answer to this at once plunged into the dispute. 
 She wrote that Ellen's letter sounded as if she thought 
 well-to-do, educated people needed extra special protec- 
 tion against the powerful influence of the poor. 
 
 Re-presented in this way, Ellen's view galled her; but 
 she stuck to her colors so far as to answer that it was 
 " just the anomaly of the thing." 
 
 " It does seem so ridiculous that Henry Spalding, down 
 the valley road, for instance, who's always in debt, and 
 can't spell his own name, should be allowed to vote when 
 my intelligent aunts are not ! " 
 
 Sue replied : 
 
 " If you just call it ridiculous that your aunts haven't 
 the right to vote, of course I most emphatically and in- 
 dignantly agree with you; it's an outrage on the town, 
 state, and country to muzzle half the sense and morality 
 of the nation, and chain it up at a safe distance from 
 politics. But it doesn't, my dear Ellen, seem at all ridicu- 
 lous, to me, that a man who is economically submerged, 
 struggling against odds with poverty (whether the odds 
 are partly his own natural inefficiency, or not) who is 
 handicapped by pitifully and shamefully small educa- 
 tional advantages — it doesn't seem to me at all ridiculous 
 that such a man, who needs the vote so much, should have 
 it. Does it really seem ridiculous to you ? But of course 
 not ! From him that hath not, you'd be the last person 
 to take away (but thank God it can't be done!) even that 
 which he hath." 
 
 Ellen was persuaded in the organ of her persuadability, 
 her heart, or call it her moral will, by this appeal, which 
 
158 THE SPINSTER 
 
 was merely a match to the tinder already waiting within 
 her, stored up from the Ashman's horse, the garbage 
 street, Carrie's lonely meals, and many another kaleido- 
 scopic impression, for many years past. The only feeble 
 protest she made was to say in her next letter that she 
 didn't think Henry Spalding was qualified to vote. He 
 couldn't possibly understand the questions involved. 
 
 Sue wrote back: 
 
 "Of course not! The point is, though, — I think the 
 point is that if Henry Spalding doesn't know himself 
 what he wants, nobody else can possibly know." 
 
 " Other people," wrote Ellen, " might know what was 
 best for him." 
 
 This appeared to be a red rag to Susan. She wrote 
 back that she saw the cloven hoof whenever she heard 
 that " sanctimonious expression," " best for." She de- 
 clared that it sounded altogether too much like what hus- 
 bands used to say about wives, and masters about slaves, 
 and kings about people ; and she added maliciously : 
 
 " Perhaps it's exactly what Henry Spalding is think- 
 ing about your Aunt Fran and the waterworks, at this 
 very minute. I can just hear Henry Spalding saying to 
 his neighbor that men know a good deal better than 
 women what's best for them." 
 
 " Well, Sue," wrote Ellen, " you've converted me to 
 another of your ideas. Though I don't think I ever 
 wanted to take away the vote from Henry Spalding." 
 
 Sometimes, in her letters to Sue, Ellen used to sketch 
 out her rather anaemic plots, and describe her characters. 
 Sue in reply said more than once : 
 
 " Those stories of yours sound more like lyrics, to me." 
 
 Once she wrote: 
 
THE YOUNG MAN MRS. RAY FORGOT 159 
 
 " Father says that plot of yours about the old woman 
 and the poplar tree would make a better sonnet than any- 
 thing else. A landscape sonnet he says." 
 
 Ellen read that letter over several times, with a sort 
 of gratified resentment, to think that Professor Redwood, 
 who had stopped her from writing verses, should now be 
 irresponsibly encouraging her to write them. She de- 
 clined to change her conception of the old woman and 
 the poplar tree. She went on, all summer, beginning 
 her balky, sulky stories, and polishing her beginnings over 
 and over and over. Everybody said, if you wanted to 
 make money by writing, write short stories. And Jim was 
 anxious to take the scientific course at Princeton before 
 entering the medical school, which would mean hard 
 sledding for her father; so it would be extremely ad- 
 visable to begin at once to write short stories and sell 
 them. Susan sent up from Nantucket De Maupassant's 
 " Odd Number," and advised that it should be read, 
 marked, and digested. Ellen, however, read '' A Piece of 
 String " and revolted at it. The feverish wrong-headed- 
 ness of it put her into a temper. It was as bad as the 
 nightmare accidents in " Far from the Madding Crowd " 
 and " Tess." She wrote hotly to Sue that she wouldn't 
 write like that if she could. ' 
 
 Ellen was not seeing very much of Julia this summer. 
 The fault was about evenly divided between them. Ellen 
 found it much more invigorating to write to Sue, and 
 have letters from her, than to go down the valley to see 
 Julia, who had so much sentimental sag in her voice 
 lately. It was undoubtedly Webster Willets. He had 
 been down from Ox River twice already since college 
 closed, to see her. Ellen knew, because Cousin Celia, 
 
i6o • THE SPINSTER 
 
 whenever she stopped to sell cream cheese, would tell her. 
 The affair troubled Julia's sisters and brothers somewhat; 
 chiefly, perhaps, on intellectual considerations. Webster 
 was never the fellow who would have fallen in with 
 Oldenbury notions about the relative importance of 
 things; indeed, one could see him, in fancy, trying to 
 stir up the slow pace of the Oldenburys, to remodel their 
 beautiful old house, and use intensive methods on their 
 crop-bare farm. Ellen's objections went deeper, and 
 were harder to pin down into concrete language. Julia's 
 toleration of Webster exasperated her, and even aroused 
 her so seldom aroused contempt. She never said so to 
 herself, however, or analyzed what it was which made 
 her obscurely irritated if Julia, according to their old 
 wont, talked about poetry when they met. Deep, very 
 deep, like rock beneath her impatience and scorn was a 
 sense of loyalty — perhaps Julia had it too — there was a 
 thought ! Something insistent, tender, unreasonable, 
 would keep the old lamp trimmed and burning. In fact 
 Ellen was conscious of a sort of jog-trot constancy in her 
 loves. They couldn't be rooted out: like legendary 
 orchids, they could live on air. 
 
 The great achievement of the summer was finishing 
 one tiny story, or rather still life picture, of a tired farm- 
 er's wife with a sort of Daltonism, red and green ara- 
 besques dancing biliously before her eyes. A pseudo- 
 radical magazinelet, about the size of a Hood's Sar- 
 saparilla Almanac, accepted this, with the jovial note: 
 
 "But, bless your soul, we don't pay anything!" 
 
 Pay anything! One was grateful that they didn't 
 charge anything. 
 
 This so-called story being printed (at once) and many 
 
THE YOUNG MAN MRS. RAY FORGOT i6i 
 
 copies of the magazinelet circulated in Tory Hill by the 
 fond, fatuous aunts, Ellen felt that she had accom- 
 plished something considerable in the literary line, and 
 took to dreaming, not to say dozing, at her desk in the 
 cubby-hole, on hot August afternoons when thunder- 
 storms were brewing. ^ 
 
 " Why, I thought your forte was poetry, all about 
 loving and dying," said Jim when he was shown the 
 printed evidence of his sister's genius in The Ishmaelite. 
 
 " No, Jim, I never write verses any more — hardly ever. 
 I was advised — at college — not to." 
 
 " Well, this would make a better piece of poetry than 
 it does a story, anyway." 
 
 " The new story writers use that form of successive 
 pictures a good deal," said Ellen instructively. " I write 
 all mine that way. I sent one off yesterday to Mc- 
 Quaid's in three parts — each a picture : all the things 
 that happened, happened in between." 
 
 " Yes — out of sight of the reader. I bet the public 
 won't stand for that." 
 
 "Time will tell," said Ellen, but she felt a little 
 shaken. 
 
 " There don't enough happen in this story, as you call 
 it, to suit me, anyway," persisted Jim. " I guess it's 
 written all right, though, as far as the style goes. I could 
 prescribe for your heroine at all events; you've done her 
 symptoms O. K." 
 
 Jim had said, with such deceptive cheerfulness that he 
 succeeded in keeping them all from guessing a twentieth 
 part of his disappointment, that he would give up col- 
 lege altogether, since his father could manage no more, 
 even by the utmost endeavor, than to finance his four 
 
i62 THE SPINSTER 
 
 years at the medical school. But the aunts were unwill- 
 ing to let him give up college altogether, and did a great 
 deal of anxious contriving about helping him to a degree 
 of Bachelor of Science at Princeton, if he could cover 
 the four years' course there in three years. The aunts 
 filled many sheets of pads with figures, and Aunt Fran 
 could be seen sometimes, even when visitors were pres- 
 ent, absently counting on her fingers. It was managed at 
 last, by a dip into the carefully husbanded principal of 
 the Misses Mowbray. To dip into principal seemed sac- 
 rilegious; but they could curtail their annual New York 
 holiday for a few years, and live within the reduced in- 
 come. It was all figured out, and Jim vowed silently 
 in his heart he would repay it in letter and spirit. He 
 was sure he could earn something more than his board 
 by working in vacations. He had catalogues from Prince- 
 ton and the College of Physicians and Surgeons on his 
 bureau, and studied them in bed every night. 
 
 It was on an afternoon of one of those August days when 
 the mountains were getting blue and hazy, at the hour 
 when the low sun began scooping out the Hollow and the 
 Glen, and pouring into them the ice-blue shadows, that a 
 note on the monogrammed paper of the Windward 
 House was brought down by a bellboy and left for Miss 
 Graham. It was signed " Franklin Tallman," and it 
 asked with mysterious brevity for an interview. 
 
 "Who's your beau, Ellen?" asked Jim. 
 
 " Why, I never heard of him before." 
 
 " I suppose the man's perfectly respectable, to be stay- 
 ing at the Windward House," said Aunt Fran. " Bet- 
 ter write and tell him to call about ten tomorrow morn- 
 ing, as we're going out to the bridge tonight." 
 
<' THE YOUNG MAN MRS. RAY FORGOT 163 
 
 " Probably an agent," suggested Aunt Sallie, with 
 whom the wish was father to the thought. 
 
 " Agents don't stay at the Windward House, Aunt 
 Sal! " cried Jim. 
 
 " Well, he might have had the impertinence to walk in 
 there and use their stationery." 
 
 " But not to send it by a bellhop." 
 
 " That's a fact. Well, Ellen, I suppose you'll have to 
 write and tell him yes." 
 
 " I have, Aunt Sallie. I sent an answer back by the 
 bellboy." 
 
 The two aunts stood rather in the respective relations 
 of father and mother to Ellen and Jim; Aunt Fran 
 always reacting with suspicion and hostility toward girls 
 who were inclined to show Jim any attention; and Aunt 
 Sallie tolerating these, but opposing a soft yet obstinate 
 breastwork to any young man who seemed to have any 
 idea of hovering about Ellen. Their roles really suited 
 very well, for Jim was already a good deal of a ladies' 
 man, and Aunt Fran rather enjoyed a shindy; while 
 thus far only Webster Willets, for one short term, had 
 disturbed Aunt Sallie's more indolent, peaceable dis- 
 position. 
 
 Ellen said the stranger must be an editor, who had 
 seen her story in the Ishmaelite, and wanted a serial for 
 Harper s or Scribncr's. She made all she could of this, 
 to luxuriate the better in her own mind in the sanguine 
 secret belief that he was that very fellow whose name 
 was something like Alderman, or Baldwin, who had called 
 with Mr. Sayre, in Cambridge, in April. 
 
 She put on her pink and black striped muslin, in op- 
 position to Aunt Fran, who stood out for a lawn waist 
 
i64 THE SPINSTER 
 
 and duck skirt. Her fine hair had been too lately washed 
 to look well, do what she would with it. Ting ! the door- 
 bell rang ahead of time, but it was only Cousin Celia 
 Oldenbury with the cream cheese, as usual. Ellen went 
 down to sit on the piazza. She had " Joseph Vance " to 
 read. A man was slanting across the street; but it was 
 only Mr. Willets with the Willetses' morning mail. He 
 always brought it down. Another man was coming down 
 the marble walk, crossing over further up the street; he 
 stopped to look at the cannas in flower by the Barn- 
 havens' side door. . . . Anyway, it was no Tory Hill in- 
 habitant. He was rather good-looking, and very well 
 set up. He was very well dressed in flannels, white 
 flannels with a hair-line stripe of black, she could see, as 
 he drew nearer. . . , How very nice-looking! No, he 
 went by. The long slate street was empty. 
 
 Round from the other corner, while she had been 
 looking at the well-dressed, well-set-up stranger, had 
 come a rather ill-dressed but well-assured young man. 
 He had a somewhat Israelitish look. He was short and 
 slight : his eyes were quite dark, and set deep in valleys 
 on each side of the high, long mountain of his nose. He 
 came up the first of the little walks and rang the front 
 doorbell. Ellen jumped up. 
 
 "Oh! Is this Mister " 
 
 " Franklin Tallman, madam . . . oiselle." 
 " How do you do? I am Miss Graham." 
 " I remember you, Miss Graham." 
 "Oh?" 
 
 " But of course you don't remember me." 
 " For the best of reasons ! " said Ellen, thinking, " He 
 is the very man ! " 
 
THE YOUNG MAN MRS. RAY FORGOT 165 
 
 " Of course you don't. I saw you at the Hasty Pud- 
 ding spread. What in the world you went home so 
 early for ! " 
 
 " Why, I thought I stayed very late ! " 
 
 "Late! Well! — I don't suppose I'd remember you, 
 though, except for Sayre having told me that you were 
 the Annex girl that wrote that thing in the Monthly 
 about the village, 
 
 'All lulled and lost in brier and fern.' 
 
 Do you know, I got Sayre to take me up to call on 
 you, one evening back in the spring, on the strength 
 of that poem — verses, I mean, of yours? But you 
 were out." 
 
 " You were that man, then ! " 
 
 " Think what you missed ! " 
 
 " If you sit there, Mr. Tallman, I'm afraid you'll rock 
 off the steps. Take this chair — it's safer, really." 
 
 " 'Tis man's perdition to be safe," said Mr. Tallman, 
 hitching his chair nearer the edge. He had a homely, 
 firm, convinced, and convincing mouth. lAunt Fran 
 wouldn't have found much caste in him. He looked 
 more like that line in the poem: 
 
 "Too proud to care from whence I came." 
 
 He now openly and brazenly consulted his watch. 
 
 " Well, Miss Graham, that poem — or at least those 
 verses — of yours " 
 
 {" Courtly! " thought Ellen.) 
 
 " — in the Monthly are my excuse for coming to see 
 you. I'm on McQiiaid's Magazine now, and you've been 
 sending in stories to us once or twice lately " 
 
i66 THE SPINSTER 
 
 " Which you always send back with a printed shp, on 
 blue bond paper." 
 
 " Of course! What else could we do? Nothing ever 
 happens in your stories, Miss Graham ! I'm the first 
 reader they generally come to, as I'm the smallest fry 
 in the office, and I have to turn them down. They're so 
 awfully static. And yet there's such a lot of local color, 
 atmosphere, and feeling for human values in them ! They 
 always make me think of that poem — those verses, I 
 mean, for it wasn't quite a poem, you know, — in the 
 Monthly. * By Silver Water's westering turn.' That's 
 the way your stories always begin. * Beneath the rocks 
 of Windward Steep.' They're melodious, they're pic- 
 turesque, those opening paragraphs of yours. Why, 
 there was one you sent in, where you said, in the first 
 sentence, * it was a lucent and buxom morning ' ! A 
 little precious, perhaps," continued Mr. Tallman ju- 
 dicially, " but in a piece of verse " 
 
 " Just let me tell you what happened to me at college, 
 Mr. Tallman!" 
 
 "Well, what?" 
 
 " Why, I akvays wanted to write verses : I never 
 wanted to write stories." 
 
 " O my prophetic soul ! " 
 
 " But you see, I showed some of my verses to Pro- 
 fessor Redwood, and he said — he told me not to write 
 'em any more." 
 
 " He did, eh? May jackasses sit on his grandmother's 
 grave! " 
 
 " Yes — he said I'd better go on loving poetry, and teach 
 other people to love it, and let it go at that." 
 
 " Nothing very remarkable about that advice. 
 
THE YOUNG MAN MRS. RAY FORGOT 167 
 
 Miss Graham, except the fact that apparently you 
 took it." 
 
 ** Why, yes, I burned up all my verses, like Hindoo 
 widows. Of course, I must confess, I've " 
 
 " Regretted it?" 
 
 " Well — nothing." She thought, on the whole, she 
 wouldn't mention, at present, having written any more 
 verses. 
 
 " Well, of course you're the doctor. My advice isn't 
 to be compared to old Redwood's; but still " 
 
 (" But still you think it is! ") 
 
 " Still, I've been in a magazine office now a couple of 
 months, and I was on the Monthly my last year in col- 
 lege." Mr. Tallman said this with that significant as- 
 surance of his, which made it sound like: 
 
 " I've ibeen chief editor of the Atlantic for* fifty 
 years." 
 
 " Would you really advise me to try verses, Mr. Tall- 
 man?" 
 
 " Shouldn't like to countermand old Redwood's ad- 
 vice, of course; especially since you saw fit to take it. 
 But I'll say this: this is very diplomatic, Miss Graham; 
 and it's really what I came to see you to say: 
 
 " If you ever write any verses, please send 'em to 
 McQuaid's. If you've got any on hand, that escaped the 
 fate of the Hindoo widows, please send 'em. If you 
 ever decide to take those lyrical opening paragraphs of 
 your stories and turn them back where they belong, into 
 verses, why, please send 'em to McQuaid's/' 
 
 " Well, I've got a few pieces of verse upstairs now, 
 Mr. Tallman, that I've written since the funeral of the 
 others." 
 
i68 THE SPINSTER 
 
 " Well ! Why don't you look over them, then, Miss 
 Graham, and maybe rewrite some of them, if you can 
 see how, and send — refrain as before? " 
 
 " Why, I will. I'm ever so much obliged to you, Mr. 
 Tallman. It certainly was awfully kind of you " 
 
 Mr. Tallman leaned further back, and let out a laugh, 
 a whistle, and a low, musical: 
 
 " Kind ! very kind." 
 
 " It was." 
 
 " Why, Miss Graham, it was very kind to McQuaid's 
 Magazine for me to take the first day of my one week's 
 vacation and come away up here to hunt up a new verse- 
 writer for it. Wasn't it?" 
 
 He looked with intense solemnity at Ellen, and she, 
 feeling very strange in this odd situation of sitting here, 
 in perfectly good daylight hours, talking to a young 
 man who seemed to be enjoying himself well enough, and 
 actually in no great hurry to be off, looked rather uncer- 
 tainly at him. He continued : 
 
 " When I wanted to climb Windward Mountain in- 
 stead." 
 
 " Well, then " 
 
 " I wanted so much to climb Windward Mountain ! 
 Instead of coming here, I mean." 
 
 He still looked gravely at her : and at last that beauless 
 young woman smiled a very small smile and turned her 
 head away, in agreeable embarrassment. 
 
 " An act of considerable self-denial on my part, you 
 
 see." 
 
 " Yes indeed ! " 
 
 " I'm glad you appreciate it. Miss Graham." 
 
 "Indeed I do!" 
 
THE YOUNG MAN MRS. RAY FORGOT 169 
 
 " It does a man good to perform such an act of self- 
 sacrifice. I feel now that I have the moral power to per- 
 form it again." 
 
 Ellen had a very becoming blush, and it came up now, 
 just as her Aunt Fran, spick in a clean cambric, came 
 out the front door and round the corner of the piazza, 
 with her general nice look of health, cold-water baths, 
 and shrewd appreciation of human motives in general, 
 and present company's in particular, 
 
 " This is Mr. Tallman — my aunt, Miss Mowbray." 
 
 Mr. Tallman did not look at all bashful under Miss 
 Frances Mowbray's eyes. He did not say that he was 
 just going. Instead, he reseated himself a fraction of 
 a second after Miss Mowbray had sat down, and looked 
 exceedingly at home. 
 
 Miss Frances said : 
 
 " Is this your first coming to Tory Hill, Mr. Tail- 
 man?" 
 
 " Yes — I've been here exactly seven hours, Miss Mow- 
 bray. I've learned that ' midnight ' in Vermont means 
 three o'clock in the morning. I had almost three hours 
 of sleep last night, and I've had a good walk this morning. 
 I'm going up Windward Mountain tomorrow." 
 
 " All alone? " asked Ellen, thinking of the picnic to be 
 held on top of the mountain on Thursday. 
 
 " Shall I get lost. Miss Graham, do you think ? So 
 much the better ! It wouldn't be the first time I ever got 
 lost. I was lost once on a bigger mountain than this, 
 in Switzerland." 
 
 He rose calmly, in his ill-fitting trousers and hitching 
 coat, which looked so ludicrously unlike the Windward 
 House and Switzerland. 
 
I70 THE SPINSTER 
 
 " May I call again, Miss Mowbray, on you and Miss 
 Graham? " 
 
 Miss Sarah Mowbray had been all this time sitting in 
 her own pleasant window-way, thinking a long way 
 ahead. She had been thinking, Heaven bless her, that if 
 anything really came of this mysterious young man drop- 
 ping out of the clouds at Ellen's feet — so, with her 
 fatherly jealousy, it already appeared to her — she must 
 be quiet, resigned, and play that difficult self-efifacing 
 part so light-heartedly demanded of parents by the 
 American code. Still thinking she would not go down- 
 stairs, she went down : and resolving not to go out on 
 the piazza, she went out. She appeared, with an im- 
 palpable air of challenge, round the corner of the piazza, 
 and had the young man introduced to her, at exactly the 
 moment when he had made the request to call again. It 
 thus happened that no one answered him: and it also 
 happened that his request was not repeated. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 DUST BEGINS TO GATHER ON THE DESK 
 IN THE CUBBY-HOLE 
 
 It was astonishing to find that for once Aunt Fran 
 had been less critical than Aunt Sallie. That was a 
 searching commentary that was passed on Ellen's young 
 man, at dinner. Nothing derogatory had escaped the 
 jealous eyes of the fatherly aunt. 
 
 Ellen remembered, now, freshly, how her Aunt Sallie's 
 plentiful young men (of whom some were married, but 
 many remained) all had highly agreeable, and even old- 
 school, manners. Whereas Aunt Fran tolerated any- 
 body who was what she called ''interesting": and had 
 a few rather freakish gentlemen among her friends. 
 Aunt Sallie warmly disliked freakishness, and still more 
 warmly did she dislike arrogance, or anything she could 
 construe into a sign of arrogance. Her code belonged 
 to the days when admirers and partners were so thick 
 that they could be kept in their places. She was an 
 accomplished snubber. Ellen remembered how she had 
 sharpened her velvet-padded claws on Webster Willets. 
 It certainly seemed to Ellen hideously in keeping that 
 her Aunt Sallie should have innocently — was it innocent 
 of her? — irrupted at the exact moment to prevent Aunt 
 Fran from saying, " We shall be happy to see you." It 
 crossed Ellen's mind that some such experience was what 
 
 171 
 
172 THE SPINSTER 
 
 had led Thomas Hardy to write those nightmare novels 
 wherein people's whole happiness was frustrated by one 
 malignant chance. 
 
 There was, however, a moon that night; and some- 
 thing in the swishing of the summer evening wind in the 
 maple tops, or some bits of " Yarrow Revisited " that 
 floated through her mind in the evening; — something, at 
 any rate, waved a flag of truce to trouble in her heart. 
 Not that she wanted to go to sleep, particularly. She did 
 go to sleep at first, and then waked up and remembered 
 that the green shade on the south window had got stuck, 
 and would not pull all the way down. The moon was 
 shining in from that quarter. It made the room wake- 
 fully bright. And besides, her right arm had a sort of 
 feeling running through it, like what people described as 
 the beginning of paralysis. She had it every time she 
 thought of shaking hands with Mr. Tallman, or of some 
 of those expressions of his and the way his voice sounded 
 when he said them : 
 
 " 'Tis man's perdition to be safe." 
 "Shall I get lost? So much the better." 
 All alone, here, in the middle of the night, for the 
 pure, silly pleasure of it, she turned away her face from 
 an imaginary Mr. Tallman, and smiled that foolish, small 
 smile again. She did it over and over. What other 
 fancies, clean, bold, virginal, she had, all consorted well 
 with that beam of moonlight striking squarely across her 
 bed, covering her pillow with whiter light than that of 
 the day. 
 
 At breakfast Aunt Fran said promptly: 
 " Why don't you get Jennie Willets to let you bring this 
 young man on her picnic, Ellen ? " 
 
■DUST BEGINS TO GATHER ON THE DESK 173 
 
 "Do you think she'd Hke it, Frances?" put in Aunt 
 SalHe. 
 
 " Like it! yes, be tickled to death." 
 
 " Well — I suppose an extra man's always welcome." 
 It seemed a good deal, somehow, for Aunt Sallie to 
 admit. 
 
 Ellen said, after a decent interval of apparently think- 
 ing it over: 
 
 " Believe I will, Aunt Fran. I wonder if he'll come? " 
 
 " Oh, I guess so. Better see Jennie and then write him 
 a note, and Jim can mail it before he goes to the links." 
 
 As if to undo her semi-complaisance, Aunt Sallie in- 
 quired : 
 
 " Didn't you all think he was rather a self-sufficient 
 young man? " 
 
 " Oh, come now, Aunt Sal ! you're getting altogether 
 too darned pernickety," said Jim. " I thought he was 
 quite a decent fellow; though of course I'd know he 
 wasn't a Princeton man." 
 
 Jennie Willets graciously consented to the proposal 
 to enrich her picnic by another lunch-carrying, girl- 
 boosting creature. Ellen wrote several notes, and at 
 last decided to send one, not because she was content 
 with it, but because she had used up all her best note 
 paper. 
 
 " I saw your beau in the post-office, and handed him 
 your note, so I saved you two cents," Jim announced 
 when he came back from his foursome at noon. 
 
 "Oh. What did he say?" 
 
 " Say — didn't say anything. Just grinned." 
 
 Ellen now laughed at the superstitious certainty she 
 had felt that Jim would lose the note. Still it seemed 
 
174 THE SPINSTER 
 
 certain that something would prevent Mr. Tallman from 
 coming on the picnic. 
 
 After tea that evening, when they were all sitting on 
 the piazza, Aunt Fran said : 
 
 " Ellen, haven't you heard from that Mr. Tillman 
 yet?" 
 
 " Tallman, Aunt Fran." 
 
 " Tallman ! What a name for a fellow about five feet 
 three! " shouted Jim, whose own lank length lay sprawl- 
 ing in the hammock, with his bag of golf clubs across his 
 knees. " Poor little runt, though, he can't help being 
 such a sawed-off." 
 
 " St. Paul was a short man ! And so was Napoleon ! 
 And Keats ! " cried Ellen. 
 
 *' How do you know how big St. Paul was?" 
 
 "Well, the tradition " 
 
 " What I want to know is, have you heard yet from 
 Mr. Tillman — Tallman — or haven't you?" demanded 
 her elder aunt. 
 
 " I haven't heard a word from him," confessed Ellen, 
 in a voice made up, in equal parts, of exasperation at her 
 Aunt Fran for asking, and of fear that her Aunt Sallie 
 would remark, as she did immediately : 
 
 " I'm afraid Mr. Tallman hasn't been brought up to 
 very much savoir faire." 
 
 " Well, Sarah, I rather liked the young man. He 
 seemed to have a good deal of faith in himself." 
 
 " Oh, certainly ! Faith in himself ! " 
 
 Whether Mr. Tallman heard this, and the remark or 
 two which preceded it, and whether, in that case, he 
 applied them to himself, were questions the family could 
 not settle at breakfast the next morning. Miss Sarah 
 
DUST BEGINS TO GATHER ON THE DESK 175 
 
 Mowbray, who had been a trifle embarrassed when Mr. 
 Tallman appeared suddenly on the short marble path to 
 the ell piazza, had hardened over night to the point of 
 saying she didn't care. Perhaps, on the whole, it would 
 have done him good if he had heard. He could stand a 
 little letting down, she believed. 
 
 At the time when it happened Ellen had certainly been 
 very much frightened. She had turned her rocking-chair, 
 when they first sat down on the piazza after tea, into a 
 position to command the street up-townward. And yet 
 she had not seen him coming at all; he had startled her 
 as much as anybody ; and the blood had rushed up to her 
 face, and pounded in her ears at the horror of it. 
 
 But Mr. Tallman had come up the side steps without 
 showing in any manner that he had overheard. He had 
 a nice handshake; even Aunt Sallie admitted that. He 
 sat down on the top step, though Jim lugged himself and 
 his golf clubs out of the hammock and offered it. 
 
 " I came round," he said, " to thank Miss Graham for 
 the invitation to go on the picnic on Thursday. I shall 
 certainly enjoy it very much. What shall I bring? " 
 
 " Why, you're company," Ellen cried. " You needn't 
 bring a single sandwich." 
 
 " Can't I buy something at Willets and Barnhaven's 
 store?" 
 
 " Oh, I'll tell you — if you could bring some peaches! " 
 
 " Peaches it is, then." 
 
 Miss Frances was smiling, but her sister's face, in the 
 streak of lamplight from the hall window, looked pinched 
 and irritable. She got up and went in, saying she had to 
 write letters. Jim took himself off, after lugging his 
 clubs into the house, to go up to the hotel and talk golf 
 
176 THE SPINSTER 
 
 with the other members of his late foursome; and Aunt 
 Fran only stayed a few moments longer. 
 
 Mr. Tallman then leaned luxuriously back against the 
 piazza post, and conversed in agreeable trivialities of a 
 local character for some time. Presently he asked if it 
 would be in order for Ellen to " put on that scarf, or 
 whatever it is, that hangs on the back of your chair, and 
 come over in that field I see rolling up to that little piece 
 of woods, for a cross country walk of about an eighth 
 of a mile? — far enough to get in amongst those millions 
 of fireflies?" 
 
 She couldn't see why not, and seconded the motion. 
 
 The Ayes had it. 
 
 She put on the scarf, and they went over, across the 
 road and into the wet grass which quickly spoiled her 
 fresh blue feather-patterned muslin, and brand-clean 
 white petticoats. They rounded the schoolhouse, looking 
 so ghostly in the half -clouded moonlight, and w^ent 
 through the turnstile into the steep wet field that ran along 
 below the Ledge Woods. Everything had exactly that 
 queerly beautiful look — that combination of vividness 
 and unreality — that it gives a familiar landscape to look at 
 it upside down. They walked along so near the Ledge 
 woods that the blackberry bushes, tangled among the 
 birch and sumach, sometimes clutched at their sleeves and 
 invited them into the ferny rock-ledges within. They 
 did not walk very fast. The fireflies wove feathery fire- 
 works all round them, and gave them the sensation of 
 having to extricate themselves, step by step, from Lillipu- 
 tian webs. Once or twice she took his hand or arm 
 across a roughish spot, or a clump of prairie weed. The 
 air was all on edge with dampness. 
 
DUST BEGINS TO GATHER ON THE DESK 177 
 
 " Nothing languid about your Vermont evenings," 
 said Mr. Tallman. 
 
 "Indeed no!" 
 
 " As soon as the air gets heavy, I suppose your moun- 
 tains catch hold of the clouds and pull down a thunder- 
 storm." 
 
 "Yes; and don't we have the beautiful thunder- 
 storms ! " 
 
 "You like 'em?" 
 
 " Why, I'd be willing to have a thunderstorm for a 
 Christmas present, any year." 
 
 " I can always fraternize with people that like storms. 
 I've seen some pretty big ones at sea. Luckily I had 
 rough crossings both ways, when I went abroad last 
 year." 
 
 " Weren't you seasick ? " 
 
 " Oh yes, awfully. I forgot it, though, in the excite- 
 ment of watching that churning sea of ink and soap- 
 suds, and feeling the rousing whacks it gave the boat 
 underneath. Besides, I wasn't allowed to be seasick. I 
 worked my way over." 
 
 There was something very " becoming to a man " 
 in this statement, Ellen thought. She had a thrilled 
 feeling that he never allowed himself to be waited 
 on. 
 
 They had come back to the road by a cow-path, wet 
 and soft, and their heads had been brushed by the boughs 
 of neglected old apple trees as they emerged into the road 
 again. 
 
 " Good-by, Ceres, Flora, and Pomona ! " cried the 
 young man. " I hope your shoes aren't wet, Miss 
 Graham." 
 
178 THE SPINSTER 
 
 " Wet ! Why, they're soaked — reeking ! So must 
 yours be, too." 
 
 " Are you afraid of catching cold ? " 
 
 Ellen laughed. 
 
 " No? Someway I knew you weren't." 
 
 They came up on the piazza, and sat down again. 
 
 " You see. Miss Graham, I don't want to leave until 
 I've made you thoroughly understand that I accept the 
 invitation to the picnic." 
 
 " I don't believe, then, that I quite understand yet." 
 
 However, he did not seem in a very talkative mood, 
 but he sat on the step, reaching up and playing with his 
 fingers on the strings of the hammock as if it were some 
 sort of zither. Ellen leaned back and rocked. After a 
 while Miss Frances Mowbray came out and seated her- 
 self in the corner of the piazza, and took a part in the 
 conversation, such as it was. The conversation, under 
 her stimulus, spruced up a little. Then Miss Frances 
 halted it to give full effect to the hall clock striking ten, 
 and though oblivious at the moment, Mr. Tallman com- 
 posedly took his leave a few moments later. 
 
 " Well, Ellen," said Aunt Fran, seating herself again 
 after his departure, " how do you like this young man ? " 
 
 "I like him! Very much!" 
 
 " Well — so do I — on the whole." 
 
 She rocked for a moment, and then inquired : 
 
 " What do you know about him? " 
 
 " His father's a country doctor, up in Maine, some- 
 where." 
 
 " Um-um." 
 
 "He's a friend, you know, of the Oldenburys' friend 
 Mr. Sayre." 
 
DUST BEGINS TO GATHER ON THE DESK 179 
 
 " So far so good," Miss Frances summed up in rather 
 a noncommittal tone. 
 
 " Look here, Aunt Fran ! You know he doesn't — 
 
 isn't — I don't Why! You know — of course! 
 
 there's no reason why you should " 
 
 " Oh, no, of course not ! " 
 
 " Well, I believe I'll turn in now. Aunt Fran." 
 
 " All right. I'll sit here awhile longer." 
 
 Ellen went upstairs, seeing fireflies, feeling wet grass 
 sprinkling her ankles with icy dew, and longing, almost 
 with physical thirst, to be alone. 
 
 She still slept with Aunt Sallie. She found the door 
 of their room shut, a thing that had never happened 
 before, except when poor little Larkum, the old terrier, 
 had been poisoned by an unknown hand and was 
 dying, very slowly, in his basket by Aunt Sallie's chair. 
 
 She knocked, and heard a sound which she took to be 
 " Come in." When she went in, her young aunt was 
 scrambling off her knees by the side of the bed, where 
 she had been saying her prayers. Mumbling something, 
 she now hurried into bed, and turned far over toward 
 the wall. When Ellen kissed her good-night, she said, in 
 a colorless voice: 
 
 " How long did he stay? " 
 
 " Not very long, only a little while. I've been sit- 
 ting out there talking to Aunt Fran. She's out there 
 yet." 
 
 " Oh dear ! Ellen ! — Well, nothing. Good-night, 
 dearie." 
 
 The diminutive of childhood almost let loose some 
 tears waiting to be shed. 
 
 Nothing happened on Thursday to prevent the picnic. 
 
i8o THE SPINSTER 
 
 Ellen had always very poor wind, climbing, and it was 
 cruel to others to make them wait for her. This she 
 knew very well; and yet she puffed and panted so tre- 
 mendously that someone always had to wait. The rest 
 of the party could safely neglect her this time, for of 
 course it was up to her own young man, whom she had 
 brought along herself, to push and pull her upward 
 through the soft soaking loam and over the slippery, 
 dripping rocks, as well as to carry her jacket and the 
 absurd thimbleful of whisky she and Jim always took 
 along on picnics to please their Aunt Frances. There 
 was always a good deal of fun over the Grahams' whisky 
 flasks, w^iich were usually the brown glass bottles a hun- 
 dred quinine pills had originally come in, and held by 
 measurement two tablespoonfuls. 
 
 " Come on, fellows, have a drink apiece ! " shouted Jim, 
 waving his quinine pill bottle until the six or seven lunch- 
 boxes he carried, slung together, knapsack fashion, over 
 his shoulder, slipped down and precipitated several hard- 
 boiled eggs and sandwiches on the ferny floor of the 
 woods. 
 
 He scrambled them back, and led the way, with some 
 unattached young men and ambitious girls, straight up 
 the short-cut, " Timothy's Path," over the moss-bedded 
 boulders and through the arching saplings and briery 
 undergrowth that sprawled across it. Ellen inevitably 
 fell back, little by little, from the rest, with a very warm 
 and rosy face after the cross-meadow climb from the 
 village. Mr. Tallman singled himself out deftly as the 
 others scattered, and came and walked, as she had hap- 
 pily expected, beside her. They skirted the precipitous 
 slanting ledge of Stratton Glen, and began to bite into the 
 
DUST BEGINS TO GATHER ON THE DESK i8i 
 
 real climb of the day. Though Ellen went up the treach- 
 erous path with desperate haste, afraid the others, in spite 
 of her known short wind, would think she was lagging 
 back on purpose to monopolize Mr. Tallman, she lost 
 ground on them faster and faster. Most of all she was 
 afraid Mr. Tallman himself would think she was lag- 
 ging back on purpose; and every time this hideous prob- 
 ability came into her mind, she spurted ahead with more 
 frantic haste, and ultimately less speed. At last things 
 began to grow dizzy round her, and she had to lean 
 against a tree, and even hold on with both arms round 
 the trunk, for a moment. 
 
 " Hullo ! What's the matter ? " 
 
 Mr. Tallman hurried over to her through some tangled 
 briers which tore a hole in one leg of his trousers. Tak- 
 ing no notice of this mishap, he repeated : 
 
 "What's the matter. Miss Graham? You're faint!" 
 
 " Oh no — I'm not. I only — haven't any — wind left — 
 at all. I'll just rest — a minute. Then we'll go on." 
 
 " But why be so ambitious. Miss Graham? It's only 
 half -past ten. Let's take half an hour, and have a good 
 rest." 
 
 " Half an hour! They'd lose us completely." 
 
 "Well?" 
 
 "Why, we'd he lost!" 
 
 " Oh no. We've only to follow the stream up to the 
 flag-pole, and then walk south along the ridge. Your 
 kid brother told me exactly which way to go." 
 
 "Oh? Well, all right." 
 
 " I see you can be quite reasonable. Miss Graham." 
 
 He threw her jacket over a crumbling, corky log that 
 lay by the edge of Mad Michael, the roaring stream that 
 
i82 THE SPINSTER 
 
 lent such wild beauty to the climbing path, and she sat 
 down on it, recovering her normal breath. 
 
 He sat down, too, and investigated the tear in his 
 trouser leg. For a time Mad Michael made the only 
 noise, rushing round small rocks as if it were Niagara, 
 and their impudence in being there were unthinkable. 
 There were some Canada violets still blooming up here, 
 on long stems that had the whole summer in them. Mr. 
 Tallman regarded these for some time with a pleased 
 eye, and something more fine-grained and responsive in 
 his look than usual. Presently he reached over and 
 picked one, and said : 
 
 " ' Take the flower, and turn the hour.' " 
 Ellen knew that, and promptly answered: 
 
 " * All the winds of Canada call the plowing-rain.' " 
 
 " You're going backward. That's the line before." 
 
 " I know it. But I particularly like it." 
 
 " So do I, for that matter. I'm fond of all kinds of 
 homesick poetry. 'Tisn't often Kipling writes it. It 
 takes an Irishman to do it to the very top notch." 
 
 " It takes an Irishman to do fairy poetry too. Did you 
 ever read anything by Sir Samuel Ferguson? " 
 
 " I never even heard of him." 
 
 " Never read his ' Fairy Well of Lagnanay * or his 
 'Fairy Thorn'?" 
 
 " No, but I believe you mean to spout one or both of 
 'em to me. You've got a recitative glitter in your eye." 
 
 "Can you endure being spouted to?" 
 
 "I'll try." 
 
 " * Get up, our Anna dear, from the weary spinning- 
 wheel,' " began Ellen at once. She repeated the whole 
 poem of the " Fairy Thorn," and Mr. Tallman said : 
 
DUST BEGINS TO GATHER ON THE DESK 183 
 
 " All I can give you in return for that bewitched 
 beauty is KipHng again. Let's hear what Kipling you 
 know." 
 
 " I know * The Seven Seas ' pretty well." 
 
 " What ! You haven't read ' Ballads and Barrack 
 Room Ballads ' ? The Lord has delivered you into my 
 hand, Miss Graham. This fairy thing of Sir Samuel 
 What's-his-name's was a beauty, and no mistake : but I'll 
 give you good measure for it. What shall I take? By 
 the Lord, the ' Ballad of East and West.' " 
 
 " Hurry up, then ! " 
 
 " ' Kamal is out with twenty men to raise the border side, 
 
 And he has lifted the Colonel's mare, that was the Colonel's pride.' " 
 
 On and on he went with the glittering galloping couplets, 
 while Ellen's eyes shone and her breast heaved afresh. 
 
 " Do you know, it's not once in a dog's age I ever 
 meet anybody that really likes poetry. I believe you're 
 the only person that ever stayed at the Windward House 
 that ever recited poetry up here on the mountain! " 
 
 " I'm only getting my breath to begin again." 
 
 "What's the next to be?" 
 
 '* What would you like, out of ' The Seven Seas ' ? " 
 
 " * The Last Chantey.' " 
 
 " Well, that's even better than t'other." 
 
 He recited it with considerable fire : and when he had 
 finished, he said : 
 
 " I want to spout another, by request of the spouter." 
 
 "Which?" 
 
 ** The Envoi about the long trail, the out trail." 
 
 " I don't know that." 
 
 ** Hooray ! Now listen. 
 
 5> 
 
i84 THE SPINSTER 
 
 She thought he put just enough singsong into the 
 beautiful monotony of the choruses: and when he came 
 to the fast-thickening beauty of the last stanzas, they 
 fairly pulled her up off the log, and made her stand, 
 listening with a hundred ears. 
 
 When he had finished, she sat down again; but he 
 looked at his watch and said : 
 
 " I suppose you're depending on me to tell you the 
 half hour's up." 
 
 " Oh well ! We'd better be off, then. But look ! before 
 we go — there's an accidental vista that shows the Old 
 Street, and — I do believe — our very house ! " 
 
 Through a miniature landslide that had left a peep- 
 hole in the woods, they looked down on the incredibly 
 tiny street meandering through the upper middle of the 
 valley like a thread with white sea-shells irregularly 
 strung on it — houses and barns. Further to the east, 
 down by the river, Ellen's familiar eye could detect the 
 Oldenbury farmhouse shining in the sun. 
 
 " You have got a lovely, dulcet, smiling country up 
 here. Miss Graham." 
 
 " And to think of our all living in those midget 
 houses ! " 
 
 " Well, this is about where Kipling stands, and that 
 valley is about where the rest of us poor devils live that 
 are trying to learn to write," said he, as they started for- 
 ward again. " Mis-ter Robinson ! I believe I'd be ready 
 to die if I'd written that ' Envoi,' and the ' Ballad of East 
 and West.' " 
 
 They plodded forward up the wild banks of Mad 
 Michael; and he told her something he had in mind about 
 a coming poet, " being born today, perhaps ! " who wouM 
 
DUST BEGINS TO GATHER ON THE DESK 185 
 
 far outshine this great Httle spectacled poet of Bombay. 
 
 " It takes all my breath to climb," said Ellen, " so you 
 can have a free floor, please." 
 
 " Here, let me help you up over this rock." 
 
 He did so, in unromantic fashion, spreading out those 
 strong hands of his, which looked as if they knew well 
 what manual labor was, over her shoulder-blades, and 
 boosting her along very successfully. 
 
 " I can — walk alone — now, thanks. What's this new 
 Milton of yours going to write about? Because I'm look- 
 ing for a new poet, too." 
 
 " You are? Well, my Milton is going to write about 
 labor and labor unions, mine-inspectors, rescue gangs, 
 structural iron-workers, bridge-builders, steeple-jacks, 
 electrical men, and steel men and all the likes of that. 
 Especially strikers and all sorts of rebellious men." 
 
 *' He'll make us excruciatingly sorry for them, I sup- 
 pose, the hard, dangerous lives they lead " 
 
 " Sorry ! Not by a long chalk, Miss Graham. He'll 
 make us admire them, and envy them, grimy Titans that 
 they are. They make the fife and drum and sword look 
 like amateur theatrical properties. They're the full- 
 grown men of the world : they're the international armies : 
 and their big strikes are the Iliad and Odyssey! " 
 
 '* Won't your poet do anything to make peace between 
 capital and labor?" 
 
 " I don't believe so. I hope not. I think perhaps 
 he'll impartially celebrate 'em both. I can see, in my 
 mind's eye, the covers of his books, with great scenes of 
 labor stamped on them, miners swinging picks past 
 charges of dynamite, and sky cowboys lassoing girders 
 hundreds of feet up in the air." 
 
i86 THE SPINSTER 
 
 " I see him too," said Ellen. " He's really just an- 
 other Kipling, up to date, isn't he? " 
 
 " Hmm ! Perhaps. I don't believe, though, I quite 
 like your saying that." 
 
 " Well, do you know, I can foresee another kind of 
 poet " 
 
 " Oh yes, tell me about yours." 
 
 ' — Or perhaps he's a novelist- 
 
 " Isn't it about time we stopped to rest again, so you 
 can do him justice?" 
 
 " We might, for a few minutes. Only I don't want 
 to be so late for lunch that we find our peaches all gone." 
 
 ** I cached some in my pocket. Here they are. Wil- 
 lets and Barnhaven's best." 
 
 " Oh, that was clever of you. It was genius, really, 
 rather than talent." 
 
 While they ate the peaches, and drank from a col- 
 lapsible cup, dipped in the ice-cold eddies, Ellen described 
 her poet. 
 
 " This man is going to speak out for all those dumb, 
 patient people that go on enduring and laboring and not 
 questioning, until they die. He'll be the spokesman of the 
 under dog, and the miners that don't strike. He'll make 
 the colored people articulate, as a race, and the Jews and 
 Chinese and Indians. In fact I shouldn't wonder if he'd 
 be a colored man." 
 
 " He afifects you like champagne, Miss Graham." 
 
 " Yes, he does. I really don't feel that I can wait 
 much longer for him." 
 
 " Maybe, after all, your poet and mine aren't such 
 miles and miles apart. What if it's one and the same 
 man?" * 
 
DUST BEGINS TO GATHER ON THE DESK 187 
 
 " I don't see how he can be. You see yours is going 
 to write about the strong, and the fighters; and mine is 
 going to write about the weak." 
 
 " Well ! I like mine best." 
 
 " Mine's the best Christian of the two, though." 
 
 " Still I like mine best. I shrewdly suspect yours is a 
 woman." 
 
 " What I don't see is why, with your ideas, you're 
 not contented with Kipling? " 
 
 *' Why, just as you said here a while ago, I suppose. 
 Because he isn't up to date. He's all for the soldier 
 in mankind when he's got on his dress uniform, and 
 has no use for him in the khaki of civil life, when he's 
 doing the work of the world and feeding the useless, 
 pretty soldier with a brass spoon." 
 
 " You think soldiers are useless ? " asked Ellen, think- 
 ing of the twenty limping veterans who marched to the 
 cemetery on Memorial Day. 
 
 " Mostly." 
 
 " So does Sue." 
 
 "Who's Sue?" 
 
 " Sue Redwood. Professor Redwood's daughter. She 
 was at Radcliffe when I was. She's the greatest, finest, 
 most of a woman ! There's simply nobody like her." 
 
 Mr. Tallman consulted his watch. 
 
 " Ought I to tell you what time it is ? It's a quarter- 
 past eleven." 
 
 " Oh ! We must hurry on, then." 
 
 They made, however, a number of additional stops 
 on the remaining way, which now lay along the ridge, 
 and commanded a fifty-mile view. Once they found a 
 lizard, and once saw a porcupine slide up a tree with his 
 
i88 THE SPINSTER 
 
 quills brandished; and once a fawn stepped into their 
 path and looked at them placidly. 
 
 " Another thing my poet will do," said Ellen, " is to 
 make animals articulate. He'll sweep away a lot of gray- 
 bearded old abuses by the simple process of describing 
 them, in plain English, and giving a shrewd guess at the 
 way the animal feels, festering in a steel trap, or being 
 skinned alive, or hung up by a skewer in a slaughter- 
 house, and scalded before it's dead." 
 
 " Not in this country, such things don't happen, 
 surely! " 
 
 " Why of course they do, and I wish / could write 
 about it." 
 
 " Then why don't you. Miss Graham?" 
 
 " I would if I could, heaven knows! " 
 
 ** I repeat, why don't you ? " 
 
 " If it's so easy, why don't you write yourself ab6ut 
 the structural iron-workers, and the sky cowboys, then? " 
 
 " Great Scott ! Miss Graham, / can't write ! I've got 
 to earn a living. That's why I'm on McQiiaid's." 
 
 " I thought editors always wrote, for their own maga- 
 zines, and on the side, too, more or less." 
 
 " Less, I guess — the younger ones. Oh, of course, 
 I've got my dream. Who hasn't? Look here! How 
 would this do, Aliss Graham, for a motto for both of us? 
 * Every man his own poet ' ? " 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 DOWN THE VALLEY 
 
 Scarcely was Ellen inside the house on her return 
 from the picnic when Aunt Fran, bursting with the news, 
 told her that Julia Oldenbury was engaged to Webster 
 Willets. 
 
 Celia and Romeo had driven up and told Aunt Fran. 
 They were not altogether pleased, and yet, Ellen gath- 
 ered, they scarcely thought Webster as stone-age and 
 cave-dwelling a young man as she did. 
 
 A week ago, how this news would have reverberated 
 and echoed in her mind! Now she could barely dwell 
 on it long enough to satisfy the immediate cravings of 
 her aunt, who had been keeping it bottled up half a day to 
 tell her. Julia's affairs seemed pale, and had only a 
 languid interest for her beside the incessant re-dramatiza- 
 tion of the events and conversation of that day, which 
 kept enacting themselves before her eyes and talking in 
 her ears. Youth in her, for this time, would be served, 
 and put all other comers temporarily aside. At tea she 
 had to pretend to a far greater interest than she felt. 
 She laboriously feigned to be unable to think of any- 
 thing else but Julia's engagement; but all the time only 
 half heard what Aunt Fran was telling about Celia and 
 Romeo, and what they said; and how this explained 
 Julia's not going on the picnic. Faint irritation even 
 
 189 
 
I90 THE SPINSTER 
 
 stirred at the bottom of everything else in her heart, to 
 think that Julia and Webster — Webster Willets ! — should 
 interrupt her golden days and nights with the unwel- 
 come news of their betrothal. 
 
 It was like a wagon jolting over cobblestones in front 
 of a hall where a concert is taking place. — Still she did 
 think a little about it when she was going to bed 
 that night. She wondered if she ought to have said more 
 to Julia about it away back in the Christmas holidays. 
 But perhaps they would be happy, perhaps they would 
 together carve out a life for themselves well worth liv- 
 ing. Julia with her poetry, Webster with his frontiers- 
 man look and spirit; — it might be a marriage builded bet- 
 ter by nature, (or by God, perhaps) than anybody knew. 
 
 Something kept her, when on the next evening Mr. 
 Tallman came to make an appointment for a walk on 
 Saturday, from saying anything to him about Julia's 
 engagement. It might be a moot point whether she 
 remembered it. 
 
 They were going to walk on Saturday afternoon. On 
 Saturday it rained, however; one of those cold, fresh, 
 autumn-boding August rains, when the mountain sum- 
 mer seems to leap ahead toward its end. At the hour 
 appointed for the walk Mr. Tallman came and pro- 
 posed that they should " sit it out." There was a corner 
 of the piazza not reached by the gusty showers. They 
 sat down, accordingly, in the inmost angle between the ell 
 and front piazzas, where the soaked and tingling air of 
 the washed earth surrounded them, without the blasts 
 of icy showers that blew across the lawn so furiously. 
 
 " My week in Tory Hill is about over," said Franklin 
 Tallman. " I thought it was going to be quite a long 
 
DOWN THE VALLEY 191 
 
 holiday; but, well! By the way, Miss Graham, didn't 
 you say you had some verses upstairs ? Don't you feel in 
 the mood of bringing them down and letting me see or 
 hear a few of them ? " 
 
 " At last you've asked for them ! I've been hoping you 
 would, for days, I sorted them over the other day, after 
 you'd put it into my head, and picked out about a dozen 
 to show you. Oh dear! how it does bring back the 
 time I went to see Professor Redwood! " 
 
 (" Now, this is a curious thing," she thought, as she 
 went into the house to get the package. " All the time 
 I was sorting over those verses, I thought I was looking 
 for the ones McQuaid's might conceivably take, with an 
 eye to helping Jim through college; and all the time I 
 was really thinking which ones would please this strange 
 man, that I never saw till less than a week ago; and what 
 opinion they'd give him of me.") 
 
 " May I look 'em over right here and now?" he in- 
 quired, on her return. 
 
 She took the rubber band off the packet and handed 
 it to him open; leaning forward a little from her chair 
 to watch his expression. 
 
 Four Roads Out of Emberdale.' I hope this piece 
 comes up to its name." 
 
 He read it twice, and then said : 
 
 " 'Tisn't quite spontaneous. Let's see — let's see what 
 there is here, a little less elaborate." He glanced through 
 the remaining manuscripts and singled out one. 
 
 " Which is that you're reading now?" asked Ellen. 
 
 " One called ' Alexandra.' " 
 
 "Oh! That's a portrait." 
 
 " Of anybody I've met up here? " 
 
192 THE SPINSTER 
 
 " No — of somebody in Nantucket. Sue Redwood. I 
 spoke to you about her the other day, on the picnic, and 
 you said our time for resting was over, and we'd bet- 
 ter go on." 
 
 "I suspect this piece would read better aloud," he said, 
 regarding her rather intently. " You've cramped that 
 small print of yours a good deal, to squeeze in all the 
 stanzas on one page." 
 
 " You'd like me to read it aloud ? " 
 
 " Yes, please. But you can't see very well there, I'm 
 afraid. Would you mind coming and sitting over here? " 
 He rubbed off the chair he had indicated, with his hand- 
 kerchief, and she suddenly remembered how at school 
 boys had dusted off chairs for girls they had liked, and 
 she had never thought much about it one way or another. 
 
 She read aloud those seven stanzas in which she had 
 tried, with so full a heart, to picture the comely health, 
 the lucid mind, the brightly-burning spirit of her friend; 
 and most of all, how 
 
 " Robust and tender 
 
 Is her home-grown feeling; 
 Swift her espousal of the hindmost's part: 
 Instinct her free faith, 
 And her loyal valor; 
 Native to her west-born, fellow-caring heart." 
 
 When she had finished, with a little difficulty toward 
 the last, because she never could read aloud anything at 
 all intimate, without some tremor of emotion in her voice, 
 she looked up and waited for a comment. At length he 
 said: 
 
 " It was lovely, Miss Graham. It was just what I 
 expected." 
 
 "Well! I'm glad you liked it." 
 
DOWN THE VALLEY 193 
 
 " I mean the sweet and darling tremble in your voice." 
 
 There was a considerable silence, which he left it to 
 Ellen to terminate. She did so finally by saying : 
 
 " Sue is different from everybody else. I could never 
 write verses, not in a thousand years, that would come 
 anywhere near her." 
 
 Mr. Tallman rather coolly said : 
 
 " I wonder what she's really like — seen through other 
 people's eyes than yours, I mean." 
 
 " Ask anybody down at Radcliffe." 
 
 " Oh, Miss Graham ! That sort of heroine only grows 
 in novels, and not very good novels." 
 
 " Your theory is perfectly right. The only trouble 
 with it is that the facts in this case won't accommodate 
 themselves. You see Sue Redwood really is that kind of 
 a heroine." 
 
 " Come, come. Miss Graham ! " 
 
 " I don't know whether you're trying to be offensive, 
 or what, Mr. Tallman ! " 
 
 "Well — what does she do, for instance?" 
 
 " She plays the violin, and answers her father's let- 
 ters, and looks after her mother, who has curvature of 
 the spine; and she arranges the concerts at the Italian 
 Settlement, and gives out literature at suffrage meetings, 
 and goes with delegations to the Governor, and some- 
 times acts as a probation officer, and helps collate statis- 
 tics for the Child Labor Committee " 
 
 "Help! I'm drowning!" 
 
 " And all the time she's studying at Radcliffe, and 
 having lonesome girls come in for tea on Sunday nights, 
 and being — Oh! being a lantern to other people's feet, 
 and a Sursum Corda to their spirits," 
 
194 THE SPINSTER 
 
 ("There!" said Franklin Tallman triumphantly to 
 himself. "There it is again, that perfectly delicious 
 tremble in her voice. I thought I could provoke it if 
 I tried hard enough, along that line. Wonder if I could 
 play on it again? ") 
 
 Aloud he said : 
 
 " Oh yes, I suppose she's beautiful, rich, clever, in- 
 nocent " 
 
 " Not beautiful," said Ellen. " She looks beautiful at 
 times, but she isn't, really. Rich, not at all, of course. 
 And as for innocent! Why, she knows ever>thing." 
 
 " I really egged you on. Miss Graham, to get a rise, 
 of sorts, out of you. I've no doubt Miss Redwood's 
 quite a paragon." He took a very restful attitude. " The 
 little I've seen of you, Miss Graham, makes me believe 
 you're moderately truthful. I don't think, if I were a 
 judge, I'd require you to take an oath." 
 
 The rain had stopped, the wind had fallen, and a 
 most lovely evening light began to shine over the whole 
 drenched valley. The sun had sunk, but " drew water " 
 in a thin misty shaft, straight up the avalanche paths 
 of Windward Mountain. 
 
 " Up here in these dulcet mountains of yours you 
 don't really see any suffering, do you? " 
 
 " No suffering! What a Windward House view you 
 take of the country, Mr. Tallman! " 
 
 " Well, I stick to it. Compared. I mean, to the north 
 end of Boston, for example, and east of Second Avenue 
 in New York.'* 
 
 " Our death rate is higher than some cities." 
 
 "Well, but " 
 
 " The first thing I saw was a horse with a broken 
 
DOWN THE VALLEY i95 
 
 hip, that had been driven twenty miles. Since then 
 
 O me!" 
 
 " Man or beast, are you thinking of, Miss Graham? " 
 " Oh, both, both, both ! In city and country, winter 
 
 and summer, he that hath eyes to see, let him see the 
 
 under dog — the corpus vilis of the poor! " 
 
 This was a deeper tremor in her voice than that he 
 
 had so laboriously evoked a little while before. It was 
 
 so deep and beautiful that for a moment he was sure 
 
 that what he felt with her and for her was the one au- 
 
 w 
 
 thentic passion, 
 
 " I hope my poet will hurry up and be born," said she. 
 
 " I hope he will : and I hope he will be you, Miss 
 Graham." 
 
 Times were beginning to occur when it seemed almost 
 probable that she would be her own poet. But when she 
 came to her desk it would be gone, the confident warmth 
 and eagerness. Yet every return of the confident mood 
 carried her judgment temporarily with it. It came on 
 tonight, when she lay awake out of sheer flood-tide hap- 
 piness, looking out the dim window, and feeling the soft 
 heave of her aunt's sleeping breath beside her. Often she 
 had heard of people lying awake with anxiety and sor- 
 row and care and remorse : never because of a solemn 
 bliss like this, rising and flooding over one. Every hour 
 and half-hour struck clearly from the big clock in the 
 dining-room : and every one of the thirty minutes in be- 
 tween was tasted freshly as it passed : every minute burst, 
 like Joy's grape in the poem " against her palate fine." 
 She thought of the stars dancing in their courses, slowly 
 dancing a stately dance, like a sky minuet. It was a white 
 and glittering night. She did not so much as grow drowsy 
 
196 THE SPINSTER 
 
 all night long. When the sun came up, at about five in 
 the morning, over the round shoulder of Hemlock Moun- 
 tain, and poured in ladlefuls of light through the slats 
 of the shutters, she was a thousand times more rested 
 than if she had been asleep. But it was Sunday, the 
 late-lying morning. Splashing and opening and shutting 
 bureau drawers would wake up her aunt. It was im- 
 material whether one rose and dressed in a flood of hap- 
 piness, or lay still in a flood of it. 
 
 Mountain lightning on one of these same August 
 nights was never more sudden than the troubling thought 
 that at this moment darted into her mind. It shot out at 
 her from the picture of Julia on the bracket on the wall 
 over the whatnot. The slats of sunshine had picked out 
 Julia's faintly colored tintype to illuminate. One bar 
 of it shone full across her beautiful red hair, and another 
 on her wonderful peach-rose complexion, leaving in 
 shadow her soft eyes. The tintype man had colored 
 it hastily, but its loveliness had somehow survived him, 
 and to anybody who knew by heart Julia's beautiful color- 
 ing, the dash of pink in each cheek and the wash of 
 crimson over the hair were enough to reconstruct the 
 whole arrangement of light and color in that fixed, 
 tender face. 
 
 If Franklin Tallman should once see Julia Olden- 
 bury, he would save her forever from Webster Willets. 
 He would not care again to sit on the Mowbrays' piazza 
 with Ellen, and call her voice " sweet and darling." 
 
 And if Julia ever came to know the thoughtfulness, the 
 tempered manliness, the strength and sense of Frank- 
 lin Tallman's mind, she would not marry, she could not 
 love, a cave-man. 
 
DOWN THE VALLEY 197 
 
 This was the forked Hghtning that struck out of 
 JuHa's picture into the very bull's-eye of Ellen's heart. 
 
 Julia never came up to the Old Street on Sun- 
 days. Mr. Tallman was leaving on the Sunday 
 evening flyer. 
 
 It was of little use trying so studiously to avoid the 
 notion that if she and Mr, Tallman took their belated 
 walk that day they might go down the valley and call on 
 Julia. 
 
 Julia might be out with Webster. There was no tele- 
 phone at Wakerobin, and none, either, at the Oldenbury 
 farm. 
 
 Or she might be at home, and Webster with her; and 
 they might be very much annoyed at callers coming. 
 
 All this, she reflected, was a good deal like her 
 having tried to think the tarantula would have run 
 out of the pasture before she could go back to scrunch 
 it. It was like Jim's nurse telling her to forget 
 the tubercular brothers in the garbage street. It was the 
 Mrs. Partington of the soul. This element of scorn 
 having once come in, it was only a question of time when 
 the self -beyond-self, so much more arrogant in these 
 days, would have its way. There was a Rubicon crossed 
 somewhere between five and six o'clock. Once on 
 the far side of it, she found pride enlisted, with all 
 its banners. She cared so much about her happiness 
 that she would risk it all. It was worth the greatest 
 stakes she could hazard. Great texts of Scripture came 
 into her mind, far beyond her present need, or any com- 
 mon need, yet fitted, by their very hyperbole, to rouse 
 and sustain her: " He that loveth his life shall lose it, 
 and he that loseth his life . . . shall keep it unto life 
 
198 THE SPINSTER 
 
 eternal." ** If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out." With 
 more sense of humor, Ellen would not have had the sub- 
 lime egotism to appropriate such mighty words to her 
 small uses. But perhaps those mighty texts were meant 
 for idealistic young egoists. 
 
 In half an hour more she got up, washed, brushed, 
 dressed, and went downstairs to skim the cream for 
 breakfast, and air the house. The sun that was shining 
 in on her conscience was a rather watery, wintry sun, 
 though a very wholesome, sanitary one. But out of 
 doors, after the gusty storm, it was the perfection of 
 mountain summer weather. There was a look of velvet 
 depth in the folds of Windward and Hemlock Moun- 
 tains, into which the sunbeams out of the blue and white 
 sky seemed to burrow like bees. It would have been 
 strange if Franklin Tallman, on such a morning, had not 
 strolled down before church (in white flannel trousers 
 of cheap quality and poor fit, but of proper dazzling 
 freshness) and asked for the belated walk they should 
 have had yesterday. 
 
 Perhaps he wondered why Ellen, in consenting, had 
 had a certain squareness and setness in her face. She 
 had not looked quite so nice today as she had yesterday, 
 he reflected, being in a musing mood, as he walked 
 down from the Windward House to Wakerobin at the 
 appointed hour that afternoon. Yesterday the dampness 
 had made the short hairs round her temples curl up a 
 little. In cloudy weather the pupils of light-colored eyes 
 grow larger. — She had a sprinkling of freckles over the 
 cheekbones, scattering down toward the chin. The end 
 of her short nose was well sprinkled with freckles. She 
 wasn't really pretty anyway. — There had been rather a 
 
DOWN THE VALLEY 199 
 
 nice look about her eyes that morning, though, chilly as 
 they were. It was a sort of soldierly look. 
 
 She wasn't going to be forgotten very soon, he said 
 to himself, with a sudden warm feeling of tenderness. 
 She would be a fine, straight, simple-hearted comrade for 
 some man. She would wear well, very well. She looked 
 constant; she looked equal to weathering dull days. It 
 had been a pleasant week, a very pleasant week. Very, 
 indeed. Next week looked rather blank, by comparison. 
 What sort of letter would she write, he wondered? 
 
 Falling in love began sometimes rather tentatively, of 
 course. It wasn't always a plunge, head on, over the 
 falls. It was getting a little difficult to keep their talk quite 
 purely companionable and friendly. It kindled a little 
 too warm, this last day or two. A little too warm, if it 
 
 were not going to be That was a sort of break he 
 
 had made on Saturday afternoon. What business had he 
 to call her voice sweet and darling? 
 
 If, on the other hand, this were the tentative kind, 
 the slowly rooting passion, how greatly worth while had 
 been the wild-goose chase after a new verse-writer for 
 McQuaid's Magazine! By the time he reached Wake- 
 robin, Franklin Tallman distinctly saw Ellen Graham 
 with a baby of his and hers in her arms. 
 
 "Which way are we going, Miss Graham?" 
 
 " Down the valley road to the Oldenbury farm." 
 
 " ' Where once the pilgrim cattle stood 
 In fragrant clover to the knee ' ? " 
 
 he quoted her own verses. 
 
 " Do you know, it was the valley road and the Olden- 
 bury farm I was thinking of when I wrote ' Atlantis ' ? " 
 
200 THE SPLNSTER 
 
 " So you're taking me down there to illustrate your 
 poem for me? " 
 
 Ellen's face sobered. 
 
 " No, I'm taking you down there to see Julia Olden- 
 bury. She's a great friend of mine." 
 
 " Oh ! Then the one you wrote about in that rather 
 fine thing you read me yesterday isn't your only great 
 friend?" 
 
 " No indeed. Julia's a good deal older friend of mine 
 than Sue. I've known Julia ever since we were the small- 
 est kind of fry. We went to school together, and wrote 
 verses all over our books. Now she's " 
 
 She stopped. There seemed something so treacherous 
 to Webster in this visit, she could not bring herself to go 
 on and mention the engagement. But then, Webster had 
 never been able to make her feel toward him as one 
 human being toward another. 
 
 And though the expedition had been undertaken for 
 the purpose of throwing herself to the lions, a notion kept 
 obtruding upon her that she was merely being extremely 
 absurd. So mingled a state of mind she had never felt 
 before. Fear and exaltation were inextricably inter- 
 twined with a sense of ridiculousness. The ground really 
 under her in the whole affair was probably a lingering 
 remnant of common sense, perpetually reminding her, 
 in caverns of the subconscious mind, that nothing at all, 
 probably, would come of the great venture; that it was a 
 mere mystical act, a sort of quixotic act of faith. There 
 was undoubtedly a certain element of the theatrical about 
 it. And yet there was also much more. Prizes and pearls 
 of great happiness always seemed to Ellen like fairy 
 jewels; one false step and they would wither away. 
 
DOWN THE VALLEY 'aoi 
 
 There was with her always, too, the old cowardly yet 
 would-be-brave longing to leap off the cliff like Perseus, 
 and try if Pallas Athene had not fastened the wings to 
 the sandals. 
 
 " What makes you so quiet. Miss Graham? " 
 
 " Why — I'm listening to you. Don't people always say 
 a person's greatest accomplishment is to be a good 
 listener? " 
 
 " But if you'll excuse me, you're not a good listener 
 today. Here I'm telling you about my boyhood, and 
 you're looking the other way, with the most preoccupied 
 look on your face I've ever seen in all the years I've 
 known you." 
 
 " Please go on telling." 
 
 " You're thinking what to say to Julia Waterbury, or 
 whatever her name is, to explain why you brought a 
 poor, homely, stupid fellow down to see her." 
 
 "What a perfect mind-reader!" 
 
 " Well, I wouldn't worry. Perhaps Julia Waterbury'll 
 be out. It's better to be born lucky than handsome." 
 
 This vein of mild frolicsomeness continued until they 
 had dipped into the deepest part of the valley, and the 
 sudden wildness of the river bottom reminded him afresh 
 of his Maine home. He began then to tell about his 
 father, small and grizzled, driving over a radius of fifteen 
 miles of wood, lake, and river country to see his scat- 
 tered patients : getting paid sometimes in cabbages, some- 
 times in butternuts, having his work undone by travel- 
 ing charlatans and patent medicines, having to invent and 
 manufacture all sorts of braces and splints, on the spur of 
 the moment, for all sorts of unheard-of accidents. 
 
 " And my mother trims her little old black bonnets over 
 
202 THE SPINSTER 
 
 and over and over again," he told her, " hke a minister's 
 wife in a short story. Her bonnets are black because 
 my brother Henry died, a good many years ago. She 
 always keeps a pansy or two in a teacup in front of a 
 queer Httle picture of Henry and me together, holding 
 hands, in the funniest little plaid knickerbockers and vel- 
 veteen jackets you ever saw! They originally belonged 
 to father and my Uncle Tom. Mother cut 'em down." 
 
 Either from walking faster, or from interest, Ellen's 
 fruity color had come up; and all her conflicting thoughts 
 were being submerged deeper and deeper by the tide of 
 inconsequent happiness the isolated companionship was 
 pouring over her. 
 
 She said : 
 
 " I see your mother ! She has one of those pretty 
 mouths, the least bit concave, and ruffled the least little 
 bit round the edges." 
 
 " That's not altogether a bad guess." 
 
 " Bonnets become her, probably." 
 
 " They do. She's got one of those round, tiable faces." 
 
 He was silent for a moment or two, and then said : 
 
 " You see, Miss Graham, I haven't a single drop of 
 blue blood in my whole body — no, not even to conciliate 
 that pretty Aunt Sallie of yours, that can't bear the sight 
 of me." 
 
 Ellen looked at her man, and all her heart rose tri- 
 umphing. 
 
 They were at the Oldenbury gate; the old gate she had 
 swung on in her childhood. They went in through the 
 hollyhocks and the bee-balm to the side door. Their 
 knock echoed and was still. Through the sittinsr-room 
 windows they saw a cat stretched in luxurious abandon 
 
DOWN THE VALLEY 203 
 
 on the sofa. No footsteps sounded within; there was no 
 sound but the faintest tinkle of a cow-bell away off in the 
 fields. 
 
 " They're all away," said Ellen at last. She was almost 
 afraid to feel such a fierce joy and triumph burning in 
 her heart as this. They stood still for a moment or two 
 more, in the level four-o'clock light pouring down across 
 the fields. You could look deep into the sugar-bush by 
 this light : you could see far into the brown dusk within. 
 Then they turned back through the bee-balm and holly- 
 hocks toward the gate again and Ellen tried to hide and 
 smother the leaping, shouting joy in her heart. 
 
 As they turned into the road there was a clat- 
 ter in the covered bridge below, on the Tewkesbury road, 
 and emerging from the bridge's hood, with spanking 
 clatter of hoofs and buggy wheels, Ellen saw Sue Red- 
 wood and a young man, driving up toward the Old 
 Street. 
 
 " Why, there she is now ! " called a high and sweet 
 voice out of the buggy. There was a gray glove waving, 
 and a white dress vaulting out over the wheel, and escap- 
 ing without a single fleck of mud in doing so. 
 
 " We were driving up to see you " 
 
 " Where did you come from? " 
 
 " — Going to surprise you " 
 
 " How long have you been here? " 
 
 " Last night — to stay a week — surprised Aunt Jane! " 
 
 " Well, Mr. Tallman, this is Sue. Miss Redwood, Mr. 
 Tallman." 
 
 " Miss Graham — Mr. Micantoni." 
 
 Mr. Micantoni was a young man of very comely and 
 well-proportioned figure, with a head that made Ellen 
 
204 THE SPINSTER 
 
 think of the portraits of Burns. He held it in much the 
 same position, and his dark, thick, longish locks were 
 brushed straight forward in the same manner. 
 
 " Oh ! " she remembered. " Sue mentioned this man in 
 one of her letters. He plays the violin, I remember." 
 
 " Now, Ellen," cried Sue, "what shall we do? Here 
 are two of us afoot, and two a-buggy. Who says to let 
 the bars down and unhitch old Mouse here, and tie her 
 to the fence, under that big tree, in the Oldenbury 
 meadow; and all walk up together, and have supper with 
 you, Ellen, and Mr. Micantoni and I'll walk back by 
 moonlight and drive Mouse home from here? " 
 
 This plan suited all hands. Mr. Micantoni looked 
 toward Sue, and his glance crossed Mr. Tallman's travel- 
 ing the same way; and something took fire, and was in- 
 stantly extinguished. Sue ran and began letting down 
 the bars into the field, and the young men unhitched the 
 mouse-colored mare and led her through into the shady 
 deep turf of the meadow. They pushed the old yellow- 
 wheeled buggy into a thicket of wayside bushes. Then 
 they all set off up the road to the Old Street. Some- 
 times Sue walked with Ellen. She told her about Mr. 
 Micantoni ; how his father was Professor of Dante at the 
 University of Rome, and he had come to this country 
 three years ago to study engineering, but was likely to 
 give that up, for scientific writing. 
 
 " He plays the violin, and so do you," said Ellen mus- 
 ingly. 
 
 Sometimes Ellen walked with Mr. Micantoni, and 
 found that what little he had to say to her was said very 
 modestly and intelligently in very good colloquial English 
 indeed : only the dwelling pause on the liquids, and a 
 
DOWN THE VALLEY 205 
 
 rolling rhythm of accent, would have let anybody know- 
 that he was Italian. 
 
 And sometimes each girl walked with her own man, 
 and those were the longest divisions of road and time. 
 They could almost see their own shadows stretching 
 longer and longer beside them in the wayside grass. The 
 blueness of late summer was all along the northern moun- 
 tains; the thick slice of hazy distance at the upper end 
 of the valley where Bald and Mother Mountains closed 
 in toward each other, was the color of the bloom on blue- 
 berries. 
 
 Mr. Tallman told Ellen more about his life. He would 
 talk for a while, and then be silent for a while. He told 
 her he had caught her silent fit of an hour or two ago. — 
 He had partly worked his way through college, and then 
 won a scholarship. He was trying now to get his sisters 
 educated. He had three younger sisters, and he had no 
 idea that there was any more need of a higher education 
 for him than for them. 
 
 Ellen said: 
 
 " Do you know at first I thought you must be quite 
 well-to-do, to be staying at the Windward House ? " 
 
 " Oh, McQuaid's sent me there. At least, they want 
 an article on typical summer hotels, and this is on the 
 Boomerang Automobile Road, you know. I combined 
 things. I have to spend next Sunday at a Long Island 
 seaside hotel." He was silent again for a little while, 
 and then added : 
 
 " And to have to write it as if you cared! Think ycfu 
 could write to order, like that. Miss Graham ? " 
 
 " I think I couldn't make a living at all, by any form of 
 writing ! " 
 
2o6 THE SPINSTER 
 
 " I think I see you writing an article on summer hotels, 
 Miss Graham." 
 
 Ellen, in sudden earnestness, laid her hand on his 
 sleeve. 
 
 " Oh, you little know, Mr, Tallman, — there's nothing 
 fine about me at all ! I'm one of those sheltered women — 
 parasites — other women call us so, and I think they're 
 right. My father supports me, I don't earn my own 
 way in the world. Who am I to have business or pro- 
 fessional ideals? And besides, there's something 
 else " 
 
 " Well? " he prompted at length, she stood still so long, 
 looking so earnest. 
 
 " Well, you said something the other day about my 
 being truthful; — I can't let you think for a minute that 
 I'm a very white, crystal person ! I don't know whether 
 you do, except that men do assume that any girl in a 
 clean dress, with a clear complexion, is just the same 
 inside ■" 
 
 She stopped and looked at him, baffled and troubled by 
 his laughing expression. 
 
 " You think these things I'm speaking of are childish, 
 but they're not! They're not! " 
 
 "No?" 
 
 "Oh no! We're not Hke that, like lilies. At least 
 I'm not. I have such base thoughts, more than thoughts! 
 You must understand, Mr. Tallman! Do you under- 
 stand?" 
 
 She shook his sleeve where she had caught hold of it. 
 
 " I understand that you're a very bad lot. Miss 
 Graham." 
 
 " Oh, you don't understand, and you don't believe nie." 
 
DOWN THE VALLEY 207 
 
 " Yes, indeed, I do. I understand," he answered more 
 seriously. 
 
 He shifted her jacket from one arm to the other, as he 
 spoke. 
 
 " I think I understand; and if I didn't feel before that 
 you were pretty white all through, I surely feel so now, 
 Miss Graham." 
 
 As they crossed the old red bridge over the Ballantyne, 
 he lifted up her jacket-sleeve where it hung over his arm, 
 and kissed it. 
 
 When they got back to Wakerobin, the aunts had the 
 tea-table on the piazza, and had bread and butter, poached 
 eggs and blackberries and cream set out on it, but only 
 for five. To make places for seven, all the young people 
 crowded into the little pantry, and bore out, with mock 
 ceremonial of bows and scrapes, with napkins, waiter- 
 Hke, over their arms, fresh slices of bread and pats of 
 butter, and another basket of blackberries to hull. Sue 
 and Ellen hulled them, while the three young men 
 whistled and sang, all sitting on the piazza steps. 
 
 It was sweet and pleasant, it was unforgettable, but it 
 came to an end. The stage for the evening flyer came 
 and stopped at the door, with Franklin Tallman's suit- 
 case already on board. He said good-by to the aunts 
 and Jim and Mr. Micantoni, and last to Sue and Ellen. 
 He shook Sue's hand, and then almost flung it away 
 from him, in the middle of her gay and cordial farewell; 
 but Ellen's he let go gently, as if he were laying it down, 
 with almost the gesture with which he had laid the sleeve 
 of her jacket over his arm again after he had kissed it. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 THE WANING 
 
 " Sue ! Come up soon ! I must have you to talk to." 
 
 " So must I have you ! " 
 
 Thus Ellen had parted with her friend on that Sunday 
 evening : and on Tuesday morning Sue drove the mouse- 
 colored mare up from Tewkesbury to spend the whole 
 day. In the interim Ellen had felt, as often before, a 
 fairly physical thirst for the sense and judgment of her 
 more than sister. She was finding it a necessity nowadays 
 to consult Sue in every intellectual and emotional emer- 
 gency. What had begun at college as an obscure instinct 
 was ripening into a settled custom, which might have 
 been condensed into a proverb: 
 
 " What is worth thinking over at all is worth consult- 
 ing Sue Redwood about." 
 
 They had gone down to the river, and were sitting by 
 the abandoned mill-race, looking into the golden-brown 
 water as they talked. And these were fragments of 
 their talk, or rather of Ellen's talk and Sue's musing 
 comments and promptings. 
 
 *' But I don't think there's enough unselfishness in my 
 feeling, Sue. I don't have any of that maternal feeling 
 people tell about. I know perfectly well what it is; I've 
 had it for years about Jim : ever since he had pneumonia, 
 in fact. I hate, even yet, to have him go off on these 
 
 208 
 
THE WANING 209 
 
 golf matches without an umbrella, and I'm always sneak- 
 ing down and looking in his room to see if he's taken his 
 coat. It frets me for days if he gets caught in the 
 rain." 
 
 " Let me ask you something else, Ellen. When you 
 think of this man, do you ever think of his being very 
 hot and dusty and tired and cross? And will he stand 
 the strain ? " 
 
 "I haven't thought of it; but wait, I will!" 
 
 After sitting sober and silent for a time, she answered 
 confidently : 
 
 " Yes, he stands that strain." 
 
 " Sometimes, Sue, I think of a line in Clough's * Mari 
 Magno,' where the bride and groom go ofiF in a boat, and 
 the old friend sees 
 
 " * Emilia closing to his side.' 
 
 And that makes me think of an old white farmhouse with 
 big maple trees in front of it, when people that have been 
 to tea there — with us — are going away at the end of the 
 evening, all calling back ' Good-night ! ' as they go down 
 the road : and we two slowly walk back into our house, 
 and are all alone there together." 
 
 " And I'll tell you. Sue, — something else — I think of 
 our sitting by a student-lamp in the evenings, talking 
 over different ways of making our lives more American, 
 more democratic, more uncluttered, and cleaner, and 
 harder, and more and more beautiful and energetic." 
 
2IO THE SPINSTER 
 
 " Oh, Ellen ! I do love your way of thinking of 
 things ! " 
 
 " But, you see, I haven't got that maternal feeling at 
 all." 
 
 " I think, my dear, you'd have it fast enough if he were 
 ill, or hurt, or in any kind of trouble." 
 
 " I don't know. For while I do feel that way about 
 Jim, and often about father, and Aunt Sallie, for in- 
 stance, when she gets that worried look in her eyes, I 
 don't need to have them right here in the house with me ! 
 I only need to know they're happy and well." 
 
 " Of course." 
 
 " Whereas with him it's so different. All I really 
 want is to have him near me. I don't look at things 
 through his eyes at all. I don't even think about his 
 happiness. All I want is to have him near, and loving 
 me. I really think that's my idea of heaven." 
 
 " I should think that Httle bit might do, to begin with." 
 
 " Sometimes I think of our being shipwrecked, and I 
 imagine us drowning together, and it seems perfectly all 
 right and nice." 
 
 " I guess I understand." 
 
 " Sue, what do you think about marriage in heaven ? " 
 
 " Why, I never think of celibacy up there." 
 
 " Neither do I." 
 
 • •••••• 
 
 " Does it frighten you, Ellen, to think of having a 
 child?" 
 
 " No — oh no ! Or do you mean, am I afraid of the 
 pain?" 
 
 " Partly that, and partly whether you find yourself 
 liking the thought of it." 
 
THE WANING 211 
 
 " Why, I love the thought of it. But I am afraid of 
 the pain and the danger. I was always a desperate 
 coward. And by the way, Sue, do you take any stock 
 in this idea that moral courage, so-called, is more diffi- 
 cult than physical ? I don't. I never did, in fact. Who 
 wouldn't rather be hissed and hooted at and stood in the 
 pillory, than burned at the stake? I'm sure / can stand 
 ridicule, if I need to : it only gets my dander up : but, 
 oh! I'm afraid I would deny Jesus to save my worthless 
 body a little pain." 
 
 " Well, Ellen, the sun's going down. And I'm con- 
 vinced you do love this nice Mr. Tallman, for better, for 
 worse." 
 
 " I guess I do. Sue." 
 
 They set off homeward across the stubbled fields, walk- 
 ing rather schoolgirlishly, arm in arm. Ellen spoke a 
 little, as if for decency's sake, of Mr. Micantoni, and of 
 Julia's engagement, not telling about her heroic fiasco of 
 Sunday afternoon. But soon she was back again on the 
 subject of her heart. 
 
 " Think, Sue, ten days ago I'd never seen him ! Do 
 you know, when I was a little girl, I used to have a 
 perfectly beautiful feeling, once in a while, that I used to 
 call the blue sky. When I grew up it dwindled away: 
 but what was the blue sky to this ? " 
 
 " Don't you ever think, too, that if the twenties go so 
 far ahead of the teens, maybe there's something stored 
 up in the thirties that's just as far ahead of the twenties? 
 And in the forties, just as far ahead of the thirties? Of 
 course I can't possibly imagine anything better than 
 
212 THE SPINSTER 
 
 this. As I say, it's simply my idea of heaven, to have 
 it, and to know, of course, that everybody else has it 
 too." 
 
 " It does make the English language seem poor, doesn't 
 it?" 
 
 " Yes. There's a very small vocabulary of words to 
 describe happiness." 
 
 " That's where musicians are lucky. They can de- 
 scribe it." 
 
 " Writers can do better than painters, at any rate." 
 
 They had climbed the last fence, and were back in the 
 Old Street, when Sue said : 
 
 " My dear, do you know why I could listen to you so 
 well, and give you such excellent advice? Because I've 
 been in love much longer than you have ! " 
 
 " Sue ! Is it Mr. Micantoni ? " 
 
 "Yes! And Ellen " 
 
 "What?" 
 
 " We're engaged." 
 
 "But when?" 
 
 " Since Sunday evening." 
 
 " On the way home from our house ? " 
 
 Sue nodded. 
 
 " God bless you, Sue. How happy we both are ! " 
 
 They kissed each other. 
 
 " But how could you let me be talking all day long 
 about my man? " 
 
 " Oh well ! Perhaps because it made me think of 
 mine." 
 
 " Well, Sue ! There's a line in Hazlitt somewhere, 
 about counting your life by lusters." 
 
 " It's in ' Reading Old Books,' I believe." 
 
THE WANING 213 
 
 " Everything anybody's ever said seems so faded, 
 though, somehow, doesn't it?" 
 " Except, as I said, music." 
 
 Sue went back to Nantucket when her week's visit with 
 her Great-aunt Jane was over; and Ellen relapsed into 
 that mooning solitude which persons in love enjoy so 
 much; that fruitful-feeling idleness, which must be to the 
 fields of the spirit what Indian summer, with its dream- 
 ing suns and moons, is to the fields of earth. This was 
 the end of the season among the summer cottagers and 
 at the Windward House. Old friends of the aunts, de- 
 scendants of old Tory Hill families, who had emigrated 
 a generation earlier to the West and South, used often 
 to come at this season; and there were afternoon teas 
 and whist parties for them at Wakerobin. They in turn 
 used to ask the Wakerobin family to dine at the Wind- 
 ward House, especially on hop nights. Ellen always 
 went. It did not occur to her to decline invitations un- 
 less (as never happened) she were ill. Putting on her 
 black low-necked dress with a sprig of sweet clover or 
 goldenrod stuck in the bosom, and her string of gold 
 beads round her neck, she would go up to the Windward 
 House parlor and take her mooning thoughts along with 
 her. On warm September evenings the party would 
 often sit on the long pillared piazzas of the hotel, while 
 the reduced orchestra played waltzes and two-steps in the 
 ballroom to the diminishing guests. Early in these even- 
 ings Jim would carry off whatever young girl beside his 
 sister was in the party, to the ballroom within, and would 
 be seen no more. Then the evening wind would rise, and 
 swing the hanging electric lanterns between the tall pil- 
 
214 THE SPINSTER 
 
 lars of the piazza; and the tops of the maples would 
 swish, and their heavily leaved branches would lap-lap 
 against each other like waves on a beach. Indolent, re- 
 freshing, these evenings called " social," but in reality 
 of essential solitude, succeeded each other several times 
 a week throughout that pleasant September; seeming 
 fruitful : not immediately fruitful of anything but pensive 
 pleasure; — due partly, no doubt, like all her blisses, to 
 mere exuberance of health. 
 
 She was not writing anything at all. Actual rust gath- 
 ered on her pen. The one pigeon-hole of her desk which 
 was looked into from time to time was that sparsely occu- 
 pied with Franklin Tallman's letters. They had not been 
 either frequent or very long. But they had sufficed. In 
 October they grew fewer. There was also about them a 
 dryer sort of tone. The signatures had changed. In- 
 stead of the humorous variety of the earlier ones, came 
 now uniformly, " Yours sincerely." 
 
 Ellen's letters were prompter and longer than his. 
 And into them went all the fancy and all the humor of her 
 not very humorous nature, with all the poetry which could 
 conform itself to a letter which was to be read by cool- 
 ing eyes. Thrice intensified now, her old habit of look- 
 ing at things through other people's eyes made her write 
 and rewrite her letters to him with far more pains than 
 she had ever bestowed on a manuscript. From the van- 
 tage of October, looking back, she realized that it had 
 been almost as soon as he had gone away that she had 
 begun to write her letters for a presumably critical, cool 
 reader. And yet, at first, all such fears, sadnesses, and 
 timidities had been easily dispelled, especially in those 
 solitary, unoccupied evenings at the Windward House, 
 
THE WANING 215 
 
 when the wind so pleasantly lapped and swished the 
 trees. Then one had only to remember his deep voice 
 calling her voice " sweet and darling," or that Sunday 
 walk, when they had stopped on the old red bridge; and 
 he was back beside her, in secret bliss. 
 
 The aunts were welcome to divine her affairs, if only 
 they would never speak, or make her speak, of them. 
 Aunt Sallie never did. She only looked wistfully puz- 
 zled sometimes, as if she were saying to herself, " I 
 didn't want the other thing, and yet I surely don't want 
 this! " Aunt Sallie seemed to divine more than Aunt 
 Fran. Aunt Fran called Ellen upstairs one night, when 
 she had been sitting out on the piazza, wrapped in a big 
 cape, all alone, very late. Aunt Fran was in bed, with 
 her bright Italian blanket pulled up over her knees, mak- 
 ing her brilliant dark face yet darker and more brilliant. 
 She called Ellen to her bedside and asked, without any 
 warning, if Ellen had anything to tell her. Ellen 
 said: 
 
 " Mercy no, Aunt Fran! " 
 
 " Well, all right. I saw one of those gray envelopes in 
 the mail this morning, I thought." 
 
 " Put it out of your mind, do, please. Aunt Fran. 
 There's really nothing in it — nothing but friendship." 
 
 The overworked word did sound very lame, she ad- 
 mitted to herself as soon as she heard herself say it. 
 
 " Tell that to the marines. You may call it a flirtation, 
 if you like." 
 
 "All right, I will," said Ellen with relief. "We'll 
 call it a flirtation." 
 
 " I really liked the young man very well," the older 
 woman continued thoughtfully. " I liked him much bet- 
 
2i6 THE SPINSTER 
 
 ter than your Aunt Sarah did. I thought, Ellen, he 
 was a good deal of a man." 
 
 It was not fortunate to be of a complexion and tem- 
 perament that showed eager, pitiful pleasure quite so 
 transparently. 
 
 Her aunt, without seeming to notice anything, added 
 shrewdly : 
 
 " To tell the truth, Ellen, I never supposed you had 
 very much of the flirt in you." 
 
 " Don't speak so discouragingly. Aunt Fran ! It's 
 never too late to learn." 
 
 " Your Aunt Sarah and I have always had men 
 friends. Now your mother never did. She was a little 
 starched, we used to tell her. She was rather prim. In 
 fact young men were rather afraid of her. She never 
 had any beaux at all, so far as any of us knew, until she 
 met your father and married him. I've sometimes 
 thought it would be the same way with you." 
 
 " Dear Aunt Fran ! Now they're both worried about 
 me," Ellen thought perplexedly to herself, as she slowly 
 undressed. " Why can't I go and confide in both of 
 them? They've surely been mothers to me. Why can't 
 I go and talk it all over with them? " But after staring 
 at herself for a long while in the glass over her bureau, 
 she ended dully, " I can't. Perhaps, after years and 
 years and years, I could." 
 
 Sue wrote that she was to be married late in October 
 or early in November. Would Ellen be bridesmaid, along 
 with Mr. Micantoni's sister? She would have but two. 
 This letter came on a bright, breezy day, and the bright- 
 ness and the breeze seemed to accentuate unkindly the 
 
THE WANING 217 
 
 faint chill of desolation that hung nowadays about the 
 word " wedding." 
 
 It was at about this time that the Sunday Censor 
 regularly had a page of " Views and Reviews," with 
 three or four pictures of magazine and newspaper edi- 
 tors scattered among the paragraphs giving their opinions 
 on various questions of the hour. On this page Ellen 
 found, one Sunday in October, a picture of Franklin 
 Tallman, " assistant editor of McQuaid's." A wretched 
 likeness it was, giving his somewhat thin face a physically 
 delicate look that did not belong to it, and doing anything 
 but justice to his deep-set dark eyes. There was an 
 abrasion in the paper, too, which gave the effect of a 
 scar or welt on his cheek. In spite of these disadvan- 
 tages, however, there was a look of quietness, firmness, 
 and self-confidence about it, which anyone would have 
 recognized. The whimsical twist of his lips, too, was 
 there, and that rather distinguished, half-Hebrew look. 
 Ellen cut it out and put it in a silver frame she had. 
 This frame was made to hang on the wall rather than to 
 stand, like an easel, on a bureau or table. She hung it, 
 accordingly, over a calendar she had hanging beside her 
 bed. On the first evening she had it there, she consulted 
 the calendar to get the distance to Sue's wedding; and 
 as she felt again the dreary reverberation of the word 
 ** wedding " in her mind, she took the picture down and 
 looked at it searchingly for some time. Before she put it 
 back she kissed it. On the next night she took occasion 
 to kiss it again : and after that throughout the autumn she 
 kissed it more regularly than she wound her clock. 
 
 It was curious how kissing the picture seemed to re- 
 lieve the staring dreariness that was gathering round her. 
 
2i8 THE SPINSTER 
 
 It seemed to open a door, and let her out into a sort 
 of garden. Only the garden was growing darker. Every 
 night when she kissed the picture and went out into the 
 garden, there were some more of the flowers that she 
 could no longer see. This slow darkening and clouding 
 of her life was punctuated by two dreams. One came 
 early in the autumn, before Sue's wedding, and one a 
 long time later. In the first, she dreamed that Franklin 
 Tallman took a locket off his watch-chain and put it in 
 her hands. She struggled for a long time with the clasp 
 of it; and when she opened it, there was Sue Redwood's 
 picture in it. In the other dream she met him walking 
 with another woman, but this time it was not Sue. It 
 was a perfectly strange face, pale, quiet, and rather sweet. 
 She knew it to be his wife, before he introduced them : 
 and then in her dream, they all walked along together, 
 and she herself smiled, talked, and even laughed. On 
 waking, she had thought startledly, " I don't believe in 
 dreams." But as time went on, she found more com- 
 fort in trying to believe in it. At least, to this extent she 
 taught herself to believe in it; she had once heard a saying 
 that " Dreams are a mirror in which we see our true 
 selves " ; and it was cheering to believe so in the case of 
 this second dream. Like the first, it had been of a vivid- 
 ness such as stays by one not only all day, but for days 
 and even weeks. It pleased her deeply to think that if 
 such an encounter ever befell her, she could walk over 
 the hot plowshares smiling and talking. An increase of 
 faith in herself and in her power to play the woman gal- 
 lantly dated from, and was partly based on, this dream. 
 
 By morning light, on days outwardly very happy, it 
 seemed, sometimes, a remote contingency. There was 
 
THE WANING 219 
 
 an imperative hopefulness in her, at times, that cast away 
 the thought of it. And curiously enough, the slower and 
 briefer his letters became, the more freely she indulged 
 herself in the hopeless sweetness of her fancies. 
 
 She could not have slept, now, without kissing the 
 picture. After kissing it, she often felt a burning in 
 her chest, as if it lay there. 
 
 That hard, sound health of hers made her sleep well, 
 except on the nights after she had had a letter from him, 
 or had written to him. Then she was apt to lie awake 
 until the small hours. She rose, however, physically 
 perfectly fresh on the next day. If there was any dif- 
 ference in her, it was only in a little heaviness and slow- 
 ness. Perhaps her eyelids were a little heavier. 
 
 Sue had fixed on the second week in November for 
 her wedding, and was married at noon on a wild, tem- 
 pestuous, dark, drenching day of equinoctial storm. She 
 was married in old Christ Church, in Cambridge, of 
 which an ancestor of hers had been the first rector. She 
 wore a beautiful old silver brooch which he had given 
 her ancestress on her remote, forgotten wedding-day 
 within the same old low brown walls. Ellen was a 
 bridesmaid. It had seemed at first too difficult, but when 
 the day came nearer, and the merciful bustle about dress 
 and hat, time-tables, and wedding present came on, it 
 grew easier and easier. 
 
 " And besides," Ellen had thought, in her old formula, 
 " what's the use of not going to Sue's wedding? If I'm 
 going to be disappointed in love, what good will it do 
 me to stick my head in the sand and not be willing to be 
 round when other people are extra happy? What if Sue 
 were to be disappointed in love? — God forgive me!" 
 
220 THE SPINSTER 
 
 The notion frightened her. She felt, in that illogical 
 way of hers, that if she let Sue's beautiful happiness 
 hurt her, it would be partly her fault if Sue's happiness 
 came to an end. She hurried all the more to get her 
 bridesmaid's dress ready. 
 
 She took the picture down off the wall and packed it in 
 her suitcase amidst her bridesmaid's finery. At the last 
 minute she packed his letters too. She had not meant to 
 take them. She seldom read them over now. She had 
 not had one for three weeks. It was only a feeling of 
 forlornness at leaving them behind that made her give 
 way and put them in, when the stage was at the door. 
 
 And after all, Sue's wedding was quite cheerful and 
 happy and pleasant. It even came into her mind, as she 
 went up to greet the bride and groom and saw that stead- 
 fast look of friendship in Sue's eyes, unmistakably show- 
 ing through the bridal look she so vividly wore, — that 
 constant look she had tried to describe by calling it 
 
 " Robust and tender," 
 
 — it came into her mind that such clear and solid depths 
 of friendship were not to be received by any person who 
 also claimed the full fruition of love. It was not the first 
 time she had thought modestly about the amount of 
 happiness any one person could claim. 
 
 There was something further connected with that 
 thought. Something came out of it in the stillness of 
 that night, in the strange room in the Redwood house, 
 like a butterfly out of a chrysalis. It tried its weak wings 
 at first tremblingly, then more and more confidently. 
 
 If there were meaning in that dream of Sue's picture 
 in the locket Franklin Tallman wore, there might be days 
 
THE WANING 221 
 
 coming, not such a long way ahead, when she could find 
 some satisfaction, at least, in the fact that he had been 
 capable of divining and loving so great and fine a nature 
 as Sue's. She conceived herself as modifying Emerson's 
 inhuman paradox to a mere statement of fact. 
 
 " My lover is nobler 
 Than to love me." 
 
 How fast and far her feeling for him had grown, since 
 that Sunday when she had deliberately taken him down to 
 see Julia ! And yet was she so sure she would not have 
 done the same thing again, if it were next Sunday instead 
 of thirteen or fourteen weeks ago? The challenge to 
 take the uttermost risk (perhaps because of her very 
 cowardice!) had always been compellingly attractive to 
 her. Along with all that wanted to be soft and safe, 
 there was in her something impatient with prudence and 
 safety — something that in a great matter like love 
 couldn't be contented unless it were founded on a rock 
 which feared no wave or storm. 
 
 Thinking of all these things, she had got into bed 
 without kissing the picture. When she remembered it, 
 she got up and felt her way, in the chill of November 
 midnight in a fireless room, round the unfamiliar furni- 
 ture, to where she had left it, and now, when she felt 
 that the original was less hers than ever, instead of merely 
 kissing it, she put it into her breast, and slept with it 
 there. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 DECEMBER 
 
 " McQuaid's " for January had a poem in it by Ellen 
 M. Graham. It was " Alexandra," which Franklin Tall- 
 man had carried off with him to submit to his fellow- 
 editors. It would have brought a good deal back into 
 Ellen's mind, if she had had time yet to forget anything. 
 It was the first of her verses ever printed, except the 
 one a year earlier in the Harvard Monthly. The immedi- 
 ate past was an ^olian harp to every wind that blew, as 
 this blew hard, upon it. Memories reverberated louder 
 than thunder at the sight of these lines, which she had 
 written in the first warmth of friendship, and read aloud 
 to the man with whom she was in love. 
 
 By the time it came out, they were expecting Jim and 
 his father for the holidays. Mr. Graham had not come 
 on for his usual seaside trip with his children, last year. 
 He was to make all the longer stay now; and the New 
 York month had been postponed by the aunts to February 
 or March. 
 
 Mr. Graham and Jim arrived on the same train on the 
 afternoon next but one before Christmas. In the inter- 
 vals of studying, con aniore, his chemistry, Jim mixed 
 up a thick and syrupy cough mixture for his father, 
 who had somehow got a very bad bronchial cough, though 
 Aunt Fran said mountain air would do more for it than 
 Jim's nostrums. 
 
 22* 
 
DECEMBER 223 
 
 Ellen felt more than a little anxious about her father. 
 In all the heaviness of her spirits, and her semi-stupor, 
 anxiety for him pierced sharply through, and found a 
 sore spot to touch her upon. He had grown older, 
 a good deal older, in the last few years. It seemed 
 a sort of foreboding on Aunt Fran's part, when 
 she reminded Ellen that her father had not been 
 married very young; and that that lost little sister 
 Sarah whom Ellen remembered had been the last of 
 several little children her poor mother had lost, " from 
 the top down." Mr. Graham's congenital stoop was ac- 
 centuated. His fair, foreign face had lost much of its 
 British color, and drooped into folds, noticeably about 
 the mouth. The spare room where he slept (the old 
 store-room made over) was next the one where Ellen 
 slept with her aunt, and she heard him, in the small hours, 
 wheezily strangling. Her Aunt Fran persuaded him to 
 see good old solemn Dr. Temple. The doctor, using the 
 good old-fashioned word, said his cough was partly 
 bronchial, partly " tisiky." The tisiky part was negli- 
 gible, for the present, he said: adding with ponderous 
 humor, " Folks often wish they could die of asthma. 
 Your heart's all right, for the present; so're your lungs. 
 You're in very fair condition, in fact, for a man of your 
 age — of your and my age," he summed up. " But it's 
 not youth, — it's not youth, Mr. Graham. It's the health 
 of an elderly man." 
 
 " Father dear, what a joke his calling you an elderly 
 man ! " said Ellen with a rather set smile. 
 
 " Well, child ! I'm over sixty. I was past my first 
 youth when I married your mother." 
 
2241 THE SPINSTER 
 
 "What's sixty, I'd like to know? Look at the old 
 deacons in the Congregational Church — neither of 'em'll 
 ever see seventy again." Her own words shot a dull 
 chill through her heart, to think how few years separated 
 sixty from seventy. A dreary chill it was, more numbing 
 than painful : but hers was not a heart to rest in one sor- 
 row alone, when another knocked at the gate. The earlier 
 sorrow, too, was all her own : but this cast a family 
 shadow. 
 
 All through the autumn she had dreaded Christmas 
 Day: how much more now, when that loud wheezing 
 cough went on so incessantly from midnight until three, 
 every night. And Christmas Eve was sorrowfully beau- 
 tiful. There was a glassy crust on the snow, and 
 the stars and moon were shining, and the whole valley 
 eastward to Hemlock Mountain had a look of being new, 
 as if this were the first December moonlight night since 
 the world was made. Clear and joyful weather some- 
 times bruises the heart of youth, when it is sad, with 
 an incredible soreness. 
 
 Like Sue's wedding, however, the day itself was not 
 at all hard. It was comparatively easy to wonder and 
 exclaim over presents that represented so much affec- 
 tionate contriving and considering, as family presents do. 
 They all went to church, and wished everyone Merry 
 Christmas, and the same to you and many of them, and 
 came home to overeat at a rich fine dinner, just as usual : 
 and Ellen tucked up her skirts and went out to coast with 
 Jim in the afternoon, just as they had done many a time 
 before. But last Christmas seemed ten years ago, or 
 rather twenty-five, or fifty. How many years measured 
 the difference between a free heart and a laden one? She 
 
DECEMBER 225 
 
 sighed, and rested, as if helping to pull the bob-sleds up 
 the hill were too hard for her. 
 
 " Tired, sis ? " asked Jim. " Sit down there and I'll 
 haul you up." 
 
 " No, Jim — I'm not tired — only worried. About 
 father." 
 
 " Father'll be all right." 
 
 " He's never had as bad a cough as this before, though, 
 I'm afraid." 
 
 " He'll get over it all right. Not but what I wish he'd 
 take that stuff I fixed up for him. Nobody seems to 
 think I know anything: and yet I do," said Jim, with 
 cheerful sangfroid. 
 
 " I wish he would take it, Jimmy, if it'd do him any 
 good." 
 
 " Oh well, old Doc. Temple gave him some stuff that's 
 probably just as good." 
 
 " Do you think his lungs are all right?" 
 
 " Sure." 
 
 " Oh, Jim, it does me good to hear you so 
 cheerful." 
 
 " Why ain't you cheerf uller, I'd like to know ? " 
 
 " Why, I told you. Worried about — father. 
 
 " There's more than that the trouble, old lady. 
 
 "Well, Jim dear,— there is." 
 
 " Why not talk it over with me? Instead of coasting, 
 we'll take a walk. We'll walk down the valley. By the 
 way, when's Julia going to get spliced? Not till spring, 
 I s'pose." 
 
 " Not till spring. — Why not go up the Flat Iron road, 
 or the Three Maples, Jim, if you'd just as soon? " 
 
 " I'd rather go down the valley, I think. Remember, 
 
 
226 THE SPINSTER 
 
 sis, I haven't been home since the first of September. I 
 think I'm entitled to choose the road." 
 
 Fanciful ideas were always coming into Ellen's head 
 nowadays. She must needs fancy now that Jim had a 
 schoolboyish fondness for Julia, and felt sad about her 
 engagement. She said : 
 
 " All right. We'll go down the valley, then. But I'm 
 not sure whether I want to talk much." 
 
 " Needn't, if you don't want to." 
 
 " I don't know whether I want to or not." 
 
 " Just as you please, old lady." 
 
 They swung into an easy stride, Jim modifying the 
 natural stretch of his long legs a little, and Ellen letting 
 out her powers, which made them meet on a fairly even 
 plane. They were walking a little under four miles 
 an hour. The dry, crusty snow crunched squeakily under 
 their heels, as it had done on the day, long years 
 ago, when walking down this road, Julia had said to 
 Ellen : 
 
 " Someway I don't think you'll ever marry." 
 
 This came into Ellen's mind, and carried her back yet 
 further, to the remark her little brother had made on 
 the day she found the tarantula. 
 
 " Jim, do you know when you were a tiny little boy 
 you said something to me once that had a whole lot of 
 sense? " 
 
 " Why, certainly, old lady. I always had sense. What 
 was it I said? " 
 
 " You called me an old maid." 
 
 " Well, I don't know that there was any great amount 
 of sense in that." 
 
 " Yes, there was. You saw ahead." 
 
DECEMBER 227 
 
 " In my experience " 
 
 " Your experience ! " 
 
 " — a girl that says she's going to be an old maid is gen- 
 erally intending to get married." 
 
 " Well, Jimmy dear, I'm not." 
 
 " All right. Have it your own way. It lets me out 
 of a wedding present, and being an usher." 
 
 Ellen scarcely heard him. She stared at the familiar, 
 unfamiliar road, which she saw not in December, but in 
 August colors, with wayside asters, and bleaching golden- 
 rod, and showery sprays of Michaelmas daisies sprinkling 
 sugar over the grass. They walked along in silence for a 
 considerable time. A cutter or two passed them, and 
 muffled voices called out " Merry Christmas ! " and were 
 mechanically wished the same, and many of them. They 
 passed several farmhouses sparsely placed, a half-mile or 
 so apart : and then they came to the old red bridge over the 
 Ballantyne> 
 
 Ellen had, for some few minutes, forgotten that she 
 was not alone : and now, in a sort of dream, she thought 
 aloud : 
 
 " This was where ! " 
 
 "Where what, sis?" 
 
 " Oh, nothing. Just a notion. It's getting colder : and 
 unless you want to go down and stop at the Olden- 
 burys' " 
 
 "The Oldenburys'— nit!" 
 
 " Then let's turn round. There's that dark-red after- 
 glow all over Hemlock." 
 
 " Yes — looks natural, all right." 
 
 " Jimmy, I believe I will tell you. I'm very — very 
 fond of Franklin Tallman." 
 
228 THE SPINSTER 
 
 " Good for you, Ellen! I'm awfully glad; I sure am. 
 Why don't you send for him? " 
 
 " Why, Jimmy, — don't say you're glad. You see, I 
 don't send for him, because " 
 
 She put her arm through her brother's arm, her pace 
 flagging a little. Her breath was short, like her father's 
 in his bronchial-asthmatic coughing fits. 
 
 " Because, Jimmy, he wouldn't want to come." 
 
 "What's the matter? Did you turn him down last 
 summer? " 
 
 "No— oh no!" 
 
 " Guess I better call and see the gentleman," said Jim, 
 with something of the primeval brother in his voice. 
 "What's his address?" 
 
 " Jimmy, dear — he never pretended he cared. Now 
 I've told you all there is to tell. I'm glad I've told you. 
 You see, these merry-making days come a little hard 
 to a person, at first." 
 
 " I got hit myself . . . last year. I've got fellow- 
 feeling for you, sis, all right." 
 
 Ellen smiled wanly to herself, skeptical of how hard 
 hit her young brother had probably been. But she won- 
 dered, after all, if it had been rather hard (and could 
 it have been Julia?) when he went on to say: 
 
 " Do you ever think of the next world, old lady? " 
 
 " Yes indeed. I always have." 
 
 "Well, do the conventional ideas satisfy you? " 
 
 " No, they don't, Jim. Not at all." 
 
 " They don't me, either. I want to come back to this 
 world again." 
 
 "Why, Jim, how curious you should think of that! 
 Sue and I've often talked about successive lives; but that 
 
DECEMBER 229 
 
 was when we — when I didn't care so much : when I didn't 
 depend so much on the next hfe. Lately I've been think- 
 ing about it a good deal," 
 
 " Successive lives sound sensible to me." 
 
 " So they do to me. And if — if we do come back, so 
 many tangles can be smoothed out, and so many things 
 we've missed can be made up to us, right here on the 
 spot! We'd really rather have what we've wanted and 
 longed for, than something else, somewhere else, that 
 was just as good." 
 
 " Or better, as they say." 
 
 " Maybe that's what Jesus meant when he told the Jews 
 they should be comforted in Jerusalem. I remember I 
 thought of that when I read how the Romans crucified 
 five hundred Jews along the road outside of Jerusalem, 
 for revolting. I remember I thought I'd like to be there, 
 to see those very Jews comforted in Jerusalem." 
 
 " You're a queer old lady." 
 
 A queer old lady she must have been, for a queer 
 thing happened that evening. It was the only " psychical 
 research thing " that ever happened to her. After the 
 usual pantry lunch which surfeited families indulge in, 
 with such cosy merriment, on holiday evenings, they all 
 sat down to play grabouge. The wind had sprung up, 
 and was beating the dead clematis vine against the piazza 
 railings, as it had done on so many winter nights in the 
 old days. The moon, in a sky of racing, billowing clouds, 
 shone, dipped, and shone again. It was such a night 
 without as warmed the inside of a small house full of 
 people who loved one another in unaffected simple- 
 heartedness. 
 
 " Draw, Ellen." 
 
230 THE SPINSTER 
 
 Ellen had to be reminded, almost every time her turn 
 came round, to draw her card and play. She was help- 
 lessly relapsing into a fit of intense absent-mindedness. 
 The afternoon walk had brought back that Sunday after- 
 noon walk of four months ago in incredible brilliancy of 
 detail. She was still going over it step by step, word by 
 word. 
 
 " It's Ellen's turn again." 
 
 " Come back, Ellen." 
 
 She drew, played, and relapsed with a sigh into her 
 moody dream. Suddenly she started, and half got up 
 from her chair. 
 
 " Where are you going, Ellen? " 
 
 " Somebody's at the door ! " 
 
 "Why, I didn't hear anything." 
 
 " Neither did I." 
 
 " Nor I." 
 
 They were unanimous. 
 
 " I'll go and look, though, if you want me to." 
 
 Jim lazily drew his legs out from under the table. He 
 flung open the door and let in a blast of icy freshness that 
 nearly blew the lamps out. 
 
 " Nobody in sight, sis." 
 
 Ellen was staring at him. Plainly she had seen, or 
 heard, or felt — it was none, and yet all, of these! — a 
 letter handed to him through the open door. An intense 
 thrill ran all over her body. She was intensely conscious 
 of the letter. It was in Jim's hand. It was addressed 
 to her. She put her hand out to take it from him, as he 
 approached the table. 
 
 " What you want, sis ? " 
 
 " My " 
 
DECEMBER 231 
 
 " Why, I've got nothing of yours." 
 
 She said nothing more, but subsided, abashed, into 
 the game. There was something here which it was im- 
 possible to understand. And yet it was borne in, press- 
 ingly, on her mind, that that letter had come through the 
 door. Jim must know about it. 
 
 As they all went upstairs, she took hold of his sleeve 
 and pulled him back a step or two. 
 
 " Jim ! " she whispered, " haven't you got a letter 
 forme?" 
 
 " Why, no," he answered, half impatiently. " No mail 
 this afternoon, you know, sis. Legal holiday — post-office 
 closed. We came right by it, coming up from the valley 
 at five o'clock, didn't we? You are absent-minded, old 
 lady." 
 
 " Jim ! Wasn't there really anybody at the door, that 
 time?" 
 
 " What time? What're you talking about, anyway? " 
 
 " Why, that time I said I heard somebody at the door. 
 I thought somebody handed you a letter " 
 
 He looked at her very gravely, and said : 
 
 " Take plenty of sleep for awhile, old lady." 
 
 Think as she would, she could only feel that intense 
 consciousness that the letter had been left at the door. 
 What it meant she could no more understand after sleep- 
 ing over it. It had been five weeks since she had heard 
 from Franklin Tallman; — not since about the time of 
 Sue's wedding. Together, or almost together, two intui- 
 tions flashed into her mind, and together they were dis- 
 carded. One was, that a letter from him was en route, 
 and would be in the morning mail. The other was that 
 he was sick or dying. 
 
232 THE SPINSTER 
 
 Ellen shook her mind free of such notions, not with- 
 out an actual blush at the foolishness of having had them 
 at all. She felt forlornly deteriorated from herself of a 
 year ago. Half-heartedly she wished, or thought she 
 wished, she could go back and be free and cheerful, with- 
 out the intolerable heaviness by which she paid for the 
 immeasurable sweetness of a few summer days. Better 
 be a child forever, and keep the blue sky. 
 
 She lay awake so long, she slept at last very well. She 
 must have slept too deeply to hear her father cough at all 
 in the usual hours, from twelve to three. 
 
 She and he went up together for the morning mail. 
 She had deliberately put off going until eleven o'clock; 
 dusting the parlor and dining-room with extra care, and 
 making charlotte russe for dinner. She did not admit to 
 herself that she was half afraid to go, in the midst of an 
 eager desire to be off. 
 
 "Well, father," she said at last, *' I'm ready 
 
 now." 
 
 They stepped out abreast into the bright twinkling 
 icy morning, intensely white and blue. Her father 
 coughed a little, but stepped along boyishly, squaring his 
 stooped yet youthful shoulders, and springing forward 
 from his heels. 
 
 " I shall soon shake off this bronchitis of mine," he 
 said with his usual light-heartedness. " It puts me in 
 mind of my father. He always had a wheeze, and yet he 
 lived to a patriarchal old age." 
 
 " Oh, father dear, I hope you will shake off that hor- 
 rid cough, right away." 
 
 " By the bye, Ellen, what's become of that young man 
 I hear you had up here last summer? " 
 
DECEMBER 233 
 
 " Why, I don't know, father. I haven't heard from 
 him for quite a while." 
 
 " So that's the way you get even with your old dad, 
 when I don't come east and take you to the seashore, 
 hey? What kind of a fellow was he? Your aunts don't 
 seem to agree about him. Frances liked him very well, 
 Sarah hadn't a good word to say for him." 
 
 Ellen endured this, but could do no more. 
 
 " Your Aunt Sarah wants to keep you an old maid, I 
 believe, Ellen," said her father. " Well, she's a good 
 woman. The women of your mother's family were all 
 good, honest, kind, motherly women, God bless 'em." 
 
 " Well, here we are, father." 
 
 " Here we are. I hope the mail's sorted. Oh 
 yes — the window's up. Box fifty-seven, please. Here's 
 one letter for you, Ellen. Well, shall we go home? 
 Didn't I hand you a letter? What have you done with 
 it?" 
 
 " I've got it, father." 
 
 It was in her bosom, safe from her own panting haste. 
 
 ** What a pace you're setting, Ellen ! " 
 
 "Am I, father?" 
 
 " Oh, I can keep up with you ! " 
 
 How could she be walking fast, when her legs 
 shook so? 
 
 "What does this sweetheart of yours do, Ellen?" 
 
 " Sweetheart indeed ! — He's on McQuaid's Magazine." 
 
 ("O father, please!") 
 
 " Why doesn't he take some of your poems and stories 
 for McQuaid's, then? " 
 
 " McQuaid's did take one, father." 
 
 ("Please! Please! We're almost home.") 
 
234 THE SPINSTER 
 
 They were at home at last. In her locked room she 
 opened the letter. It was in pencil. The handwriting 
 was a little uncertain. It said : 
 
 " I am getting over typhoid fever. I have been here 
 in the hospital for a month. They won't let me write 
 much. But I must write and tell you the truth, though 
 of course you aren't interested, and will think it uncalled 
 for. All the time I have been sick I knew I must write 
 and tell you." 
 
 " Steady, now," Ellen said to herself. 
 
 " When we first met, I thought no man could be hap- 
 pier than I should be with you, if you could do me such 
 great grace. Up on the mountain, walking down the 
 valley, I thought so more and more. And when you 
 showed me that fine poem ' Alexandra,' it almost made 
 me laugh to think you really believed such a person as 
 Alexandra existed. But then I saw her. And I began 
 to believe perhaps you were right. I have tried more 
 and more to put her out of my mind, and release myself 
 from the troubling vividness of my recollection of her, 
 and I have not succeeded. I know that she is married. 
 It seems to make no difference. 
 
 " Please excuse me for my unreasonable impulse to 
 tell you this. It will only trouble your friendliness for 
 me with pity, I know. 
 
 " Your * Alexandra ' was accepted by McQuaid's, and 
 perhaps it has been already printed during my illness. I 
 hope to read many more of your poems in print. May 
 I end by thanking you from my soul for the hours you 
 gave me ? May you be happy forever." 
 
 The surgeon had probed the wound very well, and 
 it could now heal wholesomely. 
 
DECEMBER 235 
 
 Some time afterwards — two years, perhaps — when the 
 wound was quite healed, she placed the letter where it 
 long lay, imperceptibly yellowing, in the pages of Isaiah, 
 at the chapter which begins: 
 
 " Sing, O barren, thou that did'st not bear." 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 A MUSE IN SUNBONNETS 
 
 It always seemed to Ellen, afterward, that she grew 
 into middle age when that letter came. Real middle age, 
 when she arrived at it, looked back on this premature 
 maturity with quizzical, if indulgent eyes. But when 
 twenty-one thinks it feels like thirty-one, it produces a 
 sense of illimitable age. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the change in her, swift as it was, 
 took four years to complete itself. All those idle ec- 
 stasies of early girlhood, all those fallow half-hours spent, 
 long ago, mulling over beautiful colors and shadows on 
 the mountains, beautiful sounds in poetry; and all those 
 more recent hours of brooding remembrance; — they 
 were not left behind in a day, or a month. But 
 they were steadily left behind, and in their place welled 
 up an incessant, new, practical energy, a blind longing to 
 be busy, to be fruitful, to be banded with others, as 
 many as possible, all working together. It seemed as if 
 she had spent all those idle years waiting for love to 
 pass by, and as if, now that love had passed, and there 
 was no longer any danger of her missing it, she were 
 ready to turn to and do her share (could she but find 
 out what it was) of the world's daily work. 
 
 It was in very small things, for the most part, that 
 she noticed the outward visible signs of the transforma- 
 
 236 
 
A MUSE IN SUNBONNETS ^37 
 
 tion. For example, she suddenly noticed, in the second 
 year after the letter had come, that nobody ever said to 
 her any more : 
 
 " Come back, Ellen ! Come down out of the clouds." 
 It was not, however, the letter alone which hurried 
 her forward out of youth. Home anxieties had thick- 
 ened. Her father had jovially shaken off his cough and 
 wheeze, as he had promised to do, only to begin a fresh 
 bout with them the next (and after that, every) winter. 
 Jim said : 
 
 " Oh, father'Il get over this, and many like it, all right," 
 but added more seriously : 
 
 " Of course, he's not so young any more." 
 Mr. Graham was now about sixty-five. That still 
 seemed young, when one thought of some of the old 
 deacons and farmers round Tory Hill and Tewkesbury, 
 active in their tough, wiry eighties. In time, too, these 
 coughs and wheezes always went away, and left him 
 planning for his carefully calculated week or ten days at 
 the seashore, with Ellen and Jim, if Jim could come. 
 Jim could come perhaps for a Sunday. He was working 
 in the summers, to help with his expenses at the College of 
 Physicians and Surgeons. 
 
 This year, they wouldn't go, wrote Mr. Graham, until 
 the sun had " baked the water " all summer long. Per- 
 haps he did not realize any other reason, in the back of 
 his mind, for postponing the slight effort of making the 
 sea-trip, until late August. Any slight languor he felt 
 he set down to the weather, which was very sultry in 
 MinneapoHs that summer of 1907. Ellen was never sorry 
 to be away on these August anniversaries, however pleas- 
 ant and engrossing life had become again for her. 
 
238 THE SPINSTER 
 
 And lately Aunt Fran was not very well. Ruddy, gal- 
 lant Aunt Fran, who was only fifty-odd, and who had 
 always said her ideal of life was to clean house all day 
 and go to a ball in the evening; foolish Aunt Fran, who 
 had always been so concerned about Jim's and Ellen's 
 health, and declared, so solemnly, so many times, that 
 their constitutions were delicate; — she herself now fell 
 into a baffling digestive trouble, and was obliged at times 
 to nourish herself, or as she said, to starve herself, on 
 those patent prepared foods which she so cheerfully and 
 heartily hated. 
 
 It had been during their last annual trip to New York 
 that Ellen had found herself persistently wishing to get 
 at her desk in the cubby-hole of the hall at home, and 
 to write verses. They were a new kind of verses which 
 now floated through her mind, nebulous but very much 
 alive : versified sketches of the quaint people and places she 
 could always amuse herself by fancying. The old piece 
 "Atlantis Town" had been a little on the same order: 
 but there was a homely, simple, delicately humorous char- 
 acter about these, as she visualized them, which dif- 
 ferentiated them from anything else of the kind she knew 
 about, or had thought of before. There was a notion 
 in her mind, too, of making them embody some shy and 
 covert gospel of gentleness and brotherly love. She 
 scribbled down some titles for them : " Hemlock Ceme- 
 tery on Memorial Day," " Persia Township, " Dusk Hol- 
 low"; and some half-symbolic names for imaginary 
 people, " Mr. Goodchild," '* Elva Wood," and " Titania's 
 Daughter." On the back of an old envelope or two she 
 jotted down the dress and occupations for these frag- 
 mentary dramatis personse. The whole idea pleased her 
 
A MUSE IN SUNBONNETS 239 
 
 immensely. These verses were to be altogether objective. 
 Nothing of herself was to be put into them. They would 
 be like a set of watercolor or pastel portraits, with a thin 
 wash or veil of symbolism or romance drawn over them. 
 
 They would not necessarily be altogether fiction. She 
 thought she could fleetingly prolong the memory of some 
 school-fellows, and of some of the strongly individual- 
 ized old men and women who had walked, in her child- 
 hood, in Tory Hill Old Street, and left their sayings, and 
 the pungent flavor of their personalities, behind. Some 
 excellent subjects for such sunbonnet verses still walked 
 the slate sidewalks of the Old Street. 
 
 By the time they had reached home in the earliest 
 spring, she had been all ready to begin. Her first at- 
 tempt was a puritanical child kicking over the traces and 
 embarking on a tiny puritanical spree of sorts. She sent 
 it to Scribner's, and it was taken. The check seemed 
 very fat. She wrote to her father that she believed, at 
 this rate, she could finance her own part of the trip to 
 the seashore this year. 
 
 She wrote more and more of them, and every night 
 at teatime or bedtime fresh fancies came into her head. 
 She wrote out the most endearing of them, taking about 
 a week to polish and melodify each: and about one in 
 three was sold. Sometimes it was sold to a newspaper, 
 for a small check, and sometimes to a magazine, for a 
 larger one. She wrote about the motherly little brothers 
 she saw playing in recess at the district school, with 
 their eyes always on some fat tumbling little one near by. 
 She wrote about the peaceful, pottering old age of sea- 
 faring men and veterans of the Civil War; and she wrote 
 one fiery piece about the lumbermen at their dangerous 
 
240 THE SPINSTER 
 
 trade in the silent depths of the winter forests in moun- 
 tain hollows far from any village. This piece she sold 
 to the Atlantic. It was a good deal copied about: and 
 the Tory Hill Weekly Chronicle gave it a half column 
 of laudation and local pride. 
 
 These sunbonnets were interrupted twice during the 
 early summer : once by an acute attack of Aunt Fran's 
 dyspepsia, which frightened them all badly for a few 
 days : and once by a letter from Sue which made Ellen as 
 happy as it seemed to her anything could ever make her 
 again. 
 
 " Aunt Jane, in Tewkesbury," Sue wrote from Cam- 
 bridge, " owns a monstrous lot of land along the lower 
 end of the valley. She's just made us a present (really 
 I suppose it's a belated wedding present) of a couple of 
 acres. Father says he'll equip it, if we want to try. If ! 
 David is as anxious as I am to try it : and we've definitely 
 decided, within the last twenty-four hours, to move up 
 there. We're going to move as soon as we can, perhaps 
 by the middle of July. Think, Ellen! you and I'll be 
 able to see each other as often as ever we like. Do put 
 your old bike in order, and be ready to ride down and see 
 us the day we arrive." 
 
 " Sue does nothing by halves," said Ellen to herself. 
 "If she says the middle of July, perhaps she'll be up here 
 by the first." 
 
 She was almost correct. By the fourth of July the 
 Micantonis were moved, and in a week they were settled, 
 in the small old farmhouse a mile or two below the cov- 
 ered bridge on the Tewkesbury road. 
 
 Sue was writing a novel. It was the most exciting 
 thing she had ever done, she told Ellen; so exciting that 
 
A MUSE IN SUNBONNETS 241 
 
 she almost forgot to watch the baby as he tumbled about 
 in the rough tussocky grass of the door3'^ard. She said 
 she was tangled in the web she had conceived, and felt 
 at times more bewildered than any of her characters. 
 " David," she said, " wants me to put a lot of labor 
 unrest into it. You know all those piles of tomes on the 
 floor are his statistics. He's given up even the memory 
 of engineering, to work at economics; he does a good deal 
 along that line. I'm surprised to find how well it pays. 
 At this rate we can soon get a pony for little David," 
 on which Sue snatched up her little boy, in his crumpled 
 dress, off the grass, and began talking the most delicious 
 fairy talk to him. 
 
 " Something in the atmosphere down here at your 
 house. Sue," said Ellen, " makes me very much dissatis- 
 fied with my sunbonnets. I feel the same way when I 
 read things that are particularly intolerable, in the papers ; 
 and there's something intolerable every day. Why can't 
 I write about it, I'd hke to know? " 
 
 " David would say you have chronic boiling of the 
 blood." 
 
 " That's it, exactly! I never read about these ghastly 
 tenement fires, or the infant death-rate in the crowded 
 districts, or occupational diseases, — think, Sue ! — think of 
 a man's work poisoning him ! Think of earning your daily 
 bread by being poisoned! — that I don't feel like tearing 
 something, some code of laws or customs, to pieces, and 
 burning it up." 
 
 " Ellen, dear, why don't you write verses, then, about 
 the way you feel ? " 
 
 " I can't, Sue ! I can't ! All my finicking little verses 
 can do without apoplexy is to lisp out, ' Please, every- 
 
242 THE SPINSTER 
 
 body, be kind ! ' The moment I try to write anything in- 
 dignant, I lose my meter and my adjectives and every- 
 thing else. The teeth of my pen chatter so I can't write ! 
 It's new wine in old bottles, I believe." 
 
 Sue looked wisely and tenderly at her friend, over 
 little David's black head in her lap. 
 
 "Isn't that a good deal to say, my dear, after all? 
 What more, really, do you want?" 
 
 " I want to say ' Justice ! ' with a two-edged voice." 
 
 " Well, yes, perhaps. I believe I set more store by the 
 quiet, friendly writing, though. It seems to me the most 
 useful and the most reasonable. Really the strongest." 
 
 " All very well. Sue, but I wish I could write some- 
 thing about the way the churches shirk the big questions 
 of the day, for example; and my theory that that's why 
 so many young men stay away from church, because it's 
 so timid and dull and comforting and safe. Though for 
 that matter some stalwart-looking young men are timid 
 and dull. — I've got as far as a title for that piece, by the 
 way. Sue; what do you think of ' The Young Man Mili- 
 tant'?" 
 
 " I think hurrah." 
 
 " But I don't know whether I can write it. The least 
 little bit of indignation, and my hand shakes as if I had 
 palsy." 
 
 " Think about it a little longer, then, and a little harder. 
 See it from a few more angles." 
 
 " What do you mean. Sue ? " 
 
 " Why, you know my old theory, that nothing hinders 
 good writing but the lack of clear persevering thinking. I 
 was always tickled with what Mr. Chesterton said about 
 Sordello, though whether it's deserved or not's another 
 
A MUSE IN SUNBONNETS 243 
 
 question; / wouldn't be impudent enough to judge. As 
 applied to small fry like you and me, though, it is a good 
 definition and no mistake." 
 
 "What did he say?" 
 
 " He said it was true that nobody could see to the 
 bottom of Sordcllo; but that wasn't because it was deep : 
 only muddy." 
 
 " Sue dear, I really believe that is the matter with me. 
 Muddy thinking! Muddy thinking! " 
 
 " Well, my dear woman, you're in excellent company, 
 if you've got the same fault that Browning had." 
 
 " Muddy thinking ! That's the very thing. You see, 
 I fairly burst with indignation: I'm fairly raw at the 
 wrong-headedness and wrong-heartedness I see in the 
 world : but who knows any way out? " 
 
 " When you've thought longer and harder, it's quite 
 conceivable that you may come to the conclusion that 
 there isn't any way out, except a very old, neglected, 
 grass-grown one." 
 
 "The Sermon on the Mount, you mean?" 
 
 Sue nodded gravely, adding: 
 
 " I say that to David sometimes : but he says that as 
 long as we congregate together for everything else, we'll 
 always have a tough time of it trying to be Christians 
 separately." 
 
 The clock in the little old farmhouse kitchen struck 
 five. 
 
 " I must be off," said Ellen. " Where did I leave my 
 bike?" 
 
 " Wait till I put a stick in the range, and I'll come 
 and walk a little way up the valley with you." 
 
 Ellen wheeled her bicycle round to the gate, and Sue 
 
244 THE SPINSTER 
 
 came with her, as usual, linking arms, through the cov- 
 ered bridge and a mile or so up the Tory Hill road. 
 
 " Speaking of the Sermon on the Mount, Ellen, seems 
 to me your sunbonnets, always winsomely teasing people 
 to be nice to each other, — well, I think you might do 
 worse. But as you say, there's more in the Sermon on 
 the Mount than that. Why not read along David's line 
 of economics and sociology awhile? It might clear 
 away whatever cloudiness there is in your thinking." 
 
 " I'll think it over. Sue. Economics sound rather un- 
 inviting. What's that you've got under your arm?" 
 
 " I brought it along to read you," said Sue, resting her 
 typed sheets, in their loose-leaf cover, on Ellen's handle- 
 bars. 
 
 " Oh, what is it? Your last chapter? " 
 
 " On my novel. Yes. I've read you up to this." 
 
 She began to read aloud, in her rapid, clear, light 
 voice. The chapter, though it moved fast, was long : and 
 they were almost up to the Oldenbury farm when she 
 finished. 
 
 " Well, Sue," said Ellen, *"' your thinking's clear 
 enough, God bless it. It's fairly pellucid. I believe it's 
 almost too clear. I declare I think I'd like a haze of 
 atmosphere over your wonderful hawk-eyed prose ! " 
 
 " Nothing very wonderful, I'm afraid, Ellen, about my 
 prose. Purple patches aren't in my line, and I only want 
 a pale, thin, watery wash of local color." 
 
 " I wouldn't like you, for any sakes, to change! 
 You've got what we used to talk about at college, in tlie 
 Red-Haired corner of Room 0, 
 
 "'Beauty's law of plainness and content.'" 
 
A MUSE IN SUNBONNETS 245 
 
 "Oh! As to beauty " 
 
 " I guess Minerva looked like your lovely plain writ- 
 ing, Sue, — no frills or flounces, no crimps in her hair." 
 
 Ellen's aunts endured shop talk from her very pa- 
 tiently as a rule, but when she added economics, and 
 began to mix them both up with a militant, defiant way 
 of talking about strikes that were being reported in the 
 papers, they displayed some bewildered impatience. 
 
 " Where does a daughter of Mary Mowbray get it? " 
 they asked each other. 
 
 " Your mother never had any such ideas. She didn't 
 know anything about laboring men, except the ones that 
 worked for her father; and naturally she was always kind 
 to them. But she went on with her church work, and 
 her home duties, and accepted the world as it was." 
 
 " Didn't she ever read the papers ? " asked Ellen. 
 
 " Of course she did, and she was quite excited at elec- 
 tion times: we all were; we wanted the Republicans to 
 win, because our father was a Republican." 
 
 " Were the Republicans always in the right, did you 
 think?" 
 
 " We left all such questions to the men. We could 
 trust our father to know how he ought to vote; he didn't 
 need our advice! " 
 
 " I wonder," said Ellen under her breath, '" if the 
 girls whose fathers were Democrats didn't think along 
 the same lines that mother and Aunt Fran and Aunt 
 Sallie did?" 
 
 " I must confess," her aunt said presently, " that I 
 sometimes think I should like to vote. Sometimes I 
 think I should like it in more than town affairs. But I 
 should always vote the good old Republican ticket. My 
 
246 THE SPINSTER 
 
 father taught me to despise a mugwump. I would far 
 rather be an out and out Democrat ! " 
 
 There was one big strike in the West that summer. 
 The papers talked so much about it, that it even pene- 
 trated to piazza conversation, and accelerated the motion 
 of rocking-chairs. Women whom Ellen met at teas and 
 bridge began to talk about it, and to say that perhaps 
 the working classes were really oppressed, and that they 
 certainly ought to have a living wage. The women 
 seemed to talk more about it than the men did. In the 
 office of the Windward House, and along the three-sided 
 veranda that ran round the office, Ellen sometimes heard 
 such ardent voices that she would pause, on her way 
 home from the library, with a new book on economics 
 under her arm, to listen and see if the comely white- 
 flanneled figures sitting there smoking were talking, by 
 any chance, about the strike. But they never were. It 
 was always: 
 
 " I played that hole in bogey, and put him four down 
 and three to go," or, 
 
 " I was forty-eight going out; I played rotten — foozled 
 every drive." 
 
 There were very few books on economics in the library. 
 Ellen read all there were, however, and learned at least 
 what the terms meant. David Micantoni's piles of dust- 
 white statistics looked too formidable to borrow. In the 
 books she did find to read, she felt a complaisance with 
 injustice, and a disposition to shoulder on Nature a good 
 deal that she vaguely believed was due to the collective 
 moral and intellectual laziness of men. She felt these 
 qualities in them, whether judging them correctly or not; 
 but when she asked herself what better thesis she could 
 
A MUSE IN SUNBONNETS 247 
 
 herself propose, it all came back to a passionate demand 
 for more kindness in the world. 
 
 For whether the workingman were to have, for ex- 
 ample, a living wage, an American-standard living wage, 
 or not, unless he could secure it by the transient, local, 
 ugly weapon of the strike, seemed to depend altogether 
 on the good-will of his employer. The worker seemed 
 very much in the position of the vivisected animal in the 
 laboratory. Both might be, and often were, treated with 
 consideration, but it depended entirely on the employer, 
 and on the vivisector, how they were treated. The 
 worker could strike, the ulcerated dog could try to bite ; 
 another dog, which saw, or surmised, his fellow-dog's 
 slow death, could snap at the enterprising boy who tried 
 to entice him to the laboratory door. The whip hand, 
 however, was that of the vivisector, and the employer. 
 So much of Ellen's thinking had grown clear. 
 
 The collapse of that great Western strike gave an- 
 other impulse to the slow clarifying of her thought. It 
 pointed a moral which had been still more clearly shown, 
 in microcosm, by the collapse of a trial Ellen's Aunt Sallie 
 had instituted that summer, in the name of the Tory Hill 
 S.P.C.A. It was a case against a farmer who had beaten 
 his horse with a cant-hook. Excited complaints had 
 been made by the neighbors on both sides: so excited 
 that the complainants forgot to add the usual caution: 
 
 " Don't mention me, please. Something ought to be 
 done about it, but I don't want my name should be mixed 
 up in it." 
 
 Not only had the complainants forgotten to use this 
 venerable formula, but one or two, in their indignation, 
 had promised to testify in court. The warrant was ac- 
 
248 THE SPINSTER 
 
 cordingly issued, and the case was called; but the cautious 
 persuadings of relations and friends, coupled with the 
 good old-fashioned feeling that cruelty to animals is a 
 matter of mere " sentiment," had prevailed. To her dis- 
 may Miss Sarah Mowbray found that not a witness 
 would swear to the cant-hook. The case was dismissed. 
 
 The nearness of this case made it seem temporarily 
 almost comparable in quality, though so absurdly not in 
 degree, with the failure of the Western strike. They 
 seemed cut off the same piece of cloth. In both cases, 
 as in the case of the hypothetical dog which tried to bite 
 the vivisector, the last end of that rebel would be, if 
 possible, worse than the first. The strikers in the West 
 would be unlikely now to have a raise of wages for many 
 a long day; and the horse could be beaten with the cant- 
 hook with proved impunity. So Ellen, being still young, 
 and not conceding much human nature, or embryonic 
 decency, to her opponents, rather bitterly thought. 
 
 Well, her thinking was clearer by one more point, 
 which emerged from the double failure of the strike and 
 the animal case. Ellen formulated it to herself as fol- 
 lows: 
 
 " There isn't much in the appeal to force. For the 
 side that's in the wrong is very apt to win : and when it 
 wins, Vae Victis! " 
 
 At this moment a note came from the editor of the 
 Womanly World. He inquired pleasantly why no more 
 verses had been sent in lately, adding that he needed a 
 few inches filled in several forthcoming issues. Ellen 
 showed this note to Sue, remarking: 
 
 ** You see, even if my muddy thinking has cleared up 
 a little, it's not so clear yet that I can do anything but 
 
A MUSE IN SUNBONNETS 249 
 
 sunbonnets. I'd better keep on with 'em, with their tad- 
 pole morals, for the present, don't you think so ? " 
 
 "Of course I think so, and more than that, I hope 
 you'll never altogether give up writing them, my dear 
 woman. David and I caught one another wiping our 
 eyes over the last verse of ' Titania's Daughter.' " 
 
 " That raises it fifteen cents in my estimation," Ellen 
 called back over her shoulder, as she set off homeward 
 on her bike. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 THE LAST TRIP TO THE SEA 
 
 " Meet me Boston noon Thursday seventeen bring 
 bathing togs," wired Mr. Graham on the twelfth of 
 August. 
 
 Ellen wired back: 
 
 " Hurrah all right." 
 
 This was the way they customarily arranged their 
 summer seaside holiday together. Jim of course could 
 only come for a Sunday. He was working for fifteen 
 dollars a week for a big carpet firm in New York, dip- 
 ping his pillow-case in ice water to enable him to sleep 
 in the unaccustomed hot nights of the city August. When 
 he could get to sleep on those fearsome nights, he 
 dreamed of the cool breezy golf links, and of the low 
 scores he might have made by this end of the season, if 
 he had been playing there all summer. But his spirits 
 were perfectly light and free, as his well-considered 
 choice had been. He would rather carry a medicine case 
 than a bag of clubs : though he meant, before his youth 
 was gone, to carry both. 
 
 There was a great tournament going on at Tory Hill in 
 the third week in August. It was the play for the Presi- 
 dent's cup, and golfers of renown were filling the Wind- 
 ward House and all the rentable rooms the proprietor 
 could borrow from the " natives." Ellen took a whole 
 
 350 
 
THE LAST TRIP TO THE SEA 251 
 
 afternoon off from her economics and her verse-writing, 
 and went up to the sunburnt meadows (where the original 
 nine-hole course had been expanded now to eighteen) to 
 watch the finals. She felt a good deal of pleasure in the 
 beautiful game itself, even when Jim was not playing: 
 and the sense, always so exhilarating to her, of being in 
 a company of people united by one purpose, was present 
 today in being one of the streaming gallery of onlookers 
 that trailed such a bright banner of pretty summer dresses 
 and parasols over the bright fields. The open country, 
 the holiday concourse of people, and the beauty and ac- 
 curacy of the match between the national champion and 
 the slim freshman who had that year become intercol- 
 legiate champion, quite absorbed Ellen. She forgot, for 
 the hour, the whole dark Iliad of that lost strike in the 
 Western mines, about which, of late, she had been think- 
 ing so much, and blaming all these vivacious people for 
 thinking so little. 
 
 The freshman won the cup: and the excitement and 
 semi-tragedy of the champion's defeat were fresh in 
 Ellen's mind as she walked home while the sun set behind 
 Windward Mountain. She would write it all out for 
 Jim, to make him share as fully as possible in the great 
 day he would so dearly have liked to be here for. She 
 was not at first conscious how thoroughly warm and 
 dusty she felt, until a glance at the clock told her she 
 had barely time for a tub before supper. She ran the 
 cold spring water from the faucet, and had plunged into 
 the tub and was splashing so violently that she did not 
 hear the doorbell ring twice. Her Aunt Sallie had come 
 up and had been hammering for some minutes on the 
 bathroom door before she heard anything. 
 
252 THE SPINSTER 
 
 " What do you say, Aunt Sallie ? Telegram for me ? 
 Open it, please." 
 
 "All right. Hm. Oh, Ellen! Your father's— not 
 well." 
 
 " Father ill? What? Quick! " shouted Ellen, shaking 
 the icy water off and hurrying into her bathrobe. 
 
 The telegram was from the proprietor of a hotel where 
 Mr. Graham had taken rooms for himself and Ellen, on 
 a beach near Boston where they had often gone before 
 on these short seaside holidays. He had arrived late 
 on the previous night, the 15th, ill with "pleurisy and 
 bronchitis." 
 
 " Oh, Aunt Sallie, for once I wish we had a telephone ! 
 When does the evening flyer go down ? ' Pleurisy and 
 bronchitis ! ' " 
 
 " I wish I could go with you, my dear child. I daren't 
 leave your Aunt Fran. If she should have another at- 
 tack, and neither you nor I here " 
 
 " I wouldn't have you come for worlds, Aunt Sallie ! 
 Oh, dear Aunt Sallie, don't look so sad ! Jim says father 
 will get over many an attack of bronchitis. You see 
 there's no pneumonia. You're not to be alarmed, I tell 
 you, Sallie Mowbray! But listen — will you telegraph 
 Jim? I can dress, and pack, and get some supper and 
 be ready for the stage, if you can order it, and tele- 
 graph Jim, and keep Aunt Fran from getting frightened." 
 
 Aunt Sallie ran over to the Barnhavens' and tele- 
 phoned a telegram to Jim. If he were out when it was 
 delivered he could scarcely get to Boston ahead of Ellen, 
 whose slow night train, with a multitude of waits and 
 changes, would be all night and half the morning getting 
 over the paltry two hundred miles. 
 
THE LAST TRIP TO THE SEA 253 
 
 Ellen's heart smote her at the sight of her younger 
 aunt in the doorway, waving, as the stage drove her off. 
 A weight of old forebodings pressed on her heart. The 
 imminent fear that was hurrying her off was the upper 
 millstone, and Aunt Fran on the sofa in the little parlor, 
 with spirits of ammonia to forestall her frequent palpi- 
 tation of the heart, and the nervous dyspeptic chills which 
 often followed it, was the nether millstone. The shadowy 
 circles round Aunt Sallie's lovely gray eyes were dark 
 tonight. 
 
 " Family life," thought Ellen, " goes on year after 
 year, even and pleasant, like the inside of a snug house 
 in winter; and then it seems to wear out, and cracks 
 and fissures begin to show in it as old Fuller said, and 
 the cold outside air comes in, and draughts blow out some 
 of the lamps and others flicker and flare — so it is with 
 our Hfe." 
 
 And yet the stage drive was so cool and sweet after 
 the sultry afternoon, that it seemed, to Ellen's illogical, 
 over-sanguine, and high-rebounding heart, an omen of 
 comfort. Physically rested, her mind took on a brighter 
 tinge, a reaction from foreboding set in, and by the time 
 she boarded the common car, she was smiling and 
 bustling cheerfully. What if her father were subject to 
 bronchial trouble ? He was so youthful and springing in 
 his walk, so limber, slender, and active; so fond of a 
 laugh, that he clipped jokes out of papers and pasted them 
 in a blank book for the pleasure of laughing again and 
 again at them! And then, his father, unknown old 
 Scotch Grandfather Graham, had lived almost to ninety. 
 
 She began busily to plan his recovery, and how she 
 would take him down to the sand every day when he was 
 
254 THE SPLNSTER 
 
 well enough, and hoist an umbrella over him, and sit with 
 him while he watched the surf with those British sea- 
 loving eyes of his. He would hear it boom and break 
 all night long, from his window; would hear it roaring 
 and rising, roaring and receding, on Bardwell's Beach, a 
 short eighth of a mile away from Bardwell's weather- 
 worn and paint-blistered old shell of a hotel. 
 
 Aunt Fran, too, would certainly throw ofif this dys- 
 peptic trouble. She had got over it once, long years be- 
 fore. Old Dr. Temple said it was nothing very serious. 
 Why, look at Aunt Fran's color! She'd always been 
 sound and tough. Certainly, they'd both weather through 
 all right. It wasn't as if either of them were really old, 
 or apoplectic, or anything like that. . . . You couldn't 
 think otherwise, feeling so well yourself. . . . 
 
 She sat in day-cars all night, changing sometimes at 
 dim, chilly stations, waiting in one half an hour, once, 
 during which the dawn came. She sat on her old suit- 
 case, and it was so cold out here on the cinders by the 
 tracks, that she wrapped her fingers in her veil for com- 
 fort. The dawn came neither pearly nor primrose 
 colored, not at all as poems described it; the darkness only 
 thinned and thinned and let a damp and shadowy light, 
 dingy and nondescript, ooze through. 
 
 There was something that insisted on making death 
 half-friendly, half-familiar to her mind. . . . But she 
 would not have it so. Something panic-stricken drove 
 away the ingratiating idea. Her father would surely 
 recover. With that sense of incredible sweetness which 
 attends a fancy the judgment cannot support, she began 
 to think of his return with her to Tory Hill, in Septem- 
 ber, probably: his lengthening walks up and down th^ 
 
THE LAST TRIP TO THE SEA 255 
 
 Old Street, and then down the valley, until with a burst 
 of glory, when he was quite well again, they would walk 
 the whole way down to Sue's, some Sunday afternoon. 
 
 Another change at six o'clock, and she was on the Bos- 
 ton train, due in the North station at nine. Jim would be 
 starting, perhaps, at that hour. Or perhaps he was al- 
 ready en route. She made close connections, by steam- 
 boat, for Bardwell's Beach, and disembarked there at 
 ten o'clock. There was a queer look about everything; — 
 the pier running out into the sea, advertising miscellane- 
 ous articles to eat, drink, and wear; the bathing-houses, 
 the pavilion, the bandstand, and the quiet further shore, 
 the shingles, sand and rocks where she and her father 
 had walked so often. Up there was the Bardwell House. 
 It was not far. She carried her suitcase and walked 
 fast. There stretched the hotel's flimsy brown frame, 
 diagonally, along the coast shore. A porter carried up 
 her suitcase and knocked at Room 31. 
 
 " Come in." 
 
 " Father dear, I'm here at last ! " 
 
 " Why, — Ellen! I was going in — I was going to try 
 to get up and go into Boston to meet you on the twelve- 
 twenty-two. I thought you'd take the morning train." 
 
 Go into Boston and meet her! 
 
 He was gray, unshaven, thin, and fifty years older 
 than he had seemed at Christmas. His head slipped and 
 settled weakly on the pillow. In his loose-sleeved night- 
 shirt his arms looked emaciated. 
 
 " Oh, father dearest, how long have you had this cold 
 on your chest? " 
 
 " Why, it isn't on my chest at all ! I caught cold up 
 in North Dakota, on a fishing trip two or three weeks 
 
256 THE SPINSTER 
 
 ago. and got one of those bronchial coughs I'm always 
 getting. My father had them before me, all the last 
 years of his life. I've often had a worse one " 
 
 His voice trailed away, and he winced a little. Ellen's 
 swift imagination felt the pleuritic pain that must be 
 striking its knife-edge through him, and she jumped and 
 ran to him and slid her arm uncomfortably but comfort- 
 ingly under his head, and sat down on the edge of the bed. 
 
 " Father, what doctor have you had? " 
 
 "Doctor — I don't need any doctor. Bardwell, silly 
 body, sent for one — one of those young chaps that think 
 themselves awfully clever. He said I had pleurisy — why ! 
 pleurisy — it's all foolishness. I'll get up after a bit, and 
 we'll go for a stroll, and pick up some shells and pebbles — 
 D'ye remember " 
 
 "But, father dear! What was the doctor's name?" 
 
 " Oh ! I don't know. It made no impression on me. 
 He said he'd be in again toward evening. I'll be out when 
 he comes, silly body." 
 
 " Toward evening, you say? He said he'd be in again 
 this afternoon? " 
 
 " Some such nonsense. I told him he needn't bother 
 himself to come in again at all. I wouldn't be needing 
 him." 
 
 " Father dear, you have just as little sense as ever," 
 cried Ellen, trying not to show any alarm or dismay. 
 She waited a moment and then added : 
 
 " I think I'll just step down to the office and telephone 
 him to come over now, instead of late in the afternoon. 
 Or else I'll call in some older man, if you'd rather? I 
 guess I'd rather, anyway. I'll just step down to the 
 office and ask Mr. Bardwell about doctors." 
 
THE LAST TRIP TO THE SEA 257 
 
 " Bardwell's away," her father repHed in his weak, 
 pleasant voice. " He's taken a party over to the cove in 
 his sailboat. If it hadn't been for your coming today, 
 Ellen, d'ye know I had half a mind to go — to go along 
 with them." 
 
 Ellen was sure that stammer was caused by the pain 
 of the pleurisy catching his breath. She smiled, and felt 
 the smile cut into her heart, when he added : 
 
 " I really don't want any doctor. I tell ye what, 
 though, Ellen, I feel a bit sleepy. I think I'll take a 
 snooze." 
 
 His voice was not sick. It was enfeebled, and he had 
 winced several times when he had been talking of stroll- 
 ing along the beach. But now as he fell easily into a 
 drowse, he looked very sick. 
 
 All alone with the sleeping sick man in the com- 
 fortless impersonal dreariness of the hotel where he 
 and she had found summer weeks so pleasant in 
 bygone years, Ellen felt a strong loathing mixed 
 with her helplessness and perplexed fear. She felt 
 a childish longing for somebody, anybody, from Tory 
 Hill. Oh, to see one kind face! Even to hurry 
 down to the office to telephone for the nameless 
 doctor, she cringed from leaving him alone. There was 
 a sick look about his beautiful veined hands, his bony 
 arms, outside the dismal hotel counterpane — those hands 
 that had so often patted her shoulder in days gone by, and 
 put pennies into her grimy fingers to stop her childish 
 tears. All over her in a rush came the remembrance 
 of the surreptitious lumps of sugar, the bits of candy, and 
 the frosting off his cake which he slyly gave to her and 
 Jim, though he, childlike and simple-hearted that he was, 
 
258 THE SPINSTER 
 
 had liked sweet frosting too. In her excess and panic of 
 anxiety she cringed at the necessity for leaving him here 
 now asleep, alone with that dreary varnishless wash- 
 stand, and flowerless, bookless empty table — dreary stale 
 newspapers tousled together on the floor. 
 
 She pulled herself together, shook off her paralytic 
 fear and passionate distaste, and ran down the corridor 
 and stairs to the young clerk smoking and manicuring 
 his hands in the office. When she asked him the name of 
 " the doctor my father had," he stared, bit on his ciga- 
 rette, and called to an invisible fellow-clerk: 
 
 " Anybody in the hotel had a doctor, that you know 
 of?" 
 
 " Mr. Graham, my father," put in Ellen eagerly, " in 
 Room 31. He's very sick, I think! I must have the doc- 
 tor Mr. Bardwell called for him, — right away, please ! " 
 
 " Why, I don't know what doctor he had. Mr. Bard- 
 well might know." 
 
 "But he's away!" 
 
 " He'll be back this evening, sometime." 
 
 "Oh, I can't wait till evening! I'll send for another 
 doctor. My father's very sick." 
 
 A faint glimmer of the hotel's instinctive dislike and 
 suspicion of sickness shone in the clerk's eye, but Ellen 
 did not see it. She went on feverishly: 
 
 "Can't you recommend me to another doctor? A 
 good one? " 
 
 The young man changed his cigarette from one hand 
 to the other, and glanced round toward his invisible com- 
 panion, from whom Ellen had heard the rustle of a news- 
 paper. In her helpless sense of the cold and dreary in- 
 difference of this gloomy and terrible place, she added; 
 
THE LAST TRIP TO THE SEA 259 
 
 " An old doctor. An old, kind, sympathetic, sentimen- 
 tal doctor ! " 
 
 While the two clerks conferred on this, Ellen did some 
 of the sort of thinking which was now habitual with her, 
 and which seemed to have grown out of her old instinct 
 for looking at things through other people's eyes. She 
 compared her case with other, commoner ones, where 
 the pocketbook was thinner than hers, and said to herself 
 with a start : 
 
 " This is the deadly chill of the institution ! What 
 a lot of this the poor must meet ! " 
 
 " Well," the young man was saying over his shoulder 
 to his unseen fellow-clerk, " I'm not very well acquainted 
 here. McDonald, do you know which is the best doc- 
 tor here? Dr. Abraham — Dr. Corliss — then there's a 
 city doctor up to the other hotel " 
 
 " All doctors look alike to me," replied the other 
 genially. 
 
 " Which is the oldest? " asked Ellen in desperation. 
 
 " Abraham, I guess. Is Abraham older than Corliss, 
 McDonald ? " 
 
 " Gee, I don't know. They're both old geezers." 
 
 "Well, will you please telephone for Dr. Abraham? 
 Wait — I'll do it myself. (He'd play a game of poker be- 
 fore he'd take the trouble to do it)," she thought bitterly. 
 
 And then she remonstrated with herself : 
 
 *' Why, father's just quietly sleeping. I've only been 
 away from him about ten minutes. I don't know why I 
 feel so panicky." 
 
 The telephoning, however, took another ten minutes. 
 Central called the wrong number : the second call was an- 
 swered, after a long interval, and oft-repeated: 
 
26o THE SPINSTER 
 
 "Did you get them? Did you get them?" by 
 
 "Hello! Yes, hold the wire." 
 
 After a long wait, a lady's voice said: 
 
 " Yes, this is Dr. Abraham's house. No, he's out. 
 Any message? — Why yes, I'll tell him as soon as he 
 comes in." 
 
 " Please tell him to hurry ! " 
 
 She sped back to her father. Some superstitious dread 
 affected her eyesight; — or did he really look worse? He 
 lay quietly enough, with his beautiful thin hands folded 
 over his chest. None of those wincing looks went across 
 his sleeping face. Why, then, did she persistently feel 
 that he looked more ill than before? At last she noticed 
 what it was that had given her that vague increase of 
 anxiety. His chest was rising in very frequent breaths. 
 It did not rise very far. She clutched the footboard of 
 the bed, and having no watch, began to measure his 
 breaths by hers. Three of his to one of hers ! Should 
 she not have called Dr. Corliss? And why had she not 
 thought of milk or eggs for him ? or would brandy have 
 been better ? but she had no brandy. She dared not wake 
 him. And perhaps he had been breathing as fast as this 
 when she went down to the office. When would Jim 
 arrive ? 
 
 But this was an unnatural sleep. The word " coma " 
 came into her mind. With it came a sort of settling down 
 of her fear and dread, as if they began to make them- 
 selves at home in her heart. Her mind cleared. She 
 made a plan. She would not leave him again, not for a 
 thousand doctors. If in half an hour Dr. Abraham did 
 not come, she would ring for the bellboy and call Dr. 
 Corliss. 
 
THE LAST TRIP TO THE SEA 261 
 
 She sat down, then, and took his fine hand, unclasp- 
 ing it from the other, to hold it quietly pressed hard be- 
 tween her breasts. Sitting thus beside him in silence, 
 with fear, pain, and peace, all strangely mingled, she be- 
 gan to tolerate even the hideous impersonality of the 
 hotel. Her thoughts drifted. She went over the first 
 chapters of " Pendennis " in her mind. She thought of 
 Foker and Major Pendennis meeting in the inn parlor, 
 and smiled. If she had had the book there, she could 
 have read it. The sun in the west window withdrew, 
 hair's-breadth by hair's-breadth, from the tropic reds of 
 the carpet, and a small shadow crept over it : the scrawny 
 shadow of a scrawny tree on the sandy lawn outside. 
 The surf, seeming far and far away, drummed drowsily 
 in her ears. 
 
 She guessed by the sun at half an hour. Dr. Abraham 
 had not come. Without relinquishing her father's hand, 
 which she still held against her bosom, she reached and 
 rang the bell. No bellboy came. She rang again and again. 
 No bellboy came. With tightened lips she pressed hard on 
 the bell for a long time without intermission. Fiercely 
 she thought of it ringing and ringing and ringing below. 
 She could almost hear the continuous tinkle far away. 
 At last a bellboy came. 
 
 " Ring up Dr. Corliss right away, please, and tell him 
 to hurry and come at once to Room 31 in the Bard well 
 House," she directed. 
 
 Too late, when the bellboy had gone, she thought: 
 
 " I should have told him to come back and let me know 
 what Dr. Corliss said. Well, if one of the doctors doesn't 
 come soon, I'll ring again." 
 
 Her father stirred and turned toward her. He slightly 
 
262 THE SPINSTER 
 
 moved the hand which she held, but did not withdraw it. 
 At that moment there w^as a knock, and Ellen called, 
 " Come in," without looking round, she was so confident 
 it was the bellboy returned to tell her when Dr. Corliss 
 had said he would come. But it was not the bellboy. It 
 was Jim. 
 
 Jim's one year of medical study had taught him what 
 that look and breathing, and that sort of lassitude and 
 drowsiness meant. What Ellen sensed, and hoped she 
 sensed wrongly, he knew with finality after a long feel 
 of his father's erratic pulse. He silently kissed his sister 
 and said, quite naturally: 
 
 "Well, dad, how goes it?" 
 
 His father tried to pull the sheet up under his chin, 
 gave up the attempt, and said : 
 
 " I believe I'm better, Jim. Do me good — do me good 
 to see you, Jim. I've got Ellen and you here with me. 
 
 What more do I want? Unless Where're your 
 
 aunts, children? Are they coming in to see me? " 
 
 Jim's grave look warned Ellen to control her trem- 
 bling lips. She controlled them, even in the act of think- 
 ing it was impossible to control them, and that the effort 
 to do so would only make her burst out crying. She 
 felt a solemn sense of power in stilling her emotion. She 
 smiled quite easily, and said : 
 
 " We're all here, father." 
 
 " Little Sarah's not here, and little Tom and Jack 
 
 aren't here, and your mother's — not ? Is your 
 
 mother here ? " 
 
 " Not yet, dad," answered Jim. 
 
 He took his father's other hand and held it, with that 
 steady brooding watch on the pulse with which doctors 
 
THE LAST TRIP TO THE SEA 263 
 
 sometimes seem to accompany the dying into, and beyond, 
 the veil. 
 
 It was an hour or two more before the end; and Hke 
 two dreams, in the interim, the doctors she had tele- 
 phoned for both came; quiet, kind, and still, talking with 
 Jim and looking kindly and gravely at Ellen where she 
 sat holding her father's hand, as soon as they relin- 
 quished it, steadily against her bosom. More vivid than 
 either of these strange, quiet doctors: more vivid than 
 the dreary room, or the ineffably strange afternoon wan- 
 ing over the clouded sky and sea, were the recollections 
 going through her mind, over and over, of days when he 
 and she and Jim had walked round that cove and inlet, 
 on many a summer afternoon like this. Afterward she 
 wondered if the recollections that went through her 
 mind so incessantly throughout those hours, were going 
 through his mind too — reflected from his mind to hers, 
 perhaps. He lay still, breathing rapidly and shallowly, 
 but not coughing, or showing any sign of pain, all the 
 afternoon. 
 
 Between four and five o'clock the bathers began coming 
 out of the water, and streamed dripping over the sands, 
 with far-off shouts and pleasantries and gambolings. So 
 had the Grahams gone up over the sands to the bath- 
 houses, cool and salty and refreshed, on how many an 
 afternoon of other summers! And perhaps on one of 
 those afternoons someone's father lay dying in one of 
 those cottages up on the cliff, which looked, with their 
 gardens and verandas, like houses in which no one ever 
 died. Perhaps people watching by their bedsides had 
 heard and seen the bathers' frolicsome return, and been 
 dimly and vaguely wounded by it. 
 
264 THE SPINSTER 
 
 Some of the bathers, after dressing, came up on the 
 hotel veranda, and there were sounds of desultory talk 
 and shouting. Some children were swinging each other 
 in a hammock. Ellen did not hear them, for there were 
 pauses now in the rapid and shallow breath. Thank God, 
 there was no sign of pain in the long thin body so still 
 under the bedclothes. Ellen, on her side of the bed, 
 hung over him, breathlessly watching as if to ward off 
 any unquietness, any troubling of this fortunate, heaven- 
 blessed sleep. Just as an organ-grinder began playing in 
 front of the hotel, he died. 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 BUSINESS IS BUSINESS 
 
 They looked over the old brass-bound trunk to repack 
 it, and also over the old gray valise : and Ellen thought 
 of the time when she and Aunt Sallie had brought down 
 Jim's clothes from the skylight room in the boarding- 
 house in New York. This was really not so terrible as 
 that had been. It was true, then, what people said : sus- 
 pense was worse than the certainty of the worst. Or was 
 it merely that she had grown stronger? In the trunk 
 they found a worn and blackened bit of wood with their 
 father's initials partly carved on it. Ellen remembered, 
 then, a half legendary piece of information out of her 
 childhood : namely that her long-dead uncle, her father's 
 twin brother who had died at sea, had been carving an 
 olive-wood paper-cutter for his twin when brain fever at- 
 tacked him. Eastward and westward, in this old trunk, 
 twice a year, her father had carried it. They figured out 
 the years : sixty journeys ! 
 
 In the suitcase it was no surprise to either of them to 
 find the card-photograph of their mother in the Shetland 
 shawl, and the bonnet with morning-glories on it, lean- 
 ing on the photographer's chair. This was always on 
 their father's bureau, wherever he went, with a small 
 brown Prayer Book, well worn, always lying in front 
 of it. 
 
 265 
 
266 THE SPINSTER 
 
 " Don't you remember, Jim, what father said when he 
 first brought us East to Tory Hill and left us there? that 
 there were only two things he needed to pack to take back 
 with him, that little Prayer Book and that picture of 
 mother? " 
 
 Into the extreme tenderness the handling of these 
 things had aroused in her heart, a burning iron scorched 
 and hissed, branding an ineradicable scar. 
 
 She had gone down to the hotel office to send a tele- 
 gram Jim had forgotten, to their Scotch cousins in To- 
 ronto. The two young clerks were talking, with their 
 backs toward her, while she reworded the telegram once 
 or twice. Except for herself and the clerks, the office 
 and the lounge beyond it were empty. They could not 
 have seen her, for one said, without any perceptible drop 
 in his voice : 
 
 " Let's see, who got the old gentleman's body, Mills 
 or Wilson?" 
 
 " Hm— I think Wilson got him." 
 
 Ellen went on writing her telegram. She handed it to 
 the young clerk who had asked the question, and received 
 her change back from his hand. The burning in her mind 
 was deep and sickening, but it did not startle her. It 
 only stayed, with devilish perseverance, alongside every 
 other thought, in every act, for several days. It made 
 the homeward journey with her, kept in her mind while 
 she was reading kind, comforting telegrams, when friends 
 met them at the station; and even when Sue Micantoni 
 came up and sat with her. There was one time, the fu- 
 neral itself, when the summer clergyman, though almost 
 a stranger, came and met the coffin at the foot of the 
 aisle of the little church, and said, walking before it up 
 
BUSINESS IS BUSINESS 267 
 
 the aisle, the tremendous words with which the Burial of 
 the Dead begins : 
 
 " I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord," 
 — then, Hke a medieval demon exorcised by the sign of the 
 cross, the hideous words went out of her memory. All 
 through the reading of St. Paul's great exposition of 
 death, they stayed away. They could not be heard above 
 that solemn drum-beat: 
 
 " For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and 
 this mortal must put on immortality." 
 
 The funeral comforted her deeply and lastingly. That 
 intimation that had frightened her so much in the train, 
 going down to Boston, — those advances that the thought 
 of death had made to her then, half friendly, half fa- 
 miliar — had been as good as their promise. Near by, 
 death was not so terrible: or if still terrible, it was not 
 grisly and ghastly. It was terrible, perhaps, like a thunder- 
 storm, but not like a nightmare. Seen near by, it was 
 seen by daylight. Its face might be pale and worn and 
 solemn, but it was a human face, with eyes and lips. It 
 was not a skeleton. 
 
 The horror of those ghoulish words, and the ghoulish 
 picture they called up, of the two undertakers contending 
 for her father's body, lay not in any dishonor they had 
 done, or could do, to him. Partly, no doubt, the insist- 
 ence and intensity with which she remembered them 
 were due to the fact that she had not been able yet to 
 repeat them to anyone. Sue was the one, of course, to 
 whom she could ultimately tell them. None of the family 
 should ever be subjected to hearing them. But their 
 effect on her was not, after all, personal. She heard 
 them echoing forever in the back of her mind, in the twi- 
 
268 THE SPINSTER 
 
 light where the conscious and the subconscious join, 
 not as a corollary of her father's having died in a sea- 
 side hotel, far from home, but as an index to the com- 
 petitive order in business. Like an anti-strophe 
 sounded after it that harmless seeming maxim, " Com- 
 petition is the life of trade." After a while, the maxim 
 began to be the answer. 
 
 "Who got the old gentleman's body?" 
 
 " Competition is the life of trade." 
 
 Eventually the burning got well, only leaving that sort 
 of scar to which the blood rushes easily and often. The 
 memory, at last, subsided into that cupboard of her mind 
 where she kept perennially stowed away the fishman's 
 dreadful horse, the laboratory rabbits, Carrie's thousand 
 solitary meals, and the garbage street. There were news- 
 paper items in that cupboard too, about the young colored 
 man in Kentucky who was sent to jail for life for steal- 
 ing a turkey, and some facts about the neglect of can- 
 cerous paupers in county poorhouses, and the sale of New 
 York's old fire-horses for a few dirty dollars in the city 
 treasury. Among all such enormities and brutalities of 
 civilization it was gradually stowed away: and in that 
 grewsome company it did not seem so surpassingly 
 hideous. Still, sometimes, when those other remoter 
 enormities were quiet, nodding on their shelves, this 
 one would make a commotion. 
 
 Jim went out to Minneapolis, to the probating of the 
 will. There was altogether about fifteen thousand dol- 
 lars, and barring a few modest legacies, it was all left to 
 Ellen and Jim. Jim was made sole executor. There was 
 nothing to be done but to pay lawyers and other charges 
 and divide the estate. 
 
BUSINESS IS BUSINESS 269 
 
 Ellen herself knew nothing about investments but the 
 gHttering generaHty " first bond and mortgage." She 
 had Hved on an allowance for several years, and under- 
 stood the value of money as a spendable commodity. Its 
 sources she had never particularly considered, at least 
 in any personal light, even while she read works on 
 economics, beyond a comfortable and justified faith that 
 her father in business dealings never " took advantage " 
 of anybody, " turned sharp corners " or *' put on the 
 screws." Now partly on Jim's advice and that of the 
 aunts, but chiefly on her own initiative, she wrote to an 
 old friend of her father's in North Dakota, and asked 
 him to invest her money. He was, she knew from her 
 father's account of him, an able man and an upright one, 
 " so upright that he leaned over backward " as the saying 
 went. At first, when he had replied to her letter with a 
 consent to manage her affairs for her, she had unthink- 
 ingly assumed that everything was comfortably settled. 
 Mr. Wilkinson was surely not a man who would ever, any 
 more than her own father, deal hardly or sharply with 
 struggling mortgagees, or take the pound of flesh. On 
 the other hand he would not be lax, but would deal with 
 her money with scrupulous and solicitous care. 
 
 But now she discovered, gradually, that unknown to 
 herself, she had been harboring the seeds of a certain 
 faint compunction in her mind, for some time, as re- 
 garded the general morality of receiving interest on in- 
 vestments at all. It had perhaps chiefly showed itself as 
 a difference in the pleasure of spending her allowance 
 compared with the pleasure of spending what her verses 
 earned. It was decidedly to her own horror that she 
 now discovered this compunction sprouting in her mind. 
 
270 THE SPINSTER 
 
 Sue couldn't entirely understand about it, and Ellen 
 couldn't explain, beyond saying, "I don't earn it! I 
 don't give anything whatever in return for it! It's a 
 present, willing or unwilling, from somebody ! It's — it's 
 graft!" 
 
 The uneasiness was sprouting slowly until, at Thanks- 
 giving a letter came from the man of business in North 
 Dakota, which seemed to advance it in hot-house 
 fashion. 
 
 " I have succeeded," he wrote, " in securing stock for 
 you in a malting company. It pays fairly well : six per 
 cent quarterly. I have put a little, also, in United States 
 Composite, preferred, and some in St. Nicholas Ore. 
 You will receive altogether from these three investments 
 about three hundred and fifty dollars a year. I have not 
 yet placed the rest of your principal, and may not be able 
 to do so with equal safety in equally advantageous stock; 
 but I will advise you later," etc., etc. 
 
 "Malting, Composite, and St. Nicholas Ore!" cried 
 Ellen in dismay, dropping the letter on the floor, 
 
 "What's the matter with you?" cried Jim, who had 
 come home from the College of Physicians and Surgeons 
 for Thanksgiving, and was going back tonight. 
 
 " They're the very last things — the very last ! — I would 
 have let my money be put into ! " 
 
 "What are you talking about? They're gilt-edged," 
 said Jim. 
 
 " Malting — breweries ! I might as well keep a saloon ! " 
 cried Ellen, her dismay increasing. She looked rather 
 white, anyhow, in her black dress, which was also ready- 
 made, and a little loose, and accordingly gave her a 
 fictitious look of having groAvn thinner, 
 
BUSINESS IS BUSINESS 271 
 
 " Foolishness. They use malt in plenty of other things 
 beside beer." 
 
 " Well, then, I'll write and find out what this company 
 uses it for." 
 
 " Oh, Ellen, what a queer child you are, sometimes," 
 said Aunt Sallie distressfully. "Why can't you let men 
 manage these things for you ? They understand them so 
 much better ! I don't like to have you so inquisitive, and 
 so — so — so different from the way your mother and your 
 Aunt Frances and I were brought up ! " 
 
 " Aunt Sallie, look and see what men do with my 
 money when I do trust them ! Didn't I trust Mr. Wilkin- 
 son? Now look — United States Composite! Why, 
 that's where they had the massacre during the strike — 
 where the two children were shot-i— where they've always 
 fought the union so bitterly " 
 
 " But, Ellen dearie, you must take the world as you 
 find it, you poor child ! You can't rearrange everything 
 to suit your ideas of right and wrong!" cried Aunt 
 Fran from the sofa. 
 
 " Why, Aunt Fran, I hate having stock in United 
 States Composite even worse than in St. Nicholas Ore, 
 even if St. Nicholas did cheat the Government out of 
 three millions ! " 
 
 " Well ! " cried both aunts in a chorus of distress and 
 perplexity ; and Aunt Fran went on : 
 
 " You won't find any business conducted by 
 angels ! " 
 
 Jim laughed a big, good-natured laugh. 
 
 " Well, I think Wilkinson is doing pretty well for 
 you, old lady. Write and tell him to sell, if you want 
 to carry your crotchets as far as that : but I'm afraid he'll 
 
272 THE SPINSTER 
 
 think you're darned ungrateful and pernickety; I know 
 I would, if it was me." 
 
 Ellen did write, explaining with great care and full 
 and heartfelt thanks for Mr. Wilkinson's trouble and 
 kindness, how she felt about drawing her income from 
 the liquor trade, a corporation that had the " Templeton 
 Massacre " on its record, and a corporation convicted of 
 perjury and theft. She had already written to the malting 
 company inquiring as to its output, and had received a 
 brief reply stating that the total product went to the 
 brewing trade. 
 
 Mr. Wilkinson replied dispassionately that " had he 
 known her views" ("peculiar views," she thought he 
 had begun to write) ''he would not have," etc., etc.; as 
 it was, he would try to sell her stock in all three, if he 
 could do so " without disadvantage." 
 
 During the winter, however, the quarterly dividends 
 from all three came in; and Mr. Wilkinson, in forward- 
 ing them, inclosed a letter saying that he was excessively 
 sorry he had not been able to sell the objectionable stock 
 " without disadvantage." 
 
 " Your brother thought of buying the malting stock," 
 he wrote, " but he has now decided not to do so. I am 
 in hopes, however, that he will take the Composite, and 
 part of the St. Nicholas Ore." 
 
 So it had been on Jim's shoulders she had been going 
 to unload her dirty money! 
 
 After replying in haste that she would rather keep all 
 the stock than sell any of it to her brother, Ellen went 
 off to the sugar woods one March afternoon, to settle, in 
 this particular case, And who was her brother? 
 
 It was really fairly clear before she started on her 
 
BUSINESS IS BUSINESS 273 
 
 thinking walk through the meking sponges of the spring 
 snow. The stillness under the brown beeches and leaf- 
 less white birches in the soggy wet edges of the woods, 
 or the silvery maples in the heart of them, did not help 
 her very much, because she did not need much help. 
 Selling the stock was clearly not the way out. It might 
 be a dark and difficult question, what was the way out; 
 but it was plainly a poor way to cleanse her own record 
 by bespattering someone else's, however blindly consent- 
 ing the other might be. And yet it had taken that letter 
 from Mr. Wilkinson to show her that escape in that way 
 would be no escape at all. She laughed at herself rather 
 bitterly to think how like the old rhyme had been her in- 
 stinct to unload her tainted money on somebody else — 
 but not on Jim! 
 
 " God bless me and my wife, 
 My son and his wife, 
 Us four — 
 
 And no more ! " 
 
 So much was plain ; but there must be, then, some other 
 way out. She went down to see the Micantonis again 
 about it. 
 
 Sue and her husband, in a frolicsome fit, were dancing 
 a sort of fandango with little David in his checkered 
 rompers, on the small balcony. Ellen saw them afar off, 
 and heard all three singing together as they danced : 
 
 " Sur le pont 
 D'Avignon 
 On le danse, 
 On le danse ; 
 Sur le pont 
 D'Avignon, 
 On le danse tout au rond ! " 
 
274 THE SPINSTER 
 
 It was time for David's nap, and Sue let Ellen carry 
 the little Roman in her arms, and pat and hush him with 
 all that wistful tenderness the feeling of a little body 
 arouses in the single woman's heart. Curious how the 
 sleepy child softly bumping against her shoulder helped 
 to quiet her bother and perplexity — or was it Sue's stead- 
 fastly compassionate intelligence which made it seem 
 quietly certain that a way out would be found ? 
 
 At any rate. Sue had no definite plan to propose. Ellen 
 found, however, that she had really not expected any. 
 She felt in herself a necessity to worry out the answer for 
 herself. 
 
 " I believe," she said at length, " that what I wanted 
 you to say, Sue, was just what you've said to me so many 
 times before. — ' Think ! ' I want to think. I want to 
 think my own way out." 
 
 Sue nodded. 
 
 " Steady, plodding, honest thinking," she replied, " is 
 my deus ex machina, as you know." 
 
 " For once," said Ellen, " I'm not looking for a god 
 from the machine. I zvant to think it out. I want to be 
 like you and David here, and use my own brain. Al- 
 though," she added candidly, " naturally I pray about it." 
 
 " Naturally," said Sue, " seeing it's a problem of ap- 
 plied Christianity." 
 
 Her husband had been looking at Ellen thoughtfully. 
 He glanced at Sue, with a wordless question which she 
 seemed invisibly to answer. Then he got up and took a 
 book off the top of the piano. 
 
 " Speaking of applied Christianity, here's something," 
 he said, " that Sue and I have been reading lately. It's 
 by a Baptist theological professor. Doesn't sound very 
 
BUSINESS IS BUSINESS 275 
 
 much in our line, but we've found a lot to think about 
 in it. It might just happen to boost your thinking along 
 a little." 
 
 " It's boosted David's," cried Sue. " He's going to 
 read about Socialism all summer, he says." 
 
 Ellen was looking at the title page. 
 
 "Walter Rauschenbusch ! " she cried. 
 
 " Sure! What do you know about Rauschenbusch?" 
 
 " Why, he wrote those fine modern prayers they used 
 to put on the title pages of one of the magazines — don't 
 you remember? " 
 
 " No, I never heard of the prayers. Never heard of 
 the man in any connection whatever, until a fellow I knew 
 in Rome sent this out to me the other day." 
 
 " Think of living in America and getting a great 
 American book sent out from Rome," cried Sue. 
 
 " That's where I score, then, on you two I'arned peo- 
 ple," said Ellen. " I've got all the Rauschenbusch 
 Prayers cut out and interleaved in my Prayer-Book." 
 
 " Well, do read this book and let us know what you 
 think of it. David and I have been — well! we've been 
 enormously impressed. I may join David in a course of 
 reading on Socialism, though I'm such a free lance, I 
 never could join in a choral creed with a lot of people all 
 claiming to believe just alike. See how different I am 
 from you, Ellen ! You always like to be banded together 
 with a crowd of others." 
 
 " I do. I like to wear badges, and walk in processions, 
 and be a member of organizations, and wear my heart on 
 my sleeve. Seems to me that's the place for it. You 
 miss a lot of fun. Sue! " Ellen said half-wistfully. 
 
 " I feel suffocated in processions, somehow." 
 
276 THE SPINSTER 
 
 " Your beautiful athletic brain wants to be free and 
 have lots of elbow-room to exercise in ! " 
 
 Sue laughed heartily. 
 
 " A lovely poetic way of saying I'm unsocialized." 
 
 " ' Robust and tender,' " Ellen began to quote her own 
 old verses on Sue. 
 
 "'Is her home-grown feeling; 
 Swift her espousal 
 Of the hindmost's part.' " 
 
 She embraced her friend, and then set off up the heavy 
 melting road on foot; it was too early for her bicycle. 
 She was alone, for Sue was going to have another baby 
 in May, and had been exercising enough for one morn- 
 ing. As she walked, she read; she walked past the Olden- 
 bury farm reading, and up the long hill, and over the 
 bridge: forgetting, for the first time, to stop and invite 
 the fragrant memory she could always find there as she 
 passed. 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 CHRISTIANITY IN THE ARENA 
 
 Long ago at Radcliffe, in her salad years, Ellen remem- 
 bered, she had tried to describe, in a letter to Aunt Sallie, 
 how knocked down and shaken, and yet invigorated, she 
 had felt after reading " Richard Feverel." " It's as if 
 you had been out bathing in a big surf," she had written. 
 This book, " Christianity and the Social Crisis," made her 
 feel in very much the same way. 
 
 Or one might say in another figure, it created (or did 
 it find?) a revolutionary feeling in her mind, with a core 
 of clear thought burning beneath it, like the hidden flame 
 beneath billows of lighted smoke. 
 
 The book was too exciting to be physically wholesome. 
 She slept poorly, and carried on imaginary conversa- 
 tions, arguments in favor of the thesis of the book, and 
 against the constitution of modern society, half the night. 
 She argued, in these imaginary one-sided debates, with 
 the home people, the summer people, the golfers and 
 tennis-players, the Barnhavens or Willetses, and some- 
 times with Jim. She fancied their widely varying brands 
 of touched interest, wondering humor, and tolerant con- 
 tempt for what this fiery Baptist was saying: and she 
 plunged into far more fiery invectives than his against 
 the world as it stood. With passionate partisanship she 
 took his side against all comers. She saw eye to eye 
 
 277 
 
278 THE SPINSTER 
 
 with him the maladjustments and neglects, the warped 
 framework of present society, as he portrayed it; she 
 heard the Gospel speak clearly of all these things with 
 the exact accent he told her in this book to listen for. 
 She saw and felt the poverty his pages described, read- 
 ing on and on by a late-burning lamp, while all round 
 her lay her own frosty valley along the gleaming Bal- 
 lantyne, immeasurably peaceful under the March moon, 
 and full of her old friends. 
 
 Immeasurably peaceful it looked, but Ellen knew, look- 
 ing down the valley, that some of the houses were in- 
 fected with consumption, and some of the farms were 
 hopelessly mortgaged. A valley of good fortune it was 
 not, though the heroic wars of industry were not being 
 fought along the Ballantyne, and the fiercer throat-cut- 
 ting competition of laborer with laborer was not taking 
 place here. Nor were there in the Green Mountains many 
 of those dreary industrial villages this book told of, 
 which spread like barnacles on the skirts of the normal 
 towns of early America. 
 
 " I must read more books than this about Socialism," 
 she often thought, as she read further and further 
 into it. 
 
 People said " There are so many different kinds of 
 Socialism. There are Socialists and Socialists." In 
 Buckminster, below Tewkesbury, there lived a certain 
 party leader of the Socialists — a national officer. Ellen 
 just knew his name for a famous one, as such leaders 
 went, and had heard a Tewkesbury man say once that he 
 would walk to Buckminster in a hail-storm to hear Wil- 
 liam Horn speak. On the strength of this she wrote to 
 William Horn, and asked him simply " What was So- 
 
CHRISTIANITY IN THE ARENA 279 
 
 cialism?" He answered in a long typewritten letter. 
 Socialism was a social hope, a theory of history, and a 
 political plan, he said : the plan was based on the his- 
 torical theory, and the social hope was based on the plan. 
 Had she read Edmond Kelly, for example? Had she 
 read John Spargo? Had she read Morris H^illquit? He 
 closed by saying, " I am subscribing for you for a month 
 to The Party and sending you the Communist Mani- 
 festo." 
 
 Ellen found the Manifesto a little shrill, and also a 
 little obvious, considering its great fame. She did not 
 stop to consider that perhaps it had achieved its own 
 obviousness, like a proverb. The Party was a New York 
 daily. It was printed on a poor quality of paper, with 
 poor type. It was able and keen, though bitter and harp- 
 ing — intolerably bitter ! " Bigoted," she called them, 
 carrying down a sheaf to show the Micantonis. Sue 
 shook her head a little over them : her husband smoked 
 and considered. 
 
 " We can't help," he said, " drawing a certain dis- 
 tinction between what's allowable to the under dog and 
 what's allowable to the upper. Our sympathies may be 
 all with the under dog, but we don't want him to be too 
 punctilious about his rights. We want him to be com- 
 fortable, we want him stood up for, but we can't quite 
 stand his crude dander and his grotesque self-assurance 
 when he stands up for himself. At least, I find that no- 
 tion lurking in the dregs of my mind; every now and 
 then I kick it out, but it sneaks back." 
 
 Ellen was listening rather eagerly, 
 
 " I guess I know what you mean, David," she said. 
 " For instance, one employer doesn't mind saving to an- 
 
28o THE SPINSTER 
 
 other employer, ' I think you pay altogether too high 
 wages; ' but she's very indignant if another maid says to 
 her maid, ' I think you work altogether too long hours.' " 
 
 Sue laughed. 
 
 " ' What's sauce for the goose is saucy for the 
 gander,' " she quoted. 
 
 " The thing that's difficult for you, and I confess for 
 me too, Ellen, to realize," said David, " is that we're 
 tarred with the same brush." 
 
 " Perhaps we are. At any rate, I confess I shall really 
 be glad when The Party stops coming. I declare I hate 
 the idea of Aunt Fran or Aunt Sallie getting hold of it. 
 They'd feel as if they'd touched a bomb." 
 
 " They zvould have touched a bomb ! " said David 
 Micantoni, his deep-set eyes burning. 
 
 " We-ell, I don't know that a little sincere bitterness 
 and bigotry would shock me so much as they do you, 
 Ellen dear," said Sue. " I more pity bitterness for being 
 weak and babyish, than I dread or hate it." 
 
 " They have a column in The Party every day," Ellen 
 went on, " called ' Labor's Dividends.' In it they put 
 every accident that happens in a factory or mine or shop, 
 where workmen are hurt or killed, — every such accident 
 that they can find in the day's news. There's concen- 
 trated bitterness for you ! " 
 
 This much was cleared in Ellen's thinking, at any 
 rate: that if these Socialists could persuade her to their 
 view, the problem about the dividends from the objec- 
 tionable ^Composite, St. Nicholas, and malting stock 
 would be solved. They could be turned into the party 
 funds and made to dig their own graves. 
 Well ! but suppose these Socialists, with their bigoted, 
 
CHRISTIANITY IN THE ARENA 281 
 
 one-idea'd press, couldn't convert her ? Wasn't the prob- 
 lem about the dividends equally solved, though less satis- 
 factorily? The malting stock dividends could be turned 
 into the Anti-Saloon League, the St. Nicholas and Com- 
 posite into co-operative ventures, or union funds, or 
 workman's benefit societies, or, one remove less satisfac- 
 tory, but vitally useful, into housing associations, legal 
 aid, child labor reform, — or the Fresh Air Fund, or St. 
 John's Floating Hospital, or School Gardens. Didn't Dr. 
 Rauschenbusch himself say that unmarried women should 
 adopt the whole rising generation to love and work for?,^ 
 
 She looked that night at the chapter of Isaiah where 
 she kept Franklin Tallman's last letter. She read it, with 
 new understanding, from " Sing, O barren, thou that 
 dids't not bear," to " Great shall be the peace of thy chil- 
 dren." 
 
 The first practical step toward either alternative was to 
 pare down her personal expenses to the uttermost farth- 
 ing. It could be begun at once : every item for clothing, 
 for example, could be carefully scanned and cut as low as 
 possible; and all the nameless "sundries" which began 
 with soda and ended with calling-cards could be cut out, 
 to the tune of ten to twenty dollars a year; a sum that 
 would circulate propaganda among hundreds of people. 
 Economy for a great end, transcending inimitably the 
 mere replenishing of one's own bank account, became an 
 exciting adventure. There was an exhilarating piquancy 
 in the notion of steadily returning this loot to its enemies. 
 
 But she told Sue and David, the next time she went 
 down there, that she didn't think she could ever be a 
 Socialist, much as she liked their ideas about profit, 
 dividends, and capital. 
 
282 THE SPINSTER 
 
 " Do you know, Sue, I discovered the other day, — I 
 wonder if David's come across it in his reading? — that 
 you've got to take a pledge, if you join their party, not 
 to vote for any other party's candidate, on any considera- 
 tion?" 
 
 " It suffocates me to think of it! " cried Sue. " You 
 don't catch me signing any such pledge ! Not in a thou- 
 sand years! " 
 
 " Yes, I've heard of it, " said David, in his most rumi- 
 native voice, and that slightly meticulous pronunciation, 
 even when using slang, which was, or seemed to Ellen's 
 familiar ears, all that was left of his Italian accent. " It 
 sounds a large order to me, too. I'm in process of mak- 
 ing up my mind about it. I suspect when, or if, I'm 
 ever ready to embrace the rest of their doctrines, I shall 
 be ready to swallow that pledge. The idea must be that 
 partial reforms will come all the quicker without So- 
 cialist votes, because Socialist votes reach out so far be- 
 yond partial reforms. You know the Socialists claim 
 they stimulate a crowd of non-Socialist reformers to 
 hurry through the half-measures; whereas they say, ' If 
 we radicals content ourselves with conservative conces- 
 sions, conservative concessions will soon begin to 
 dwindle.' " 
 
 " David, I believe you'll join 'em ! " 
 
 " It'll be a neck-and-neck race between us, then," said 
 David, looking shrewdly at Ellen. 
 
 Ellen shook her head. 
 
 " There's one thing I do like," Sue said. " and that is 
 the system of regular dues David was telling me about. 
 It sounds much wholesomer than depending on gifts, like 
 the other parties. I like the way party policies are 
 
CHRISTIANITY IN THE ARENA 283 
 
 adopted, too, by written votes of the whole membership, 
 with plenty of time allowed for thinking it over. They're 
 getting splendid practice for the initiative and refer- 
 endum, to say nothing of woman suffrage. All the same, 
 nothing would induce me to sign that pledge." 
 
 " What bothers me more now, Sue, than that pledge," 
 said Ellen a few weeks later, " is this inhuman doctrine 
 of the class struggle." 
 
 " David swallows that whole," said Sue. " He says 
 he's seen it all his life, — says he's tired of the newspapers 
 treating every strike as if it were a separate thing, in- 
 stead of another battle in a long war. David and I in- 
 tend, some time, to run a newspaper ourselves. We'll 
 sink all our savings, I can forewarn you now, trying to 
 print news in the order of its real importance." 
 
 "Hope you'll take me on as a reporter!" 
 
 " We will, won't we, David ? " 
 
 Oh dear, how long ago it seemed — and was — that 
 Sunday of the unforgotten walk, the night of Sue's and 
 David's engagement, and of her own one and last good-by 
 to Franklin Tallman ! Sometimes the flight of time 
 came over her, suddenly, like this, with some obscure 
 feeling of homesickness for the past which was swirling 
 and weltering into the distance, like landscape past a 
 railway train ! An instant covered the experience : and 
 then the feeling was gone. It had been brought on in 
 this case, or seemed to have been, simply by observing 
 that David seemed a thought stouter this spring, and had 
 been growing side-whiskers, like a mid-Victorian Eng- 
 lishman. 
 
284 THE SPINSTER 
 
 " I believe I'll give up reading and talking about So- 
 cialism, for the rest of the spring, anyway. Did I tell 
 you, Sue? — Aunt Fran's pretty well now, and if Cousin 
 Celia Oldenbury can come up and stay a week with her. 
 Aunt Sallie and I are going down to New York to see 
 Jim." 
 
 " What's the matter with Jim? " 
 
 " Why, nothing's the matter. Only he's taking three 
 sets of examinations at once ; hospital, State, and Medi- 
 cal School ; he graduates at P. and S. this year, you know. 
 If he ' makes ' a hospital, as he calls it, he won't be home 
 at all this summer. And we've all three got it into our 
 heads — Aunt Fran particularly — that he must be a little 
 fagged and worn. We're going to take down some tarts 
 and wild cranberry jelly and maple sugar, and darn his 
 socks, and see how he is, and so forth. Perhaps we'll 
 each buy a summer hat at the same time." 
 
 " Summer hats are no anodyne for Ellen, and darning 
 Jim's socks won't settle her mind," said David Micantoni 
 to his wife, as Ellen hiked away up the muddy April road. 
 " Bon voyage, Ellen ! Just take the Fabian Essays along 
 to read on the train." 
 
 " Class struggle, indeed," he muttered as he and Sue 
 went their evening rounds to feed their few head of 
 stock. "Just let her live among mills awhile, and see 
 the silk and textile strikes, foolish woman that she is. 
 Class struggle — why, it's the A. B. C. of the whole 
 thing." 
 
 " It doesn't seem so to Ellen," his wife replied. " She 
 can't endure the preaching of envy, hatred, malice, and 
 all uncharitableness." 
 
 "It doesn't have to be preached, you see; and then 
 
CHRISTIANITY IN THE ARENA 285 
 
 again, it can't be preached away, or sent to Coventry." 
 
 " Well, Ellen's going to cut out the economics for 
 awhile, anyway," persisted Sue, " and write some saleable 
 verses." 
 
 " She'll never sell many verses again, my dear. She's 
 headed for another port." 
 
 Cousin Celia Oldenbury did come up to stay with Miss 
 Frances Mowbray, and Ellen and her Aunt Sallie did go 
 down to their usual boarding-place in one of the Twenty 
 Streets east of Madison Square. It was near the hospital 
 Jim was hoping to " make " ; and they were to visit the 
 hospital with him, on some afternoon of their stay. The 
 city, and above all, Madison Square, looked beautiful — 
 overhead. The fountain played, too, over the red and 
 yellow tulips arranged round it : the trees were all leafing, 
 and the blue and green were dazzlingly mingled. There 
 had been, however, the usual amount of unemployment all 
 winter. The charitable organizations' appeals had let up 
 a little, now that the winter was over and the overcoatless 
 no longer had the bitter cold to contend with as they 
 stood in the bread lines. But the bread lines themselves 
 were still long, as Ellen noticed, crossing Fourteenth 
 Street late one afternoon. The benches in the Square 
 were largely filled with slack and frowsy unemployed, 
 whose desperate neglected sufferings all winter seemed 
 to have burned out their manhood and left husks of men. 
 
 Did some of them sit in the Square all night, Ellen 
 wondered? Otherwise how did that whitish-leathery- 
 faced young man in the sleazy blue serge suit, so badly 
 bagged at the knees, keep always that same place on the 
 westernmost bench by the fountain? 
 
 Spring had come, of course, and in the middle of the 
 
286 THE SPINSTER 
 
 day it was almost seventy degrees, but the evenings were 
 cool, and the nights, especially if damp, must be quite 
 cold. Particularly so, she reflected, to anybody with a 
 stomach empty of food, and a heart empty of anticipa- 
 tion. Thus the pale-leathery young man by the fountain 
 looked, at first. And yet, when you came closer, there 
 was a fixed concentration in his eyes. Ellen rather 
 studied him, for some reason: perhaps because he was 
 always there, and then The Party, which she was getting 
 into the habit of buying at news-stands, had so much 
 more to say about the unemployed than the Censor, for 
 instance. She thought there was a gleam of purpose 
 away back in his eyes. He must be living and hoping 
 still for something; something not altogether for him- 
 self, perhaps. On the third or fourth day that she saw 
 him there, she inclined her head in a scarcely perceptible 
 bow to him as she passed. He also bowed slightly, 
 gravely, but did not take off his hat. If he had taken 
 off his hat he might have seemed familiar. But that 
 grave, slight bow was exactly like her own. — On each 
 side of him sat older and more frowsy men, whom Ellen 
 pitied more than she pitied him. If life were intending 
 to befriend them, to cease badgering them and wasting 
 them, it would better be quick. They were ageing a year 
 a week, or faster, she judged, in this mockingly sweet 
 and pleasant weather. 
 
 On the last morning of their stay, her aunt went up- 
 town to lunch with a friend in one of the Fifty Streets. 
 Ellen had executed a commission or two from Tory Hill 
 friends, and on her way home from the shops, strolled 
 through the Square. Outwardly she took pains to stroll : 
 but at heart she jntended f; walk up to the fountain and 
 
CHRISTIANITY IN THE ARENA 287 
 
 make acquaintance, if possible, with the strange man with 
 the strange complexion. But for the first time he was not 
 there. 
 
 Disappointed in her quixotic scheme, and feeling the 
 hour or so before the time when Jim was to come and 
 take them over the hospital lengthening out rather tedi- 
 ously, she wandered over to the curb at the southeastern 
 corner of the Square, where a street orator, as usual, was 
 holding forth. She had never stopped here before to 
 listen : but with a half hope that the curb orator would 
 prove interesting, since perhaps the pale-brown man had 
 left his bench to come and hear, she now lingered, worm- 
 ing her way, as listeners came and went, a little nearer 
 the soap-box, until at last she began to hear what the thin, 
 flushed old man, gesticulating so wildly, was saying. 
 
 " The churches are nothing but Sunday clubs ! " 
 
 " That's true," called out a scarred, undersized young 
 man near Ellen. 
 
 " Christians send you to hell for not believing their 
 dogmas ! " 
 
 " What Christians? " Ellen called out boldly. 
 
 "Who's that? Lady, what did you say?" 
 
 " I say, what Christians condemn people to hell for not 
 believing their dogmas? " 
 
 *' Lady, I'll answer all the questions you want to ask, 
 if you'll wait till I'm finished. I'm not going to talk very 
 long." 
 
 " Lady, take my advice and get out of here," a middle- 
 aged man in the crowd addressed Ellen. " You'll be get- 
 ting in bad if you stay." 
 
 " But if I go, he'll think I was afraid to stay." 
 
 The man shrugged his shoulders. 
 
288 THE SPINSTER 
 
 " The authorities oughtn't to allow them talking such 
 blasphemy here," he said. 
 
 " Well," said Ellen, " I haven't heard him say anything 
 really blasphemous." 
 
 " Sh ! Sh ! " came in little spurts all around them. 
 
 The speaker went on. He ridiculed, with taunts and 
 innuendo, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and other 
 sections of the Creed. His face was aflame with a bit- 
 ter but selfless passion. It crossed Ellen's mind that he 
 might have been a martyr of the Reformation; that just 
 so in Tudor England might a crowd have listened to an 
 English Luther. 
 
 He went on and on. It was lunch time at the boarding- 
 house. Ellen was not hungry. Only Jim had said not to 
 come to the hospital without " a good meal aboard." The 
 dining-room would be open only half an hour. The half- 
 hour was almost over. The speaker had put on an ex- 
 pression of hypocritical sanctity, and was singing through 
 his nose what he called a " hymn." He said it was ex- 
 actly what these " Sunday clubs " thought and felt in 
 their hearts. 
 
 " We're the select and chosen few : 
 Let all the rest be damned. 
 There's room enough in hell for you : 
 We can't have heaven crammed ! " 
 
 Ellen made a hasty calculation. Jim was coming at 
 two. She must go. She held up her hand and wagged 
 it at the speaker. 
 
 " Can't you answer my question before I go? I've got 
 to go now." 
 
 " Wait, lady, till I finish, and I'll answer all the ques- 
 tions you like." 
 
CHRISTIANITY IN THE ARENA 289 
 
 " Well then," said Ellen in a lower voice, turning and 
 addressing the half-dozen men who stood nearest, " I'll 
 just say to you what I wanted to say to him. There are 
 all kinds of Christians. Some of them are just like 
 what he says they are. Others are only half as stupid, 
 lazy, and mean as he says ; and others — others — why, some 
 live and die to save the sick, and some to save drunkards, 
 and some to save women; and some are leaders in the So- 
 cialist party, fighting for justice and freedom ! " Her voice, 
 as usual in excitement, had lifted treacherously fast, and 
 many in the crowd were listening. Ellen felt them facing 
 toward her, and swept their faces with a glance; she 
 saw many of those pale whitey-brown complexions, like 
 her unknown friend on the bench; faces that looked as 
 if this were perhaps the first time, for months, that they 
 had been out in the open air, or felt the sun on their pores. 
 " Did you ever hear of Vida D. Scudder? " she went on. 
 (" Yes, I have," replied a man. " She writes in the 
 Sunday Party.") " She's a Christian, and a church 
 member! Did you ever hear of Rauschenbusch ? " 
 
 " Yes, I've heard him in Cooper Union," said a voice. 
 
 " Well — he's a minister! " 
 
 "Is that right, lady? Is that straight?" a weary, 
 shabby man asked with sincere wonder. " Is that 
 straight?" asked another: and all round her rose an in- 
 credulous murmur, from pale, shabby men. 
 
 " What's the lady saying over there ? " the speaker 
 paused to inquire. His audience had partly turned away 
 from him. " The lady must be saying she's a good Chris- 
 tian. She thinks she's a fine Christian! " 
 
 " No ! No ! The poorest 1 The poorest ! " cried Ellen 
 fiercely. 
 
290 THE SPINSTER 
 
 Perhaps he would answer her question now. But no, 
 he was selling literature. He held up pamphlets and 
 weeklies, reeling off their tables of contents. It was a 
 pity, Ellen thought, she had no money left. She would 
 have bought some. 
 
 Well, she must go. She softly pushed her way through 
 the men who had listened to her. But at the edge she 
 turned and, unable to restrain herself, cried out again : 
 
 "And who killed Jesus, and why? The rich! for 
 standing up for the poor ! " 
 
 They closed in behind her, many staring after her with 
 the same heavy wonder, and dim. incredulous surprise; 
 and the words came into her head : 
 
 " Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship " 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 THE CALL TO THE COLORS 
 
 The doors of the dining-room at the boarding-house 
 were closing; the colored waiter was actually pushing 
 them together, when Ellen entered. " Could I get a bite 
 of lunch, do you think, Williams?" ''Sure you could, 
 Miss Graham ! " " Anything, Williams, — if I could have 
 an egg and a bit of bread and butter." With friendly 
 haste he brought her a poached egg and a glass of milk. 
 She bolted them with dismayed looks at her watch : and 
 yet, when she had gone upstairs and begun to change her 
 crumpled old suit (three years old) for her new one (two 
 years old) such a press of thoughts surged against the 
 feeble barriers she tried to keep them down with, that 
 she paused for whole minutes, her blouse half on, half 
 off. 
 
 " After I finish this one more book on Socialism, I'll 
 get out of economics," she resolved. " Perhaps my 
 verses'll be all the better. Of course my immediate 
 business in life is to earn enough by sunbonnets to enable 
 me to turn over all my malting, Composite, and St. 
 Nicholas dividends to temperance and social work. I'd 
 better let economics alone, now I've thought out my im- 
 mediate problem about the unfumigated stock." 
 
 Sunbonnets had been easy enough to write two years 
 ago, — one year — nine months ago. Her head had been 
 
 291 
 
292 THE SPINSTER 
 
 full of them then. But would they come back whenever 
 she whistled, silly verses though they were? 
 
 At times like this, it seemed very unlikely. The allure 
 was gone. Whenever, in the past nine months, she had 
 dug out of her listless imagination a few notions for sun- 
 bonnets, they had presented themselves baldly and obvi- 
 ously, without any of the delicacies and individualities 
 that had enabled her to assign vaguely symbolic names to 
 them in the early days; — without any of the tender para- 
 dox and embryonic humor that once had adorned them. 
 Gone were all their "beautiful obliquities"; shorn of 
 which, their underlying ideas looked painfully hackneyed. 
 
 Was it more or less violent self-deception to try to 
 think she could go back to them again, at will, half- 
 heartedly? Her return would be half-hearted, could not 
 be otherwise, now that she had had this other bee of 
 justice buzzing in her head. To think herself back into 
 those wistful quaint verses would be very hard indeed. 
 
 " Still I shall do it in time, even if eventually, as I 
 suspect, I go into the Socialist party," she concluded, 
 spasmodically hurrying as she glanced at the clock, and 
 saw that Jim and Aunt Sallie were both overdue. Or 
 could Aunt Sallie be down in her room waiting? 
 
 " There! It's drizzling, and it the first day of May! " 
 she thought. The air began to come in rather raw and 
 shivery at her window. The sidewalks were rapidly get- 
 ting a thin mush of wet dust spread out over them, 
 and the brewery horses going by steamed into the graying 
 air. The greenness of the Square was slightly veiled by 
 the drizzle and damp. Over there, beyond the fountain, 
 was the pale-leather-faced )^oung man sitting in his sleazy 
 serge suit, that would soon reek wet all over him ? 
 
THE CALL TO THE COLORS 293 
 
 What immediate message, after all, to this man and his 
 neighbors on the benches, had Dr. Rauschenbusch, or 
 Spargo and Arner, or any other of the writers she had 
 been reading so much of late? It was so far away, — 
 supposing them right — that majority of Socialist votes, 
 that Socialist Congress and President, those Socialist 
 legislatures! If the young man's lungs were the least 
 bit weak, he'd be dead long before then, sitting on that 
 bench in the drizzHng rain, with his lean, fixed face. He 
 had taken hold of her imagination, that young man: he 
 was assuming statuesque proportions, as of a Type. The 
 type of the brothers in the garbage street! of whom a 
 certain number would have pneumonia, and out of those 
 a certain number would drift, through undernourishment 
 and poor air, into tuberculosis. . . . 
 
 Why should she think so persistently of him, she won- 
 dered, when the Square was full of older men, thin old 
 men, stooping like her father? Old men, with young, 
 unreconciled eyes : old men with old eyes : middle-aged 
 men, dingy, heavy; and plenty of other young men, be- 
 side this one: young men of about Jim's age: perhaps 
 some of them would have liked to be doctors, too: per- 
 haps some of them would have found the cause and cure 
 of cancer. Ah, well! Socialism was pretty slow. But 
 perhaps it was slow because people kept on writing what 
 would sell, instead of embracing it at once and chuck- 
 ing everything for propaganda. And if it meant what it 
 said, Togetherness, could not all the people who believed 
 in it perhaps get together, meanwhile, to befriend each 
 other and outsiders, and show them what it really meant 
 to say " E Pluribus Unum," and " United We Stand "? 
 
 Well, here was Jim, with that half-English look a rain- 
 
294 THE SPINSTER 
 
 coat always gave him : Jim, with his clear, thin, shaven, 
 professional face and beautiful, fine, professional hands. 
 He was ready. Aunt Sallie was ready, her fresh veil trim 
 and taut, her trim gloves buttoned. What had Ellen been 
 doing, that she hadn't come down and waited in the par- 
 lor? Ellen, dismayed and abashed, plunged about the 
 room hunting up her rubbers; and presently was ready, 
 with that loosish look about the waist she always had 
 (before it was the fashion for clothes to look loose) ; her 
 broad rubbers on over her broad-toed, low-heeled shoes, 
 and her thrice-trimmed, thrice-wintered hat a little over 
 one ear. Jim looked at her, a disparaging look. 
 
 '* My family are such swells," she apologized. 
 
 " Swells nothing," Jim answered, with a friendly 
 enough grin. " The only thing is, old lady, your turn- 
 over collar's off the band; one end of it sticks out." 
 
 " Well — I pinned it in. My only motto is. Things may 
 be pinned, but they must be clean." 
 
 " What are these people waiting for along the curbs? " 
 asked Aunt Sallie as they crossed Third Avenue. 
 " Seems to me they might have chosen a pleasanter day 
 for loitering on the sidewalks." 
 
 " They're waiting for the May Day parade," said Jim. 
 
 " What! a children's parade? Oh, I'd like to see it! " 
 
 " Children, Lord, no. There may be some children in 
 it, but the first of May's the international Labor Day, you 
 know, Aunt Sal." 
 
 "Oh, I knew, but I'd forgotten!" cried Ellen; while 
 her aunt went on in some perplexity: 
 
 " Labor Day — I thought it came in September." 
 
 " Ours does, but the general Labor Day all over the 
 world's the first of May," Ellen joined Jim in explaining. 
 
THE CALL TO THE COLORS 295 
 
 " How can they parade, though, if it isn't a legal holi- 
 day? Why don't they have to work?" persisted Aunt 
 Sallie. 
 
 " They do have to work : only they don't work. They 
 just take a holiday, — that's all. It's nothing much to see, 
 you know," added Jim. " They don't keep step, or carry 
 much in the way of banners. Most of 'em look too tired 
 to tramp so far. They just walk along." 
 
 " I'd like to watch it ! " cried Ellen. " It must be 
 fine." 
 
 " Well, maybe there's something fine in it, but it seems 
 sort of disappointing to me," said Jim. " There's noth- 
 ing much to it. As I say, they just walk." 
 
 ** But there must be some purpose or ideal in their 
 minds, — some feeling of solidarity, at any rate. To- 
 getherness," she added, half to herself. 
 
 " I thought that'd get a rise out of the old lady," said 
 her brother indulgently. " Well, there's the hospital, on 
 the right. See? — the iron railings." 
 
 " They must have some idea of a world where people 
 will hang together and neighbor better than they do now," 
 pursued Ellen, not looking where she was going, and 
 stumbling up the semi-circular steps with the iron railing. 
 
 " Oh well, perhaps. This is the visitor's entrance. 
 Here's the elevator. We'll go through the surgical wards 
 first. Here's where I hope I'll be an interne this fall. 
 If I can't make the surgical, I'll be content to get into 
 the medical wards." 
 
 They saw an old woman whose arm had been caught in 
 a wheel, and a young girl, with baby-blue eyes, whose 
 scalp had been torn off in a machine. Ellen looked at 
 every patient's eyes as they passed. She tried with quiet 
 
296 THE SPINSTER 
 
 passion to put a little plank of friendship across to them. 
 But few answering glances kindled. Life in this white, 
 barren, cleanly place seemed to be a tough fabric of 
 endurance mostly. A few in wheel chairs were talking, 
 and one or two were sewing, which lent a touch of wel- 
 come homeliness to the monotonous ranges of beds. 
 
 In the men's surgical ward were the usual number 
 (smaller than in the women's ward) of convalescents after 
 operation. It was at the very end that a swathed and 
 shrouded figure, with only the eyes showing, made Ellen 
 cringe and ask what was his malady. Jim inquired and 
 discovered that it was a man who had been boiled. He 
 had fallen into a vat in chemical works : most of his 
 flesh had fallen, like soup meat, from his bones. 
 
 Ellen remembered the column she had so disliked in 
 The Party, the column headed " Labor's Dividends." 
 There one had read daily, for a month, in the light of 
 the editor's bitter caption, of many such accidents as 
 these, scalps torn off, arms torn out, men boiled alive. 
 
 " Yes," Jim was saying, " I hope I'll make the surgical 
 side. And yet the medical wards are nearly as 
 good." 
 
 "Good, Jim!" 
 
 " I knew you'd ask me if doctors and nurses get cyni- 
 cal ! Sooner or later you were bound to, old lady. Aunt 
 Sal looks shocked, too. I'm sorry either of you saw that 
 man, poor fellow, that fell into the vat. But see here ! he 
 isn't suffering. He won't live long: but he won't suffer. 
 If he weren't scalded so badly, he'd suffer far more. 
 
 " Most people are scandalized when they hear stories 
 about young hospital doctors joking about the dead-house 
 and the cadavers, and so forth; but don't ever let any- 
 
THE CALL TO THE COLORS 297 
 
 body make you think, Ellen, that those fellows give any- 
 thing but their best care and thought to the ward pa- 
 tients. Surrounded as they are all the time by pain and 
 sickness and death, they'd go bug-house if they didn't 
 lighten it up all they could. Goodness knows I've been 
 in a hospital only a week or two, on ambulance duty and 
 things like that; but I can see what the strain is. It's 
 fierce ! " 
 
 " It must be. If I were a ward patient here I'd trust 
 any of the young doctors that hadn't been doing any 
 vivisecting: I wouldn't care to be handled by those that 
 had." 
 
 " Oh, well, vivisection has its abuses, and I'd like to 
 see 'em corrected; but it's come to stay, I guess." 
 
 " Why, Jim, if the doctors that send delegations to 
 legislatures to fight us would only send delegations to get 
 machinery fenced in, that girl with her scalp gone and 
 that scalded man wouldn't be here ! " 
 
 " There's something in that, too," said Jim. " The 
 doctors might do a lot more, collectively, by moral pres- 
 sure, for social reforms. They could put a big crimp in 
 child labor and night work for women and dark sleeping- 
 rooms in tenements, for instance : that would be a little 
 more in their line perhaps, than fencing in machinery. 
 But don't forget that they couldn't very well do more for 
 poor devils individually than they do. Why, if a shoe- 
 maker or a clothier were asked to make his prices what 
 the customer could pay, just because his feet would 
 freeze, or he'd catch pneumonia, otherwise, why ! the man 
 would laugh in your face ! " 
 
 They had come into the medical ward, and there was 
 a desperate case of the " bends " two or three doctors and 
 
298 THE SPINSTER 
 
 nurses were working over. " A worker in the harbor," 
 said Jim. " Think of fellows being willing to do such 
 risky work as that for the wages they get! " 
 
 " Think of anybody being willing to hire them to do 
 such risky work, and pay them such small wages ! " cried 
 Ellen. 
 
 " Well, it's an instance of caveat labor — let the work- 
 man beware. Now here's another; here's a case of 
 phossy jaw. You know what that is, Ellen? You've 
 read the muck-rake magazines." 
 
 " I haven't — I never read muck-rake magazines," con- 
 fessed Aunt Sallie. " What is it ? " 
 
 " Why, the stuff they used to dip the matches into, in 
 certain match factories, got on their hands. They're 
 careless, I suppose, poor devils; and then they put their 
 fingers in their mouths, or handle something they're 
 going to eat; and then the jaw gradually rots away. But 
 now the law has stepped in and protected them; most of 
 these cases date back to the old times, — that is a year or 
 two ago. It used to be very common among match- 
 workers." 
 
 " Don't tell us any more ! Poor creatures ! " cried Aunt 
 Sallie, shivering. 
 
 Ellen walked along in silence, thinking again and again, 
 with staring eyes, " Labor's Dividends — Labor's Divi- 
 dends!" 
 
 When they came out into the street again, the drizzle 
 was transiently holding up. The crowds along Second 
 and Third Avenues had thickened a good deal. At first 
 they could not get across Third Avenue. The parade was 
 passing. 
 
 " Ladies' Garment Workers," read a small paper 
 
THE CALL TO THE COLORS 299 
 
 transparency carried by two pale, small men in black 
 suits. " The Times Are Hard Because the People Are 
 Soft." 
 
 Two young girls with red sashes carried a paper 
 trough along the curb, into which Ellen saw a few dimes 
 drop. It was labeled : 
 
 " Help the Fur Striker?." 
 
 A red banner with gold fringe was printed in Polish, 
 and back of that another transparency was borne along, 
 with its motto in letters half Greek, half Hebrew in form. 
 
 These were the Ukrainian and Lithuanian Song So- 
 cieties. 
 
 A band preceded the Painters', Paperers', and Plaster- 
 ers' Union. It was playing the Marseillaise. Over the 
 drum was perilously poised another of the favorite white 
 transparencies. It read : 
 
 " Be Thrifty! Give Up Having MilHonaires." 
 
 Ellen clapped. Jim said : 
 
 " I wouldn't make myself conspicuous, Ellen." 
 
 "Here! The policeman's letting people go across," 
 Aunt Sallie exclaimed. "Come on, Ellen!" She took 
 Jim's arm. 
 
 Ellen said : 
 
 " You and Jim go along, but I'll just stand here and 
 watch it a little longer, Aunt Sallie. I think it's very 
 interesting." 
 
 " Oh dear — well ! Be back in time for dinner. Re- 
 member your packing. Here — you keep the umbrella." 
 
 "Sure! I'll remember. Jim, I won't say good-by. 
 You're coming to see us off? " 
 
 They were gone, and Ellen was left alone amid the 
 silent, watching crowd along the curb. 
 
300 THE SPINSTER 
 
 " The Only Way To Get Something For Nothing Is To 
 Take It From Somebody Else," 
 
 read a broad transparency carried by Local New York. 
 
 Ellen clapped again, with a grave face thinking of her 
 income. 
 
 " Pretty good, comrade." 
 
 Was this strange man in the crowd addressing her? 
 But he wasn't altogether strange, after all. It was the 
 pale-leather-faced young man from Madison Square, 
 from the bench beside the fountain. 
 
 " I didn't know you was one of us," he went on, 
 
 " I'm not — I'm sorry to say." 
 
 "Aren't you a SociaHst?" 
 
 " No. I've been reading a good deal about Socialism, 
 though," she added. " I like a good many things about 
 it — more than like them ! " 
 
 "What don't you like about it?" 
 
 "Well! I don't like the bitterness." 
 
 He looked her slowly, thoughtfully — not insultingly — 
 up and down. 
 
 " You don't see anything to be bitter about, hey ? " 
 
 " Oh yes, indeed I do ! I've been in a hospital this 
 afternoon." She told what she had seen there. 
 
 "And still you don't understand the bitterness?" 
 
 " Oh yes, yes ! I understand it well! But I don't 
 like it." 
 
 " Don't you suppose the soldiers at Valley Forge were 
 bitter? But I suppose you'd have stood by 'em, and 
 knitted mufflers for 'em ? " 
 
 Ellen thought this over, forgetful of the parade. 
 
 " You're perfectly right," she said at length. " I'm in 
 
THE CALL TO THE COLORS 301 
 
 other things where my colleagues are bitter. Come to 
 think of it, there's bitterness in a good many controver- 
 sies. Why, even Bacon and Shakespere ! " 
 
 After she had said this, she was sorry. She 
 thought he would not know anything about Bacon and 
 Shakespere. But perhaps he did, for he smiled 
 understandingly. 
 
 " For that matter," he said, " I've heard people almost 
 come to blows over whether something happened on 
 Tuesday or Wednesday." 
 
 Ellen was following a train of thought of her own. 
 She was thinking too intently to notice the banners and 
 devices going by, or to do more than sense, in a vague 
 way, the stream itself of men and women. She was, 
 however, dimly aware, even in the ferment of her new 
 estimates which had instantly to be rearranged, had to be 
 reconciled with the old ones, or else to oust them : in all 
 this inner tumult she was aware, in a dim way, how 
 undersized and pinched many of these people were, how 
 wearily, as well as out of step, they walked. More 
 clearly and impressively the gallantry and fervor of the 
 march itself came home to her. That such tired, pale 
 people should march at all, that these crowds of quiet 
 watchers should stand under the uncertain sky, on the 
 sloppy pavements, to see them pass, began to illuminate 
 her mind. Where there was such a deeply burrowing 
 fire, there would be some acrid, smarting smoke. 
 
 A boy passed, selling banners and badges, and she 
 bought a banner for ten cents. It was of red baize, with 
 the design stamped rather crudely on it, of two hands 
 clasping across the map of the world, and round the 
 whole the legend: 
 
302 THE SPINSTER 
 
 ** Workers of the World, Unite!" 
 
 There came a small band of young women, in dark- 
 blue dresses with red sashes, singing something. It was 
 something rather lively and challenging. By listening 
 intently, and fixing her eyes on the lips of the foremost, 
 who seemed their captain, Ellen was able to make out the 
 words of the song: 
 
 " Do you complain who feed the world, 
 And clothe the world, 
 And house the world?" 
 
 (Fine! Fine how they held up their heads, and 
 walked, for a wonder, in step.) 
 
 " Do you complain who are the world 
 Of what the world may do? 
 As from this hour you use your power. 
 The world shall follow you ! " 
 
 Ellen remembered that song of Mrs. Oilman's, and 
 smiled to herself, thinking of her own pleading sunbon- 
 nets, and then of such militant songs of labor as this, 
 fit to be sung by these fervent young workingwomen ! 
 Far up the street she heard still the challenging rise of 
 their voices, perfectly clear and joyous, with the effect of 
 sunshine, somehow, under the leaden sky : 
 
 " Do you complain who are the world, 
 Of what the world may do?" 
 
 This song and those joyous young militants woke Ellen 
 up. She became aware of the paper trough passing close 
 beside her again, with its legend, " Help the Fur Strik- 
 ers." It was the third or fourth one that had thus passed. 
 
 " You think strikers are right sometimes, don't you, 
 mv good woman, bitterness or no bitterness ? " suddenly 
 inquired the bencher next her. It struck Ellen as very 
 
THE CALL TO THE COLORS 303 
 
 queer and amusing, to be called *' good woman," like a 
 workingwoman. Then she was flamingly ashamed to 
 have noticed or thought of such a thing, and especially 
 in the face of this parade. She answered quickly: 
 
 "Yes! Often and often I think they're right." 
 
 " Did you ever contribute anything to help 'em? " 
 
 " Why, no — not that I remember." Contribute to a 
 strike! Who ever heard of such a thing? Why, no- 
 body contributed to a strike — nobody but the workers. 
 Moral support was all the general public gave, to a strike 
 it approved of . . . 
 
 " You better help the fur workers, then, in their strike." 
 said her neighbor quietly. " They'll need a little help — 
 especially those that have been breathing fur fluff into 
 their lungs the longest." 
 
 Ellen had a foolish little purse in her glove. She had 
 been very economical, trying not to touch for personal 
 expenses any of the malting, Composite, or St. Nicholas 
 money. She wished she had some of that money with 
 her now. She emptied, however, the little purse into her 
 her hand. Dimes, nickels, and quarters — it only made 
 ninety-five cents altogether. Would that she dared to 
 offer the two quarters to the bencher next her ! But he 
 looked miles above them; or so she thought; perhaps mis- 
 takenly. Well, such as it was, she would drop it all in 
 the next paper trough. To show that it was all she had, 
 she dropped it purse and all. One of the young girls 
 carrying the trough looked up and saw Ellen's red ban- 
 ner. She smiled and said : 
 
 " Thanks, comrade." 
 
 Ellen felt her breast rise with a wave of sudden feel- 
 ing. What was it? What urge and thrill within her 
 
304 THE SPINSTER 
 
 answered to the word the bencher first, and now this 
 unknown girl, had used? 
 
 The parade apparently was nearly over. There was 
 something coming at the end, however, which aroused 
 spasmodic cheering along the sidewalk. Bursts of cheer- 
 ing greeted it; by fits and starts they seemed to come. It 
 was not a band. There was nothing in it like a uniform. 
 It seemed to keep even worse step and time than the rest 
 of the parade had done. It looked, in fact, at the distance 
 of a block or two, a mere horde of straggling people, 
 trailing along behind the regular procession — a medley 
 and motley throng, and a small throng at that. 
 
 At half a block's distance Ellen could read the one 
 banner which was borne teeteringly in the midst of the 
 nondescript little crowd. It was stretched taut beween 
 two poles, and on a red ground, in large white letters, 
 exclaimed : 
 
 " Recruits ! To the Colors ! " 
 
 What caused the spasms of cheering, then, must be 
 these occasional recruits from the sidewalk who plunged 
 into the parade. Evidently there had been a number of 
 such impulsive accretions. The excitement was rather 
 contagious. Ellen saw an old man swing off his hat and 
 plunge over the curb, marching stiffly, rheumatically, yet 
 jauntily. She joined in the cheers which greeted him; 
 and suddenly an intense envy of him possessed her. She 
 wished it were herself whom those other marchers were 
 reaching over to shake hands with, calling, " Welcome, 
 comrade ! " She wished she were that old rheumatic 
 man. 
 
 "Will you march?" 
 
THE CALL TO THE COLORS 305 
 
 It was the bencher, still standing next her, who was 
 speaking. Looking round at him, she saw that deep- 
 lying spark in his eyes again, which she had seen, or 
 had thought she saw, in the Square, But the blood beat 
 in her wrists and temples so loudly that she could hardly 
 hear or see. 
 
 "Will you march — comrade?" 
 
 He put out his hand. 
 
 Ellen took it. 
 
 "Yes!" 
 
 " Hurrah ! Welcome, comrades ! " 
 
 Now they were reaching over and shaking hands with 
 her, and with the bencher who walked beside her. The 
 cheering on the sidewalk redoubled, quadrupled. Ellen 
 lifted her banner and waved it. At the sight of the 
 clasping hands pictured on it, the workers all cheered 
 again. In all the flooding feeling of that moment she was 
 most clearly aware, not of the shouts themselves, or the 
 press of comrades round her, but that the bencher with 
 whom she walked had a faint color at last in his powdery- 
 leather cheeks; and that she herself felt that strange 
 tingle, all along the arm that carried her banner, which 
 she had felt years ago, in the hand that Franklin Tall- 
 man had touched. 
 
 " As far beyond this, perhaps, as this is beyond the 
 
 blue sky," 
 
 her own forecast of the future, in that vanished, en- 
 chanted August six years ago, came back to her now. 
 
 She held the banner so that the slight breeze blew it 
 straight across her breast. She walked with the bencher, 
 they two alone together. The same sexless fervor 
 
3o6 THE SPINSTER 
 
 which she felt, she saw in his pinched face, in the faces 
 of the men behind them, of the occasional women who 
 marched. She heard it in the shouts that greeted others 
 coming down from the sidewalk into the parade. Most 
 of all it showed in the very young girls with the red 
 sashes who carried the paper troughs. It was won- 
 derful to Ellen to look at their faces. Seldom was there 
 any color in them, but they were sometimes very pretty, 
 round-cheeked and delicate and youthful. Only there 
 was no more conscious sex in them than in the faces 
 of children, or of the very old. 
 
 She did not know at all where she walked. She was 
 not aware of any turnings, or crossings, or policemen. 
 She was not aware of the lapse of time, or the coming 
 on again of the drizzle. She had forgotten almost her 
 identity. When all was over she found herself alone in 
 Union Square, in the midst of a smart shower. A few 
 speakers were addressing fragments of the diminished 
 crowd, from scattered boxes and carts. Splashes of rain 
 on her cheeks at length awoke her to the necessity for 
 getting home, and the fact that she had an umbrella and 
 would better hoist it. Suddenly she realized that her 
 marching companion was gone. No — there he was, 
 crossing the Square toward Broadway. He was going 
 back to his bench! She had not even his name, and he 
 had not hers! She had not asked him to let her help 
 him, comradelike, with the price of a night's lodging. 
 While she thought these things, dismayed and reproach- 
 ful, she was running, dodging through the remnants of 
 the crowd, through the torn wet papers on the grass, the 
 huckstering boys with badges still soliciting trade. She 
 ran after the bencher, losing sight of him again and 
 
THE CALL TO THE COLORS 307 
 
 again. With so many obstacles and delays she was not 
 gaining on him. She was losing distance. 
 
 But he turned round and saw her, and waved his hat. 
 She motioned violently, beckoned imperiously to him to 
 come back. At least he should share her umbrella. He 
 shook his head, waved his hat again, and quickened his 
 pace. Through the rain, the branches, the crowds, and 
 the beginning of dusk, she could no longer discern him. 
 
 Well, it would be the same thing to share her umbrella 
 with any of these men and women with whom she had 
 marched. She offered to share it with an elderly man 
 who was starting alongside her up Fourth Avenue, and 
 who wore the red button. He accepted with grave thanks, 
 and held it himself over the two. They walked in com- 
 panionable silence. Ellen did not try to hold up her 
 skirts. She preferred to hold her banner still across her 
 bosom, where passers-by could see it under the street 
 lamps. Many looked at it, and one or two smiled, in a 
 friendly, understanding fashion. Perhaps they were 
 comrades too. 
 
 Ellen was thinking the same thing over and over, that 
 she had been in a manner baptized that afternoon; and 
 that this was indeed as far beyond mortal love, as she 
 had known its honey beginning, as mortal love itself had 
 been beyond the blue sky of childhood. 
 
 The train for home left early in the morning; but be- 
 fore they went, Ellen hurried over to the fountain in 
 Madison Square, and looked for her comrade in his old 
 place. He was not there. Perhaps he had found work : 
 or perhaps he was sick. Or perhaps he had some proud 
 reason, convincing to himself, for not letting her see him 
 again. 
 
CHAPTER XXII 
 THE MUSE FORSWEARS THE SUNBONNET 
 
 " Well, of course you're a full-grown woman, and 
 you've made up your own mind, I don't understand it at 
 all," said Aunt Sallie with the nearest approach to tem- 
 per that could creep into her gentle and beloved voice. 
 
 They were sitting on the piazza at Wakerobin. It was 
 far, and it seemed further than it was, from the march- 
 ing workers of a few days ago. There had been time to 
 write to William Horn in Buckminster, and to receive 
 (by the evening mail tonight), her red card. 
 
 " Where do you get it from, Ellen, this queer streak? " 
 inquired Aunt Fran from the rustic bench, where she 
 sat with a shawl thrown over her knees, and the slightly 
 invalid look that had lately come over her, and that 
 struck so poignantly to Ellen's heart. 
 
 " From you, I do believe, Aunt Fran ! You've set me 
 the bad example of doing some of your own thinking! " 
 
 But both her aunts took the matter more seriously. 
 It must be very serious indeed to Aunt Sallie, when she 
 was inclined to argue about it. 
 
 " I cannot see, Ellen dearie, why you have to join 
 anything, and especially an organization with red flags. 
 Why not read and study about it, and keep out of it? 
 You've gone and got yourself into it so irrevocably! " 
 
 " I go further," said Aunt Fran. " I can't see why a 
 
 308 
 
THE MUSE FORSWEARS THE SUNBONNET 309 
 
 young person like our Ellen needs to read and study about 
 such things at all. If she wants to do good, and be kind 
 to the poor, why can't she go and see them when they're 
 sick, and teach the children to sew, and do all such 
 things, in a ladylike way ? Though I think there's some- 
 thing unwholesome about young people going in so much 
 for such work. They ought to be dancing and having a 
 good time." 
 
 " Why shouldn't anybody do all three. Aunt Fran ? " 
 
 " Well, you haven't time and strength enough for all 
 three. I can't think of any sweeter, more Christiai- 
 thing to do than to go and see the sick. — Not that I'd 
 want you to go where there was anything contagious," 
 added Aunt Fran, looking anxiously at Ellen out of her 
 dark eyes, which seemed finer and deeper, in a face no 
 longer so plump. 
 
 "Well— Aunt Fran " 
 
 Ellen drew a long breath. 
 
 " I'll tell you both something, now, that I've never 
 told anybody before. Years ago I read a little book of 
 Tolstoi's. I didn't read it all, to be exact. I only read 
 a page or two. It made the Christian religion come to 
 life too suddenly. I thought it had been alive for me 
 before; but when I read that book I saw that it had only 
 been half alive. I was afraid to read any more : afraid, 
 for one thing, that if I did, I'd have to sell all my little 
 bits of jewelry, and give the money to the poor." 
 
 Neither of the aunts spoke. It was dark, but Ellen 
 felt, perhaps because she knew it was there — knew be- 
 forehand that it would be there, — the instinctive intel- 
 lectual disgust they could not help having for such fer- 
 vent, violent ideas about Christianity. Such melodrama 
 
3IO THE SPINSTER 
 
 did not fit in with their Hellenic conception of "All 
 things in moderation." 
 
 Finally, Aunt Sallie, with an effort, said: 
 
 " Perhaps if you got the book now and read it, you 
 wouldn't find it so — unsettling." 
 
 " Yes, I would. Aunt Sallie ! I'm just as much afraid 
 of it now as I ever was." 
 
 The silence settled down again over the piazza. Ellen 
 should have listened to it, should have heard the sound 
 of the planting of trouble and confusion in hearts so 
 warm and dear. But her own inward tumult sounded too 
 loudly in her ears. The relief was too great, of reveal- 
 ing the hidden scars of the great rejection she had made 
 — had been daily making, all her life; — the great refusal 
 to think, in any situation in her life, what her Lord 
 would have done in her place. She went on, with a 
 kind of fierce pleasure in her own wounding words : 
 
 " I'm afraid I'm ' all for religion when he walks in his 
 silver slippers in the sunshine.' " 
 
 Aunt SalHe, after a moment, said mildly: 
 
 " Well, Ellen, now that you've joined this — movement, 
 you won't be afraid to read Tolstoi's book." 
 
 Ellen shook her head. 
 
 " You see this is really a kind of compromise, Aunt Sal- 
 lie. I've only done what lots of ordinary men and women 
 do, — not half, not a quarter, what I think Jesus com- 
 mands." 
 
 Aunt Fran at length spoke. In a voice full of love 
 and bitterness, she said : 
 
 " The children we have brought up rise and tell us we 
 didn't bring them up to be Christians." 
 
 "Aunt Fran!" 
 
THE MUSE FORSWEARS THE SUNBONNET 311 
 
 " That's just the plain EngHsh of it." 
 
 " It's not my bringing up, but my own lazy mind and 
 heart," Ellen began, " that make me so afraid of my own 
 conscience." 
 
 It was all too much for Aunt Sallie, that Greek lover 
 of limits and reserve. Her intellectual stomach turned. 
 
 "Oh, how I hate all this tragedy!" she exclaimed. 
 " Why can't people be quiet, and live in a friendly way 
 in the world, the way they did when I was a child? 
 Everybody was pleasant, and went on with their work, 
 and lived within their means, and respected themselves." 
 
 ** It seemed that way to you, Aunt Sallie." 
 
 " It was that way ! " 
 
 " Well, I suppose it was, to a large extent. The free 
 land wasn't all used up." 
 
 " Free what ? It was a great deal nicer then than 
 now, I can tell you, with all this agitation and stirring 
 people up. Nobody went around, then, trying to make 
 poor people hate rich people, and be discontented with 
 their station in life. We didn't have any of these pro- 
 fessional hate-breeders, — Socialists, Anarchists, or what- 
 ever you call yourselves." 
 
 " I don't call myself an Anarchist, Aunt Sallie." 
 
 " Your Aunt Frances and I don't envy Mr. Rocke- 
 feller, or Mr. Morgan, or those of our friends that have 
 more money than we have, and come and stay at the 
 Windward House, and bring their big cars, and their 
 maids, and so forth. Then why need anybody envy us ? " 
 
 "Aunt Sallie, don't you remember that boiled man at 
 the hospital? You wouldn't begrudge him a little envy 
 of comfortable, fat, well people like ourselves, would 
 you?" 
 
312 THE SPINSTER 
 
 " Poor creature, no. But such accidents may happen to 
 anybody." 
 
 " Only they do usually happen to the poor." 
 
 " This country pays the highest wages in the world ! " 
 
 ** But that's not saying much. Besides, it charges the 
 most for the necessities of life." 
 
 " Well, the Bible says, ' The poor ye have always with 
 you ' " 
 
 " I believe that's our favorite national text ! " 
 
 Alas! that in the very act of speaking of religion, 
 Ellen's voice should become so bitter and belligerent! 
 Was this the way to make reason and the will of God 
 prevail ? 
 
 Aunt Fran began: 
 
 " And if everybody divided up tomorrow, the way 
 you Socialists want them to " 
 
 " Please, Aunt Fran, don't say that ! Even in the little 
 time Fve been interested in Socialism, Fve heard that said 
 five hundred thousand times ! " 
 
 " It's perfectly true, anyway. If everybody divided up 
 tomorrow, in a year from now " 
 
 Ellen stopped her rebellious ears. 
 
 " I know every word of it, I can say it backwards in 
 my sleep, I tell you, Aunt Fran! Socialists don't want 
 to * divide up ' ! They never propose to divide up. That's 
 just as much of a fiction as ritual murder by the Jews is 
 a fiction! Jesus said to divide up, and the early Chris- 
 tians did divide up, and St. Francis said to own nothing, 
 and marry Lady Poverty, and it's a good doctrine for 
 infidels and atheists to attack, because it's a cornerstone of 
 Christianity to divide up; but it isn't Socialism. It's too 
 good for Socialism! Socialism is too conservative for 
 
THE MUSE FORSWEARS THE SUNBONNET 313 
 
 it! It belongs to the ideals of Jesus, and consequently 
 it's a great deal too radical for Socialism ! " 
 
 Ellen's high, excited, pugnacious voice died at last 
 into the sweet dewy quiet of the mountain evening. She 
 herself winced at her own echoes, and was glad when 
 Aunt Sallie interrupted them. 
 
 " For zeal, commend me to the brand-new convert," 
 said Aunt Sallie, getting up and turning her chair back 
 against the clapboards of the house in case of showers 
 during the night. 
 
 With sore hearts she and Ellen kissed each other a 
 warm, troubled, vexed good-night. 
 
 " Ellen and I won't go in quite yet," said Aunt Fran 
 from her corner. " I want to ask you, Ellen, what did 
 really take you into Socialism?" 
 
 After considering a little while, with a long " We-e- 
 ell," Ellen said : 
 
 " Why, it's partly the sense of justice, I suppose. Aunt 
 Fran, and partly the sense of beauty." 
 
 "Justice, hey? Well, what do you mean by justice? 
 Do you mean an even start, and letting the winners win, 
 and the losers lose, and no whining and whimpering 
 about it? Because if you do, isn't that what we have 
 now? or would have, if it weren't for our hospitals and 
 asylums and so forth ? " 
 
 " Aunt Fran, I see your point. I think my own idea 
 of a fair race is a handicap — not a scratch. I think I'd 
 give the cripple a head start. But let that go. Suppose 
 we draw a line on the ground, and make them all toe 
 it when they start. Even so, what about the winners' 
 children, and the losers' children? Do they start even? " 
 
 Aunt Fran finally said: 
 
314 THE SPINSTER 
 
 "No. That's part of the losers' penalty." 
 
 " Doesn't it take you back to Adam in the attempt to 
 find a fair race ? " 
 
 " I don't know. No ! Because often the winners' chil- 
 dren lose, and the losers' children win." 
 
 " That's true too, Aunt Fran, Isn't it time we went 
 in? I'll put off converting you until tomorrow." 
 
 " Partly the sense of justice and partly the sense of 
 beauty," Aunt Fran repeated to Aunt Sallie. " That's 
 what took her in, she says. What does she mean, about 
 beauty?" 
 
 " I don't know. The nearest I can come to under- 
 standing what in the world she means is this : Ellen, you 
 remember, never enjoyed a party, no matter how nice, if 
 she could think of anybody that hadn't been invited." 
 
 " Hm ! That's about what she did mean, Sarah, I 
 guess." 
 
 On second thoughts, they both doubted if this were 
 quite what she meant. The sense of beauty was some- 
 thing a little hard to pin down, it seemed. 
 
 Ellen's announcement to Sue and David of her entry 
 into Socialism was received with congratulations : though 
 Sue said she never expected to join her with a red card. 
 She simply couldn't, she said, sign away her voting 
 liberty, remote as votes for women might be in Vermont. 
 
 " I wonder what you'd have done if you'd seen that 
 call to the colors at the end of the parade? But no, 
 Sue, I don't believe you'd have thought any differently. 
 I don't believe it made any real change in my notions, 
 I'd really been consenting in my mind, I suppose, before. 
 I haven't felt any regrets, or wanted any more time. I 
 came home and wrote off right away for my red card," 
 
THE MUSE FORSWEARS THE SUNBONNET 315 
 
 " Didn't I tell you, Mrs. Micantoni, that buying a new- 
 bonnet and darning her brother's socks would never quiet 
 Ellen's mind ? " demanded David. " You'll never make 
 a hving writing verses now, Ellen Graham." 
 
 " I believe I can do something better, maybe, David," 
 said Ellen rather soberly. When David had gone back 
 to his statistics, she said to Sue : 
 
 " Let me read you my plan for a piece of verse I care 
 more about than all my old sunbonnets put together." 
 
 " Come into the woodshed while I wash these dande- 
 lion greens, then, and read it to me," replied Sue. Her 
 novel had succeeded and she had a good market for her 
 short stories, but she seemed to like to live in a state of 
 freedom, and had no maid. " Wait a minute though, till 
 I call little David in and give him his medicine. Davie ! 
 Where are you? Come here a minute, little man." 
 
 "What's the little man have to take medicine for?" 
 inquired Ellen suspiciously, her face clouding. She was 
 very fond of the little man, and he was fond of her. She 
 had a small accomplishment of being able to play all 
 sorts of wee, grave, imaginative games with little chil- 
 dren : — a sort of juvenile holiday edition of her fancy: 
 and David liked, too, the fearful joy of having imaginary 
 " steaks " cut out of his ribs by tickling fingers imper- 
 sonating knives : and the humorously terrible advances 
 of a crabbish-looking hand up his shoulders toward the 
 neckband of his small shirt, when he wasn't expecting it, 
 still pleased him in his more babyish moods. They were 
 reminiscences of her father's favorite old games with 
 herself and Jim in their childhood. She played creepy- 
 crabby now with little David while Sue was pouring out 
 a teaspoonful of the aromatic mixture. 
 
3i6 THE SPINSTER 
 
 " What's the matter with Davie ? " repeated Ellen when 
 the little Roman had run away again to play. 
 
 " Oh, nothing, really, I suppose. He seems to have a 
 little cold. My baby's so near coming, I'm silly and 
 anxious." 
 
 "Sue, look here!" Ellen cried, on the impulse she 
 wondered she hadn't had before. " Let me come down 
 and stay here while you're at the hospital." 
 
 " Oh, my dear, could you ? Then David could come 
 with me, as he wants to so much! " 
 
 " Of course I could, and naturally I will. When do 
 you go ? " 
 
 " Tomorrow — didn't I tell you ? But what about your 
 Aunt Fran?" 
 
 " Aunt Fran's really better again lately. She's off with 
 the raw eggs, and had one poached this morning." 
 
 " Ellen, you're a comfort." 
 
 " I'll take care of Davie the best ever ! " 
 
 "As if I didn't know that! Here — where's the 
 poem?" 
 
 " It's only one of those first plans I make in prose and 
 put into meter afterward. I mean to put it into four-line 
 stanzas, perfectly plain iambics, rhyming two by two.'* 
 
 " Hurry up and let's hear it." 
 
 Ellen began: 
 
 " ' Alias Jesus.' " 
 
 "Oh, Elien! What a beautiful name!" 
 
 "You know of course it refers to the Inasmuch 
 verses, — but I'll go on. 
 
 Certainly we like walking in these gardens ; 
 
 They are very pleasant, arborcd, pleached : 
 
 The only ugly thing about them 
 
 Is the overworked people who never come into them.*" 
 
THE MUSE FORSWEARS THE SUNBONNET 317, 
 
 " You might almost leave it free verse," suggested Sue. 
 Ellen shook her head and went on: 
 
 " * Indeed these furs are warm and luxurious 
 If we could forget the steel trap 
 And the small terrified animal 
 Festering to death in it. 
 
 ' Beloved and delightful are our children ; 
 I could play all day long with them, 
 If the factory children could come out and play too.' " 
 
 At this Sue's eyes filled with slow tears. 
 Ellen went on: 
 
 " ' — Give us a rest from harping about them: 
 — IVe do all that we can. — 
 — Still the hindmost man, alias Jesus, is calling, 
 — / am sick, I am in prison, I am conscripted, I am out of work.' " 
 
 " Oh, Ellen ! You've written a real poem this time ! 
 No arrested development about the morals of that." 
 
 " Oh, if I can only make a real poem out of it! " 
 
 " You will, my dear woman, you will." 
 
 " I can't help hoping." 
 
 She went down the next afternoon with her suit- 
 case, to stay at Sue's as long as she might be needed. 
 Sue and David got off on the morning after, for the 
 hospital; and Ellen turned with zest to putting Davie to 
 bed and getting him up, and looking after everything 
 about the house. She looked into the refrigerator and 
 found plenty of cold meat and fresh vegetables there: 
 she inspected the jelly and jam in the cellar, and then, 
 with infinite pleasure, she sat down and began to mend 
 Davie's overalls, just home that day from the wash. 
 
 Davie did indeed seem to have a bad cold. He coughed 
 a good deal. Ellen followed him about with hen-like 
 
3i8 THE SPINSTER 
 
 fidgetings, and fearful perturbations and perplexities 
 about whether she would better have him put on his 
 sweater, or take it off, as the May sun grew hot. At 
 about nine o'clock, on the second night, he woke up cough- 
 ing. She ran up to him, cuddled and tucked him in 
 with secret pleasure in his need of her. He was quiet 
 then until she herself had got into bed, and was allowing 
 herself a half-hour's pillow-reading in a small book of 
 poems she had found on David's shelves. It was a book 
 of dialect sea-ballads by a poet she had never heard of 
 before, — John Masefield. She felt a great hunger for 
 poetry after all her economics. These were very lilting 
 and she was just wondering whether she could ever use 
 any of their swinging, breezy meters, and trying to think 
 what was the difference between this man and Kipling, 
 when little David woke her up again, coughing. Bare- 
 footed she ran over the chilly floors to his crib-side, and 
 found him kneeling in his night-drawers on the counter- 
 pane, coughing and strangling. The intake of his breath 
 had a curious whistle in it. Was it a whoop? 
 
 She took him out of the crib, and cuddled him again, 
 carrying him to a rocking-chair, and prolonging a little 
 over the necessary minutes, her rocking and soothing of 
 him. Her limbs were thrilled through by the sweet and 
 tender dead weight of the sick, sleepy child in her lap. 
 
 " Oh, my little Davie," she thought, " you're laying 
 your head in the very spot where I kept Franklin Tall- 
 man's picture, the night your mother was married ! " 
 
 Twice more in the night he woke and coughed, and the 
 second time he whooped again, even more unmistakably. 
 In the morning she telephoned for old Dr. Temple. He 
 ^ame and said it was whooping-cough. It would run for 
 
THE MUSE FORSWEARS THE SUNBONNET 319 
 
 twelve weeks. He would send and get her an elastic brace 
 for the little boy's body, to protect his muscles from the 
 strain. 
 
 Thenceforward every night she was awake from one to 
 seven times; and sometimes Davie coughed and whooped 
 until his face darkened from blood congestion. All day 
 she carried on the housekeeping, cooking for herself and 
 the boy, washing dishes, sweeping, dusting, cleaning. 
 Often in the evening, when the dishes were washed and 
 the dish-pan scrubbed, the towels drying by the window, 
 she sat down and dipped again into those sea-ballads she 
 had found when she first came. There was a glimmer 
 and a haze all over them, a sort of floating brightness, as 
 of sunny distance on smooth water. It was not until she 
 had read them all, and the most beguiling of them many 
 times, that she chanced on the Dedication. It seemed as 
 if she had been picking up pebbles and had suddenly come 
 on an amethyst. This Dedication foretold epics, where it 
 said: 
 
 " Not the bemedalled commander, beloved of the Throne, 
 Riding cock-horse to parade when the bugles are blown . . . 
 
 Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind, in the rain and the cold, 
 Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales be told." 
 
 " This is my poet, at last," Ellen thought to herself, 
 somewhat fancifully, perhaps, and yet prophetically. 
 " He'll be the one to write immortal idylls of the in- 
 articulate. God send he remembers the altogether dumb 
 — the beasts that perish." 
 
 It was the next day after that that the expected tele- 
 gram from the hospital came. The baby weighed eight 
 pounds and was a girl. 
 
 Ellen told Davie, and they had a little celebration, 
 
320 THE SPINSTER 
 
 with freshly picked buttercups and meadow-rue on the 
 table for dinner, and sugar on the buttered bread for tea. 
 It was Sunday evening, and Davie always sat up half an 
 hour later on Sundays. He clung tenaciously to this 
 privilege, even though a day of hard coughing and a 
 broken nap at noon had left him too fagged and sleepy 
 to enjoy it. Looking at the heavy eyelids drooping and 
 the pale cheeks, Ellen gingerly proposed bed; but a storm 
 of weeping threatened. "What would Sue do?" the 
 question, in her mind so many times a day, fairly ached 
 for an answer. She knew, though, what her aunts would 
 have done, when she and Jim were small. She took 
 Davie into her own room, and shut the shutters, and lay 
 down, with the little boy beside her, on the big tester bed, 
 and told little old Irish fairy tales, and legends of St. 
 Francis, and the pleasant Sunday-hearted story of Childe 
 Charity and the mongrel dog: and softly sang: 
 
 " We hunted and we halloo'ed," 
 
 until she could feel the taut, weary nerves slowly smooth 
 out, and Davie kissed her in the dark. 
 
 Sweetness beyond all sweetness, she thought, a little 
 boy's kiss and cuddle in the dark ! And yet she thought, 
 even in that moment, of the red card in her Bible over 
 on the bureau, and her heart exulted in it, with inclusive 
 passion. 
 
 An elderly cousin of Sue's was coming up to take 
 charge, until it should be safe for Sue to bring her baby 
 home. Meantime Sue and the baby were coming to stay 
 at the next farm. To Ellen's astonishment she began 
 to feel a certain resentment that the elderly cousin should 
 be coming. She found herself inventing reasons for the 
 
THE MUSE FORSWEARS THE SUNBONNET 321 
 
 cousin to be delayed. *' I'm jealous ! " she discovered, to 
 her intense surprise. " I don't want her cuddling Davie 
 in the night. I don't want her cooking cream of wheat 
 for him, or peeling his orange." 
 
 Luckily the elderly cousin (who knew all about chil- 
 dren, and had brought up seven or eight) was delayed. 
 A member of her family had rheumatism, and she 
 couldn't be spared. From day to day she promised and 
 put off, Ellen wrote to her reassuringly. She was get- 
 ting along all right with Davie, she told the elderly cousin. 
 She was really very happy. The rheumatism of the oblig- 
 ing unknown sufferer continued. It held out like the 
 widow's cruse of oil. Ellen feared and hoped from day 
 to day, while the aunts in Tory Hill thought it " inex- 
 cusable," the way that elderly person put off coming to 
 Ellen's relief. And after all. Sue and David and the 
 baby all got back to Tewkesbury a few hours before the 
 cousin came. 
 
 The sweeping and dusting had, however, got rather 
 ahead of Ellen in that third and last week. Davie 
 coughed and whooped so violently, and wrenched his 
 body so, in spite of his elastic brace, that she had oftener 
 and oftener to get up in the night, and longer and longer 
 to sit up with him. The aunts had driven down two or 
 three times to see how she was getting on, and had said 
 disapprovingly that modern children seemed to " have 
 things " much harder than the previous generation, which 
 they had brought up. 
 
 When Ellen went down to the neighboring farmhouse, 
 on Sue's arrival there, to see her and the new baby, leav- 
 ing Davie to be put to bed by " Farvie," she had a sudden 
 revelation and knew what painter it was, of whose pic- 
 
322 THE SPINSTER 
 
 tures Sue had long ago reminded her, when they first 
 met at Radcliffe. A Httle pale and blue lipped, Sue was 
 lying on the sofa, while Ellen sat beside her with the new 
 Roman on her fumigated lap. 
 
 " It's Botticelli ! " Ellen exclaimed. " For eight years 
 I've been trying to think ! " 
 
 "What's Botticelli?" 
 
 " You are ! It's partly your dark hair, curling so 
 crisply and queerly all round your face, and partly your 
 being a little pale, I guess, but mostly it's your expression, 
 of course. You look so wise and childish." 
 
 " Well, Ellen, I'm very happy, and yet a little anxious 
 about Davie, if that's what you mean." 
 
 " Dr. Temple says Davie's getting through with fly- 
 ing colors. You know, he hasn't lost an ounce of flesh. 
 Sue dear." 
 
 " If I only had him here, you see." 
 
 " Wise and childish and wistful and happy — that's how 
 you look — exactly hke Botticelli." 
 
 "Ellen!" 
 
 "What, Sue?" 
 
 " Do you know what we're going to name the baby? " 
 
 " No. After one of her grandmothers, I suppose. 
 After her Italian grandmother! No? — Oh, Sue! you 
 can't possibly mean it ! " 
 
 "Yes! Ellen." 
 
 Ellen was without any words for a time. 
 
 " And if anything ever happened to David and me, 
 we'd be perfectly contented to have you bring up our 
 children." 
 
 " That's the most beautiful thing, Sue, that one woman 
 ever said to another ! " 
 
CHAPTER XXIII 
 ANOTHER LETTER 
 
 " What became of ' Alias Jesus,' Ellen? " 
 
 " The Proletariat took it." 
 
 '* You didn't try any of the other magazines, then? " 
 
 " No : though I don't think they'd have taken it. But 
 I wanted it in The Proletariat. They put it in last week. 
 All round it they put tiny silhouettes of men working at 
 dangerous trades, in mines, and on sky-scrapers and 
 bridges, and cattle-ships, and among explosives, and so 
 forth : and every fourth silhouette was a man looking for 
 work and being turned away. It made a sort of frame 
 round my ' Alias Jesus.' " 
 
 " That was fine ! " 
 
 " Yes, it was really very beautiful. I was pleased to 
 the very soul at the tragic power it put into the verses. 
 Those artists on The Proletariat work for nothing, you 
 know. The Proletariat can't afford to pay anything. I 
 wonder if volunteer art, con aniore, isn't often a shade 
 more beautiful than anything that's paid for? " 
 
 " Perhaps it is. I wonder ! " 
 
 This was the day of little Ellen's christening. She was 
 six weeks old. In the ancient brick church in Tewkes- 
 bury, with Great-aunt Jane for the other godmother, 
 the second little Roman was vowed to the follow- 
 ing of the Cross. She lay composedly on the young min- 
 
 323 
 
324 THE SPINSTER 
 
 ister's arm, in the old yellowing embroidered dress that 
 Sue's mother had worn; and Sue began softly to cry, for 
 that reason, and because her invalid mother, who had 
 seen little Davie, would never see little Ellen. She had 
 died in the year after Ellen's father's death. Professor 
 Redwood had come up from Cambridge to be the baby's 
 godfather; but he had gone back after the service. It 
 was four o'clock now, and Ellen was leaving for home. 
 
 " Good-by, Sue dear. I don't know of anything that 
 could make me much happier than I am tonight." 
 
 " Until your brother Jim marries and has children. 
 They'll come nearer than mine ! " 
 
 " They'll come very near, then." 
 
 She bent over her namesake and kissed her, and hiked 
 away home, in the cool of the summer afternoon. 
 
 Aunt Sallie came down the road to meet her. Aunt 
 Fran was taking a nap, in her rocker on the piazza, with 
 the Censor spread out over her face. 
 
 Well, how had the christening gone off? The big 
 boiler had begun to leak that morning, and they had had 
 the plumber there all the afternoon, mending it. Young 
 Tabbie had caught a mouse, and old Keturah had caught 
 a bird, and would have to be belled. The second radishes 
 were big enough to pull : they would have some for tea. 
 Callers had been over from the New Street. 
 
 " Ellen, I must say I hope you'll never marry." 
 
 " Marry ! at my age — it's unbecoming even to talk 
 about it." 
 
 " You're only twenty-seven." 
 
 ** That's almost thirty." 
 
 " Well, what's thirty? " 
 
 " Besides, Aunt Sallie, I'm a sort of constant creature. 
 
ANOTHER LETTER 325 
 
 I was very fond of Franklin Tallman, once upon a time. 
 Did I say ' was ' ? I am." 
 
 " Ellen, I never told you. I think he's married." 
 
 " I know he is, my dear. I saw it in the paper." 
 
 " Well " 
 
 "Well!" 
 
 They walked along wheeling the bicycle together. 
 
 " I'm mighty glad you're home at last." 
 
 " Why, I've only been away half a day, Sallie Mow- 
 bray!" 
 
 " It seems longer when you're in another township. 
 You were down there almost three weeks in May, too, 
 remember." 
 
 " You and Aunt Fran had a good rest from all my 
 viewy talk." 
 
 "We don't want any more rest from it, anyway!" 
 
 "Remember, now, it's not my fault if I'm spoiled!" 
 
 " Oh, by the way, there's a letter for you upstairs in 
 your room." 
 
 "Who's it from?" 
 
 " Some newspaper office." 
 
 " Well, I'll get it when I go to bed. Some advertise- 
 ment, probably." 
 
 When at last, after a long evening of desultory but 
 incessant home talk, such as any household breeds, daily, 
 for the use of an intimate small family, Ellen went to 
 bed, she found the letter on her bureau. It was in a 
 strange handwriting. The envelope was embossed with 
 the seal of a great New York daily, the Censors special 
 rival. 
 
 Ellen took out the letter carelessly, but read it in a 
 dream. 
 
326 THE SPINSTER 
 
 It was very short. 
 
 " We only want to tell you, comrade, that four of us, 
 workers for the Revolution, have learned your * Alias 
 Jesus ' by heart." 
 
 It was signed with four strange names, one of which 
 was a woman's; supposedly four young reporters. 
 
 She sat late by the open window, reading the letter 
 over and over. 
 
 At last she opened her Bible, and Interleaved it, in St. 
 Matthew, beside her red card. She left it there a long 
 time, while she said her prayers. Then she took it out 
 and stood it up on the bureau, between her mother's and 
 her father's pictures. She left it there for quite a long 
 time. She intended to leave it there all night. But after 
 she had blown out the light, she felt her way over to the 
 bureau, and felt for the letter in the darkness, found it 
 and put it in her bosom, where the picture of Franklin 
 Tallman once had lain. 
 
 FINIS 
 
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