Ethel M. Kelley

“ Stevie stuck up for Carlo as if he was really something to be proud of. Perhaps my uncles and aunts feel that way about me, I don’t know. I don’t even know if I feel that way about them. I certainly criticize them in my soul at times, and feel tired of being dragged around from pillar to post. I don’t feel that way about Uncle Peter, but there is nobody else that I am certain, positive sure that I love better than life itself. If there is only one in the world that you feel that way about, I might not be Uncle Peter’s one. ”

“ He brings me flowers, and gets me taxi-cabs as if I were really a grown up young lady, and he pinches my nose and teases me as if I were still the little girl that kept house in a studio for him. I never realized before what a good-looking man he is. I used to think that Uncle Peter was the only handsome man of the three, but now I realize that they are all exceptionally good-looking. Uncle David has a great deal of distinction, of course, but Uncle Jimmie is merry and radiant and vital, and tall and athletic looking into the bargain. ”

“ Eleanor was a very vital interest in his life. It had seemed to him for a few minutes at the Christmas party that she was no longer the little girl he had known, that a lovelier, more illusive creature—a woman—had come to displace her, but when she had flung her arms around him he had realized that it was still the heart of a child beating so fondly against his own.
The real trouble with arrogating to ourselves the privileges of parenthood is that our native instincts are likely to become deflected by the substitution of the artificial for the natural responsibility. ”

“ Both Peter and David had the unconscious feeling that their obligation to their race was met by their communal interest in Eleanor. Beulah, of course, sincerely believed that the filling in of an intellectual concept of life was all that was required of her. Only Jimmie groped blindly and bewilderedly for his own. Gertrude and Margaret both understood that they were unnaturally alone in a world where lovers met and mated, but they, too, hugged to their souls the flattering unction that they were parents of a sort. ”

“ Eleanor wrote, “and I have had the kind of experience that makes me feel as if I never wanted to be any older. I know life is full of disillusionment and pain, but I did not know that any one with whom you have broken bread, and slept in the same room with, and told everything to for four long years, could turn out to be an absolute traitor and villainess. Let me begin at the beginning. For nearly a year now I have noticed that Bertha Stephens avoided me, and presented the appearance of disliking me. ”

“ The pink silk coverlet and the elegance of the silver coated steampipes at Beulah’s; the implacable British stuffiness at the Winchester which had had its own stolid charm for the lineal descendant of the Pilgrim fathers; the impressively casual atmosphere over which the “hired butler” presided distributing after-dinner gold spoons, these impressions all dwindled and diminished and took their insignificant place in the background of the romance she was living and breathing in Peter’s jewel box of an apartment on Thirtieth Street. ”

“ Eleanor played with the rabbit doll only at night after this. In the daytime she looked rather battered and ugly to eyes accustomed to the delicate finish of creatures like the French manikins, but after she was tucked away in her cot in the passion flower dressing-room—all of Margaret’s belongings and decorations were a faint, pinky lavender,—her dear daughter Gwendolyn, who impersonated Albertina at increasingly rare intervals as time advanced, lay in the hollow of her arm and received her sacred confidences and ministrations as usual. ”

“ How much of us lives when we are entirely shut out of the consciousness of those whom we love? If there is no one to realize us day by day,—if all that love has made of us is taken away, what is left? Is there anything? I don’t know. I look in the glass, and see the same face,—Eleanor Hamlin, almost nineteen, with the same bow shaped eyebrows, and the same double ridge leading up from her nose to her mouth, making her look still very babyish. ”

“ Framed in the high doorway, complete, cap and curls, softly rounding bodice, and the long, straight lines of the Renaissance, stood Juliet—Juliet, immemorial, immortal, young—austerely innocent and delicately shy, already beautiful, and yet potential of all the beauty and the wisdom of the world.
“I’ve never worn these clothes before anybody but the girls before,” Eleanor said, “but I thought”—she looked about her appealingly—“you might like it—for a surprise.” ”

“ Aunt Margaret tells me that Aunt Beulah’s experience with him has been the thing that has made her whole, that she needed to live through the human cycle of emotion—of love and possession and renunciation before she could be quite real and sound. This may be true, but it is not the kind of reasoning for Peter and me to comfort ourselves with. If a surgeon makes a mistake in cutting that afterwards does more good than harm, he must not let that result absolve him from his mistake. Nothing can efface the mistake itself, and Peter and I must go on feeling that way about it. ”

“ From being rather small of her age she developed into a tall slender creature, inherently graceful and erect, with a small, delicate head set flower-wise on a slim white neck. Gertrude never tired of modeling that lovely contour, but Eleanor herself was quite unconscious of her natural advantages. She preferred the snappy-eyed, stocky, ringleted type of beauty, and spent many unhappy quarters of an hour wishing she were pretty according to the inexorable ideals of Harmon. ”

“ Beulah said. “Is she homesick?”
“Yes, she’s homesick,” Peter said gravely, “but not for anything she’s left in Colhassett. David told you the story, didn’t he?—She is homesick for her own kind, for people she can really love, and she’s never found any of them. Her grandfather and grandmother are old and decrepit. She feels a terrible responsibility for them, but she doesn’t love them, not really. She’s too hungry to love anybody until she finds the friends she can cling to—without compromise.” ”

“ I know every girl always thinks there is something different about her, but I think there are ways in which I truly am different. When I want anything I know more clearly what it is, and why I want it than most other girls do, and not only that, but I know now, that I want to keep myself, and everything I think and feel and am,—sacred. There is an inner shrine in a woman’s soul that she must keep inviolate. ”

“ I felt as if we were both dreaming; that you were talking as a man does sometimes in delirium when he believes the woman he loves to be by his side, and I was listening the same way. It made me very happy, as dreams sometimes do. I can’t help feeling that your idea of me is a dream idea, and the pain that you said this kind of a letter would give you will be merely dream pain. It is a shock to wake up in the morning and find that all the lovely ways we felt, and delicately beautiful things we had, were only dream things that we wouldn’t even understand if we were thoroughly awake. ”

“ We cook on an old gas stove that smells. I can’t do very good housekeeping becase things are not convenient. I haven’t any oven to do a Saturday baking in, and Uncle Jimmie won’t let me do the washing. I should feel more as if I earned my keap if I baked beans and made boiled dinners and layer cake, but in New York they don’t eat much but hearty food and saluds. It isn’t stylish to have cake and pie and pudding all at one meal. Poor Grandpa would starve. He eats pie for his breakfast, but if I told anybody they would laugh. If I wrote Albertina what folks eat in New York she would laugh. ”

“ Eleanor had not made a direct change from the Washington Square studio to the ample house of the Hutchinsons, and it was as well for her that a change in Jimmie’s fortunes had taken her back to the Winchester and enabled her to accustom herself again to the amenities of gentler living. Like all sensitive and impressionable children she took on the color of a new environment very quickly. ”

“ Our capital strength and energy must be used for the struggle for existence itself if we are to have a world of balanced individuals. There is an arrogance involved in assuming ourselves more humane than human that reacts insidiously on our health and morals. Peter, looking into the twitching hectic face before him with the telltale glint of mania in the eyes, felt himself becoming helpless with pity for a mind gone so far askew. He felt curiously responsible for Beulah’s condition. ”

“ Experience teaches, but I think love forecasts and points the way, and shows you what you can be. Even if the light it sheds should grow dim after a while, the path it has shown you should be clear to your inner eye forever and ever. Having been in a great temple is a thing to be better for all your life. ”

“ Beulah’s eyes filled with tears.
“You’re the only one who comes anywhere near knowing,” she said, “or who ever will, I guess. I try so hard, Peter, and now when I don’t seem to be accomplishing as much as I want to, as much as it’s necessary for me to accomplish if I am to go on respecting myself, every one enters into a conspiracy to stop my doing anything at all. The only thing that makes me nervous is the way I am thwarted and opposed at every turn. ”

“ I can only pray that it will be found to be all a mistake, and come out right in the end. Surely such beautiful people as you and Uncle David can find the way to each other, and can help Uncle Jimmie and Aunt Gertrude, who are a little blinder about life. Surely, when the stumbling block is out of the way, you four will walk together beautifully. Please try, Aunt Margaret, to make things as right as if I had never helped them to go wrong. I was so young, I didn’t know how to manage. I shall never be that kind of young again. I grew up last night, Aunt Margaret. ”

“ Peter asked mildly.
“No woman lives her own life to-day,” Beulah cried, still excitedly. “Every woman is living the life of some man, who has the legal right to treat her as an imbecile.”
“Hold on, Beulah. How about the suffrage states, how about the women who are already in 227 the proud possession of their rights and privileges? They are not technical imbeciles any longer according to your theory. The vote’s coming. Every woman will be a super-woman in two shakes,—so what’s devouring you, as Jimmie says?” ”

“ Margaret, warmed by secret fires and nourished by the stuff that dreams are made of, flourished strangely in her attic chamber, and learned the wisdom of life by some curious method of her own of apprehending its dangers and delights. ”

“ All she does all day is to moan and wring her hands and call out his name. The nurses are not very sympathetic. They seem to think that it is disgraceful to love a man so much that your whole life stops as soon as he goes out of it. What of Juliet and Ophelia and Francesca de Rimini? They loved so they could not tear their love out of their hearts without lacerating them forever. There is that kind of love in the world,—bigger than life itself. ”

“ She tripped on the trailing folds of that nightgown her Aunt Beulah—it was funny that all these ladies should call themselves her aunts, when they were really no relation to her—had insisted on her wearing. Her own nightdress had been left in the time-worn carpetbag that Uncle David had forgotten to take out of the “handsome cab.” She stumbled against the silver pipes. They were hot; so hot that the flesh of her arm nearly blistered, but she did not cry out. Here was another mysterious problem of the kind that New York presented at every turn, to be silently accepted, and dealt with. ”

“ It gives me the creeps to talk about being a woman. David, do you know sometimes I have a kind of queer hunch about Eleanor? I love her, you know, dearly, dearly. I think that she is a very successful kind of Frankenstein; but there are moments when I have the feeling that she’s going to be a storm center and bring some queer trouble upon us. ”

“ He went to the train to meet her, and when the slender chic figure in the most correct of tailor made suits appeared at the gateway, with an obsequious porter bearing her smart bag and ulster, he gave a sudden gasp of surprise at the picture. He had been aware for some time of the increase in her inches and the charm of the pure cameo-cut profile, but he regarded her still as a child histrionically assuming the airs and graces of womanhood, as small girl children masquerade in the trailing skirts of their elders. ”

“ On the fifth week of Eleanor’s stay Beulah became a real aunt, the cook left, and her own aunt and official chaperon, little Miss Prentis, was laid low with an attack of inflammatory rheumatism. Beulah’s excitement on these various counts, combined with indiscretions in the matter of overshoes and overfatigue, made her an easy victim to a wandering grip germ. She opened her eyes one morning only to shut them with a groan of pain. There was an ache in her head and a thickening in her chest, the significance of which she knew only too well. She found herself unable to rise. ”

“ I know the thousand and one activities you women are concerned with. I know how much better church and state always have been and are bound to be, when the women get behind and push, if they throw their strength right.”
Beulah rose enthusiastically to this bait and talked rationally and well for some time. Just as Peter was beginning to feel that David and Jimmie had been guilty of the most unsympathetic exaggeration of her state of mind—unquestionably she was not as fit physically as usual—she startled him with an abrupt change into almost hysterical incoherence. ”

“ He had it the first night I saw him, when Uncle David brought me to show me to my foster parents for the first time. It was the thing I grew up by, and measured men and their attitude to women by—just that look in his eyes, that tender warm look of consideration.
“It means a good many things, I think,—a gentle generous nature, and a tender chivalrous heart. It means selflessness. It means being a good man, and one who protects by sheer unselfish instinct. I don’t know how I shall ever heal him of the hurt he has done Aunt Beulah. ”