Olive Higgins Prouty

“ ELSIE and Burr had been engaged nearly four years when Burr asked me, one Saturday noon, whether I could give him half an hour after luncheon up-stairs in his room. I wondered, with a slight stir of disturbance in my heart, what he wanted to speak to me about. There was the same forced cheerfulness in his manner as on the day he broke the news to me about his college degree. When he had me well established on the couch in the corner, with all his old college pillows banked up behind me, had produced his college pipe and lit it, I was sure something important was on his mind. ”

“ Oh, I ought to have warned him that his decision would break Elsie!
Burr was one of the famous football men of his day at college. Anybody whose football enthusiasm dates back to the early nineties has heard of Burr Guthrie. I was present when his class was graduated in 1895. I was a short, stodgy, gray-looking person even then, but I'll never forget how adorably, and with what apparent pride, Burr introduced me to all his fine friends, as "my sister, Nan." That was like Burr. He always treats me as if I was some one to honor. ”

“ Would Burr never come back? The sound of every automobile that I heard turn the corner went through me with a sharp sensation of pain. And yet, as anxiously as I waited, every automobile that proved not to be ours after all brought momentary relief. When Burr hadn't returned in time to catch the eight o'clock train to New York, I was sure that the blow that my brother had dealt Elsie DeForrest had been more than she could bear. When Burr was a boy he used to hate to hurt anything that was helpless. ”

“ And he held up the magazine, revealing a half-page picture of a tropical river—palm-shaded, vine-entangled, its banks a chaos of ferns, moss, and rotting tree trunks, and in the foreground a half-naked native, shining as if oiled.
"A good deal," I conceded. "But, you know, you have to see the coloring, and feel the heat, and smell the queer hot odor of pungent moss and decaying trees to get the real impression." ”

“ Burr didn't get back from his ride with Elsie that Saturday afternoon until after midnight. I hadn't gone to bed. I was sitting by my window in the dark, fully dressed, still waiting. The sound of a distant motor sent me down-stairs to turn on the light on the veranda. This surely must be Burr; in our little quiet street motors are seldom heard at midnight. When I opened the door there was, indeed, an automobile drawn up to the curbing, but not ours. ”

“ Without him Miss Elsie would go straight into hysterics, and the doctors say we mustn't allow that. If your brother should be two minutes late, we'd have to take those weights right off. With him here, though, the poor little creature seems to get new strength, somehow. It's queer."
At exactly on a quarter of the hour I heard a step on the stairs, a moment later Burr's big, reassuring voice calling through the hall, "Coming, Elsie!" And I saw him pass quickly into Elsie's room.
"Listen to him," said the nurse to me. "It's wonderful. He just goes up to her, takes her two hands in both his. ”

“ It was when I was down there in New York acting as sort of trained nurse for Elsie. Elsie's progress was hopelessly slow just then, and Burr's financial prospects anything but bright.
"I talk a lot of nonsense to Elsie, Nan," he said, "about courage, and nerve, and playing her game, and all that, but it's really to myself I'm preaching. It doesn't seem as if I were making progress toward success of any kind. The doctors are more and more doubtful about Elsie. I've not been able to put by anything this year. Not a cent. ”

“ You were so intent on winning."
"Same old Nan!" Burr laughed.
I went right on, in spite of him. "It was that game with the broken rib which made you in football," I said. My brother smiled at me fondly. "It sometimes takes broken ribs of one kind or another to make men in life, Burr," I said. ”

“ Guthrie tells her she is, and when he's around she really does show control. He comes and helps us three times a day, at one and five and ten, at the end of each of the three periods when she has the weights put on. ”