CHAPTER V

“We made up our minds that we were always to be true friends of men and lift their minds up as women should. We are going tothink only of our studies, our homes, and of religion. Roberta says we may as well begin now, for we are getting older every minute, and one of us is already fourteen. And before we know it we will be thinking of nothing but boys. We have only to look around us to see what such things lead to. Patty Newcomb and Elizabeth Taylor and all those big girls are both forward and bold. When I said, ‘Roberta, isn’t noticing everything they do and talking about it just the same as talking about boys?’ she said at once, ‘It is not the same at all,’ in the tone that I know she doesn’t want me to say anything more. And when I said, ‘Oh, Roberta, aren’t we rather young yet to think about being old maids?’ she replied sternly, ‘It is never too young to begin.’”

I feel rather sorry now for the stern, little Roberta. I feel sorry, too, for Janie Acres and her kiss that never was. She would have been so proud of it; it would have been her proof that she was a young lady.

No sooner had Ellen covenanted “Thou shalt not!” than off she went on her first adventure,—a trifling one but bleeding. She walked one day to the academy with Arthur McLain. He wore long trousers. Of this fatal occurrence Ellen remarks touchingly: “I tried very hard to be interesting, but I chose the wrong thing.” It is a mistake frequently made by grown men and women. Alas! capricious fate that governs these things turned my sweet, unconscious Ellen to one forever on the alert for the appearance of this long-legged quidnunc.

I will give three or four paragraphs from her journal:—

“I asked Aunt Sarah if she wanted me to get her some more yarn when hers ran short. She answered, ‘Yes, you may, though I wish, Ellen, my dear child, that you were as eager to do your work as you are to wait on others.’But I knew all the time that I offered to go because I hoped that I should see him, and I should have told my aunt that that was why I offered.”

A few days later comes the touching little expression of the desire of the eyes:—

“Last week I walked all over town to catch glimpses of him. I went to the post-office, and he wasn’t there; I went down past the school-house and past his house, and whenever I saw a boy coming toward me, it was hard to breathe. The whole day was empty and I thought it would never be night.”

Again:—

“To-day I saw him; he passed by me and just said, ‘Hulloa, Ellen.’ When I stopped for a moment, I thought he would speak to me. In school this morning he stopped and talked, but all my words went away and I seemed so stupid. At night I make up things I would like to say to him, and when he stops for amoment,—oh, he stops so seldom,—I forget them all.”

Throughout all this, not once does she use the wordlove. From that terrible and impersonal longing, unaware of itself and unrecognized, Ellen walked out toward the long-trousered boy. She spread before him as much as she could of her little shy sweetnesses. She walked up and down the silent streets waiting for him. Later she writes: “I had no single reason in the world for liking him.”

I was with Ellen at the moment of her disillusion. We were out walking together when Arthur McLain came toward us. Ahead of us, tail wagging, ran the beloved mongrel Faro. He stopped to sniff at Arthur. Arthur shooed him away. He was a lad timid about dogs, it seems. Faro saw his nervousness, and, for deviltry, barked. Arthur kicked at him with the savageness of fear.

I can see Ellen now gathering her dog to her with one regal sweep of the hand and walking past the boy, her head erect, her cheeks scarlet.

“Ihatea coward,” she said to me in a low,tense voice; and later with a flaming look, “I would have killed him with myhandsif he had hurt Faro,” she cried.

So humiliated was she that she says no word in her journal for her reason for her change of heart. She could not forgive him for having made a fool of herself about him—about one so unworthy. For of all things in the world hard to forgive, this is the hardest.

“I would be glad if he were dead. Oh, I know I am awful, but it is like that. Think of him walking around this town day by day, and I will have to meet him; when I go uptown, when I go to school, I will be avoiding him exactly the way I used to look for him. Oh, if he would only go away.”

It is not only Ellen who would like to slay the dead ghosts of unworthy loves.

“He walks up and down, and doesn’t know I have looked at him. Oh, if he knew that, I think I should die [her journal goes on]. He walks up and down and doesn’t know that Iso hate the sight of him. I don’t hate him, but just the sight of him—so awfully I hate it. Everything he does seems to me so tiresome; his loud laugh makes me feel sick, and he doesn’t know anything. I make-believe to myself that he walked all over town after me and got in my way and annoyed me until I said, ‘I will be very glad, Arthur, if you would cease these undesired attentions.’ How could he cease anything he had never begun, for it wasn’t at all like that it happened. I should feel so much happier if I only could have hurt him, too.”

This experience, so phantasmal and yet so poignant, led to the Zinias’ premature death. Conscience invaded Ellen now that disillusion had done its blighting work. There came a day when she could no longer keep to herself her deviation from the precise morals demanded by the Zinias.

It was after a walk toward evening up the mountain, full of pregnant silences, that she confessed:—

“You would despise me, if you really knewme. I’m not the kind of a girl we are trying to be.”

Ellen and the three Zinias

I HATE YOUR SOCIETY ANYWAY! I NEVER DID WANT TO BE AN OLD MAID

It shocked me and thrilled me at the same time.

“What have you been doing?” I asked her.

“I can’t tell you,” she told me. “You would despise me too much.”

“Why, Ellen!” I cried. “Tell me about it.”

“No! No!” she said; and she buried her face in the moss in a very agony of shame. “I can’t tell a human soul.”

And she still left me with a feeling of having had an interesting sentimental experience. Thus may we, when young, rifle sweetness from the blossom of despair.

It was communicated to the other two Zinias that Ellen’s conduct had been unbecoming a sincere old maid, and when they turned on her, instead of shame, she had for them: “I hate your society, anyway! I never did want to be an old maid!”

As I look back, this adventure closes for us a certain phase of life as definitely as though we had shut the door. We all realized, though we were not honest enough to say it aloud, thatwe too didn’t wish to be old maids. And all this happened because an unlovable boy had made Ellen like him. So much at the mercy of men are women! Just a shadow of the Cyprian over us and we blossomed. It was the shadow of a shadow; it had not one little objective event to give it substance, yet the Zinias withered.

With a deep revulsion of feeling, Ellen gave up girls, sewing, and Zinias, and made a dash into childhood with Alec Yorke. Alec at this time was a strong lad of thirteen, a head shorter than Ellen. I remember even then he seemed more a person than the other boys, though at the monkey-shining age.

They egged one another on until the ordinary obstacles that stand in people’s way did not exist. They became together drunken with the joy of life. In this mood, they disappeared together one day, to the scandal of Miss Sarah. She was particularly annoyed because Mrs. Payne refused to be disturbed by the event.

“While he and Ellen are off together, they are somewhere having a good time. Why should I worry?” said she. They had come together to find out if Ellen was at my house.

“If I had known Ellen was gone with Alec, Sarah, I should never have gone to look forher. I wasn’t worried about her, anyway; I only wanted company,” said she, with more asperity than usual.

The two returned at sunset, the glamour of a glorious day about them. They merely told vaguely: “They had been off on the mountain.”

It leaked out that they had been as far as the village, ten miles away, and that the peddler had given them a lift back. This last was a scandal.

An Irish peddler lived on the outskirts of our village, and this was before the day when foreigners were plenty. He lived contrary to our American customs,—the pig roamed at will, in friendly fashion, through his cabin. He sang in Gaelic as he drove his cart with its moth-eaten, calico horse,—songs that were now wildly sad, now wildly gay. He was alien, so we disapproved of him.

I remonstrated with Ellen on this.

“I like him,” was her only answer.

This had not been all the adventure, nor was this the end of it. To tell the story in Ellen’s own words:—

“Alec and I were picking currants at Aunt Sarah’s when I heard a voice behind me, and I never knew before what it meant when I read in books, that ‘their hearts were in their mouths.’ I thought mine would beat its way right out of me and lie thumping at my feet when I heard a voice say: ‘Oh, here are my little friends from Erin’s Isle.’ I suppose it is because I am very bad that it never occurred to me until that minute that fooling a minister, by pretending to be the peddler’s children, was not right, especially when it was Alec’s and my singing songs in what we made him believe was Gaelic that made him buy so many more things. I wonder if all people who do wrong only feel badly when they are found out? I turned around and I thought I should fall, for my mother was with him, and Aunt Sarah and uncle and our own minister. Uncle Ephraim had not heard what he said, and now, ‘Permit me, Mr. Sweetser,’ he said, ‘to present my little niece, Ellen, Mrs. Payne’s little daughter, and our neighbor, Master Alec Yorke.’ I saw him wondering if we really could be the same children, because, while we were playing thatwe were the peddler’s children, we had taken off our shoes and stockings to make ourselves look like wild Irish children, and had succeeded very well, indeed. I thought for a moment that perhaps he wouldn’t say anything, but Aunt Sarah’s ears were open. ‘What was that? Did I hear you say “your little friends from Erin”? Have you seen these children before?’ This was an awful moment. ‘These are the same children that came with the Irish peddler to my house.’ ‘Ha! Ha! I knew that those children were gone for no good, Emily, and that they were strangely silent about their exploits,’ Aunt Sarah said. ‘Do you mean,’ said Uncle Ephraim, ‘that my niece and Horace Yorke’s son made believe to be the children of a drunken, Irish peddler, and thus appeared before you?’ ‘Not only that,’ said Mr. Sweetser sadly, ‘but they sang to us in Gaelic.’ ‘Gaelic,’ snorted Aunt Sarah; ‘never a word does she know of Gaelic. I have heard her making up gibberish to the tunes that that peddler sings on his way.’ Here Alec acted extremely noble, though it annoyed me very much, and I am sure that I am a very ungrateful girl that it did annoyme. He spoke right up and said: ‘Mr. Grant, it is all my fault. It was I who thought of being children of the Irish peddler and I who suggested that we hop on his cart. I should take all the blame.’ There was not one word of truth in this, for we had often ridden with the peddler before, and the idea of playing that we were his children was my own, and without thinking I told them so. ‘Let us say no more about this childish prank,’ said Mr. Sweetser. ‘These children have shown real nobility, the little lad in desiring to shield Miss Ellen and Miss Ellen in not permitting herself to be shielded.’ Well, I knew that we should have more of it and plenty later, and we did when Aunt Sarah came ravening—there is no other word to use for it, though I know it is not polite—down to our house. It all oppressed me very much, even though Alec whispered: ‘We can make-believe we are being persecuted by the Philistines.’ I know I have disgraced the family, but I shall never understand why riding with the peddler should do this. If our family is any good, it should take more than this. Uncle Ephraim and Aunt Sarah have said thatI am really too old to act as I do. When I answer, ‘But if I act so, doesn’t it show that I am not too old, Aunt Sarah?’ she says: ‘Mercy, my child, as tall as any flagpole and with legs like a beanstalk, you’ve got to be acting like a young lady. We can’t have young women of our family getting a ridiculous name.’ This means that I must give up Alec. ‘Why you want that child around all the time is incomprehensible to me,’ said my aunt. ‘You are a good head higher than he is.’ People are always measuring things in length and breadth. How can one measure one’s friends by the pound? Roberta agrees with them. She thinks I am giddy, and feels that she must be good for me. I love Roberta more than any other earthly being beside mamma, but when Roberta tries to be good for me, I am so wicked that I try to be bad for Roberta, and can very easily be so.”

This episode stopped the free skylarking with Alec. As you have seen, it was explained to Ellen that since she was fourteen and nearly a young lady, she must behave as such. WhenI think how many lovely spontaneities have been offered on the sad and drab altar of young ladyhood, I could weep, as Ellen did. Alec’s suggestion that they were being persecuted by the Philistines did not comfort her, and little Mrs. Payne said sadly:—

“Your aunt and uncle are right, Ellen, and I suppose I’ll have to punish you to satisfy them, but I can’t help knowing that you must have had a perfectly wonderful day, and they are few in this world. Don’t let your punishment cloud your memory.”

Look back and see if you can remember when it was you drifted from that part of the river of life that is little girlhood to that time when you recognized that you were grown up, and the eyes of men rested on you speculatively, interestedly, and your parents foreshadowed these things by an irritating watchfulness that you did not understand. The picture of Ellen that comes to me oftenest is one of her progress through the streets, her hair in an anguished neatness, from her desire to escape Miss Sarah’s critical censure, her skirts longer now, and behind her perpetually screeled the three motherless babes of our not long widowed minister. He was a middle-aged man, ineffectual except for some occasional Gottbetrunkener moments. From my present vantage-point I now recognize him to be one of the brothers of St. Francis by temperament. He had a true poetic sense, and Ellen would go to his house for the purpose of washingdishes and helping about, performing her labors with the precision which she had only for the work of other people, her own room, to my anguish, being a whited sepulcher of disorder, outwardly fair to the glance of her Aunt Sarah, while dust lay thick in every unobservable spot. It was I who kept her bureau drawers in order.

She writes:—

“I just can’t waste a minute indoors. I don’t know why grown people have so many things to do. When I get married I am going to live in a tent and have just one cupboard where I keep everything, with doors that can’t be seen through. Roberta wrings her hands, but she would wring them more if she knew that I have from earliest childhood learned to sleep quietly in my bed as it takes less time to make it when I get up. And mother doesn’t care one bit more than I. I am so glad. She so frequently says: ‘Ellen, this is too sweet a day to cook’; and we eat bread and milk all day, and don’t even light the stove, though there have been moments when I have beenglad that there is a big kitchen in which they are always cooking, up at my Aunt Sarah’s. We would get things done much better if it were not for reading aloud, but so frequently mother finds things she wants to read, and then we go on, but not on and on like Mr. Sylvester and I. We began reading poetry the other day—how shall I tell it? And he read and I read, and he read and I read, until we understood everything we were reading, the very heart. We felt as if we had made the poetry—just knowing it for ourselves, and it was us. By pretending I am Mr. Sylvester’s second wife sent by the Lord to take care of his motherless children, I find I can do housework very well, for me, though I feel rather guilty when I look at him, for I know that even he might be exasperated at the thought of me as his second wife. But one has to do something.”

Some weeks later this occurs:—

“Now I have learned to work so beautifully and have done so well, besides taking care ofthe children and then baking, I feel it isn’t fair not to do it at home. Oh, how hard it is to do work for one’s self. I know I should think I am doing it for my mother, and when I was very little I used to pretend that I was a poor child who supported her mother; but the little silly pretenses of childhood are now impossible for me since I am so much over fifteen.”

It was at this time that we began to be allowed to go to the young people’s parties, because with us there was no fixed and rigid time when girls come out. They went when their legs were long enough and when they had learned to fold their hands properly in their laps and sit with decorum, which with Ellen and myself occurred somewhere toward sixteen. Ellen writes of one of these parties:—

“I am sitting waiting to go. I have a new pale-blue dress with little ruffles—little, tiny ruffles. Aunt Sarah is disgusted that mother put so much work into my dress because it isn’t practical, when we need so many things,for her to waste her eyes. And it is true, but oh, how much more fun it is to work on ornaments than useful things, and parties are like ornaments. I think they are like jewels, and a great, big, enormous party, with lights and flowers, like one reads about in books, must be like having strings of pearls. All I hope is that I will act politely, and not show how pleased I am, because if I did I should shout and sing. My Aunt Sarah said: ‘Ellen, please, my child, don’t make me feel as if you were going to burst into flame or perhaps slide down the banisters.’ And, indeed, I often look in the glass and wonder that I can look so quiet and unshining.”

It was in this high mood that Ellen met Edward Graham. I know now that he must have been an honest lad, square-cornered, solid, with an awkward, bearish, honest walk, nice, kind eyes, and a short mop of wiry, glinting curls as his only beauty, which fitted his head like a close-clinging cap, stopping abruptly instead of straggling down unkemptwise, as hair is apt to do, on the back of hisneck and temples. It was Ellen who noticed this and wrote about it. He must have been not over one-and-twenty, but he was instructor at the academy in chemistry and mathematics.

Well do I remember hearing this conversation at the other side of a vine-trellis at this party. In her low, pensive voice Ellen was saying: “I lived by the sea; it was in my veins. The noise of its beating is in my heart. One cannot live inland when one has been a lighthouse-keeper’s daughter.”

Rage and anger surged in me, for Ellen had made but three visits to the sea in all her days, and one of which occurred when she was too small to remember it. As you may gather from this, her father had not been a lighthouse-keeper. I stamped my foot; a little-girlmadfeeling came over me. I took my saucer of goodies and my cake firmly in my hand and went to confront her then and there. She had talked so beautifully about truth and life that very afternoon.

I couldn’t do it. The little sarcastic remark that anger had invented for me died still-born.She was too lovely; something almost mystically beautiful radiated from her whole little personality. “I am so happy,” she seemed to say. “Let me stay happy one moment more.” There was always about her this heart-rending quality. It was not until I could draw her by herself that I spoke to her, and then my remonstrance was gentle.

“You must tell him the truth,” I insisted kindly.

And Ellen wrung her hands and said:—

“Oh, Roberta! you make my heart feel like a shriveled-up little leaf; you make me feel like a bad dream, like when you find yourself in company without your clothes.”

But I repeated inexorably:—

“Youmusttell him.”

I can see her now drooping up to him and the appealing glance of her large eyes. Presently I saw him take both her hands in his, and then she came toward me, her feet dancing, a glad, naughty look in her eyes. She answered my glance of inquiry with:—

“He asked me why I told him what I did, and, since I was telling the whole truth, Ianswered, ‘I wanted awfully to have you like me.’”

That, you see, is what I got for interfering with my friend and torturing her.

The next few weeks there were very few entries.

Ellen was very bad at mathematics, and her uncle, who rarely left his seclusion to interest himself in her affairs and who merely enjoyed her personality, thought it would be a fine plan if this responsible young man should give his Ellen lessons. Mr. Grant was advanced in his theories concerning the female brain, which, he said, lost its vagueness and inexactnesses through a mathematical training. Ellen merely makes a note of this.

There are very few entries in her journal at this time, for she was playing with the great forces of life. God help us all! We didn’t know passion when it came to us, nor how should we? It was the warp on which were woven all our generous impulses, all our high idealisms, making in all the shimmering garments in which we clothed our fragile, newborn spirits.

Ellen walked in a magic circle of her own ignorance, never dreaming of love or of being in love. So absorbed was she that it seemed like some one walking down a road that leads directly into a swift-flowing river, and not knowing that the river was there until one had walked directly into it. So close is the so-called silly moment of girlhood to the moment of full development, that when the change comes it sometimes takes only overnight. It was only a few pages, after all, that separated Ellen, who managed to do the minister’s dishes by pretending that she was his second wife, from the Ellen who wrote:—

“I don’t know how to begin what I am going to say. I thought everybody in the world must know what had happened to me. I thought my face must shine with it. I thought I must look like some one very different from myself,—like a woman, perhaps. I came home through Lincoln Field and squeezed myself through a hole in the fence so no one could see me. I came up the back way to my room and locked the door. My heart beat both waysat once when I looked in the glass, but I looked just the same as before I went out—as before he kissed me. I went downstairs and my hand seemed too heavy to open the door and go in where I heard their voices. I was afraid to go because I felt: ‘They will know, they will know!’ Mr. Sylvester and mamma and Aunt Sarah were there. ‘Where have you been?’ said mamma. And I could not answer. I felt I had been gone so long and so far. I could hear the blood beating in my ears, and when my aunt said: ‘I wish, Ellen, you would stand up straighter,’ I could hardly lift my head.”Next day there is an entry: “I didn’t know we were engaged until he told me, ‘Why, of course, we are.’”

Next day there is an entry: “I didn’t know we were engaged until he told me, ‘Why, of course, we are.’”

Thus simply does youth plight its troth. They had been together and he had kissed her, and so, of course, they were engaged. Of course, they were ready to fight the long battle of life side by side, and she who had given so much in her kiss had walked out past the doorsof girlhood; through that one light touch she felt that her whole life must be then surrendered to the boy who had had the magic word for her. They decided to tell no one on account of their youth.

No sooner did this honest lad have my rainbow Ellen in his hands than he started in trying to make some one else of her. I read her journal that follows with a certain heartache because I was not blameless in this matter. I, too, wanted to take this gay and shimmering child and turn her into something else; trim her generosities and check her impulses.

Another thing that makes me rage is the fact that my knowledge of the lives of men teaches me that, had Ellen had one little affectation in which to clothe herself, her young lover would have been on his knees before her instead of being the pedantic young master. Ellen’s journal at this time varies from a thing glittering with life, from being drunk with the heady wine of being beloved for the first time, to a book of copy-book maxims, beginning with: “Edward says I must read—or do—or act—or mustn’t.”

Poor young man! He wrote her decalogues by the dozen, and yet the tragedy of him is that he tasted her special quality and loved her while trying to kill it. The youth of Ellen and her high joy of living carried him along in spite of himself, though he always made Ellen pay for his happiness by lectures on the seriousness of life.

It was here that Alec began to perceive the place he had in her life. They had a game they played that they called “Two Years Ago,” in which they outdid their own childish pranks. Ellen remarks ingenuously:—

“I suppose that I ought to tell Edward how Alec and I rest ourselves from growing up, but there is no place in him to tell this to. I tried it with Roberta, and she just understood what it was about, but doesn’t see why I want to do it; and I don’t know myself exactly, except that I just have to.”

Then from one day to another Alec was sent West to an uncle and two weeks later, as had been planned, Edward left. He was to goaway for a year and a half, and then come back and formally ask for Ellen’s hand. It shocked Ellen terribly that she missed Alec most.

Through all the year and a half that followed, Ellen never told me anything of what was in her mind, nor did she tell her mother, and here is the characteristic of their young girlhood that people seem to forget—this nameless reticence. So, alone, she went through the crucial thing that falling out of love always is. Another girl in her situation might have deceived herself, the idea of a grown-up lover was such a pleasant one to a girl of Ellen’s age. Ellen was unaware of the disillusion she was preparing for herself. She writes, appalled:—

“I don’t know what has happened to me, I can only describe it by saying I have waked up. I know now that I am not in love with Edward and I just understood this from one day to another. He has not done anything at all. He writes me just the way he always has. He hasn’t changed, so I suppose I am fickle and bad, and that I can’t trust myself, for ifthis wasn’t real, I don’t know what can be real, and yet I feel as though I had never loved him at all. I sometimes wonder if I should have become engaged to some other person if it had happened that some other person had kissed me.”

Write him of her change of heart she could not, for as time went on apparently the memory of her became dearer to the boy. Good and slow and pedantic, he yet realized what a lovely thing life had put into his hands, and he longed to keep it, and he communicated this ever-growing longing to Ellen. She so wanted to keep faith with herself and to live up to all the things about “one love and only one love” that books from all time have taught young girls they ought to feel. She felt a great need of talking about it with some one and could not bring herself to do it.

“If I could only tell some one and ask what to do, but it seems disloyal. Roberta wouldn’t understand and some way I don’t want to worry my little mother. Sometimes I feel asif I did tell her without saying any words, when I sit beside her and hold her hand and feel afraid. The other night we sat alone in the dark. The smell of honeysuckle vines was so sweet that I shall never smell it again without thinking how soft her hand felt in the dark. She said: ‘When I was your age, I used often to want to tell my mother things and didn’t dare. My mother was more like your Aunt Sarah.’ My heart beat so when she said this that it seemed as if she could hear it, but I only pressed her hand and kissed it. Then she said to me: ‘You have seemed a little absent-minded lately, my darling child; have you anything on your mind, Ellen?’ And I said in a low voice, and blushing,—and I took my face off her hand for fear she would feel me blush against it,—‘What should I have?’”

As I read her cramped little handwriting a sudden wave of shame creeps over me as though I had gone back; I remember her so well; I was so on the outside; I loved her so truly. Meantime, as every day shortened thedistance that separated them, a certain dread encompassed Ellen; she visualized their approach one to another in this way:—

“It was as if I was standing still and he was standing still, and that the space between us was being shortened by little jerks, and each jerk was as a day that makes us come nearer and nearer. I don’t want to see him—oh, I don’t want to see him. I don’t know what I’m going to say to him—perhaps nothing. He will look at me kindly—oh, kindly and critically,—and then I shall be afraid; afraid of hurting him—afraid of him.”

A little later she writes again:—

“If I go on feeling undecided as to what I shall do, something will snap inside my head. I can’t feel so uncertain. He wrote to me lately, ‘Ellen, my life would be utterly worthless without you.’ I cannot ruin any one’s life, and my life is pretty worthless, anyway, so I am going to stand by my first promise, which is the only brave thing to do. Now that I havedecided that, I feel at peace. I loved him once and my love will come back.”

She adds touchingly, “I have two weeks before he comes”; but these two weeks of respite were denied her. I was going down to Ellen’s when I met Edward Graham on his way there also.

“I’ve come to surprise Ellen,” he said. So it happened that it was I who went to her with the words, “Edward Graham’s waiting for you downstairs,” and wondered at the sudden ebb of color from her face.

It was with her mind utterly made up as to what course to take that she went to her ordeal. She was going to offer herself a little, white offering before the altar of the fetish which decrees that we shall keep our promises. Herding her to this doom were all the cruel things which we teach our young girls. In New England in my day we did not joke about engagements. In her innocence, having given her lover her mouth to be kissed and her hand to be held, and having promised to be his, she had definitely decided that in the sight of God she was his, and so she dressed herself in her best that she might please him.

I suppose that had I made up my mind to do what Ellen did at that age, I should have gone through to the iniquitous end, shut my eyes and quieted my rebellious spirit with sophistries. I should have done according to whichever part of the strange anomalous teaching which we give young girls that I believedin most. Had I believed most that it is the crime of crimes to marry without love, I should have frankly made up my mind to break the engagement, but had I believed that one may love but once, and that an engagement is a marriage of the spirit, and that in giving this I had given so much to one man that I had nothing left for any other,—it is strange, but this is still taught to girls to-day,—I should have traveled that terrible road. For girls as young as Ellen have to find their way around through a world that is hung with a cobweb of lies, which is put there to screen us from the real world. The suffering that the unlearning of these lies has given to girls of our class from all time is greater than the suffering through which we must pass to come to a wider religious belief.

Ellen might make up her mind as to what to do, but she lived by instincts. She writes about it:—

“I couldn’t. All day I pretended to myself that I was glad he was coming, and that as soon as I saw him everything would be allright, but it is a terrible, awful thing. He cares. He put his arms out toward me and said: ‘Ellen, oh, Ellen!’ All I could say—I was so cruel, so stupid—was, ‘Don’t, don’t’; and I meant I didn’t want him to touch me. And then he said, and it was worse because he has grown much older looking, ‘I don’t understand. What’s the matter, Ellen?’ I said, ‘I can’t marry you; I don’t love you.’ He said: ‘Why, what have I done?’ What could I tell him? It was just that he was he and I was I, and that’s no reason, and yet it is the only reason in the world that you can’t change, and that’s why you love people and that’s why you don’t love them. We both stood and just stared at each other. While I looked at him all the color went out of his face and it grew gray. ‘When did it happen, Ellen?’ he said. ‘I don’t know,’ I told him; ‘it just went out.’ ‘You might have told me.’ ‘I meant never to tell you,’ I said; and then his color all came back to his face and this was worse than before. ‘You meant to marry me just the same? Then youdocare for me; it’s just an idea you’ve gotten; it’s just because wehave been apart so long. Let’s just go on just as you meant to, Ellen, if there is no one else.’ He opened his arms as if he wanted to hide me from myself in them, but I don’t know what happened to me. I just said, ‘No-no-no-no,’ and ran out of the room, and out of the house up into the orchard. I didn’t notice, but threw myself down under the tree and cried and cried. I don’t know how long I was there, but I heard my mother saying: ‘Ellen, Ellen,’ and the sound of her footsteps coming toward me, but I couldn’t stop sobbing so that she wouldn’t find me like that. She heard me and came to me and said, ‘Why, Ellen darling! Child, it is as wet as a river here.’ She felt my dress and at first it seemed to me that it must be wet with my tears, but it was just the grass. ‘What is it, Ellen?’ she said to me, and I told her that we had been engaged and that I had just seen Edward, and told him that I didn’t want to marry him; and she just folded me in her arms and said, ‘Why, darling, you needn’t’; and she comforted me, and I felt all safe from everything and just like a very little girl. Not many people can feel likethat with their mothers, but I don’t think unless you can that your mother’s a mother to you really. I couldn’t go on feeling safe and rested forever. I’ve broken faith with myself. I can’t count on myself any more. It’s a terrible thing not to be able to count on people you love, but it’s worse not to be able to count on yourself. I couldn’t do what I thought was right; how do I know I will be able to keep from doing what’s wrong? I think I will try and give up being good, because most of the things people think are good I don’t understand why. I might have saved myself all that suffering and been happy and low-minded, comfortable and contented, and I think I will be from now on.”

I well remember this epoch in Ellen’s life; she must have been between eighteen and nineteen when she gave up hope of herself and went out to be comfortable, low-minded, and happy, for she told me about this spiritual change in her. It was a crisis with Ellen, a spiritual crisis as important as the time in a boy’s life when he makes a breach in the“Thou Shalt Nots” that have guarded him around, and surrenders himself to the heady wine of living and says to himself: “I am a sinner; now let’s see what there is in sin.”

Just about the time Ellen broke her engagement, a boy named Landry lay heavily on my conscience. At this time, also, Ellen was engaged and yet was unhappy, and yet all I knew about Ellen was that there was something weighing heavily on her mind, and all she knew about me was my outward principles in this matter and none of my inward storm and stress. I can remember very well the never-ending conversations we had at this time. I suppose all young girls who are not on terms of familiarity with their own souls thus cloak their real feelings from each other. For there is happily nothing more usual than that shivering, shrinking, spiritual modesty which can tell of no event in life that implicates another human being. Later the weaker women outgrow it shamefully, or the finer ones among us replace it with a beautiful frankness. There are some happy girls who have been so simply brought up that they have neverfelt the need for the ambiguities of life as Ellen and myself did. The facts of the case were these: Released from the torturing thought of Edward Graham, the breath of life blew through Ellen in a storm, while I was being discreetly courted by George Landry. I had never had a tumultuous suitor, on account of my being matter-of-fact in my attitude toward the boys I knew or instinctively withdrawing myself from any sentimental approach. But now this sentimentally inclined youth had called on me and shown a recurring disposition to try and hold my hand when we were alone together. We read a great deal of poetry also and with deep emphasis. Thus does Satan trick the unwary. I, Roberta, the straightforward; I, the hater of philandering, and who sincerely felt that a self-respecting woman should be proposed to only by a man she would willingly accept as her husband, read verses far-gazing at distant horizons and with gentle underscorings whose audacity set my heart to beating. That I had gone into this slow-moving and decorous little flight of sentiment seemed so contrary to my ideals that Ifelt I must give up my friend and his poetry-reading and forego the heart-throbbing performance of having my hand gently captured and as gently withdrawing it again, both of us apparently blankly unaware of the actions of our respective hands. Ellen and I would discuss our affairs in ambiguities like this:—

“There’s a doom threatening me,” Ellen would confess.

“A doom?” asked I, impressed by the sinister darkness of the word.

“Fate has tangled up my life,” Ellen averred. “I have been deceived in myself, and now that I know what I am, I don’t care.”

“What sort of fate?” I then made bold to ask.

“One that will influence my whole life because it has made me glad I’m not good like I tried to be. I love the feeling of having gotten rid of goodness, Roberta”; and Ellen flashed me the smile of a naughty angel, and turned from me to wipe the nose of the youngest Sylvester baby, Prudentia, who accompanied us on our woodsy rambles. “Can you always decide everything in your life?”

“Indeed I cannot,” I answered quickly. “Imust give up a thing that’s sweetest and dearest in life to me, and I can’t decide to do it—I am not strong.”

“Oh, Roberta!” Ellen cried out. “You are so much stronger than I, for I decided and did the opposite thing.”

“What did you want to do?”

“The thing I did do,” poor Ellen cried, tears welling up to her sweet eyes. “I wanted to do what I wanted to do, and yet before I so wanted to do what was right.” Then, with her little fists pounding on the moss on which we were sitting, she said: “And mighty often, Roberta Hathaway, what people want to do seems to me the really right thing to do.”

As I grow older, it seems to me so very often that what people want is really the right thing. There are so many needless sacrifices made in life,—sacrifices that do good to no one and cripple and maim one.

I might have saved myself the worry of giving up the “sweetest and dearest thing in life,” for I had an experience which showed me what a solemn young fool I was.

If Ellen and I had this intense spiritual modesty, Janie Acres was not so afflicted. She was always prolific in detail of any sentimental adventure which she had, and was generally only quiet when she had nothing to tell. Ellen summed this characteristic up in her observation on Janie’s character:—

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