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By the Light of the Soul: A Novel

by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman · English · Gutenberg #17564 · 850,667 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: By the Light of the Soul: A Novel

Author: Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

Illustrator: Harold Brett


        
Release date: January 21, 2006 [eBook #17564]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17564

Credits: Produced by Jeff Kaylin and Andrew Sly


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BY THE LIGHT OF THE SOUL: A NOVEL ***




Produced by Jeff Kaylin and Andrew Sly






By the Light of the Soul

A Novel

By
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman


Author of
"The Debtor" "The Portion of Labor"
"Jerome" "A New England Nun"
Etc. etc.


Illustrations by
Harold M. Brett


New York and London
Harper & Brothers Publishers
1907



Copyright, 1906, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserved.
Published January, 1907.



To Harriet and Carolyn Alden



Chapter I


Maria Edgham, who was a very young girl, sat in the church vestry
beside a window during the weekly prayer-meeting.

As was the custom, a young man had charge of the meeting, and he
stood, with a sort of embarrassed dignity, on the little platform
behind the desk. He was reading a selection from the Bible. Maria
heard him drone out in a scarcely audible voice: "Whom the Lord
loveth, He chasteneth," and then she heard, in a quick response, a
soft sob from the seat behind her. She knew who sobbed: Mrs. Jasper
Cone, who had lost her baby the week before. The odor of crape came
in Maria's face, making a species of discordance with the fragrance
of the summer night, which came in at the open window. Maria felt
irritated by it, and she wondered why Mrs. Cone felt so badly about
the loss of her baby. It had always seemed to Maria a most
unattractive child, large-headed, flabby, and mottled, with ever an
open mouth of resistance, and a loud wail of opposition to existence
in general. Maria felt sure that she could never have loved such a
baby. Even the unfrequent smiles of that baby had not been winning;
they had seemed reminiscent of the commonest and coarsest things of
life, rather than of heavenly innocence. Maria gazed at the young man
on the platform, who presently bent his head devoutly, and after
saying, "Let us pray," gave utterance to an unintelligible flood of
supplication intermingled with information to the Lord of the state
of things on the earth, and the needs of his people. Maria wondered
why, when God knew everything, Leon Barber told him about it, and she
also hoped that God heard better than most of the congregation did.
But she looked with a timid wonder of admiration at the young man
himself. He was so much older than she, that her romantic fancies,
which even at such an early age had seized upon her, never included
him. She as yet dreamed only of other dreamers like herself,
Wollaston Lee, for instance, who went to the same school, and was
only a year older. Maria had made sure that he was there, by a
glance, directly after she had entered, then she never glanced at him
again, but she wove him into her dreams along with the sweetness of
the midsummer night, and the morally tuneful atmosphere of the place.
She was utterly innocent, her farthest dreams were white, but she
dreamed. She gazed out of the window through which came the wind on
her little golden-cropped head (she wore her hair short) in cool
puffs, and she saw great, plumy masses of shadow, themselves like the
substance of which dreams were made. The trees grew thickly down the
slope, which the church crowned, and at the bottom of the slope
rushed the river, which she heard like a refrain through the
intermittent soughing of the trees. A whippoorwill was singing
somewhere out there, and the katydids shrieked so high that they
almost surmounted dreams. She could smell wild grapes and pine and
other mingled odors of unknown herbs, and the earth itself. There had
been a hard shower that afternoon, and the earth still seemed to cry
out with pleasure because of it. Maria had worn her old shoes to
church, lest she spoil her best ones; but she wore her pretty pink
gingham gown, and her hat with a wreath of rosebuds, and she felt to
the utmost the attractiveness of her appearance. She, however, felt
somewhat conscience-stricken on account of the pink gingham gown. It
was a new one, and her mother had been obliged to have it made by a
dress-maker, and had paid three dollars for that, beside the
trimmings, which were lace and ribbon. Maria wore the gown without
her mother's knowledge. She had in fact stolen down the backstairs on
that account, and gone out the south door in order that her mother
should not see her. Maria's mother was ill lately, and had not been
able to go to church, nor even to perform her usual tasks. She had
always made Maria's gowns herself until this pink gingham.

Maria's mother was originally from New England, and her conscience
was abnormally active. Her father was of New Jersey, and his
conscience, while no one would venture to say that it was defective,
did not in the least interfere with his enjoyment of life.

"Oh, well, Abby," her father would reply, easily, when her mother
expressed her distress that she was unable to work as she had done,
"we shall manage somehow. Don't worry, Abby." Worry in another
irritated him even more than in himself.

"Well, Maria can't help much while she is in school. She is a
delicate little thing, and sometimes I am worried about her."

"Oh, Maria can't be expected to do much while she is in school," her
father said, easily. "We'll manage somehow, only for Heaven's sake
don't worry."

Then Maria's father had taken his hat and gone down street. He always
went down street of an evening. Maria, who had been sitting on the
porch, had heard every word of the conversation which had been
carried on in the sitting-room that very evening. It did not alarm
her at all because her mother considered her delicate. Instead, she
had a vague sense of distinction on account of it. It was as if she
realized being a flower rather than a vegetable. She thought of it
that night as she sat in meeting. She glanced across at a girl who
went to the same school--a large, heavily built child with a
coarseness of grain showing in every feature--and a sense of
superiority at once exalted and humiliated her. She said to herself
that she was much finer and prettier than Lottie Sears, but that she
ought to be thankful and not proud because she was. She felt vain,
but she was sorry because of her vanity. She knew how charming her
pink gingham gown was, but she knew that she ought to have asked her
mother if she might wear it. She knew that her mother would scold
her--she had a ready tongue--and she realized that she would deserve
it. She had put on the pink gingham on account of Wollaston Lee, who
was usually at prayer-meeting. That, of course, she could not tell
her mother. There are some things too sacred for little girls to tell
their mothers. She wondered if Wollaston would ask leave to walk home
with her. She had seen a boy step out of a waiting file at the vestry
door to a blushing girl, and had seen the girl, with a coy readiness,
slip her hand into the waiting crook of his arm, and walk off, and
she had wondered when such bliss would come to her. It never had. She
wondered if the pink gingham might bring it to pass to-night. The
pink gingham was as the mating plumage of a bird. All unconsciously
she glanced sideways over the fall of lace-trimmed pink ruffles at
her slender shoulders at Wollaston Lee. He was gazing straight at
Miss Slome, Miss Ida Slome, who was the school-teacher, and his young
face wore an expression of devotion. Maria's eyes followed his; she
did not dream of being jealous; Miss Slome seemed too incalculably
old to her for that. She was not so very old, in her early thirties,
but the early thirties to a young girl are venerable. Miss Ida Slome
was called a beauty. She, as well as Maria, wore a pink dress, at
which Maria privately wondered. The teacher seemed to her too old to
wear pink. She thought she ought wear black like her mother. Miss
Slome's pink dress had knots of black velvet about it which
accentuated it, even as Miss Slome's face was accentuated by the
clear darkness of her eyes and the black puff of her hair above her
finely arched brows. Her cheeks were of the sweetest red--not pink
but red--which seemed a further tone of the pink of her attire, and
she wore a hat encircled with a wreath of red roses. Maria thought
that she should have worn a bonnet. Maria felt an odd sort of
instinctive antagonism for her. She wondered why Wollaston looked at
the teacher so instead of at herself. She gave her head a charming
cant, and glanced again, but the boy still had his eyes fixed upon
the elder woman, with that rapt expression which is seen only in the
eyes of a boy upon an older woman, and which is primeval, involving
the adoration and awe of womanhood itself. The boy had not reached
the age when he was capable of falling in love, but he had reached
the age of adoration, and there was nothing in little Maria Edgham in
her pink gingham, with her shy, sidelong glances, to excite it. She
was only a girl, the other was a goddess. His worship of the teacher
interfered with Wollaston's studies. He was wondering as he sat there
if he could not walk home with her that night, if by chance any _man_
would be in waiting for her. How he hated that imaginary man. He
glanced around, and as he did so, the door opened softly, and Harry
Edgham, Maria's father, entered. He was very late, but he had waited
in the vestibule, in order not to attract attention, until the people
began singing a hymn, "Jesus, Lover of my Soul," to the tune of "When
the Swallows Homeward Fly." He was a distinctly handsome man. He
looked much younger than Maria's mother, his wife. People said that
Harry Edgham's wife might, from her looks, have been his mother. She
was a tall, dark, rather harsh-featured woman. In her youth she had
had a beauty of color; now that had passed, and she was sallow, and
she disdained to try to make the most of herself, to soften her stern
face by a judicious arrangement of her still plentiful hair. She
strained it back from her hollow temples, and fastened it securely on
the top of her head. She had a scorn of fashions in hair or dress
except for Maria. "Maria is young," she said, with an ineffable
expression of love and pride, and a tincture of defiance, as if she
were defying her own age, in the ownership of the youth of her child.
She was like a rose-bush which possessed a perfect bud of beauty, and
her own long dwelling upon the earth could on account of that be
ignored. But Maria's father was different. He was quite openly a vain
man. He was handsome, and he held fast to his youth, and would not
let it pass by. His hair, curling slightly over temples boyish in
outlines, although marked, was not in the least gray. His mustache
was carefully trimmed. After he had seated himself unobtrusively in a
rear seat, he looked around for his daughter, who saw him with
dismay. "Now," she thought, her chances of Wollaston Lee walking home
with her were lost. Father would go home with her. Her mother had
often admonished Harry Edgham that when Maria went to meeting alone,
he ought to be in waiting to go home with her, and he obeyed his
wife, generally speaking, unless her wishes conflicted too
strenuously with his own. He did not in the least object to-night,
for instance, to dropping late into the prayer-meeting. There were
not many people there, and all the windows were open, and there was
something poetical and sweet about the atmosphere. Besides, the
singing was unusually good for such a place. Above all the other
voices arose Ida Slome's sweet soprano. She sang like a bird; her
voice, although not powerful, was thrillingly sweet. Harry looked at
her as she sang, and thought how pretty she was, but there was no
disloyalty to his wife in the look. He was, in fact, not that sort of
man. While he did not love his Abby with utter passion, all the women
of the world could not have swerved him from her.

Harry Edgham came of perhaps the best old family in that vicinity,
Edgham itself had been named for it, and while he partook of that
degeneracy which comes to the descendants of the large old families,
while it is as inevitable that they should run out, so to speak, as
flowers which have flourished too many years in a garden, whose soil
they have exhausted, he had not lost the habit of rectitude of his
ancestors. Virtue was a hereditary trait of the Edghams.

Harry Edgham looked at Ida Slome with as innocent admiration as
another woman might have done. Then he looked again at his daughter's
little flower-like head, and a feeling of love made his heart warm.
Maria could sing herself, but she was afraid. Once in a while she
droned out a sweet, husky note, then her delicate cheeks flushed
crimson as if all the people had heard her, when they had not heard
at all, and she turned her head, and gazed out of the open window at
the plumed darkness. She thought again with annoyance how she would
have to go with her father, and Wollaston Lee would not dare accost
her, even if he were so disposed; then she took a genuine pleasure in
the window space of sweet night and the singing. Her passions were
yet so young that they did not disturb her long if interrupted. She
was also always conscious of the prettiness of her appearance, and
she loved herself for it with that love which brings previsions of
unknown joys of the future. Her charming little face, in her
realization of it, was as the untried sword of the young warrior
which is to bring him all the glory of earth for which his soul longs.

After the meeting was closed, and Harry Edgham, with his little
daughter lagging behind him with covert eyes upon Wollaston Lee, went
out of the vestry, a number inquired for his wife. "Oh, she is very
comfortable," he replied, with his cheerful optimism which solaced
him in all vicissitudes, except the single one of actually witnessing
the sorrow and distress of those who belonged to him.

"I heard," said one man, who was noted in the place for his
outspokenness, which would have been brutal had it not been for his
naivete--"I heard she wasn't going to get out again."

"Nonsense," replied Harry Edgham.

"Then she is?"

"Of course she is. She would have come to meeting to-night if it had
not been so damp."

"Well, I'm glad to hear it," said the man, with a curious
congratulation which gave the impression of disappointment.

Little Maria Edgham and her father went up the village street; Harry
Edgham walked quite swiftly. "I guess we had better hurry along," he
observed, "your mother is all alone."

Maria tagged behind him. Her father had to stop at a grocery-store on
the corner of the street where they lived, to get a bag of peaches
which he had left there. "I got some peaches on my way," he
explained, "and I didn't want to carry them to church. I thought your
mother might like them. The doctor said she might eat fruit." With
that he darted into the store with the agility of a boy.

Maria stood on the dusty sidewalk in the glare of electric light, and
waited. Her pink gingham dress was quite short, but she held it up
daintily, like a young lady, pinching a fold between her little thumb
and forefinger. Mrs. Jasper Cone, with another woman, came up, and to
Maria's astonishment, Mrs. Cone stopped, clasped her in her arms and
kissed her. As she did so, she sobbed, and Maria felt her tears of
bereavement on her cheek with an odd mixture of pity and awe and
disgust. "If my Minnie had--lived, she might have grown up to be like
her," she gasped out to her friend. "I always thought she looked like
her." The friend made a sympathetic murmur of assent. Mrs. Cone
kissed Maria again, holding her little form to her crape-trimmed
bosom almost convulsively, then the two passed on. Maria heard her
say again that she always had thought the baby looked like her, and
she felt humiliated. She looked after the poor mother's streaming
black veil with resentment. Then Miss Ida Slome passed by, and
Wollaston Lee was clinging to her arm, pressing as closely to her
side as he dared. Miss Slome saw Maria, and spoke in her sweet, crisp
tone. "Good-evening, Maria," said she.

Maria stood gazing after them. Her father emerged from the store with
the bag of peaches dangling from his hand. He looked incongruous. Her
father had too much the air of a gentleman to carry a paper bag. "I
do hope your mother will like these peaches," he said.

Maria walked along with her father, and she thought with pain and
scorn how singular it was for a boy to want to go home with an old
woman like Miss Slome, when there were little girls like her.



Chapter II


Maria and her father entered the house, which was not far. It was a
quite new Queen Anne cottage of the better class, situated in a small
lot of land, and with other houses very near on either side. There
was a great clump of hydrangeas on the small smooth lawn in front,
and on the piazza stood a small table, covered with a dainty white
cloth trimmed with lace, on which were laid, in ostentatious
neatness, the evening paper and a couple of magazines. There were
chairs, and palms in jardinieres stood on either side of the flight
of wooden steps.

Maria's mother was, however, in the house, seated beside the
sitting-room table, on which stood a kerosene lamp with a singularly
ugly shade. She was darning stockings. She held the stocking in her
left hand, and drew the thread through regularly. Her mouth was
tightly closed, which was indicative both of decision of character
and pain. Her countenance looked sallower than ever. She looked up at
her husband and little girl entering. "Well," she said, "so you've
got home."

"I've brought you some peaches, Abby," said Harry Edgham. He laid the
bag on the table, and looked anxiously at his wife. "How do you feel
now?" said he.

"I feel well enough," said she. Her reply sounded ill-humored, but
she did not intend it to be so. She was far from being ill-humored.
She was thinking of her husband's kindness in bringing the peaches.
But she looked at the paper bag on the table sharply. "If there is a
soft peach in that bag," said she, "and there's likely to be, it will
stain the table-cover, and I can never get it out."

Harry hastily removed the paper bag from the table, which was covered
with a white linen spread trimmed with lace and embroidered.

"Don't you feel as if you could eat one to-night? You didn't eat much
supper, and I thought maybe--"

"I don't believe I can to-night, but I shall like them to-morrow,"
replied Mrs. Edgham, in a voice soft with apology. Then she looked
fairly for the first time at Maria, who had purposely remained behind
her father, and her voice immediately hardened. "Maria, come here,"
said she.

Maria obeyed. She left the shelter of her father's broad back, and
stood before her mother, in her pink gingham dress, a miserable
little penitent, whose penitence was not of a high order. The
sweetness of looking pretty was still in her soul, although Wollaston
Lee had not gone home with her.

Maria's mother regarded her with a curious expression compounded of
pride and almost fierce disapproval. Harry went precipitately out of
the room with the paper bag of peaches. "You didn't wear that new
pink gingham dress that I had to hire made, trimmed with all that
lace and ribbon, to meeting to-night?" said Maria's mother.

Maria said nothing. It seemed to her that such an obvious fact
scarcely needed words of assent.

"Damp as it is, too," said her mother.

Mrs. Edgham extended a lean, sallow hand and felt of the dainty
fabric. "It is just as limp as a rag," said she, "about spoiled."

"I held it up," said Maria then, with feeble extenuation.

"Held it up!" repeated her mother, with scorn.

"I thought maybe you wouldn't care."

"Wouldn't care! That was the reason why you went out the other door
then. I wondered why you did. Putting on that new pink gingham dress
that I had to hire made, trimmed with all that lace and ribbon, and
wearing it out in the evening, damp as it is to-night! I don't see
what you were thinking of, Maria Edgham."

Maria looked down disconsolately at the lace-trimmed ruffles on her
skirt, but even then she thought how pretty it was, and how pretty
she must look herself standing so forlornly before her mother. She
wondered how her mother could scold her when she was her own
daughter, and looked so sweet. She still felt the damp coolness of
the night on her cheeks, and realized a bloom on them like that of a
wild rose.

But Mrs. Edgham continued. She had the high temper of the women of
her race who had brought up great families to toil and fight for the
Commonwealth, and she now brought it to bear upon petty things in
lieu of great ones. Besides, her illness made her irritable. She
found a certain relief from her constant pain in scolding this child
of her heart, whom secretly she admired as she admired no other
living thing. Even as she scolded, she regarded her in the pink dress
with triumph. "I should think you would be ashamed of yourself, Maria
Edgham," said she, in a high voice.

Harry Edgham, who had deposited the peaches in the ice-box, and had
been about to enter the room, retreated. He went out the other door
himself, and round upon the piazza, when presently the smoke of his
cigar stole into the room. Then Mrs. Edgham included him in her wrath.

"You and your father are just alike," said she, bitterly. "You both
of you will do just what you want to, whether or no. He will smoke,
though he knows it makes me worse, besides costing more than he can
afford, and you will put on your best dress, without asking leave,
and wear it out in a damp night, and spoil it."

Maria continued to stand still, and her mother to regard her with
that odd mixture of worshipful love and chiding. Suddenly Mrs. Edgham
closed her mouth more tightly.

"Stand round here," said she, violently. "Let me unbutton your dress.
I don't see how you fastened it up yourself, anyway; you wouldn't
have thought you could, if it hadn't been for deceiving your mother.
You would have come down to me to do it, the way you always do. You
have got it buttoned wrong, anyway. You must have been a sight for
the folks who sat behind you. Well, it serves you right. Stand round
here."

"I am sorry," said Maria then. She wondered whether the wrong
fastening had showed much through the slats of the settee.

Her mother unfastened, with fingers that were at once gentle and
nervous, the pearl buttons on the back of the dress. "Take your arms
out," said she to Maria. Maria cast a glance at the window. "There's
nobody out there but your father," said Mrs. Edgham, harshly, "take
your arms out."

Maria took her arms out of the fluffy mass and stood revealed in her
little, scantily trimmed underwaist, a small, childish figure, with
the utmost delicacy of articulation as to shoulder-blades and neck.
Maria was thin to the extreme, but her bones were so small that she
was charming even in her thinness. Her little, beautifully modelled
arms were as charming as a fairy's.

"Now slip off your skirt," ordered her mother, and Maria complied and
stood in her little white petticoat, with another glance of the
exaggerated modesty of little girlhood at the window.

"Now," said her mother, "you go and hang this up in the kitchen where
it is warm, on that nail on the outside door, and maybe some of the
creases will come out. I've heard they would. I hope so, for I've got
about all I want to do without ironing this dress all over."

Maria gazed at her mother with sudden compunction and anxious love.
After all, she loved her mother down to the depths of her childish
heart; it was only that long custom had so inured her to the loving
that she did not always realize the warmth of her heart because of
it. "Do you feel sick to-night mother?" she whispered.

"No sicker than usual," replied her mother. Then she drew the
delicate little figure close to her, and kissed her with a sort of
passion. "May the Lord look out for you," she said, "if you should
happen to outlive me! I don't know what would become of you, Maria,
you are so heedless, wearing your best things every day, and
everything."

Maria's face paled. "Mother, you aren't any worse?" said she, in a
terrified whisper.

"No, I am not a mite worse. Run along, child, and hang up your dress,
then go to bed; it's after nine o'clock."

It did not take much at that time to reassure Maria. She had
inherited something of the optimism of her father. She carried her
pink dress into the kitchen, with wary eyes upon the windows, and
hung it up as her mother had directed. On her return she paused a
moment at the foot of the stairs in the hall, between the dining-room
and sitting-room. Then, obeying an impulse, she ran into the
sitting-room and threw her soft little arms around her mother's neck.
"I'm real sorry I wore that dress without asking you, mother," she
said. "I won't again, honest."

"Well, I hope you will remember," replied her mother. "If you wear
the best you have common you will never have anything." Her tone was
chiding, but the look on her face was infinitely caressing. She
thought privately that never was such a darling as Maria. She looked
at the softly flushed little face, with its topknot of gold, the
delicate fairness of the neck, and slender arms, and she had a
rapture of something more than possession. The beauty of the child
irradiated her very soul, the beauty and the goodness, for Maria
never disobeyed but she was sorry afterwards, and somehow glorified
faults seem lovelier than cold virtues. "Well, run up-stairs to bed,"
said she. "Be careful of your lamp."

When Maria was in her own room she set the lamp on the dresser and
gazed upon her face reflected in the mirror. That was her nightly
custom, and might have been regarded as a sort of fetich worship of
self. Nothing, in fact, could have been lovelier than that face of
childish innocence and beauty, with the soft rays of the lamp
illuminating it. Her blue eyes seemed to fairly give forth light, the
soft pink on her cheeks deepened until it was like the heart of a
rose. She opened her exquisitely curved lips, and smiled at herself
in a sort of ecstasy. She turned her head this way and that in order
to get different effects. She pulled the little golden fleece of hair
farther over her forehead. She pushed it back, revealing the bold yet
delicate outlines of her temples. She thought how glad she should be
when her hair was grown. She had had an illness two years before, and
her mother had judged it best to have her hair cut short. It was now
just long enough to hang over her ears, curving slightly forward like
the old-fashioned earlocks. She had her hair tied back from her face
with a pink ribbon in a bow on top of her head. She loosened this
ribbon, and shook her hair quite loose. She peeped out of the golden
radiance of it at herself, then she shook it back. She was charming
either way. She was undeveloped, but as yet not a speck of the mildew
of earth had touched her. She was flawless, irreproachable, except
for the knowledge of her beauty, through heredity, in her heart,
which was older than she herself.

Suddenly Maria, after a long gaze of rapture at her face in the
glass, gave a great start. She turned and saw her mother standing in
the door looking at her.

Maria, with an involuntary impulse of concealment, seized her brush,
and began brushing her hair. "I was just brushing my hair," she
murmured. She felt as guilty as if she had committed a crime.

Her mother continued to look at her sternly. "There isn't any use in
your trying to deceive me, Maria," said she. "I am ashamed that a
child of mine should be so silly. To stand looking at yourself that
way! You needn't think you are so pretty, because you are not. You
don't begin to be as good-looking as Amy Long."

Maria felt a cold chill strike her. She had herself had doubts as to
her superior beauty when Amy Long was concerned.

"You don't begin to be as good-looking as your aunt Maria was at your
age, and you know yourself how she looks now. Nobody would dream for
a minute of calling her even ordinary-looking," her mother continued
in a pitiless voice.

Maria shuddered. She seemed to see, instead of her own fair little
face in the glass, an elderly one as sallow as her mother's, but
without the traces of beauty which her mother's undoubtedly had. She
saw the thin, futile frizzes which her aunt Maria affected; she saw
the receding chin, indicative at once of degeneracy and obstinacy;
she saw the blunt nose between the lumpy cheeks.

"Your aunt Maria looked very much as you do when she was your age,"
her mother went on, with the calm cruelty of an inquisitor.

Maria looked at her, her mouth was quivering. "Did I look like Mrs.
Jasper Cone's baby that died last week when I was a baby?" said she.

"Who said you did?" inquired her mother, unguardedly.

"She did. She came up behind me with Mrs. Elliot when I was waiting
for father to get the peaches, and she said her baby that died looked
just like me; she had always thought so."

"That Cone baby look like you!" repeated Maria's mother. "Well, one's
own always looks different to them, I suppose."

"Then you don't think it did?" said Maria. Tears actually stood in
her beautiful blue eyes.

"No, I don't," replied her mother, abruptly. "Nobody in their sober
senses could think so. I am sorry poor Mrs. Cone lost her baby. I
know how I felt when my first baby died, but as for saying it looked
like you--"

"Then you don't think it did, mother?"

"It was one of the homliest babies I ever laid my eyes on, poor
little thing, if it did die," said Maria's mother, emphatically. She
was completely disarmed by this time. But when she saw Maria glance
again at the glass she laid hold of her moral weapons, the wielding
of which she believed to be for the best spiritual good of her child.
"Your aunt Maria was very much better looking than you at her age,"
she repeated, firmly. Then, at the sight of the renewed quiver around
the sensitive little mouth her heart melted. "Get out of your clothes
and into your night-gown, and get to bed, child," said she. "You look
well enough. If you only behave as well as you look, that is all that
is necessary."



Chapter III


Maria fell asleep that night with the full assurance that she had not
been mistaken concerning the beauty of the little face which she had
seen in the looking-glass. All that troubled her was the
consideration that her aunt Maria, whose homely face seemed to glare
out of the darkness at her, might have looked just as she did when
she was her age. She hoped, and then she hoped that the hope was not
wicked, that she might die young rather than live to look like her
aunt Maria. She pictured with a sort of pleasurable horror, what a
lovely little waxen-image she would look now, laid away in a nest of
white flowers. She had only just begun to doze, when she awoke with a
great start. Her father had opened her door, and stood calling her.

"Maria," he said, in an agitated voice.

Maria sat up in bed. "Oh, father, what is it?" said she, and a vague
horror chilled her.

"Get up, and slip on something, and go into your mother's room," said
her father, in a gasping sort of voice. "I've got to go for the
doctor."

Maria put one slim little foot out of bed. "Oh, father," she said,
"is mother sick?"

"Yes, she is very sick," replied her father. His voice sounded almost
savage. It was as if he were furious with his wife for being ill,
furious with Maria, with life, and death itself. In reality he was
torn almost to madness with anxiety. "Slip on something so you won't
catch cold," said he, in his irritated voice. "I don't want another
one down."

Maria ran to her closet and pulled out a little pink wrapper. "Oh,
father, is mother very sick?" she whispered again.

"Yes, she is very sick. I am going to have another doctor to-morrow,"
replied her father, still in that furious, excited voice, which the
sick woman must have heard.

"What shall I--" began Maria, but her father, running down the
stairs, cut her short.

"Do nothing," said he. "Just go in there and stay with her. And don't
you talk. Don't you speak a word to her. Go right in." With that the
front door slammed.

Maria went tiptoeing into her mother's room, still shaking from head
to foot, and her blue eyes seeming to protrude from her little white
face. Even before she entered her mother's room she became conscious
of a noise, something between a wail and a groan. It was
indescribably terrifying. It was like nothing which she had ever
heard before. It did not seem possible that her mother, that anything
human, in fact, was making such a noise, and yet no animal could have
made it, for it was articulate. Her mother was in fact both praying
and repeating verses of Scripture, in that awful voice which was no
longer capable of normal speech, but was compounded of wail and
groan. Every sentence seemed to begin with a groan, and ended with a
long-drawn-out wail. Maria went close to her mother's bed and stood
looking at her. Her poor little face would have torn her mother's
heart with its piteous terror, had she herself not been in such agony.

Maria did not speak. She remembered what her father had said. As her
mother lay there, stretched out stiff and stark, almost as if she
were dead, Maria glanced around the room as if for help. She caught
sight of a bottle of cologne on the dresser, one which she had given
her mother herself the Christmas before; she had bought it out of her
little savings of pocket-money. Maria went unsteadily over to the
dresser and got the cologne. She also opened a drawer and got out a
clean handkerchief. She became conscious that her mother's eyes were
upon her, even although she never ceased for a moment her cries of
agony.

"What--r you do--g?" asked her mother, in her dreadful voice.

"Just getting some cologne to put on your head, to make you feel
better, mother," replied Maria, piteously. She thought she must
answer her mother's question in spite of her father's prohibition.

Her mother seemed to take no further notice; she turned her face to
the wall. "Have--mercy upon me, O Lord, according to Thy loving
kindness, according to the multitude of Thy tender mercies," she
shrieked out. Then the words ended with a long-drawn-out "Oh--oh--"

Had Maria not been familiar with the words, she could not have
understood them. Not a consonant was fairly sounded, the vowels were
elided. She went, feeling as if her legs were sticks, close to her
mother's bed, and opened the cologne bottle with hands which shook
like an old man's with the palsy. She poured some cologne on the
handkerchief and a pungent odor filled the room. She laid the wet
handkerchief on her mother's sallow forehead, then she recoiled, for
her mother, at the shock of the coldness, experienced a new and
almost insufferable spasm of pain. "Let--me alone!" she wailed, and
it was like the howl of a dog.

Maria slunk back to the dresser with the handkerchief and the cologne
bottle, then she returned to her mother's bedside and seated herself
there in a rocking-chair. A lamp was burning over on the dresser, but
it was turned low; her mother's convulsed face seemed to waver in
unaccountable shadows. Maria sat, not speaking a word, but quivering
from head to foot, and her mother kept up her prayers and her verses
from Scripture. Maria herself began to pray in her heart. She said it
over and over to herself, in unutterable appeal and terror, "O Lord,
please make mother well, please make her well." She prayed on,
although the groaning wail never ceased.

Suddenly her mother turned and looked at her, and spoke quite
naturally. "Is that you?" she said.

"Yes, mother. I'm so sorry you are sick. Father has gone for the
doctor."

"You haven't got on enough," said her mother, still in her natural
voice.

"I've got on my wrapper."

"That isn't enough, getting up right out of bed so. Go and get my
white crocheted shawl out of the closet and put it over your
shoulders."

Maria obeyed. While she was doing so her mother resumed her cries.
She said the first half of the twenty-third psalm, then she looked
again at Maria seating herself beside her, and said, in her own
voice, wrested as it were by love from the very depths of mortal
agony. "Have you got your stockings on?" said she.

"Yes, ma'am, and my slippers."

Her mother said no more to her. She resumed her attention to her own
misery with an odd, small gesture of despair. The cries never ceased.
Maria still prayed. It seemed to her that her father would never
return with the doctor. It seemed to her, in spite of her prayer,
that all hope of relief lay in the doctor, and not in the Lord. It
seemed to her that the doctor must help her mother. At last she heard
wheels, and, in her joy, she spoke in spite of her father's
injunction. "There's the doctor now," said she. "I guess he's
bringing father home with him."

Again her mother's eyes opened with a look of intelligence, again she
spoke in her natural voice. She looked towards the clothes which she
had worn during the day, on a chair. "Put my clothes in the closet,"
said she, but her voice strained terribly on the last word.

Maria flew, and hung up her mother's clothes in the closet just
before her father and the doctor entered the room. As she did so, the
tears came for the first time. She had a ready imagination. She
thought to herself that her mother might never put on those clothes
again. She kissed the folds of her mother's dress passionately, and
emerged from the closet, the tears streaming down her face, all the
muscles of which were convulsed. The doctor, who was a young man,
with a handsome, rather hard face, glanced at her before even looking
at the moaning woman in the bed. He said something in a low tone to
her father, who immediately addressed her.

"Go right into your own room, and stay there until I tell you to come
out, Maria," said he, still in that angry voice, which seemed to have
no reason in it. It was the dumb anger of the race against Fate,
which included and overran individuals in its way, like Juggernaut.

At her father's voice, Maria gave a hysterical sob and fled. A sense
of injury tore her heart, as well as her anxiety. She flung herself
face downward on her bed and wept. After a while she turned over on
her back and looked at the room. Not one little thing in the whole
apartment but served to rack her very soul with the consideration of
her mother's love, which she was perhaps about to lose forever. The
dainty curtains at the windows, the scarf on the dresser, the chintz
cover on a chair--every one her mother had planned. She could not
remember how much her mother had scolded her, only how much she had
loved her. At the moment of death the memory of love reigns
triumphant over all else, but she still felt the dazed sense of
injury that her father should have spoken so to her. She could hear
the low murmur of voices in her mother's room across the hall.
Suddenly the cries and moans ceased. A great joy irradiated the
child. She said to herself that her mother was better, that the
doctor had given her something to help her.

She got off the bed, wrapped her little pink garment around her, and
stole across the hall to her mother's room. The whole hall was filled
with a strange, sweet smell which made her faint, but along with the
faintness came such an increase of joy that it was almost ecstasy.
She turned the knob of her mother's door, but, before she could open
it, it was opened from the other side, and her father's face, haggard
and resentful as she had never seen it, appeared.

"Go back!" he whispered, fiercely.

"Oh, father, is mother better?"

"Go back!"

Maria went back, and again the tempest of woe and injury swept over
her. Why should her father speak to her so? Why could he not tell her
if her mother were better? She sat in her little rocking-chair beside
the window, and looked out at the night. She was conscious of a
terrible sensation which seemed to have its starting-point at her
heart, but which pervaded her whole body, her whole consciousness.
She was conscious of such misery, such grief, that it was like a
weight and a pain. She knew now that her mother was no better, that
she might even die. She heard no more of the cries and moans, and
somehow now, the absence of them seemed harder to bear than they
themselves had been. Suddenly she heard her mother's door open. She
heard her father's voice, and the doctor's in response, but she still
could not distinguish a word. Presently she heard the front door open
and close softly. Then her father hurried down the steps, and got
into the doctor's buggy and drove away. It was dark, but she could
not mistake her father. She knew that he had gone for another doctor,
probably Dr. Williams, who lived in the next town, and was considered
very skilful. The other doctor was remaining with her mother. She did
not dare leave her room again. She sat there watching an hour, and a
pale radiance began to appear in the east, which her room faced. It
was like dawn in another world, everything had so changed to her. The
thought came to her that she might go down-stairs and make some
coffee, if she only knew how. Her father might like some when he
returned. But she did not know how, and even if she had she dared not
leave her room again.

The pale light in the east increased, suddenly rosy streamers, almost
like northern lights, were flung out across the sky. She could
distinguish things quite clearly. She heard the rattle of wheels, and
thought it was her father returning with Dr. Williams, but instead it
was the milkman in his yellow cart. He carried a bottle of milk
around to the south door. There was something horribly ghastly in
that every-day occurrence to the watching child. She realized the
interminable moving on of things in spite of all individual
sufferings, as she would have realized the revolution of a wheel of
torture. She felt that it was simply hideous that the milk should be
left at the door that morning, just as if everything was as it had
been. When the milkman jumped into his wagon, whistling, it seemed to
her as if he were doing an awful thing. The milk-wagon stopped at the
opposite house, then moved on out of sight down the street. She
wished to herself that the milkman's horse might run away while he
was at some door. The rancor which possessed her father, the kicking
against the pricks, was possessing her. She felt a futile rage, like
that of some little animal trodden underfoot. A boy whom she knew ran
past whooping, with a tin-pail, after the milkman. Evidently his
mother wanted some extra milk. The sun was reflected on the sides of
the swinging pail, and the flash of light seemed to hurt her, and she
felt the same unreasoning wrath against the boy. Why was not Willy
Royce's mother desperately sick, like her mother, instead of simply
sending for extra milk? The health and the daily swing of the world
in its arc of space seemed to her like a direct insult.

At last it occurred to her that she ought to dress herself. She left
the window, brushed her hair, braided it, and tied it with a blue
ribbon, and put on her little blue gingham gown which she commonly
wore mornings. Then she sat by the window again. It was not very long
after that that she saw the doctor coming, driving fast. Her father
was with him, and between them sat a woman. She recognized the woman
at once. She was a trained nurse who lived in Edgham. "They have got
Miss Bell," she thought; "mother must be awful sick." She knew that
Miss Bell's wages were twenty-five dollars a week, and that her
father would not have called her in except in an extreme case. She
watched her father help out the woman, who was stout and middle-aged,
and much larger than he. Miss Bell had a dress-suit case, which her
father tugged painfully into the house; Miss Bell followed him. She
heard his key turn in the lock while the doctor fastened his horse.

She saw the doctor, who was slightly lame, limp around to the buggy
after his horse was tied, and take out two cases. She hated him while
he did it. She felt intuitively that something terrible was to come
to her mother because of those cases. She watched the doctor limp up
the steps with positive malevolence. "If he is such a smart doctor,
why doesn't he cure himself?" she asked.

She heard steps on the stairs, then the murmur of voices, and the
sound of the door opening into her mother's room. A frightful sense
of isolation came over her. She realized that it was infinitely worse
to be left by herself outside, suffering, than outside happiness. She
tried again to pray, then she stopped. "It is no good praying," she
reflected, "God did not stop mother's pain. It was only stopped by
that stuff I smelled out in the entry." She could not reason back of
that; her terror and misery brought her up against a dead wall. It
seemed to her presently that she heard a faint cry from her mother's
room, then she was quite sure that she smelled that strange, sweet
smell even through her closed door. Then her father opened her door
abruptly, and a great whiff of it entered with him, like some ghost
of pain and death.

"The doctors have neither of them had any breakfast, and they can't
leave her," he said, with a jerk of his elbow, and speaking still
with that angry tone towards the unoffending child. "Can you make
coffee?"

"I don't know how."

"Good for nothing!" said her father, and shut the door with a subdued
bang.

Maria heard him going down-stairs, and presently she heard a rattle
in the kitchen, a part of which was under her room. She went out
herself and stole softly down the stairs. Her father, with an air of
angry helplessness, was emptying the coffee-pot into her mother's
nice sink. Maria stood trembling at his elbow. "I don't believe
that's where mother empties it," she ventured.

"It has got to be emptied somewhere," said her father, and his tone
sounded as if he swore. Maria shrank back. "They've got to have some
coffee, anyhow."

Maria's father carried the coffee-pot over to the stove, in which a
freshly kindled fire was burning, and set it on it, in the hottest
place. Maria stealthily moved it back while he was searching for the
coffee in the pantry. She did not know much, but she did know that an
empty coffee-pot on such a hot place would come to ruin.

Her father emerged from the pantry with a tin-canister in his hand.
"I've sent a telegram to our aunt Maria for her to come right on,"
said he, "but she can't get here before afternoon. I don't suppose
you know how much coffee your mother puts in. I don't suppose you
know about anything."

Maria realized dimly that she was a scape-goat, but there was such
terrible suffering in her father's face that she had no impulse to
rebel. She smelled of the canister which her father held out towards
her with a nervously trembling hand. "Why, father, this is tea; it
isn't coffee," said she.

"Well, if you don't know anything that a big girl like you ought to
know, I should think you might know enough not to try to make coffee
with tea," said her father.

Maria looked at her father in a bewildered sort of way. "I guess the
coffee is in the other canister," said she, meekly.

"Why didn't you say so then?" demanded her father.

Maria was silent. It seemed to her that her father had gone mad.
Harry Edgham made a ferocious stride across the kitchen to the
pantry. Maria followed him. "I guess that is the coffee canister,"
said she, pointing.

"Why didn't you say so, then?" asked her father, viciously, and again
Maria made no reply. Her father seized the coffee canister and
approached the stove. "I don't suppose you know how much she puts in.
I don't suppose you know anything," said he.

"I guess she puts in about a cupful," said Maria, trembling.

"A cupful! with coffee at the price it is now? I guess she doesn't,"
said her father. He poured the coffee-pot full of boiling water from
the tea-kettle, then he tipped the coffee canister into his hand, and
put one small pinch into the pot.

"Oh, father," ventured Maria. "I don't believe--"

"You don't believe what?"

"I don't believe that is enough."

"Of course it's enough. Don't you suppose your father knows how to
make coffee?"

Her father set the coffee-pot on the stove, where it immediately
began to boil. Then he carried back the canister into the pantry, and
returned with a panful of eggs. "You can set the table, I suppose,
anyhow?" said he. "You know enough to do as much as that?"

"Yes, I can do that," replied Maria, with alacrity, and indeed she
could. Her mother had exacted some small household tasks from her,
and setting the table was one of them. She hurried into the
dining-room and began setting the table with the pretty blue-flowered
ware that her mother had been so proud of. She seemed to feel tears
in her heart when she laid the plates, but none sprang to her eyes.
Somehow, handling these familiar inanimate things was the acutest
torture. Presently she smelled eggs burning. She realized that her
father was burning up the eggs, in his utter ignorance of cookery.
She thought privately that she didn't believe but she could cook the
eggs, but she dared not go out in the kitchen. Her father, in his
anxiety, had actually reached ferocity. He had always petted her, in
his easy-going fashion, now he terrified her. She dared not go out
there.

All at once, as she was getting the clean napkins from the sideboard,
she heard the front door open, and one of the neighbors, Mrs. Jonas
White, entered without knocking. She was a large woman and carelessly
dressed, but her great face was beaming with kindness and pity.

"I just heard how bad your ma was," she said, in a loud whisper, "an'
I run right over. I thought mebbe--How is she?"

"She is very sick," replied Maria. She felt at first an impulse to
burst into tears before this broadside of sympathy, then she felt
stiff.

"You are as white as a sheet," said Mrs. White. "Who is burnin' eggs
out there?" She pointed to the kitchen.

"Father."

"Lord! Who's up-stairs?"

"Miss Bell and the doctors. They've sent for Aunt Maria, but she
can't come before afternoon."

Mrs. White fastened a button on her waist. "Well, I'll stay till
then," said she. "Lillian can get along all right." Lillian was Mrs.
White's eighteen-year-old daughter.

Mrs. White opened the kitchen door. "How is she?" she said in a
hushed voice to Harry Edgham, frantically stirring the burned eggs,
which sent up a monstrous smoke and smell. As she spoke, she went
over to him, took the frying-pan out of his hands, and carried it
over to the sink.

"She is a very sick woman," replied Harry Edgham, looking at Mrs.
White with a measure of gratitude.

"You've got Dr. Williams and Miss Bell, Maria says?"

"Yes."

"Maria says her aunt is coming?"

"Yes, I sent a telegram."

"Well, I'll stay till she gets here," said Mrs. White, and again that
expression of almost childish gratitude came over the man's face.
Mrs. White began scraping the burned eggs off the pan.

"They haven't had any breakfast," said Harry, looking upward.

"And they don't dare leave her?"

"No."

"Well, you just go and do anything you want to, Maria and I will get
the breakfast." Mrs. White spoke with a kindly, almost humorous
inflection. Maria felt that she could go down on her knees to her.

"You are very kind," said Harry Edgham, and he went out of the
kitchen as one who beats a retreat before superior forces.

"Maria, you just bring me the eggs, and a clean cup," said Mrs.
White. "Poor man, trying to cook eggs!" said she of Maria's father,
after he had gone. She was one of the women who always treat men with
a sort of loving pity, as if they were children. "Here is some nice
bacon," said she, rummaging in the pantry. "The eggs will be real
nice with bacon. Now, Maria, you look in the ice-chest and see if
there are any cold potatoes that can be warmed up. There's plenty of
bread in the jar, and we'll toast that. We'll have breakfast in a
jiffy. Doctors do have a hard life, and Miss Bell, she ought to have
her nourishment too, if she's goin' to take care of your mother."

When Maria returned from the ice-box, which stood out in the
woodshed, with a plate of cold potatoes, Mrs. White was sniffing at
the coffee-pot.

"For goodness sake, who made this?" said she.

"Father."

"How much did he put in?"

"He put in a little pinch."

"It looks like water bewitched," said Mrs. White. "Bring me the
coffee canister. You know where that is, don't you?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Maria watched Mrs. White pour out the coffee which her father had
made, and start afresh in the proper manner.

"Men are awful helpless, poor things," said Mrs. White. "This sink is
in an awful condition. Did your father empty all this truck in it?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Well, I must clean it out, as soon as I get the other things goin',
or the dreen will be stopped up." Mrs. White's English was not
irreproachable, but she was masterful.

Maria continued to stand numbly in the middle of the kitchen,
watching Mrs. White, who looked at her uneasily.

"You must be a good girl, and trust in the Lord," said she, and she
tried to make her voice sharp. "Now, don't stand there lookin' on;
just fly round and do somethin'. I don't believe but the dinin'-room
needs dustin'. You find somethin' and dust the dinin'-room real nice,
while I get the breakfast."

Maria obeyed, but she did that numbly, without any realization of the
task.

The morning wore on. The doctors, one at a time came down, and the
nurse came down, and they ate a hearty breakfast. Maria watched them,
and hated them because they could eat while her mother was so ill.
Miss Bell also ate heartily, and she felt that she hated her. She was
glad that her father refused anything except a cup of coffee. As for
herself, Mrs. White made her drink an egg beaten up with milk. "If
you won't eat your breakfast, you've got to take this," said she.

Mrs. White took her own breakfast in stray bites, while she was
clearing away the table. She stayed, and put the house in order,
until Maria's aunt Maria arrived. One of the physicians went away.
For a short time Maria's mother's groans and wailings recommenced,
then the smell of chloroform was strong throughout the house.

"I wonder why they don't give her morphine instead of chloroform?"
said Mrs. White, while Maria was wiping the dishes. "It is dreadful
dangerous to give that, especially if the heart is weak. Well, don't
you be scart. I've seen folks enough worse than your mother git well."

In the last few hours Maria's face had gotten a hard look. She no
longer seemed like a little girl. After a while the doctors went away.

"I don't suppose there is much they can do for a while, perhaps,"
remarked Mrs. White; "and Miss Bell, she is as good as any doctor."

Both physicians returned a little after noon, and previously Mrs.
Edgham had made her voice of lamentation heard again. Then it ceased
abruptly, but there was no odor of chloroform.

"They are giving her morphine now, I bet a cooky," Mrs. White said.
She, with Maria, was clearing away the dinner-table then. "What time
do you think your aunt Maria will get here?" she asked.

"About half-past two, father said," replied Maria.

"Well, I'm real glad you've got some one like her you can call on,"
said Mrs. White. "Somebody that 'ain't ever had no family, and 'ain't
tied. Now I'd be willin' to stay right along myself, but I couldn't
leave Lillian any length of time. She 'ain't never had anything hard
put on her, and she 'ain't any too tough. But your aunt can stay
right along till your mother gits well, can't she?"

"I guess so," replied Maria.

There was something about Maria's manner which made Mrs. White
uneasy. She forced conversation in order to make her speak, and do
away with that stunned look on her face. All the time now Maria was
saying to herself that her mother was going to die, that God could
make her well, but He would not. She was conscious of blasphemy, and
she took a certain pleasure in it.

Her aunt Maria arrived on the train expected, and she entered the
house, preceded by the cabman bearing her little trunk, which she had
had ever since she was a little girl. It was the only trunk she had
ever owned. Both physicians and the nurse were with Mrs. Edgham when
her sister arrived. Harry Edgham had been walking restlessly up and
down the parlor, which was a long room. He had not thought of going
to the station to meet Aunt Maria, but when the cab stopped before
the house he hurried out at once. Aunt Maria was dressed wholly in
black--a black mohair, a little black silk cape, and a black bonnet,
from which nodded a jetted tuft. "How is she?" Maria heard her say,
in a hushed voice, to her father. Maria stood in the door. Maria
heard her father say something in a hushed tone about an operation.
Aunt Maria came up the steps with her travelling-bag. Harry forgot to
take it. She greeted Mrs. White, whom she had met on former visits,
and kissed Maria. Maria had been named for her, and been given a
silver cup with her name inscribed thereon, which stood on the
sideboard, but she had never been conscious of any distinct affection
for her. There was a queer, musty odor, almost a fragrance, about
Aunt Maria's black clothes.

"Take the trunk up the stairs, to the room at the left," said Harry
Edgham, "and go as still as you can." The man obeyed, shouldering the
little trunk with an awed look.

Aunt Maria drew Mrs. White and Maria's father aside, and Maria was
conscious that they did not want her to hear; but she did
overhear--"...one chance in ten, a fighting chance," and "Keep it
from Maria, her mother had said so." Maria knew perfectly well that
that horrible and mysterious thing, an operation, which means a duel
with death himself, was even at that moment going on in her mother's
room. She slipped away, and went up-stairs to her own chamber, and
softly closed the door. Then she forgot her lack of faith and her
rebellion, and she realized that her only hope of life was from that
which is outside life. She knelt down beside her bed, and began to
pray over and over, "O God, don't let my mother die, and I will
always be a good girl! O God, don't let my mother die, and I will
always be a good girl!"

Then, without any warning, the door opened and her father stood
there, and behind him was her aunt Maria, weeping bitterly, and Mrs.
White, also weeping.

"Maria," gasped out Harry Edgham. Then, as Maria rose and went to
him, he seized upon her as if she were his one straw of salvation,
and began to sob himself, and Maria knew that her mother had died.



Chapter IV


Without any doubt, Maria's self-consciousness, which was at its
height at this time, helped her to endure the loss of her mother, and
all the sad appurtenances of mourning. She had a covert pleasure at
the sight of her fair little face, in her black hat, above her black
frock. She realized a certain importance because of her grief.

However, there were times when the grief itself came uppermost; there
were nights when she lay awake crying for her mother, when she was
nothing but a bereft child in a vacuum of love. Her father's
tenderness could not make up to her for the loss of her mother's.
Very soon after her mother's death, his mercurial temperament jarred
upon her. She could not understand how he could laugh and talk as if
nothing had happened. She herself was more like her mother in
temperament--that is, like the New-Englander who goes through life
with the grief of a loss grown to his heart. Nothing could exceed
Harry Edgham's tenderness to his motherless little girl. He was
always contriving something for her pleasure and comfort; but Maria,
when her father laughed, regarded him with covert wonder and reproach.

Her aunt Maria continued to live with them, and kept the house. Aunt
Maria was very capable. It is doubtful if there are many people on
earth who are not crowned, either to their own consciousness or that
of others, with at least some small semblance of glories. Aunt Maria
had the notable distinction of living on one hundred dollars a year.
She had her rent free, but upon that she did not enlarge. Her married
brother owned a small house, of the story-and-a-half type prevalent
in New England villages, and Maria had the north side. She lived,
aside from that, upon one hundred dollars a year. She was openly
proud of it; her poverty became, in a sense, her riches. "Well, all I
have is just one hundred a year," she was fond of saying, "and I
don't complain. I don't envy anybody. I have all I want." Her little
plans for thrift were fairly Machiavellian; they showed subtly. She
told everybody what she had for her meals. She boasted that she lived
better than her brother, who was earning good wages in a
shoe-factory. She dressed very well, really much better than her
sister-in-law. "Poor Eunice never had much management," Maria was
wont to say, smoothing down, as she spoke, the folds of her own gown.
She never wore out anything; she moved carefully and sat carefully;
she did a good deal of fancy-work, but she was always very
particular, even when engaged in the daintiest toil, to cover her
gown with an apron, and she always held her thin-veined hands high.
She charged this upon her niece Maria when she had her new black
clothes. "Now, Maria," said she, "there is one thing I want you to
remember, here is nothin'--" (Aunt Maria elided her final "g" like
most New-Englanders, although she was not deficient in education, and
even prided herself upon her reading.) "Black is the worst thing in
the world to grow shiny. Folks can talk all they want to about black
bein' durable. It isn't. It grows shiny. And if you will always
remember one thing when you are at home, to wear an apron when you
are doin' anything, and when you are away, to hold your hands high,
you will gain by it. There is no need of anybody gettin' the front
breadths of their dresses all shiny by rubbin' their hands on them.
When you are at school you must remember and hold your school-books
so they won't touch your dress. Then there is another thing you must
remember, not to move your arms any more than you can help, that
makes the waist wear out under the arms. There isn't any need of your
movin' your arms much if any when you are in school, that I can see,
and when you come home you can change your dress. You might just as
well wear out your colored dresses when you are home. Nobody is goin'
to see you. If anybody comes in that I think is goin' to mind, you
can just slip up-stairs, and put on your black dress. It isn't as if
you had a little sister to take your things--they ought to be worn
out."

It therefore happened that Maria was dressed the greater part of the
time, in her own home, where she missed her mother most, in
bright-colored array, and in funeral attire outside. She told her
father about it, but he had not a large income, and it had been
severely taxed by his wife's almost tragic illness and death.
Besides, if the truth were known, he disliked to see Maria in
mourning, and the humor of the thing also appealed to him.

"You had better wear what your aunt says, dear. You feel just the
same in your heart, don't you?" asked Harry Edgham, with that light
laugh of his, which always so shocked his serious little daughter.

"Yes, sir," she replied, with a sob.

"Well, then, do just as your aunt says, and be a good little girl,"
said Harry, and he went hastily out on the porch with his cigar.

Nothing irritated him so much as to see Maria weep for her mother. He
was one of those who wrestle and fight against grief, and to see it
thrust in his face by the impetus of another heart exasperated him,
although he could say nothing. It may be that, with his temperament,
it was even dangerous for him to cherish grief, and, for that very
reason, he tried to put his dead wife out of his mind, as she had
been taken out of his life.

"Well, men are different from women," Aunt Maria said to her niece
Maria one night, when Harry had gone out on the piazza, after he had
talked and laughed a good deal at the supper-table.

Harry Edgham heard the remark, and his face took on a set expression
which it could assume at times. He did not like his sister-in-law,
although he disguised the fact. She was very useful. His meals were
always on time, the house was as neatly kept as before, and Maria was
being trained as she had never been in household duties.

Maria was obedient, under silent protest, to her aunt. Often, after
she had been bidden to perform some household task, and obeyed, she
had gone to her own room and wept, and told herself that her mother
would never have put such things on her. She had no one in whom to
confide. She was not a girl to have unlimited intimates among other
girls at school. She was too self-centred, and, if the truth were
told, too emulative.

"Maria Edgham thinks she's awful smart," one girl would say to
another. They all admitted, even the most carping, that Maria was
pretty. "Maria Edgham is pretty enough, and she knows it," said they.
She was in the high school, even at her age, and she stood high in
her classes. There was always a sort of moral strike going on against
Maria, as there is against all superiority, especially when the
superiority is known to be recognized by the possessor thereof.

In spite of her prettiness, she was not a favorite even among the
boys. They were, as a rule, innocent as well as young, but they would
rather have snatched a kiss from such a pretty, dainty little
creature than have had her go above them in the algebra class. It did
not seem fitting. Without knowing it, they were envious. They would
not even acknowledge her cleverness, not even Wollaston Lee, for whom
Maria entertained a rudimentary affection. He was even rude to her.

"Maria Edgham is awful stuck up," he told his mother. He was of that
age when a boy tells his mother a good deal, and he was an only child.

"She's a real pretty little girl, and her aunt says she is a good
girl," replied his mother, who regarded the whole as the antics of
infancy.

The Lees lived near the Edghams, on the same street, and Mrs. Lee and
Aunt Maria had exchanged several calls. They were, in fact, almost
intimate. The Lees were at the supper-table when Wollaston made his
deprecatory remark concerning Maria, and he had been led to do so by
the law of sequence. Mrs. Lee had made a remark about Aunt Maria to
her husband. "I believe she thinks Harry Edgham will marry her," she
said.

"That's just like you women, always trumping up something of that
kind," replied her husband. His words were rather brusque, but he
regarded, while speaking them, his wife with adoration. She was a
very pretty woman, and looked much younger than her age.

"You needn't tell me," said Mrs. Lee. "She's just left off bonnets
and got a new hat trimmed with black daisies; rather light mourning,
I call it, when her sister has not been dead a year."

"You spiteful little thing!" said her husband, still with his adoring
eyes on his wife.

"Well, it's so, anyway."

"Well, she would make Harry a good wife, I guess," said her husband,
easily; "and she would think more of the girl."

It was then that Wollaston got in his remark about poor Maria, who
had herself noticed with wonder that her aunt had bought a new hat
that spring instead of a bonnet.

"Why, Aunt Maria, I thought you always wore a bonnet!" said she,
innocently, when the hat came home from the milliner's.

"Nobody except old women are wearing bonnets now," replied her aunt,
shortly. "I saw Mrs. Rufus Jones, who is a good deal older than I, at
church Sunday with a hat trimmed with roses. The milliner told me
nobody of my age wore a bonnet."

"Did she know how old you really are, Aunt Maria?" inquired Maria
with the utmost innocence.

Harry Edgham gave a little chuckle, then came to his sister-in-law's
rescue. He had a thankful heart for even small benefits, and Aunt
Maria had done a good deal for him and his, and it had never occurred
to him that the doing might not be entirely disinterested. Besides,
Aunt Maria had always seemed to him, as well as to his daughter, very
old indeed. It might have been that the bonnets had had something to
do with it. Aunt Maria had never affected fashions beyond a certain
epoch, partly from economy, partly from a certain sense of injury.
She had said to herself that she was old, she had been passed by; she
would dress as one who had. Now her sentiments underwent a curious
change. The possibility occurred to her that Harry might ask her to
take her departed sister's place. She was older than that sister,
much older than he, but she looked in her glass and suddenly her
passed youth seemed to look forth upon her. The revival of hopes
sometimes serves as a tonic. Aunt Maria actually did look younger
than she had done, even with her scanty frizzes. She regarded other
women, not older than herself, with pompadours, and aspiration seized
her.

One day she went to New York shopping. She secretly regarded that as
an expedition. She was terrified at the crossings. Stout, elderly
woman as she was, when she found herself in the whirl of the great
city, she became as a small, scared kitten. She gathered up her
skirts, and fled incontinently across the streets, with policemen
looking after her with haughty disapprobation. But when she was told
to step lively on the trolley-cars, her true self asserted its
endurance. "I am not going to step in front of a team for you or any
other person," she told one conductor, and she spoke with such
emphasis that even he was intimidated, and held the car meekly until
the team had passed. When Aunt Maria came home from New York that
particular afternoon, she had an expression at once of defiance and
embarrassment, which both Maria and her father noticed.

"Well, what did you see in New York, Maria?" asked Harry, pleasantly.

"I saw the greatest lot of folks without manners, that I ever saw in
my whole life," replied Aunt Maria, sharply.

Harry Edgham laughed. "You'll get used to it," he said, easily.
"Everybody who comes from New England has to take time to like New
York. It is an acquired taste."

"When I do acquire it, I'll be equal to any of them," replied Aunt
Maria. "When I lose my temper, they had better look out."

Harry Edgham laughed again.

It was the next morning when Aunt Maria appeared at the early
breakfast with a pompadour. Her thin frizzes were carefully puffed
over a mystery which she had purchased the afternoon before.

Maria, when she first saw her aunt, stared open-mouthed; then she ate
her breakfast as if she had seen nothing.

Harry Edgham gave one sharp stare at his sister-in-law, then he said:
"Got your hair done up a new way, haven't you, Maria?"

"Yes, my hat didn't set well on my head with my hair the way I was
wearing it," replied Aunt Maria with dignity; still she blushed. She
knew that her own hair did not entirely conceal the under structure,
and she knew, too, why she wore the pompadour.

Harry Edgham recognized the first fact with simple pity that his
sister-in-law's hair was so thin. He remembered hearing a hair-tonic
recommended by another man in the office, and he wondered privately
if Maria would feel hurt if he brought some for her. Of the other
fact he had not the least suspicion. He said: "Well, it's real
becoming to you, Maria. I guess I like it better than the other way.
I notice all the girls seem to wear their hair so nowadays."

Aunt Maria smiled at him gratefully. When her sister had married him,
she had wondered what on earth she saw in Harry Edgham; now he seemed
to her a very likeable man.

When Maria sat in school that morning, her aunt's pompadour diverted
her mind from her book; then she caught Gladys Mann's wondering eyes
upon her, and she studied again.

While Maria could scarcely be said to have an intimate friend at
school, a little girl is a monstrosity who has neither a friend nor a
disciple; she had her disciple, whose name was Gladys Mann. Gladys
was herself a little outside the pale. Most of her father's earnings
went for drink, and Gladys's mother was openly known to take in
washing to make both ends meet, and keep the girl at school at all;
moreover, she herself came of one of the poor white families which
flourish in New Jersey as well as at the South, although in less
numbers. Gladys's mother was rather a marvel, inasmuch as she was
willing to take in washing, and do it well too, but Gladys had no
higher rank for that. She was herself rather a pathetic little soul,
dingily pretty, using the patois of her kind, and always at the fag
end of her classes. Her education, so far, seemed to meet with no
practical results in the child herself. Her brain merely filtered
learning like a sieve; but she thought Maria Edgham was a wonder, and
it was really through her, and her alone, that she obtained any
education.

"What makes you always say 'have went'?" Maria would inquire, with a
half-kindly, half-supercilious glance at her satellite.

"What had I ought to say," Gladys would inquire, meekly--"have came?"

"Have gone," replied Maria, with supreme scorn.

"Then when my mother has came home shall I say she has gone?"
inquired Gladys, with positive abjectness.

"Gladys, you are such a ninny," said Maria. "Why don't you remember
what you learn at school, instead of what you hear at home?"

"I guess I hear more at home than I learn at school," Gladys replied,
with an adoring glance at Maria.

Maria half despised Gladys, and yet she had a sort of protective
affection for her, as one might have for a little clinging animal,
and she confided more in her than in any one else, sure, at least, of
an outburst of sympathy. Maria had never forgotten how Gladys had
cried the first morning she went to school after her mother died.
Every time Gladys glanced at poor little Maria, in her black dress,
her head went down on a ring of her little, soiled, cotton-clad arms
on her desk, and Maria knew that she was sorrier for her than any
other girl in school.

Gladys had a sort of innocent and ignorant impertinence; she asked
anything which occurred to her, with no reflection as to its effect
upon the other party.

"Say, is it true?" she asked that very morning at recess.

"Is what true?"

"Is your father goin' to marry her?"

"Marry who?" Maria turned quite pale, and forgot her own grammar.

"Why, your aunt Maria."

"My aunt Maria? I guess he isn't!" Maria left Gladys with an offended
strut. However, she reflected on Aunt Maria's pompadour. A great
indignation seized her. After this she treated Aunt Maria stiffly,
and she watched both her and her father.

There was surely nothing in Harry Edgham's behaviour to warrant a
belief that he contemplated marrying his deceased wife's sister.
Sometimes he even, although in a kindly fashion, poked fun at her, in
Maria's presence. But Aunt Maria never knew it; she was, in fact,
impervious to that sort of thing. But Maria came to be quite sure
that Aunt Maria had designs on her father. She observed that she
dressed much better than she had ever done; she observed the fairly
ostentatious attention which she bestowed upon her brother-in-law,
and also upon herself, when he was present. She even used to caress
Maria, in her wooden sort of way, when Harry was by to see. Once
Maria repulsed her roughly. "I don't like to be kissed and fussed
over," said she.

"You mustn't speak so to your aunt," said Harry, when Aunt Maria had
gone out of the room. "I don't know what we should have done without
her."

"You pay her, don't you, father?" asked Maria.

"Yes, I pay her," said Harry, "but that does not alter the fact that
she has done a great deal which money could not buy."

Maria gazed at her father with suspicion, which he did not recognize.

It had never occurred to Harry Edgham to marry Aunt Maria. It had
never occurred to him that she might think of the possibility of such
a thing. It was now nearly a year since his wife's death. He himself
began to take more pains with his attire. Maria noticed it. She saw
her father go out one evening clad in a new, light-gray suit, which
he had never worn before. She looked at him wonderingly when he
kissed her good-bye. Harry never left the house without kissing his
little daughter.

"Why, you've got a new suit, father," she said.

Harry blushed. "Do you like it, dear?" he asked.

"No, father, I don't like it half as well as a dark one," replied
Maria, in a sweet, curt little voice. Her father colored still more,
and laughed, then he went away.

Aunt Maria, to Maria's mind, was very much dressed-up that evening.
She had on a muslin dress with sprigs of purple running through it,
and a purple ribbon around her waist. She made up her mind that she
would stay up until her father came home, in that new gray suit, no
matter what Aunt Maria should say.

However, contrary to her usual custom, Aunt Maria did not mention, at
half-past eight, that it was time for her to go to bed. It was
half-past nine, and her father had not come home, and Aunt Maria had
said nothing about it. She appeared to be working very interestedly
on a sofa-cushion which she was embroidering, but her face looked, to
Maria's mind, rather woe-begone, although there was a shade of wrath
in the woe. When the little clock on the sitting-room shelf struck
one for half-past nine, Maria looked at her aunt, wondering.

"Why, I wonder where father has gone so late?" she said.

Aunt Maria turned, and her voice, in reply, was both pained and
pitiless. "Well, you may as well know first as last," said she, "and
you'd better hear it from me than outside: your father has gone
courtin'."



Chapter V


Maria looked at her aunt with an expression of almost idiocy. For the
minute, the term Aunt Maria used, especially as applied to her
father, had no more meaning for her than a term in a foreign tongue.
She was very pale. "Courtin'," she stammered out vaguely, imitating
her aunt exactly, even to the dropping of the final "g."

Aunt Maria was, for the moment, too occupied with her own personal
grievances and disappointments to pay much attention to her little
niece. "Yes, courtin'," she said, harshly. "I've been suspectin' for
some time, an' now I know. A man, when he's left a widower, don't
smarten up the way he's done for nothin'; I know it." Aunt Maria
nodded her head aggressively, with a gesture almost of butting.

Maria continued to gaze at her, with that pale, almost idiotic
expression. It was a fact that she had thought of her father as being
as much married as ever, even although her mother was dead. Nothing
else had occurred to her.

"Your father's thinkin' of gettin' married again," said Aunt Maria,
"and you may as well make up your mind to it, poor child." The words
were pitying, the tone not.

"Who?" gasped Maria.

"I don't know any more than you do," replied Aunt Maria, "but I know
it's somebody." Suddenly Aunt Maria arose. It seemed to her that she
must do something vindictive. Here she had to return to her solitary
life in her New England village, and her hundred dollars a year,
which somehow did not seem as great a glory to her as it had formerly
done. She went to the parlor windows and closed them with jerks, then
she blew out the lamp. "Come," said she, "it's time to go to bed. I'm
tired, for my part. I've worked like a dog all day. Your father has
got his key, an' he can let himself in when he gets through his
courtin'."

Maria crept miserably--she was still in a sort of daze--up-stairs
after Aunt Maria.

"Well, good-night," said Aunt Maria. "You might as well make up your
mind to it. I suppose it had to come, and maybe it's all for the
best." Aunt Maria's voice sounded as if she were trying to reconcile
the love of God with the existence of hell and eternal torment. She
closed her door with a slam. There are, in some New England women,
impulses of fierce childishness.

Maria, when she was in her room, had never felt so lonely in her
life. A kind of rage of loneliness possessed her. She slipped out of
her clothes and went to bed, and then she lay awake. She heard her
father when he returned. The clock on a church which was near by
struck twelve soon after. Maria tried to imagine another woman in the
house in her mother's place; she thought of every eligible woman in
Edgham whom her father might select to fill that place, but her
little-girl ideas of eligibility were at fault. She thought only of
women of her mother's age and staidness, who wore bonnets. She could
think of only two, one a widow, one a spinster. She shuddered at the
idea of either. She felt that she would much rather have had her
father marry Aunt Maria than either of those women. She did not
altogether love Aunt Maria, but at least she was used to her.
Suddenly it occurred to her that Aunt Maria was disappointed, that
she felt badly. The absurdity of it struck her strongly, but she felt
a pity for her; she felt a common cause with her. After her father
had gone into his room, and the house had long been silent, she got
up quietly, opened her door softly, and crept across the hall to the
spare room, which Aunt Maria had occupied ever since she had been
there. She listened, and heard a soft sob. Then she turned the knob
of the door softly.

"Who is it?" Aunt Maria called out, sharply.

Maria was afraid that her father would hear.

"It's only me, Aunt Maria," she replied. Then she also gave a little
sob.

"What's the matter?"

Maria groped her way across the room to her aunt's bed. "Oh, Aunt
Maria, who is it?" she sobbed, softly.

Aunt Maria did what she had never done before: she reached out her
arms and gathered the bewildered little girl close, in an embrace of
genuine affection and pity. She, too, felt that here was a common
cause, and not only that, but she pitied the child with unselfish
pity. "You poor child, you are as cold as ice. Come in here with me,"
she whispered.

Maria crept into bed beside her aunt, but she would rather have
remained where she was. She was a child of spiritual rather than
physical affinities, and the contact of Aunt Maria's thin body, even
though it thrilled with almost maternal affection for her, repelled
her.

Aunt Maria began to weep unrestrainedly, with a curious passion and
abandonment for a woman of her years.

"Has he come home?" she whispered. Aunt Maria's hearing was slightly
defective, especially when she was nervously overwrought.

"Yes. Aunt Maria, who is it?"

"Hush, I don't know. He hasn't paid any open court to anybody, that I
know of, but--I've seen him lookin'."

"At whom?"

"At Ida Slome."

"But she is younger than my mother was."

"What difference do you s'pose that makes to a man. He'll like her
all the better for that. You can thank your stars he didn't pitch on
a school-girl, instead of the teacher."

Maria lay stretched out stiff and motionless. She was trying to bring
her mind to bear upon the situation. She was trying to imagine Miss
Ida Slome, with her pink cheeks and her gay attire, in the house
instead of her mother. Her head began to reel. She no longer wept.
She became dimly conscious, after a while, of her aunt Maria's
shaking her violently and calling her by name, but she did not
respond, although she heard her plainly. Then she felt a great jounce
of the bed as her aunt sprang out. She continued to lie still and
rigid. She somehow knew, however, that her aunt was lighting the
lamp, then she felt, rather than saw, the flash of it across her
face. Her aunt Maria pulled on a wrapper over her night-gown, and
hurried to the door. "Harry, Harry Edgham!" she heard her call, and
still Maria could not move. Then she also felt, rather than saw, her
father enter the room with his bath-robe slipped over his pajamas,
and approach the bed.

"What on earth is the matter?" he said. He also laid hands on Maria,
and, at his touch, she became able to move.

"What on earth is the matter?" he asked again.

"She didn't seem able to speak or move, and I was scared," replied
Aunt Maria, with a reproachful accent on the "I"; but Harry Edgham
was too genuinely concerned at his little daughter's white face and
piteous look to heed that at all.

He leaned over and began stroking her soft little cheeks, and kissing
her. "Father's darling," he whispered. Then he said over his shoulder
to Aunt Maria, "I wish you would go into my room and get that flask
of brandy I keep in my closet."

Aunt Maria obeyed. She returned with the flask and a teaspoon, and
Maria's father made her swallow a few drops, which immediately warmed
her and made the strange rigidity disappear.

"I guess she had better stay in here with you the rest of the night,"
said Harry to his sister-in-law; but little Maria sat up
determinately.

"No, I'm going back to my own room," she said.

"Hadn't you better stay with your aunt, darling?"

Harry Edgham looked shamefaced and guilty. He saw that his
sister-in-law and Maria had been weeping, and he knew why, in the
depths of his soul. He saw no good reason why he should feel so
shamed and apologetic, but he did. He fairly cowered before the
nervous little girl and her aunt.

"Well, let father carry you in there, then," he said; and he lifted
up the slight little thing, carried her across the hall to her room,
and placed her in bed.

It was a very warm night, but Maria was shivering as if with cold. He
placed the coverings over her with clumsy solicitude. Then he bent
down and kissed her. "Try and keep quiet, and go to sleep, darling,"
he said. Then he went out.

Aunt Maria was waiting for him in the hall. Her face, from grief and
consternation, had changed to sad and dignified resignation.

"Harry," said she.

Harry Edgham stopped.

"Well, sister," he said, with pleasant interrogation, although he
still looked shamefaced.

Aunt Maria held a lamp, a small one, which she was tipping
dangerously.

"Look out for your lamp, Maria," he said.

She straightened the lamp, and the light shone full upon her swollen
face, at once piteous and wrathful. "I only wanted to know when you
wanted me to go?" she said.

"Oh, Lord, Maria, you are going too fast!" replied Harry, and he
fairly ran into his own room.

The next morning when Maria, in her little black frock--it was made
of a thin lawn for the hot days, and the pale slenderness of her arms
and neck were revealed by the thinness of the fabric--went to school,
she knew, the very moment that Miss Ida Slome greeted her, that Aunt
Maria had been right in her surmise. For the first time since she had
been to school, Miss Slome, who was radiant in a flowered muslin,
came up to her and embraced her. Maria submitted coldly to the
embrace.

"You sweet little thing," said Miss Slome.

There was a man principal of the school, but Miss Slome was first
assistant, and Maria was in most of her classes. She took her place,
with her pretty smile as set as if she had been a picture instead of
a living and breathing woman, on the platform.

"You are awful sweet all of a sudden, ain't you?" said Gladys Mann in
Maria's ear.

Maria nodded, and went to her own seat.

All that day she noted, with her sharp little consciousness, the
change in Miss Slome's manner towards her. It was noticeable even in
class. "It is true," she said to herself. "Father is going to marry
her."

Aunt Maria was a little pacified by Harry's rejoinder the night
before. She begun to wonder if she had been, by any chance, mistaken.

"Maybe I was wrong," she said, privately, to Maria. But Maria shook
her head.

"She called me a sweet little thing, and kissed me," said she.

"Didn't she ever before?"

"No, ma'am."

"Well, she may have taken a notion to. Maybe I was mistaken. The way
your father spoke last night sort of made me think so."

Aunt Maria made up her mind that if Harry was out late the next
Sunday, and the next Wednesday, that would be a test of the
situation. The first time had been Wednesday, and Wednesday and
Sunday, in all provincial localities, are the acknowledged courting
nights. Of course it sometimes happens that an ardent lover goes
every night; but Harry Edgham, being an older man and a widower,
would probably not go to that extent.

He soon did, however. Very soon Maria and her aunt went to bed every
night before Harry came home, and Miss Ida Slome became more loving
towards Maria.

Wollaston Lee, boy as he was, child as he was, really suffered. He
lost flesh, and his mother told Aunt Maria that she was really
worried about him. "He doesn't eat enough to keep a bird alive," said
she.

It never entered into her heart to imagine that Wollaston was in love
with the teacher, a woman almost if not quite old enough to be his
mother, and was suffering because of her love for Harry Edgham.

One afternoon, when Harry's courtship of Ida Slome had been going on
for about six weeks, and all Edgham was well informed concerning it,
Maria, instead of going straight home from school, took a cross-road
through some woods. She dreaded to reach home that night. It was
Wednesday, and her father would be sure to go to see Miss Slome.
Maria felt an indefinable depression, as if she, little, helpless
girl, were being carried so far into the wheels of life that it was
too much for her. Her father, of late, had been kinder than ever to
her; Maria had begun to wonder if she ought not to be glad if he were
happy, and if she ought not to try to love Miss Slome. But this
afternoon depression overcame her. She walked slowly between the
fields, which were white and gold with queen's-lace and golden-rod.
Her slender shoulders were bent a little. She walked almost like an
old woman. She heard a quick step behind her, and Wollaston Lee came
up beside her. She looked at him with some sentiment, even in the
midst of her depression. The thought flashed across her mind, what is
she should marry Wollaston at the same time her father married Miss
Slome? That would be a happy and romantic solution of the affair. She
colored sweetly, and smiled, but the boy scowled at her.

"Say?" he said.

Maria trembled a little. She was surprised.

"What?" she asked.

"Your father is the meanest man in this town, he is the meanest in
New Jersey, he is the meanest man in the whole United States, he is
the meanest man in the whole world."

Again the boy scowled at Maria, who did not understand; but she would
not have her father reviled.

"He isn't, so there!" she said.

"He's going to marry teacher."

"I don't see as he is mean if he is," said Maria, forced into justice
by injustice.

"I was going to marry her myself, if she'd only waited, and he hadn't
butted in," said Wollaston.

The boy gave one last scowl at the little girl, and it was as if he
scowled at all womanhood in her. Then he gave a fling away, and ran
like a wild thing across the field of golden-rod and queen's-lace.
Maria, watching, saw him throw himself down prone in the midst of the
wild-flowers, and she understood that he was crying because the
teacher was going to marry her father. She went on, walking like a
little old woman, and she had a feeling as if she had found a road in
the world that led outside all love.



Chapter VI


Maria felt that she no longer cared about Wollaston Lee, that she
fairly scorned him. Then, suddenly, something occurred to her. She
turned, and ran back as fast as she could, her short fleece of golden
hair flying. She wrapped her short skirts about her, and wormed
through the barbed-wire fence which skirted the field--the boy had
leaped it, but she was not equal to that--and she hastened, leaving a
furrow through the white-and-gold herbage, to the boy lying on his
face weeping. She stood over him.

"Say?" said she.

The boy gave a convulsive wriggle of his back and shoulders, and
uttered an inarticulate "Let me alone"; but the girl persisted.

"Say?" said she again.

Then the boy turned, and disclosed a flushed, scowling face among the
flowers.

"Well, what do you want, anyway?" said he.

"If you want to marry Miss Slome, why don't you, instead of my
father?" inquired Maria, bluntly, going straight to the point.

"I haven't got any money," replied Wollaston, crossly; "all a woman
thinks of is money. How'd I buy her dresses?"

"I don't believe but your father would be willing for you to live at
home with her, and buy her dresses, till you got so you could earn
yourself."

"She wouldn't have me," said the boy, and he fairly dug his flushed
face into the mass of wild-flowers.

"You are a good deal younger than father," said Maria.

"Your father he can give her a diamond ring, and I haven't got more'n
forty cents, and I don't believe that would buy much of anything,"
said Wollaston, in muffled tones of grief and rage.

Maria felt a shock at the idea of a diamond ring. Her mother had
never owned one.

"Oh, I don't believe father will ever give her a diamond ring in the
world," said she.

"She's wearing one, anyhow--I saw it," said Wollaston. "Where did she
get it if he didn't give it to her, I'd like to know?"

Maria felt cold.

"I don't believe it," she said again. "Teacher is all alone in the
school-house, correcting exercises. Why don't you get right up, and
go back and ask her? I'll go with you, if you want me to."

Wollaston raised himself indeterminately upon one elbow.

"Come along," urged Maria.

Wollaston got up slowly. His face was a burning red.

"You are a good deal younger and better looking than father," urged
Maria, traitorously.

The boy was only a year older than Maria. He was much larger and
taller, but although she looked a child, at that moment he looked
younger. Both of his brown hands hung at his sides, clinched like a
baby's. He had a sulky expression.

"Come along," urged the girl.

He stood kicking the ground hesitatingly for a moment, then he
followed the girl across the field. They went down the road until
they came to the school-house. Miss Slome was still there; her
graceful profile could be seen at a window.

Both children marched in upon Miss Slome, who was in a
recitation-room, bending over a desk. She looked up, and her face
lightened at sight of Maria.

"Oh, it's you, dear?" said she.

Maria then saw, for the first time, the white sparkle of a diamond on
the third finger of her left hand. She felt that she hated her.

"He wants to speak to you," she said, indicating Wollaston with a
turn of her hand.

Miss Slome looked inquiringly at Wollaston, who stood before her like
a culprit, blushing and shuffling, and yet with a sort of doggedness.

"Well, what is it, Wollaston?" she asked, patronizingly.

"I came back to ask you if--you would have me?" said Wollaston, and
his voice was hardly audible.

Miss Ida Slome looked at him in amazement; she was utterly dazed.

"Have you?" she repeated. "I think I do not quite understand you.
What do you mean by 'have you,' Wollaston?"

"Marry me," burst forth the boy.

There was a silence. Maria looked at Miss Slome, and, to her utter
indignation, the teacher's lips were twitching, and it took a good
deal to make Miss Slome laugh, too; she had not much sense of humor.

In a second Wollaston stole a furtive glance at Miss Slome, which was
an absurd parody on a glance of a man under similar circumstances,
and Miss Slome, who had had experience in such matters, laughed
outright.

The boy turned white. The woman did not realize it, but it was really
a cruel thing which she was doing. She laughed heartily.

"Why, my dear boy," she said. "You are too young and I am too old.
You had better wait and marry Maria, when you are both grown up."

Wollaston turned his back upon her, and marched out of the room.
Maria lingered, in the vain hope that she might bring the teacher to
a reconsideration of the matter.

"He's a good deal younger than father, and he's better looking," said
she.

Miss Slome blushed then.

"Oh, you sweet little thing, then you know--" she began.

Maria interrupted her. She became still more traitorous to her father.

"Father has a real bad temper, when things go wrong," said she.
"Mother always said so."

Miss Slome only laughed harder.

"You funny little darling," she said.

"And Wollaston has a real good disposition, his mother told my aunt
Maria so," she persisted.

The room fairly rang with Miss Slome's laughter, although she tried
to subdue it. Maria persisted.

"And father isn't a mite handy about the house," said she. "And Mrs.
Lee told Aunt Maria that Wollaston could wipe dishes and sweep as
well as a girl."

Miss Slome laughed.

"And I've got a bad temper, too, when I'm crossed; mother always said
so," said Maria. Her lip quivered.

Miss Slome left her desk, came over to Maria, and, in spite of her
shrinking away, caught her in her arms.

"You are a little darling," said she, "and I am not a bit afraid of
your temper." She hesitated a moment, looking at the child's averted
face, and coloring. "My dear, has your father told you?" she
whispered; then, "I didn't know he had."

"No, ma'am, he hasn't," said Maria. She fairly pulled herself loose
from Miss Slome and ran out of the room. Her eyes were almost blinded
with tears; she could scarcely see Wollaston Lee on the road, ahead
of her, also running. He seemed to waver as he ran. Maria called out
faintly. He evidently heard, for he slackened his pace a little; then
he ran faster than ever. Maria called again. This time the boy
stopped until the girl came up. He picked a piece of grass, as he
waited, and began chewing it.

"How do you know that isn't poison?" said Maria, breathlessly.

"Don't care if it is; hope it is," said the boy.

"It's wicked to talk so."

"Let it be wicked then."

"I don't see how I am to blame for any of it," Maria said, in a
bewildered sort of way. It was the cry of the woman, the primitive
cry of the primitive scape-goat of Creation. Already Maria began to
feel the necessity of fitting her little shoulders to the blame of
life, which she had inherited from her Mother Eve, but she was as yet
bewildered by the necessity.

"Ain't it your father that's going to marry her?" inquired Wollaston,
fiercely.

"I don't want him to marry her any more than you do," said Maria. "I
don't want her for a mother."

"I told you how it would come out, if I asked her," cried the boy,
still heaping the blame upon the girl.

"I would enough sight rather marry you than my father, if I were the
teacher," said Maria, and her blue eyes looked into Wollaston's with
the boldness of absolute guilelessness.

"Hush!" responded Wollaston, with a gesture of disdain. "Who'd want
you? You're nothing but a girl, anyway."

With that scant courtesy Wollaston Lee resumed his race homeward, and
Maria went her own way.

It was that very night, after Harry Edgham had returned from his call
upon Ida Slome, that he told Maria. Maria, as usual, had gone to bed,
but she was not asleep. Maria heard his hand on her door-knob, and
his voice calling out, softly: "Are you asleep, dear?"

"No," responded Maria.

Then her father entered and approached the child staring at him from
her white nest. The room was full of moonlight, and Maria's face
looked like a nucleus of innocence upon which it centred. Harry
leaned over his little daughter and kissed her.

"Father has got something to tell you, precious," he said.

Maria hitched away a little from him, and made no reply.

"Ida, Miss Slome, tells me that she thinks you know, and so I made up
my mind I had better tell you, and not wait any longer, although I
shall not take any decisive step before--before November. What would
you say if father should bring home a new mother for his little girl,
dear?"

"I should say I would rather have Aunt Maria," replied Maria,
decisively. She choked back a sob.

"I've got nothing to say against Aunt Maria," said Harry. "She's been
very kind to come here, and she's done all she could, but--well, I
think in some ways, some one else--Father thinks you will be much
happier with another mother, dear."

"No, I sha'n't."

Harry hesitated. The child's voice sounded so like her dead mother's
that he felt a sudden guilt, and almost terror.

"But if father were happier--you want father to be happy, don't you,
dear?" he asked, after a little.

Then Maria began to sob in good earnest. She threw her arms around
her father's neck. "Yes, father, I do want you to be happy," she
whispered, brokenly.

"If father's little girl were large enough to keep his house for him,
and were through school, father would never think of taking such a
step," said Harry Edgham, and he honestly believed what he said. For
the moment his old love of life seemed to clutch him fast, and Ida
Slome's radiant visage seemed to pale.

"Oh, father," pleaded Maria. "Aunt Maria would marry you, and I would
a great deal rather have her."

"Nonsense," said Harry Edgham, laughing, with a glance towards the
door.

"Yes, she would, father; that was the reason she got her pompadour."

Harry laughed again, but softly, for he was afraid of Aunt Maria
overhearing. "Nonsense, dear," he said again. Then he kissed Maria in
a final sort of way. "It will be all for the best," he said, "and we
shall all be happier. Father doesn't think any the less of you, and
never will, and he is never going to forget your own dear mother; but
it is all for the best, the way he has decided. Now, good-night,
darling, try to go to sleep, and don't worry about anything."

It was not long before Maria did fall asleep. Her thoughts were in
such a whirl that it was almost like intoxication. She could not seem
to fix her mind on anything long enough to hold herself awake. It was
not merely the fact of her father's going to marry again, it was
everything which that involved. She felt as if she were looking into
a kaleidoscope shaken by fate into endless changes. The changes
seemed fairly to tire her eyes into sleep.

The very next afternoon Aunt Maria went home. Harry announced his
matrimonial intentions to her before he went to New York, and she
said immediately that she would take the afternoon train.

"But," said Harry, "I thought maybe you would stay and be at
the--wedding, Maria. I don't mean to get married until the November
vacation, and it is only the first of September now. I don't see why
you are in such a hurry."

"Yes," replied Aunt Maria, "I suppose you thought I would stay and
get the house cleaned, and slave here like a dog, getting ready for
you to be married. Well, I sha'n't; I'm tired out. I'm going to take
the train this afternoon."

Harry looked helplessly at her.

"I don't see what Maria and I are going to do then," said he.

"If it wasn't for taking Maria away from school, I would ask her to
come and make me a visit, poor child," said Aunt Maria, "until you
brought her new ma home. I have only a hundred dollars a year to live
on, but I'd risk it but I could make her comfortable; but she can't
leave her school."

"No, I don't see how she can," said Harry, still helplessly. "I
thought you'd stay, Maria. There is the house to be cleaned, and some
painting and papering. I thought--"

"Yes, I'll warrant you thought," said Aunt Maria, with undisguised
viciousness. "But you were mistaken; I am not going to stay."

"But I don't see exactly--"

"Oh, Lord, you and Maria can take your meals at Mrs. Jonas White's,
she'll be glad enough to have you; and you can hire the cleaning
done," said Aunt Maria, with a certain pity in the midst of her
disappointment and contempt.

It seemed to Maria, when her aunt went away that afternoon, as if she
could not bear it. There is a law of gravitation for the soul as well
as for the body, and Maria felt as one who had fallen from a known
quantity into strangeness, with a horrible shock.

"Now, if she don't treat you well, you send word, and I'll have you
come and stay with me," whispered Aunt Maria at the last.

Maria loved Aunt Maria when she went away. She went to school late
for the sake of seeing her off; and she was late in the geography
class, but Miss Slome only greeted her with a smile of radiant
reassurance.

At recess, Gladys Mann snuggled up to her.

"Say, is it true?" she whispered.

"Is what true?"

"Is your father goin' to get married to teacher?"

"Yes," said Maria. Then she gave Gladys a little push. "I wish you'd
let me alone," she said.



Chapter VII


Extreme youth is always susceptible to diversion which affords a
degree of alleviation for grief. Many older people have the same
facility of turning before the impetus of circumstances to another
view of life, which serves to take their minds off too close
concentration upon sorrow, but it is not so universal. Maria,
although she was sadly lonely, in a measure, enjoyed taking her meals
at Mrs. Jonas White's. She had never done anything like it before.
The utter novelty of sitting down to Mrs. White's table, and eating
in company with her and Mr. Jonas White, and Lillian White, and a son
by the name of Henry, amused her. Then, too, they were all very kind
to her. They even made a sort of heroine of her, especially at noon,
when her father was in New York and she, consequently, was alone.
They pitied her, in a covert sort of fashion, because her father was
going to get married again, especially Mrs. White and Lillian.
Lillian was a very pretty girl, with a pert carriage of blond head,
and a slangy readiness of speech.

"Well, she's a dandy, as far as looks and dress go, and maybe she'll
make you a real good mother-in-law," she said to Maria. Maria knew
that Lillian should have said step-mother, but she did not venture to
correct her.

"Looks ain't everything," said Mrs. White, with a glance at her
daughter. She had thought of the possibility of Harry Edgham taking a
fancy to her Lillian.

Mr. Jonas White, who with his son Henry kept a market, thereby
insuring such choice cuts of meat, spoke then. He did not, as a rule,
say much at table, especially when Maria and her father, who in his
estimation occupied a superior place in society, were present.

"Guess Mr. Edgham knows what he's about," said he. "He's going to
marry a good-looking woman, and one that's capable of supportin'
herself, if he's laid up or anything happens to him. Guess she's all
right."

"I guess so, too," said Henry White. Both nodded reassuringly at
Maria, who felt mournfully comforted.

"Shouldn't wonder if she'd saved something, too," said Mr. White.

When he and his son were on their way back to the market, driving in
the white-covered wagon with "J. White & Son" on the sides thereof,
they agreed that women were queer.

"There's your mother and Lillian, they mean all right," said Jonas
White, "but they were getting that poor young one all stirred up."

Maria never settled with herself whether the Whites thought she had a
pleasant prospect before her or the reverse, but they did not
certainly influence her to love Miss Ida Slome any more.

Miss Slome was so kind to Maria, in those days, that it really seemed
to her that she ought to love her. She and her father were invited to
take tea at Miss Slome's boarding-house, and after tea they sat in
the little parlor which the teacher had for her own, and Miss Slome
sang and played to them. She had a piano. Maria heard her and her
father talking about the place in the Edgham parlor where it was to
stand. Harry stood over Miss Slome as she was singing, and Maria
observed how his arm pressed against her shoulder.

After the song was done, Harry and Miss Slome sat down on the sofa,
and Harry drew Maria down on the other side. Harry put his arm around
his little daughter, but not as if he realized it, and she peeked
around and saw how closely he was embracing Miss Slome, whose cheeks
were a beautiful color, but whose set smile never relaxed. It seemed
to Maria that Miss Slome smiled exactly like a doll, as if the smile
were made on her face by something outside, not by anything within.
Maria thought her father was very silly. She felt scorn, shame, and
indignation at the same time. Maria was glad when it was time to go
home. When her father kissed Miss Slome, she blushed, and turned away
her head.

Going home, Harry almost danced along the street. He was as
light-hearted as a boy, and as thoughtlessly in love.

"Well, dear, what do you think of your new mother?" he asked, gayly,
as they passed under the maples, which were turning, and whose
foliage sprayed overhead with a radiance of gold in the electric
light.

Then Maria made that inevitable rejoinder which is made always, which
is at once trite and pathetic. "I can't call her mother," she said.

But Harry only laughed. He was too delighted and triumphant to
realize the pain of the child, although he loved her. "Oh, well,
dear, you needn't until you feel like it," he said.

"What am I going to call her, father?" asked Maria, seriously.

"Oh, anything. Call her Ida."

"She is too old for me to call her that," replied Maria.

"Old? Why, dear, Ida is only a girl."

"She is a good deal over thirty," said Maria. "I call that very old."

"You won't, when you get there yourself," replied Harry, with another
laugh. "Well, dear, suit yourself. Call her anything you like."

It ended by Maria never calling her anything except "you," and
referring to her as "she" and "her." The woman, in fact, became a
pronoun for the child, who in her honesty and loyalty could never put
another word in the place which had belonged to the noun, and feel
satisfied.

Maria was very docile, outwardly, in those days, but inside she was
in a tumult of rebellion. She went home with Miss Slome when she was
asked, but she was never gracious in response to the doll-like smile,
and the caressing words, which were to her as automatic as the smile.
Sometimes it seemed to Maria that if she could only have her own
mother scold her, instead of Miss Slome's talking so sweetly to her,
she would give the whole world.

For some unexplained cause, the sorrow which Maria had passed through
had seemed to stop her own emotional development. She looked at
Wollaston Lee sometimes and wondered how she had ever had dreams
about him; how she had thought she would like him to go with her,
and, perhaps, act as silly as her father did with Miss Slome. She
remembered how his voice sounded when he said she was nothing but a
girl, and a rage of shame seized her. "He needn't worry," she
thought. "I wouldn't have him, not if he was to go down on his knees
in the dust." She told Gladys Mann that she thought Wollaston Lee was
a very homely boy, and not so very smart, and Gladys told another
girl whose brother knew Wollaston Lee, and he told him. After a
little, Wollaston and Maria never spoke when they met. The girl did
not seem to see the boy; she was more delicate in her manner of
showing aversion, but the boy gazed straight at her with an insolent
stare, as at one who had dared him. He told the same boy who had told
him what Maria had said, that he thought Amy Long was the prettiest
girl in school, and Maria was homely enough to crack a looking-glass,
and that came back to Maria. Everything said in the school always
came back, by some mysterious law of gravitation.

There was one quite serious difficulty involved in Aunt Maria's
deserting her post, and that was, Maria was too young to be left
alone in the house every night while her father was visiting his
fiancee. She could not stay at Mrs. White's, because it was obviously
unfair to ask them to remain up until nearly midnight to act as her
guardian every, or nearly every, night in the week. However, Harry
submitted the problem to Miss Slome, who solved it at once. She had,
in some respects, a masterly brain, and her executive abilities were
somewhat thrown away in her comparatively humble sphere.

"You must have the house cleaned," said she. "Let the woman you get
to clean stay over until you come home. She won't be afraid to go
home alone afterwards. Those kind of people never are. I suppose you
will get Mrs. Addix?"

"They tell me she is about the best woman for house-cleaning," said
Harry, rather helplessly. He was so unaccustomed to even giving a
thought to household details, that he had a vague sense of self-pity
because he was now obliged to do so. His lost Abby occasionally, he
believed, had employed this Mrs. Addix, but she had never troubled
him about it.

It thus happened that every evening little Maria Edgham sat guarded,
as it were, by Mrs. Addix. Mrs. Addix was of the poor-white race,
like the Manns--in fact, she was distantly related to them. They were
nearly all distantly related, which may have accounted for their
partial degeneracy. Mrs. Addix, however, was a sort of anomaly.
Coming, as she did, of a shiftless, indolent family, she was yet a
splendid worker. She seemed tireless. She looked positively radiant
while scrubbing, and also more intelligent. The moment she stopped
work, she looked like an automatic doll which had run down: all
consciousness of self, or that which is outside self, seemed to leave
her face; it was as if her brain were in her toiling arms and hands.
Moreover, she always went to sleep immediately after Harry had gone
and Maria was left alone with her. She sat in her chair and breathed
heavily, with her head tipped idiotically over one shoulder.

It was not very lively for Maria during those evenings. She felt
afraid to go to bed and leave the house alone except for the heavily
sleeping woman, whom her father had hard work to rouse when he
returned, and who staggered out of the door, when she started home,
as if she were drunk. She herself never felt sleepy; it was even hard
for her to sleep when at last her father had returned and she went to
bed. Often after she had fallen asleep her heart seemed to sting her
awake.

Maria grew thinner than ever. Somebody called Harry Edgham's
attention to the fact, and he got some medicine for her to take. But
it was not medicine which she needed--that is, not medicine for the
body, but for the soul. What probably stung her most keenly was the
fact that certain improvements, for which her mother had always
longed but always thought she could not have, were being made in the
house. A bay-window was being built in the parlor, and one over it,
in the room which had been her father's and mother's, and which Maria
dimly realized was, in the future, to be Miss Ida Slome's. Maria's
mother had always talked a good deal about some day having that
bay-window. Maria reflected that her father could have afforded it
just as well in her mother's day, if her mother had insisted upon it,
like Miss Slome. Maria's mother had been of the thrifty New England
kind, and had tried to have her husband save a little. Maria knew
well enough that these savings were going into the improvements, the
precious dollars which her poor mother had enabled her father to save
by her own deprivations and toil. Maria heard her father and Miss
Slome talk about the maid they were to have; Miss Slome would never
dream of doing her own work, as her predecessor had done. All these
things the child dwelt upon in a morbid, aged fashion, and,
consequently, while her evenings with Mrs. Addix were not enjoyable,
they were not exactly dull. Nearly every room in the house was being
newly papered and painted. Maria and Mrs. Addix sat first in one
room, then in another, as one after another was torn up in the
process of improvement. Generally the room which they occupied was
chaotic with extra furniture, and had a distracted appearance which
grated terribly upon the child's nerves. Only her own room was not
touched. "You shall have your room all fixed up next year," her
father told her. "I would have it done now, but father is going to
considerable expense as it is." Maria assured him, with a sort of
wild eagerness, that she did not want her room touched. It seemed to
her that if the familiar paper which her mother had selected were
changed for something else, and the room altered, that the last
vestige of home would disappear, that she could not bear it.

"Well," said Harry, easily, "your paper will do very well, I guess,
for a while longer; but father will have your room fixed up another
year. You needn't think you are going to be slighted."

That night, Maria and Mrs. Addix sat in Maria's room. The parlor was
in confusion, and so was the dining-room and the guest-chamber;
indeed, the house was at that time in the height of its repairs. That
very day Maria's mother's room had been papered with a beautiful
paper with a sheenlike satin, over which were strewn garlands of pink
roses. Pink was Miss Slome's favorite color. They had a new hard-wood
floor laid in that room, and there was to be a pink rug, and white
furniture painted with pink roses; Maria knew that her father and
Miss Slome had picked it out. That evening, after her father had
gone, and she sat there with the sleeping Mrs. Addix, a sort of
frenzy seized her, or, rather, she worked herself up to it. She
thought of what her mother would have said to that beautiful new
paper, and furniture, and bay-window. Her mother also had liked pink.
She thought of how much her mother would have liked it, and how she
had gone without, and not made any complaint about her shabby old
furnishings, which had that very day been sold to Mrs. Addix for an
offset to her wages, and which Maria had seen carried away. She
thought about it all, and a red flush deepened on her cheeks, and her
blue eyes blazed. For the time she was abnormal. She passed the limit
which separates perfect sanity from mania. She had some fancy-work in
her hands. Mrs. White had suggested that she work in cross-stitch a
cover for the dresser in her new mother's room, and she was engaged
upon that, performing, as she thought, a duty, but her very soul
rebelled against it. She made some mistakes, and whenever she did she
realized with a sort of wicked glee that the thing would not be
perfect, and she never tried to rectify them.

Finally, Maria laid her work softly on the table, beside which she
was sitting. She glanced at Mrs. Addix, whose heavy, measured
breathing filled the room, then she arose. She took the lamp from the
table, and tiptoed out. Maria stole across the hall. The room which
had been her father's and mother's was entirely empty, and the roses
on the satiny wall-paper gleamed out as if they were real. There was
a white-and-silver picture-moulding. Maria set her lamp on the floor.
She looked at the great bay-window, she looked at the roses on the
walls. Then she did a mad thing. The paper was freshly put on; it was
hardly dry. Maria deliberately approached the wall near the
bay-window, where the paper looked somewhat damp; she inserted her
slender little fingers, with a scratching of her nails under the
edge, and she tore off a great, ragged strip. Then she took up her
lamp and returned to her room.

Mrs. Addix was still asleep. She had begun to snore, in an odd sort
of fashion, with deep, regular puffs of breath; it was like the
beating of a drum to peace and rest, after a day of weary and
unskilled labor unprofitable to the soul. Maria sat down again. She
took up her work. She felt very wicked, but she felt better.



Chapter VIII


When Maria's father returned that night, he came, as usual, straight
to the room wherein she and Mrs. Addix were sitting. Maria regarded
her father with a sort of contemptuous wonder, tinctured with
unwilling admiration. Her father, on his return from his evenings
spent with Miss Ida Slome, looked always years younger than Maria had
ever seen him. There was the humidity of youth in his eyes, the flush
of youth on his cheeks, the triumph of youth in his expression. Harry
Edgham, in spite of lines on his face, in spite, even, of a shimmer
of gray and thinness of hair on the temples, looked as young as youth
itself, in this rejuvenation of his affection, for he was very much
in love with the woman whom he was to marry. He had been faithful to
his wife while she lived, even the imagination of love for another
woman had not entered his heart. His wife's faded face had not for a
second disturbed his loyalty; but now the beauty of this other woman
aroused within him long dormant characteristics, like some wonderful
stimulant, not only for the body, but for the soul. When he looked in
Ida Slome's beautiful face he seemed to drink in an elixir of life.
And yet, down at the roots of the man's heart slept the memory of his
wife; for Abby Edgham, with her sallow, faded face, had possessed
something which Ida Slome lacked, and which the man needed, to hold
him. And always in his mind, at this time, was the intention to be
more than kind to his motherless little daughter, not to let her
realize any difference in his feeling for her.

When he came to-night, he looked at the sleeping Mrs. Addix, and at
Maria, taking painful stitches in her dresser cover, at first with a
radiant smile, then with the deepest pity.

"Poor little soul," he said. "You have had a long evening to
yourself, haven't you?"

"I don't mind," replied Maria. She was thinking of the torn
wall-paper, and she did not look her father fully in the eyes.

"Has she been asleep ever since I went?" inquired Harry, in a whisper.

"Yes, sir."

"Poor little girl. Well, it will be livelier by-and-by for you. We'll
have company, and more going on." Harry then went close to Mrs.
Addix, sitting with her head resting on her shoulder, still snoring
with those puffs of heavy breath. "Mrs. Addix," he said.

Mrs. Addix did not stir; she continued to snore.

"Mrs. Addix!" repeated Harry, in a louder tone, but still the
sleeping woman did not stir.

"Good Lord, what a sleeper!" said Harry, still aloud. Then he shook
her violently by the shoulder. "Come, Mrs. Addix," said he, in a
shout; "I've got home, and I guess you'll want to be going yourself."

Mrs. Addix moved languidly, and glanced up with a narrow slit of eye,
as dull as if she had been drugged. Harry shook her again, and
repeated his announcement that he was home and that she must want to
go. At last he roused her, and she stood up with a dazed expression.
Maria got her bonnet and shawl, and she gazed at them vaguely, as if
she were so far removed from the flesh that the garments thereof
perplexed her. Maria put on her bonnet, standing on tiptoe, and Harry
threw the shawl over her shoulders. Then she staggered out of the
room with a mumbled good-night.

"Take care of the stairs, and do not fall," Harry said.

He himself held the light for her, until she was safely down, and the
outer door had closed after her.

"The fresh air will wake her up," he said, laughing. "Not very lively
company, is she, dear?"

"No, sir," replied Maria, simply.

Harry looked lovingly at her, then his eyes fell on the door of the
room which had been papered that day. It occurred to him to go in and
see how the new paper looked.

"Come in with father, and let's see the improvements," he said, in a
gay voice, to Maria.

Maria followed him into the room. It would have been difficult to say
whether triumphant malice and daring, or fear, prevailed in her heart.

Harry, carrying the lamp, entered the room, with Maria slinking at
his heels. The first thing he saw was the torn paper.

"Hullo!" said he. He approached the bay-window with his lamp.
"Confound those paperers!" he said.

For a minute Maria did not say a word. She was not exactly struggling
with temptation; she had inherited too much from her mother's Puritan
ancestry to make the question of a struggle possible when the duty of
truth stared her, as now, in the face. She simply did not speak at
once because the thing appeared to her stupendous, and nobody, least
of all a child, but has a threshold of preparation before stupendous
things.

"They haven't half put the paper on," said her father. "Didn't half
paste it, I suppose. You can't trust anybody unless you are right at
their heels. Confound 'em! There, I've got to go round and blow 'em
up to-morrow, before I go to the city."

Then Maria spoke. "I tore that paper off, father," said she.

Harry turned and stared at her. His face went white. For a second he
thought the child was out of her senses.

"What?" he said.

"I tore that paper off," repeated Maria.

"You? Why?"

The double question seemed to hit the child like a pistol-shot, but
she did not flinch.

"Mother never had paper as pretty as this," she said, "nor new
furniture." Her eyes met her father's with indescribable reproach.

Harry looked at her with almost horror. For the moment the child's
eyes looked like her dead mother's, her voice sounded like her's. He
continued gazing at her.

"I couldn't bear it," said Maria. "She" [she meant Mrs. Addix] "was
asleep. I was all alone. I got to thinking. I came in here and tore
it off."

Harry heaved a deep sigh. He did not look nor was he in the least
angry.

"I know your poor mother didn't have much," said he. He sighed again.
Then he put his arm around Maria and kissed her. "You can have your
room newly papered now, if you want it," said he, in a choking voice.
"Father will send you over to Ellisville to-morrow with Mrs. White,
and you can pick out some paper your own self, and father will have
it put right on."

"I don't care about any," said Maria, and she began to sob.

"Father's baby," said Harry.

She felt his chest heave, and realized that her father was weeping as
well as she.

"Oh, father, I don't want new paper," she sobbed out, convulsively.
"Mother picked out that on my room, and--and--I am sorry I tore this
off."

"Never mind, darling," said Harry. He almost carried the child back
to her own room. "Now get to bed as soon as you can, dear," he said.

After Maria, trembling and tearful, had undressed and was in bed, her
father came back into the room. He held a small lamp in one hand, and
a tumbler with some wine in the other.

"Here is some of the wine your mother had," said Harry. "Now I want
you to sit right up and drink this."

"I--don't want it, father," gasped Maria.

"Sit right up and drink it."

Maria sat up. The tumbler was a third full, and the wine was an old
port. Maria drank it. Immediately her head began to swim; she felt in
a sort of daze when her father kissed her, and bade her lie still and
go right to sleep, and went out of the room. She heard him, with
sharpened hearing, enter her mother's room. She remembered about the
paper, and the new furniture, and how she was to have a new mother,
and how she had torn the paper, and how her own mother had never had
such things, but she remembered through a delicious haze. She felt a
charming warmth pervade all her veins. She was no longer unhappy.
Nothing seemed to matter. She soon fell asleep.

As for Harry Edgham, he entered the empty room which he had occupied
with his dead wife. He set the lamp on the floor and approached the
paper, which poor little Maria, in her fit of futile rebellion, had
torn. He carefully tore off still more, making a clean strip of the
paper where Maria had made a ragged one. When he had finished, it
looked as if the paper had in reality dropped off because of
carelessness in putting on. He gathered up the pieces of paper and
stood looking about the room.

There is something about an empty room, empty except of memories, but
containing nothing besides, no materialities, no certainties as to
the future, which is intimidating to one who stops and thinks. Harry
Edgham was not, generally speaking, of the sort who stop to think;
but now he did. The look of youth faded from his face. Instead of the
joy and triumph which had filled his heart and made it young again,
came remembrance of the other woman, and something else, which
resembled terror and dread. For the first time he deliberated whether
he was about to do a wise thing: for the first time, the image of Ida
Slome's smiling beauty, which was ever evident to his fancy, produced
in him something like doubt and consternation. He looked about the
room, and remembered the old pieces of furniture which had that day
been carried away. He looked at the places where they had stood. Then
he remembered his dead wife, as he had never remembered her before,
with an anguish of loss. He said to himself that if he only had her
back, even with her faded face and her ready tongue, that old,
settled estate would be better for him than this joy, which at once
dazzled and racked him. Suddenly the man, as he stood there, put his
hands before his face; he was weeping like a child. That which Maria
had done, instead of awakening wrath, had aroused a pity for himself
and for her, which seemed too great to be borne. For the instant, the
dead triumphed over the living.

Then Harry took up the lamp and went to his own room. He set the lamp
on the dresser, and looked at his face, with the rays thrown upward
upon it, very much as Maria had done the night of her mother's death.
When he viewed himself in the looking-glass, he smiled involuntarily;
the appearance of youth returned. He curled his mustache and moved
his head this way and that. He thought about some new clothes which
he was to have. He owned to himself, with perfect ingenuousness, that
he was, in his way, as a man, as good-looking as Ida herself.
Suddenly he remembered how Abby had looked when she was a young girl
and he had married her; he had not compared himself so favorably with
her. The image of his dead wife, as a young girl, was much fairer in
his mind than that of Ida Slome.

"There's no use talking, Abby was handsomer than Ida when she was
young," he said to himself, as he began to undress. He went to sleep
thinking of Abby as a young girl, but when once asleep he dreamed of
Ida Slome.



Chapter IX


Harry and Ida Slome were to be married the Monday before
Thanksgiving. The school would close on the Friday before.

Ida Slome possessed, along with an entire self-satisfaction, a vein
of pitiless sense, which enabled her to see herself as others might
see her, and which saved her from the follies often incident to the
self-satisfied. She considered herself a beauty; she thought, and
with reason, that she would be well worth looking at in her
wedding-clothes, but she also told herself that it was quite possible
that some remarks might be made to her disparagement if she had the
wedding to which her inclination prompted her. She longed for a white
gown, veil, bridesmaids, and the rest, but she knew better. She knew
that more could be made of her beauty and her triumph if she
curtailed her wish. She realized that Harry's wife had been dead only
a little more than a year, and that, although still a beauty, she was
not a young girl, and she steered clear of criticism and ridicule.

The ceremony was performed in the Presbyterian church Monday
afternoon. Ida wore a prune-colored costume, and a hat trimmed with
pansies. She was quite right in thinking that she was adorable in it,
and there was also in the color, with its shade of purple, a delicate
intimation of the remembrance of mourning in the midst of joy. The
church was filled with people, but there were no bridesmaids. Some of
Ida's scholars acted as ushers. Wollaston Lee was among them. To
Maria's utter astonishment, he did not seem to realize his trying
position as a rejected suitor. He was attired in a new suit, and wore
a white rosebud in his coat, and Maria glanced at him with mingled
admiration and disdain.

Maria sat directly in front of the pulpit, with Mrs. Jonas White and
Lillian. Mrs. White had a new gown of some thin black stuff,
profusely ornamented with jet, and Lillian had a new pink silk gown,
and wore a great bunch of roses. The situation, with regard to Maria,
in connection with the wedding ceremony and the bridal trip, had been
a very perplexing one. Harry had some western cousins, far removed,
both by blood and distance. Aunt Maria and her brother were the only
relatives on his former wife's side. Aunt Maria had received an
invitation, both from Harry and the prospective bride, to be present
at the wedding and remain in the house with Maria until the return of
the bridal couple from their short trip. She had declined in a few
stilted words, although Harry had sent a check to cover the expenses
of her trip, which was returned in her letter.

"The fact is, I don't know what to do with Maria," Harry said to Ida
Slome, a week before the wedding. "Maria won't come, and neither will
her brother's wife, and she can't be left alone, even with the new
maid. We don't know the girl very well, and it won't do."

Ida Slome solved the problem with her usual precision and promptness.

"Then," said she, "she will have to board at Mrs. White's until we
return. There is nothing else to do."

It was therefore decided that Maria was to board at Mrs. White's,
although it involved some things which were not altogether
satisfactory to Ida. Maria could not sit all alone in a pew, and
watch her father being married to his second wife, that was obvious;
and, since Mrs. Jonas White was going to take charge of her, there
was nothing else to do but to place herself and daughter in a
position of honored intimacy. Mrs. Jonas White said quite openly that
she was not in any need of taking boarders, that she had only taken
Mr. Edgham and Maria to oblige, and that she now was to take poor
little Maria out of pity. She, in reality, did pity Maria, for a good
many reasons. She was a shrewd woman, and she gauged Miss Ida Slome
pitilessly. However, she had to admit that she had shown some
consideration in one respect. In the midst of her teaching, and
preparations for her wedding, she had planned a lovely dress for
Maria. It was unquestionable but the realization of her own
loveliness, and her new attire had an alleviating influence upon
Maria. There was a faint buzz of admiration for her when she entered
the church. She looked as if enveloped in a soft gray cloud. Ida had
planned a dress of some gray stuff, and a soft gray hat, tied under
her chin with wide ribbons, and a long gray plume floating over her
golden-fleece of hair. Maria had never owned such a gown, and, in
addition, she had her first pair of kid-gloves of gray, to match the
dress, and long, gray coat, trimmed with angora fur. She was charming
in it, and, moreover, the gray, as her step-mother's purple,
suggested delicately, if one so chose to understand a dim yet
pleasing melancholy, a shade, as it were, of remembrance.

Maria had been dressed at home, under Mrs. White's supervision. Maria
had viewed herself in the new long mirror in her mother's room, which
was now resplendent with its new furnishings, and she admitted to
herself that she was lovelier than she had ever been, and that she
had Miss Ida Slome to thank for it.

"I will say one thing," said Mrs. White, "she has looked out for you
about your dress, and she has shown real good taste, too."

Maria turned herself about before the glass, which reflected her
whole beautiful little person, and she loved herself so much that for
the first time it seemed to her that she almost loved Ida. She was
blushing and smiling with pleasure.

Mrs. White sighed. "Well, maybe it is for the best," said she. "One
never knows about such things, how they will work out."

Maria listened, with a degree of indignation and awe, to the service.
She felt her heart swelling with grief at the sight of this other
woman being made her father's wife and put in the place of her own
mother, and yet, as a musical refrain is the haunting and
ever-recurrent part of a composition, so was her own charming
appearance. She felt so sure that people were observing her, that she
blushed and dared not look around. She was, in reality, much
observed, and both admired and pitied.

People, both privately and outspokenly, did not believe that the
step-mother would be, in a way, good to the child by the former
marriage. Ida Slome was not exactly a favorite in Edgham. People
acquiesced in her beauty and brilliancy, but they did not entirely
believe in her or love her. She stood before the pulpit with her same
perfect, set smile, displaying to the utmost the sweet curves of her
lips. Her cheeks retained their lovely brilliancy of color. Harry
trembled, and his face looked pale and self-conscious, but Ida
displayed no such weakness. She replied with the utmost self-poise to
the congratulations which she received after the ceremony. There was
an informal reception in the church vestry. Cake and ice-cream and
coffee were served, and Ida and Harry and Maria stood together. Ida
had her arm around Maria most of the time, but Maria felt as if it
were an arm of wood which encircled her. She heard Ida Slome
addressed as Mrs. Edgham, and she wanted to jerk herself away and
run. She lost the consciousness of herself in her new attire.

Once Harry looked around at her, and received a shock. Maria's face
looked to him exactly like her mother's, although the coloring was so
different. Maria was a blonde, and her mother had been dark. There
was something about the excitement hardly restrained in her little
face, which made the man realize that the dead wife yet lived and
reigned triumphant in her child. He himself was conscious that he
conducted himself rather awkwardly and foolishly. A red spot burned
on either cheek. He spoke jerkily, and it seemed to him that
everything he said was silly, and that people might repeat it and
laugh. He was relieved when it was all over and he and Ida were in
the cab, driving to the station. When they were rolling rapidly
through a lonely part of the road, he put his arm around his new
wife, and kissed her. She received his kiss, and looked at him with
her set smile and the set sparkle in her beautiful eyes. Again the
feeling of almost terror which he had experienced the night when
Maria had torn the paper off in her mother's room, came over him.
However, he made an effort and threw it off.

"Poor little Maria looked charming, thanks to you, dearest," he said,
tenderly.

"Yes, I thought she did. That gray suit was just the thing for her,
wasn't it? I never saw her look so pretty before," returned Ida, and
her tone was full of self-praise for her goodness to Maria.

"Well, she will be a great deal happier," said Harry. "It was a
lonesome life for a child to lead."

Harry Edgham had not an atom of tact. Any woman might have judged
from his remarks that she had been married on account of Maria; but
Ida only responded with her never-changing smile.

"Yes," said she, "I think myself that she will be much happier,
dear." Privately she rather did resent her husband's speech, but she
never lost sight of the fact that a smile is more becoming than a
frown.

Maria remained boarding at Mrs. Jonas White's until her father and
his new wife returned. She did not have a very happy time. In the
first place, the rather effusive pity with which she was treated by
the female portion of the White family, irritated her. She began to
consider that, now her father had married, his wife was a member of
her family, and not to be decried. Maria had a great deal of pride
when those belonging to her were concerned. One day she retorted
pertly when some covert remark, not altogether to her new mother's
laudation, had been made by Lillian.

"I think she is perfectly lovely," said she, with a toss of her head.

Lillian and her mother looked at each other. Then Lillian, who was
not her match for pertness, spoke.

"Have you made up your mind what to call her?" she asked. "Mummer, or
mother?"

"I shall call her whatever I please," replied Maria; "it is nobody's
business." Then she arose and went out of the room, with an absurd
little strut.

"Lord a-massy!" observed Mrs. Jonas White, after she had gone.

"I guess Ida Slome will have her hands full with that young one,"
observed Lillian.

"I guess she will, too," assented her mother. "She was real sassy.
Well, her mother had a temper of her own; guess she's got some of it."

Mr. Jonas White and Henry were a great alleviation of Maria's
desolate estate during her father's absence. Somehow, the men seemed
to understand better than the women just how she felt: that she would
rather be let alone, now it was all over, than condoled with and
pitied. Mr. Henry White took one of the market horses, hitched him
into a light buggy, and took Maria out riding two evenings, when the
market was closed. It was a warm November, and the moon was full.
Maria quite enjoyed her drive with Mr. Henry White, and he never said
one word about her father's marriage, and her new mother--her pronoun
of a mother--all the way. Mr. Henry White had too long a neck, and
too large a mouth, which was, moreover, too firmly set, otherwise
Maria felt that, with slight encouragement, she might fall in love
with him, since he showed so much delicacy. She counted up the
probable difference in their ages, and estimated it as no more than
was between her father and Her. However, Mr. Henry White gave her so
little encouragement, and his neck was so much too long above his
collar, that she decided to put it out of her mind.

"Poor little thing," Mr. Henry White said to his father, next day,
"she's about wild, with mother and Lill harping on it all the time."

"They mean well," said Mr. White.

"Of course they do; but who's going to stand this eternal harping? If
women folks would only stop being so durned kind, and let folks alone
sometimes, they'd be a durned sight kinder."

"That's so," said Mr. Jonas White.

Maria's father and his bride reached home about seven on the Monday
night after Thanksgiving. Maria re-entered her old home in the
afternoon. Miss Zella Holmes, who was another teacher of hers, went
with her. Ida had requested her to open the house. Ida's former
boarding-house mistress had cooked a large turkey, and made some
cakes and pies and bread. Miss Zella Holmes drove around for Maria in
a livery carriage, and all these supplies were stowed in beside them.
On the way they stopped at the station for the new maid, whose train
was due then. She was a Hungarian girl, with a saturnine, almost
savage visage. Maria felt an awe of her, both because she was to be
their maid, and they had never kept one, and because of her
personality.

When they reached home, Miss Zella Holmes, who was very lively and
quick in her ways, though not at all pretty, gave orders to the maid
in a way which astonished Maria. She was conscious of an astonishment
at everything, which had not before possessed her. She looked at the
kitchen, the dining-room, the sitting-room, the parlor, all the old
apartments, and it was exactly as if she saw old friends with new
heads. The sideboard in the dining-room glittered with the wedding
silver and cut-glass. New pictures hung on the sitting-room and
parlor walls, beside the new paper. Wedding gifts lay on the tables.
There had been many wedding gifts. Miss Zella Holmes flew about the
house, with the saturnine Hungarian in attendance. Maria, at Miss
Holmes's bidding, began to lay the table. She got out some new
table-linen, napkins, and table-cloth, which had been a wedding
present. She set the table with some new china. She looked, with a
numb feeling, at her mother's poor old blue-and-white dishes, which
were put away on the top shelves.

"I think it would be a very good idea to pack away those dishes
altogether, and put them in a box up in the garret," said Miss
Holmes. Then she noticed Maria's face. "They will come in handy for
your wedding outfit, little girl," she added, kindly and jocosely,
but Maria did not laugh.

Every now and then Maria looked at the clock on the parlor shelf,
that was also new. The old sitting-room clock had disappeared; Maria
did not know where, but she missed the face of it as if it had been
the face of a friend. Miss Holmes also glanced frequently at the new
clock. There arose a fragrant odor of warming potatoes and gravy from
the kitchen.

"It is almost time for them," said Miss Holmes.

She was very much dressed-up, Maria thought. She wore a red silk gown
with a good many frills about the shoulders. She was very slight, and
affected frills to conceal it. Out of this mass of red frills arose
her little, alert head and face, homely, but full of vivacity. Maria
thought her very nice. She would have liked her better for a mother
than Ida. When Miss Zella Holmes smiled it seemed to come from within.

At last a carriage came rapidly up to their door, and Miss Holmes
sprang to open it. Maria remained in the dining-room. Suddenly an
uncanny fancy had seized her and terrified her. Suppose her father
should look different, like everything else? Suppose it should be to
her as if he had a new head? She therefore remained in the
dining-room, trembling. She heard her father's voice, loud and merry.
"Where is Maria?" Still, Maria did not stir. Then her father came
hurrying into the room, and behind him she who had been Ida Slome,
radiant and triumphant, in her plum-colored array, with the same
smile with which she had departed on her beautiful face. Harry caught
Maria in his arms, rubbed his cold face against her soft little one,
and kissed her.

"How is father's little girl?" he asked, with a break in his voice.

"Pretty well, thank you," replied Maria. She gave a helpless little
cling to her father, then she stood away.

"Speak to your new mother, darling," said Harry.

"How do _You do_?" said Maria, obediently, and Ida said, "You
darling," and then kissed her exactly as if she had been an
uncommonly well-constructed doll, with a clock-work system which
fitted her to take such a part with perfect accuracy.

Harry watched his wife and daughter rather anxiously. He seized the
first opportunity to ask Maria, aside, if she had been well, and if
she had been happy and comfortable at Mrs. White's. Then he wound up
with the rather wistful inquiry:

"You are going to love your new mother, aren't you, darling? Don't
you think she is lovely?"

Ida had gone up-stairs with Miss Holmes, to remove her wraps.

"Yes, sir, I think She is lovely," replied Maria.



Chapter X


Ida Edgham was, in some respects, a peculiar personality. She was
as much stronger, in another way, than her husband, as her
predecessor had been. She was that anomaly: a creature of supreme
self-satisfaction, who is yet aware of its own limits. She was so
unemotional as to be almost abnormal, but she had head enough to
realize the fact that absolute unemotionlessness in a woman detracts
from her charm. She therefore simulated emotion. She had a spiritual
make-up, a panoply of paint and powder for the soul, as truly as any
actress has her array of cosmetics for her face. She made no effort
to really feel, she knew that was entirely useless, but she observed
all the outward signs and semblance of feeling more or less
successfully. She knew that to take up her position in Harry Edgham's
house like a marble bust of Diana, which had been one of her
wedding-presents, would not be to her credit. She therefore put
herself to the pace which she would naturally be expected to assume
in her position. She showed everybody who called her new possessions,
with a semblance of delight which was quite perfect. She was, in
reality, less deceptive in that respect than in others. She had a
degree of the joy of possession, or she would not have been a woman
at all, and, in fact, would not have married. She had wanted a home
and a husband; not as some women want them, for the legitimate desire
for love and protection, but because she felt a degree of
mortification on account of her single estate. She had had many
admirers, but, although no one ever knew it, not one offer of
marriage, the acceptance of which would not have been an absurdity,
before poor Harry Edgham. She was not quite contented to accept him.
She had hoped for something better; but he was good-looking, and
popular, and his social standing, in her small world, was good. He
was an electrical engineer, with an office in the city, and had a
tolerably good income, although his first wife's New England thrift
had compelled him to live parsimoniously.

Ida made up her mind from the first that thrift, after the plan of
the first woman, should not be observed in her household. Without
hinting to that effect, or without Harry's recognizing it, she so
managed that within a few weeks after her marriage he put an
insurance on his life, which would insure her comfort in case she
outlived him. He owned his house, and she had herself her little
savings, well invested. She then considered that they could live up
to Harry's income without much risk, and she proceeded to do so. It
was not long before the saturnine Hungarian, who could have provided
a regiment of her own countrymen with the coarse food of her race,
but seemed absolutely incapable of carrying out American ideas of
good cookery, was dismissed, and a good cook, at a price which at
first staggered Harry, installed in her place. Then a young girl was
found to take care of the bedrooms, and wait on table, attired in
white gowns and aprons and caps.

Ida had a reception two weeks after her return from her bridal trip,
and an elaborate menu was provided by a caterer from New York. Maria,
in a new white gown, with a white bow on her hair, sat at one end of
the dining-table, shining with cut-glass and softly lighted with
wax-candles under rose-colored shades in silver candlesticks, and
poured chocolate, while another young girl opposite dipped lemonade
from a great cut-glass punch-bowl, which had been one of the
wedding-presents. The table was strewn with pink-and-white
carnations. Maria caught a glimpse now and then of her new mother, in
a rose-colored gown, with a bunch of pink roses on her breast,
standing with her father receiving their guests, and she could
scarcely believe that she was awake and it was really happening. She
began to take a certain pleasure in the excitement. She heard one
woman say to another how pretty she was, "poor little thing," and her
heart throbbed with satisfaction. She felt at once beautiful and
appealing to other people, because of her misfortunes. She turned the
chocolate carefully, and put some whipped-cream on top of each dainty
cup; and, for the first time since her father's marriage, she was not
consciously unhappy. She glanced across the table at the other little
girl, Amy Long, who was dark, and wore a pink bow on her hair, and
she was sure that she herself was much prettier. Then, too, Amy had
not the sad distinction of having lost her mother, and having a
step-mother thrust upon her in a year's time. It is true that once
when Amy's mother, large and portly in a blue satin which gave out
pale white lights on the curves of her great arms and back, and whose
roseate face looked forth from a fichu of real lace pinned with a
great pearl brooch, came up behind her little daughter and
straightened the pink bow on her hair, Maria felt a cruel little
pang. There was something about the look of loving admiration which
Mrs. Long gave her daughter that stung Maria's heart with a sense of
loss. She felt that if her new mother should straighten out her white
bow and regard her with admiration, it would be because of her own
self, and the credit which she, Maria, reflected upon her. Still, she
reflected how charming she looked. Self-love is much better than
nothing for a lonely soul.

That night Maria realized that she was in the second place, so far as
her father was concerned. Ida, in her rose-colored robes, dispensing
hospitality in his home, took up his whole attention. She was really
radiant. She sang and played twice for the company, and her perfectly
true high soprano filled the whole house. To Maria it sounded as
meaningless as the trill of a canary-bird. In fact, when it came to
music, Ida, although she had a good voice, had the mortification of
realizing that her simulation of emotion failed her. Harry did not
like his wife's singing. He felt like a traitor, but he could not
help realizing that he did not like it. But the moment Ida stopped
singing, he looked at her, and fairly wondered that he had married
such a beautiful creature. He felt humble before her. Humility was
not a salutary condition of mind for him, but this woman inspired it
now, and would still more in the future. In spite of his first wife's
scolding, her quick temper, he had always felt himself as good as she
was. The mere fact of the temper itself had served to give him a
sense of equality and, perhaps, superiority, but this woman never
showed temper. She never failed to respond with her stereotyped smile
to everything that was said. She seemed to have no faults at all, to
realize none in herself, and not to admit the possibility of any one
else doing so.

Harry felt himself distinctly in the wrong beside such unquestionable
right. He even did not think himself so good-looking as he had
formerly done. It seemed to him that he looked much older than Ida.
When they went out together he felt like a lackey in attendance on an
empress. In his own home, it came to pass that he seldom made a
remark when guests were present without a covert glance at his wife
to see what she thought of it. He could always tell what she thought,
even if her face did not change and she made no comment neither then
nor afterwards, and she always made him know, in some subtle fashion,
when he had said anything wrong.

Maria felt very much in the same way at first, but she fought
involuntarily against it. She had a good deal of her mother in her.
Finally, she never looked at Ida when she said anything. She was full
of rebellion although she was quiet and obedient, and very
unobtrusive, in the new state of things.

Ida entertained every Tuesday evening. There was not a caterer as at
the first reception, but Ida herself cooked dainty messes in a silver
chafing-dish, and Maria and the white-capped little maid passed
things. It was not especially expensive, but people in Edgham began
to talk. They said Harry was living beyond his means; but Ida kept
within his income. She had too good a head for reckless extravagance,
although she loved admiration and show. When there were no guests in
the house, Maria used to go to her own room early of an evening, and
read until it was time to go to bed. She realized that her father and
Ida found her somewhat superfluous, although Ida never made any
especial effort to entertain her father that Maria could see. She was
fond of fancy-work, and was embroidering a silk gown for herself. She
embroidered while Harry read the paper. She did not talk much. Maria
used to wonder that her father did not find it dull when he and She
were alone together of an evening. She looked at him reading his
paper, with frequent glances of admiration over it at his beautiful
wife, and thought that in his place, she should much prefer a woman
like her mother, who had kept things lively, even without company,
and even in a somewhat questionable fashion. However, Harry and Ida
themselves went out a good deal. People in Edgham aped city society,
they even talked about the "four hundred." The newly wedded pair were
frequent guests of honor at dinners and receptions, and Ida herself
was a member of the Edgham's Woman's Club, and that took her out a
good deal. Maria was rather lonely. Finally the added state and
luxury of her life, which had at first pleased her, failed to do so.
She felt that she hated all the new order of things, and her heart
yearned for the old. She began to grow thin; she did not sleep much
nor sleep well. She felt tired all the time. One day her father
noticed her changed looks.

"Why, Maria is getting thin!" said he.

"I think it is because she is growing tall," said Ida. "Everybody
seems thin when they are growing tall. I did myself. I was much
thinner than Maria at her age." She looked at Maria with her
invariable smile as she spoke.

"She looks very thin to me," Harry said, anxiously.

He himself looked thin and older. An anxious wrinkle had deepened
between his eyes. It was June, and the days were getting warm. He was
anxious about Ida's health also. Ida was not at all anxious. She was
perfectly placid. It did not seem to her that an overruling
Providence could possibly treat her unkindly. She was rather annoyed
at times, but still never anxious, and utterly satisfied with herself
to that extent that it precluded any doubt as to the final outcome of
everything.

Maria continued to lose flesh. A sentimental interest in herself and
her delicacy possessed her. She used to look at her face, which
seemed to her more charming than ever, although so thin, in the
glass, and reflect, with a pleasant acquiescence, on an early death.
She even spent some time in composing her own epitaph, and kept it
carefully hidden away in a drawer of her dresser, under some linen.

Maria felt a gloomy pride when the doctor, who came frequently to see
Ida, was asked to look at her; she felt still more triumphant when he
expressed it as his opinion that she ought to have a change of air
the moment school closed. The doctor said Maria was running down,
which seemed to her a very interesting state of things, and one which
ought to impress people. She told Gladys Mann the next day at school.

"The doctor says I'm running down," said she.

"You do look awful bad," replied Gladys.

After recess Maria saw Gladys with her face down on her desk,
weeping. She knew that she was weeping because she looked so badly
and was running down. She glanced across at Wollaston Lee, and
wondered if he had noticed how badly she looked, and yet how
charming. All at once the boy shot a glance at her in return; then he
blushed and scowled and took up his book. It all comforted Maria in
the midst of her langour and her illness, which was negative and
unattended by any pain. If she felt any appetite she restrained it,
she became so vain of having lost it.

It was decided that Maria should go and visit her aunt Maria, in New
England, and remain there all summer. Her father would pay her board
in order that she should not be any restraint on her aunt, with her
scant income. Just before Maria went, and just before her school
closed, the broad gossip of the school came to her ears. She
ascertained something which filled her at once with awe, and shame,
and jealousy, and indignation. If one of the girls began to speak to
her about it, she turned angrily away. She fairly pushed Gladys Mann
one day. Gladys turned and looked at her with loving reproach, like a
chidden dog. "What did you expect?" said she. Maria ran away, her
face burning.

After she reached her aunt Maria's nothing was said to her about it.
Aunt Maria was too prudish and too indignant. Uncle Henry's wife,
Aunt Eunice, was away all summer, taking care of a sister who was ill
with consumption in New Hampshire; so Aunt Maria kept the whole
house, and she and Maria and Uncle Henry had their meals together.
Maria loved her uncle Henry. He was a patient man, with a patience
which at times turns to fierceness, of a man with a brain above his
sphere, who has had to stand and toil in a shoe-factory for his bread
and butter all his life. He was non-complainant because of a sort of
stern pride, and a sense of a just cause against Providence, but he
was very kind to Maria; he petted her as if she had been his own
child. Every pleasant night Uncle Henry took Maria for a
trolley-ride, or a walk, and he treated her to ice-cream soda and
candy. Aunt Maria also took good care of the child. She showed a sort
of vicious curiosity with regard to Maria's step-mother and all the
new household arrangements, which Maria did not gratify. She had too
much loyalty, although she longed to say all that she thought to her
aunt, being sure of a violent sympathizer.

"Well, I'll say one thing, she has fixed your clothes nice," said
Aunt Maria.

"She didn't do it, it was Miss Barnes," replied Maria. She could not
help saying that much. She did not want Aunt Maria to think her
step-mother took better care of her wardrobe than her own mother had
done.

"Good land! She didn't hire all these things made?" said Aunt Maria.

"Yes'm."

"Good land! I don't see how your father is going to stand it. I'd
like to know what your poor mother would have said?" said Aunt Maria.

Then Maria's loyalty came to the front. After all, she was her
father's wife, and to be defended.

"I guess maybe father is making more money now," said she.

"Well, I hope to the land he is," said Aunt Maria. "I guess if She
(Aunt Maria also treated Ida like a pronoun) had just one hundred
dollars and no more to get along with, she'd have to do different."

Maria regained her strength rapidly. When she went home, a few days
before her school begun, in September, she was quite rosy and
blooming. She had also fallen in love with a boy who lived next to
Aunt Maria, and who asked her, over the garden fence, to correspond
with him, the week before she left.

It was that very night that Aunt Maria had the telegram. She paid the
boy, then she opened it with trembling fingers. Her brother Henry and
Maria were with her on the porch. It was a warm night, and Aunt Maria
wore an ancient muslin. The south wind fluttered the ruffles on that
and the yellow telegram as she read. She was silent a moment, with
mouth compressed.

"Well," said her brother Henry, inquiringly.

Aunt Maria's face flushed and paled. She turned to Maria.

"Well," she said, "you've got a little sister."

"Good!" said Uncle Henry. "Ever so much more company for you than a
little brother would have been, Maria."

Maria was silent. She trembled and felt cold, although the night was
so warm.

"Weighs seven pounds," said Aunt Maria, in a hard voice.

Maria returned home a week from that day. She travelled alone from
Boston, and her father met her in New York. He looked strange to her.
He was jubilant, and yet the marks of anxiety were deep. He seemed
very glad to see Maria, and talked to her about her little sister in
an odd, hesitating way.

"Her name is Evelyn," said Harry.

Maria said nothing. She and her father were crossing the city to the
ferry in a cab.

"Don't you think that is a pretty name, dear?" asked Harry, with a
queer, apologetic wistfulness.

"No, father, I think it is a very silly name," replied Maria.

"Why, your mother and I thought it a very pretty name, dear."

"I always thought it was the silliest name in the world," said Maria,
firmly. However, she sat close to her father, and realized that it
was something to have him to herself without Her, while crossing the
city. "I don't know as I think Evelyn is such a very silly name,
father," she said, presently, just before they reached the ferry.

Harry bent down and kissed her. "Father's own little girl," he said.

Maria felt that she had been magnanimous, for she had in reality
never liked Evelyn, and would not have named a doll that.

"You will be a great deal happier with a little sister. It will turn
out for the best," said Harry, as the cab stopped. Harry always put a
colon of optimism to all his happenings of life.

The next morning, when Ida was arrayed in a silk negligee, and the
baby was washed and dressed, Maria was bidden to enter the room which
had been her mother's. The first thing which she noticed was a faint
perfume of violet-scented toilet-powder. Then she saw Ida leaning
back gracefully in a reclining-chair, with her hair carefully
dressed. The nurse held the baby: a squirming little bundle of soft,
embroidered flannel. The nurse was French, and she awed Maria, for
she spoke no English, and nobody except Ida could understand her. She
was elderly, small, and of a damaged blond type. Maria approached Ida
and kissed her. Ida looked at her, smiling. Then she asked if she had
had a pleasant summer. She told the nurse, in French, to show the
baby to her. Maria approached the nurse timidly. The flannel was
carefully laid aside, and the small, piteously inquiring and puzzled
face, the inquiry and the bewilderment expressed by a thousand
wrinkles, was exposed. Maria looked at it with a sort of shiver. The
nurse laid the flannel apart and disclosed the tiny feet seeming
already to kick feebly at existence. The nurse said something in
French which Maria could not understand. Ida answered also in French.
Then the baby seemed to experience a convulsion; its whole face
seemed to open into one gape of expostulation at fate. Then its
feeble, futile wail filled the whole room.

"Isn't she a little darling?" asked Ida, of Maria.

"Yes'm," replied Maria.

There was a curious air of aloofness about Ida with regard to her
baby, and something which gave the impression of wistfulness. It is
possible that she was capable of wishing that she had not that
aloofness. It did not in the least seem to Maria as if it were Ida's
baby. She had a vague impression, derived she could not tell in what
manner, of a rosebud laid on a gatepost. Ida did not seem conscious
of her baby with the woodeny consciousness of an apple-tree of a
blossom. When she gazed at it, it was with the same set smile with
which she had always viewed all creation. That smile which came from
without, not within, but now it was fairly tragic.

"Her name is Evelyn. Don't you think it is a pretty name?" asked Ida.

"Yes'm," replied Maria. She edged towards the door. The nurse,
tossing the wailing baby, rose and got a bottle of milk. Maria went
out.

Maria went to school the next Monday, and all the girls asked her if
the baby was pretty.

"It looks like all the babies I ever saw," replied Maria guardedly.
She did not wish to descry the baby which was, after all, her sister,
but she privately thought it was a terrible sight.

Gladys Mann supported her. "Babies do all look alike," said she.
"We've had nine to our house, and I had ought to know."

At first Maria used to dread to go home from school, on account of
the baby. She had a feeling of repulsion because of it, but gradually
that feeling disappeared and an odd sort of fascination possessed her
instead. She thought a great deal about the baby. When she heard it
cry in the night, she thought that her father and Ida might have
sense enough to stop it. She thought that she could stop its crying
herself, by carrying it very gently around the room. Still she did
not love the baby. It only appealed, in a general way, to her
instincts. But one day, when the baby was some six weeks old, and Ida
had gone to New York, she came home from school, and she went up to
her own room, and she heard the baby crying in the room opposite. It
cried and cried, with the insistent cry of a neglected child. Maria
said to herself that she did not believe but the French nurse had
taken advantage of Her absence, and had slipped out on some errand
and left the baby alone.

The baby continued to wail, and a note of despair crept into the
wail. Maria could endure it no longer. She ran across the hall and
flung open the door. The baby lay crying in a little pink-lined
basket. Maria bent over it, and the baby at once stopped crying. She
opened her mouth in a toothless smile, and she held up little, waving
pink hands to Maria. Maria lifted the baby out of her basket and
pressed her softly, with infinite care, as one does something very
precious, to her childish bosom, and at once something strange seemed
to happen to her. She became, as it were, illuminated by love.



Chapter XI


Maria had fallen in love with the baby, and her first impulse, as in
the case of all true love, was secrecy. Why she should have been
ashamed of her affection, her passion, for it was, in fact, passion,
her first, she could not have told. It was the sublimated infatuation
half compounded of dreams, half of instinct, which a little girl
usually has for her doll. But Maria had never had any particular love
for a doll. She had possessed dolls, of course, but she had never
been quite able to rise above the obvious sham of them, the cloth and
the sawdust and the paint. She had wondered how some little girls
whom she had known had loved to sleep with their dolls; as for her,
she would as soon have thought of taking pleasure in dozing off with
any little roll of linen clasped in her arms. It was rather singular,
for she had a vivid imagination, but it had balked at a doll. When,
as sometimes happened, she saw a little girl of her own age, wheeling
with solemnity a doll in a go-cart, she viewed her with amazement and
contempt, and thought privately that she was not altogether bright.
But this baby was different. It did not have to be laid on its back
to make its eyes close, it did not have to be shaken and squeezed to
make it vociferous. It was alive, and Maria, who was unusually alive
in her emotional nature, was keenly aware of that effect. This
little, tender, rosy thing was not stuffed with sawdust, it was
stuffed with soul and love. It could smile; the smile was not painted
on its face in a doll-factory. Maria was so thankful that this baby,
Ida's baby, did not have Her smile, unchanging and permanent for all
observers and all vicissitudes. When this baby smiled it smiled, and
when it cried it cried. It was honest from the crown of its fuzzy
head to the soles of its little pink worsted socks.

At the first reception which Ida gave after the baby came, and when
it was on exhibition in a hand-embroidered robe, it screamed every
minute. Maria was secretly glad, and proud of it. It meant much to
her that _her_ baby should not smile at all the company, whether it
was smiling in its heart or not, the way She did. Maria had no room
in her heart for any other love, except that for her father and the
baby. She looked at Wollaston Lee, and wondered how she could ever
have had dreams about him, how she could ever have preferred a boy to
a baby like her little sister, even in her dreams. She ceased
haunting the post-office for a letter from that other boy in New
England, who had asked her to correspond over the garden fence, and
who had either never written at all, or had misdirected his letter.
She wondered how she had thought for a moment of doing such a thing
as writing to a boy like that. She remembered with disgust how
overgrown that boy was, and how his stockings were darned at the
knees; and how she had seen patches of new cloth on his trousers, and
had heard her aunt Maria say that he was so hard on his clothes on
account of his passion for bird-nesting, that it was all his mother
could do to keep him always decent. How could she have thought for a
moment of a bird-nesting sort of boy? She was so thankful that the
baby was a girl. Maria, as sometimes happens, had a rather inverted
system of growth. With most, dolls come first, then boys; with her,
dolls had not come at all. Boys came first, then her little baby
sister, which was to her in the place of a doll, and the boys got
promptly relegated to the background.

Much to Maria's delight, the French nurse, whom she at once disliked
and stood in awe of, only remained until the baby was about two
months old, then a little nurse-girl was engaged. On pleasant days
the nurse-girl, whose name was Josephine, wheeled out the baby in her
little carriage, which was the daintiest thing of the kind to be
found, furnished with a white lace canopy lined with rose-colored
silk. It was on these occasions that Maria showed duplicity. On
Saturdays, when there was no school, she privately and secretly
bribed Josephine, who was herself under the spell of the baby, to go
home and visit her mother, and let her have the privilege of wheeling
it herself. Maria had a small sum every week for her pocket-money,
and a large part of it went to Josephine in the shape of chocolates,
of which she was inordinately fond; in fact, Josephine, who came of
the poor whites, like Gladys Mann, might have been said to be a
chocolate maniac. Maria used to arrange with Josephine to meet her on
a certain corner on Saturdays, and there the transfer was made:
Josephine became the possessor of half a pound of chocolates, and
Maria of the baby. Josephine had sworn almost a solemn oath to never
tell. She at once repaired to her mother's, sucking chocolates on the
way, and Maria blissfully wheeled the baby. She stood in very little
danger of meeting Her on these occasions, because the Edgham Woman's
Club met on Saturday afternoon. It often happened, however, that
Maria met some of the school-girls, and then nothing could have
exceeded her pride and triumph. Some of them had little brothers or
sisters, but none of them such a little sister as hers.

The baby had, in reality, grown to be a beauty among babies. All the
inflamed red and aged puckers and creases had disappeared; instead of
that was the sweetest flush, like that of just-opened rosebuds.
Evelyn was a compact little baby, fat, but not overlapping and
grossly fat. It was such a matter of pride to Maria that the baby's
cheeks did not hang the least bit in the world, but had only lovely
little curves and dimples. She had become quite a connoisseur in
babies. When she saw a baby whose flabby cheeks hung down and touched
its bib, she was disgusted. She felt as if there was something
morally wrong with such a baby as that. Her baby was wrapped in the
softest white things: furs, and silk-lined embroidered cashmeres, and
her little face just peeped out from the lace frill of a charming
cap. There was only one touch of color in all this whiteness, beside
the tender rose of the baby's face, and that was a little knot of
pale pink baby-ribbon on the cap. Maria often stopped to make sure
that the cap was on straight, and she also stopped very often to tuck
in the white fur rug, and she also stopped often to thrust her own
lovely little girl-face into the sweet confusion of baby and lace and
embroidery and fur, with soft kisses and little, caressing murmurs of
love. She made up little love phrases, which she would have been
inexpressibly ashamed to have had overheard. "Little honey love" was
one of them--"Sister's own little honey love." Once, when walking on
Elm Street under the leafless arches of the elms, where she thought
she was quite alone, although it was a very bright, warm afternoon,
and quite dry--it was not a snowy winter--she spoke more loudly than
she intended, and looked up to see another, bigger girl, the daughter
of the Edgham lawyer, whose name was Annie Stone. Annie Stone was
large of her age--so large, in fact, that she had a nickname of
"Fatty" in school. It had possibly soured her, or her over-plumpness
may have been due to some physical ailment which rendered her
irritable. At all events, Annie Stone had not that sweetness and
placidity of temperament popularly supposed to be coincident with
stoutness. She had a bitter and sarcastic tongue for a young girl.
Maria inwardly shuddered when she saw Annie Stone's fat, malicious
face surveying her from under her fur-trimmed hat. Annie Stone was
always very well dressed, but even that did not seem to improve her
mental attitude. Her large, high-colored face was also distinctly
pretty, but she did not seemed to be cognizant of that to the result
of any satisfaction.

"Sister's little honey love!" she repeated after Maria, with fairly a
snarl of satire.

Maria had spirit, although she was for the moment dismayed.

"Well, she is--so there," said she.

"You wait till you have a few more little honey loves," said Annie
Stone, "and see how you feel."

With that Annie Stone went her way, with soft flounces of her short,
stout body, and Maria was left. She was still defiant; her blood was
up. "Sister's little honey love," she said to the baby, in a tone so
loud that Annie Stone must have heard. "Were folks that didn't have
anything but naughty little brothers jealous of her?" Annie Stone
had, in fact, a notorious little brother, who at the early age of
seven was the terror of his sisters and all law-abiding citizens; but
Annie Stone was not easily touched.

"Sister's little honey love," she shouted back, turning a malignant
face over her shoulder. She had that very morning had a hand-to-hand
fight with her naughty little brother, and finally come out
victorious, by forcing him to the ground and sitting on him until he
said he was sorry. It was not very reasonable that she should be at
all sensitive with regard to him.

After Annie Stone had gone out of sight, Maria went around to the
front of the little carriage, adjusted the white fur rug carefully,
secured a tiny, white mitten on one of the baby's hands, and
whispered to the baby alone. "You _are_ sister's little honey love,
aren't you, precious?" and the baby smiled that entrancing smile of
honesty and innocence which sent the dimples spreading to the lace
frill of her cap, and reached out her arms, thereby displacing both
mittens, which Maria adjusted; then, after a fervent kiss, she went
her way.

However, she was not that afternoon to proceed on her way long
uninterrupted. For some time Josephine, the nurse-girl, had either
been growing jealous, or chocolates were palling upon her. Josephine
had also found her own home locked up, and the key nowhere in
evidence. There would be a good half-hour to wait at the usual corner
for Maria. The wind had changed, and blew cold from the northwest.
Josephine was not very warmly clad. She wore her white gown and
apron, which Mrs. Edgham insisted upon, and which she resented. She
had that day felt a stronger sense of injury with regard to it, and
counted upon telling her mother how mean and set up she thought it
was for any lady as called herself a lady to make a girl wear a
summer white dress in winter. She shivered on her corner of waiting.
Josephine got more and more wroth. Finally she decided to start in
search of Maria and the baby. She gave her white skirts an angry
switch and started. It was not very long after she had turned her
second corner before she saw Maria and the baby ahead of her.
Josephine then ran. She was a stout girl, and she plunged ahead
heavily until she came up with Maria. The first thing Maria knew,
Josephine had grabbed the handle of the carriage--two red girl hands
appeared beside her own small, gloved ones.

"Here, gimme this baby to once," gabbled Josephine in the thick
speech of her kind.

Maria looked at her. "The time isn't up, and you know it isn't,
Josephine," said she. "I just passed by a clock in Melvin & Adams's
jewelry store, and it isn't time for me to be on the corner."

"Gimme the baby," demanded Josephine. She attempted to pull the
carriage away from Maria, but Maria, although her strength was
inferior, had spirit enough to cope with any poor white. Her little
fingers clutched like iron. "I shall not give her up until four
o'clock," said she. "Go back to the corner."

Josephine's only answer was a tug which dislodged Maria's fingers and
hurt her. But Maria came of the stock which believed in trusting the
Lord and keeping the powder dry. She was not yet conquered. The right
was clearly on her side. She and Josephine had planned to meet at the
corner at four o'clock, and it was not quite half-past three, and she
had given Josephine half a pound of chocolates. She did not stop to
reflect a moment. Maria's impulses were quick, and lack of decision
in emergencies was not a failing of hers. She made one dart to the
rear of Josephine. Josephine wore her hair in a braided loop, tied
with a bow of black ribbon. Maria seized upon this loop of brown
braids, and hung. She was enough shorter than Josephine to render it
effectual. Josephine's head was bent backward and she was helpless,
unless she let go of the baby-carriage. Josephine, however, had good
lungs, and she screamed, as she was pulled backward, still holding to
the little carriage, which was also somewhat tilted by the whole
performance.

"Lemme be, you horrid little thing!" she screamed, "or I'll tell your
ma."

"She isn't my mother," said Maria in return. "Let go of my baby."

"She is your ma. Your father married her, and she's your ma, and you
can't help yourself. Lemme go, or I'll tell on you."

"Tell, if you want to," said Maria, firmly, actually swinging with
her whole weight from Josephine's loop of braids. "Let go my baby."

Josephine screamed again, with her head bent backward, and the
baby-carriage tilted perilously. Then a woman, who had been watching
from a window near by, rushed upon the scene. She was Gladys Mann's
mother. Just as she appeared the baby began to cry, and that
accelerated her speed. The windows of her house became filled with
staring childish faces. The woman, who was very small and lean but
wiry, a bundle of muscles and nerve, ran up to the baby-carriage, and
pulled it back to its proper status, and began at once quieting the
frightened baby and scolding the girls.

"Hush, hush," cooed she to the baby. "Did it think it was goin' to
get hurted?" Then to the girls: "Ain't you ashamed of yourselves, two
great girls fightin' right in the street, and most tippin' the baby
over. S'posin' you had killed him?"

Then Josephine burst forth in a great wail of wrath and pain. The
bringing down of the carriage had increased her agony, for Maria
still clung to her hair.

"Oh, oh, oh!" howled Josephine, her head straining back. "She's most
killin' me."

"An' I'll warrant you deserve it," said the woman. Then she added to
Maria--she was entirely impartial in her scolding--"Let go of her,
ain't you shamed." Then to the baby, "Did he think he was goin' to
get hurted?"

"He's a girl!" cried Maria in a frenzy of indignation. "He is not a
boy, he is a girl." She still clung desperately to Josephine's hair,
who in her turn clung to the baby-carriage.

Then Gladys came out of the house, in a miserable, thin, dirty gown,
and she was Maria's ally.

"Let that baby go!" she cried to Josephine. She tugged fiercely at
Josephine's white skirt.

"Gladys Mann, you go right straight into the house. What be you
buttin' in for!" screamed her mother. "You let that girl's hair
alone. Josephine, what you been up to. You might have killed this
baby."

The baby screamed louder. It wriggled around in its little, white fur
nest, and stretched out imploring pink paws from which the mittens
had fallen off. Its little lace hood was awry, the pink rosette was
cocked over one ear. Maria herself began to cry. Then Gladys waxed
fairly fierce. She paid no attention whatever to her mother.

"You jest go round an' ketch on to the kid's wagin," said she, "an'
I'll take care of her." With that her strong little hands made a
vicious clutch at Josephine's braids.

Maria sprang for the baby-carriage. She straightened the lace hood,
she tucked in the fur robe, and put on the mittens. The baby's
screams subsided into a grieved whimper. "Did great wicked girls come
and plague sister's own little precious?" said Maria. But now she had
to reckon with Gladys's mother, who had recovered her equilibrium,
lost for a second by her daughter's manoeuvre. She seized in her turn
the handle of the baby-carriage, and gave Maria a strong push aside.
Then she looked at all three combatants, like a poor-white Solomon.

"Who were sent out with him in the first place, that's what I want to
know?" she said.

"I were," replied Josephine in a sobbing shout. Her head was aching
as if she had been scalped.

"Shet up!" said Gladys's mother inconsistently.

"Did your ma send her out with him?" she queried of her.

"He is not a boy," replied Maria shiftily.

"Yes, she did," said Josephine, still rubbing her head.

Gladys, through a wholesome fear of her mother, had released her hold
on her braids, and stood a little behind.

Mrs. Mann's scanty rough hair blew in the winter wind as she took
hold of the carriage. Maria again tucked in the white fur robe to
conceal her discomfiture. She was becoming aware that she was being
proved in the wrong.

"Shet up!" said Mrs. Mann in response to Josephine's answer. There
was not the slightest sense nor meaning in the remark, but it was, so
to speak, her household note, learned through the exigency of being
in the constant society of so many noisy children. She told
everybody, on general principles, to "shet up," even when she wished
for information which necessitated the reverse.

Mrs. Mann was thin and meagre, and wholly untidy. The wind lashed her
dirty cotton skirt around her, disclosing a dirtier petticoat and
men's shoes. The skin of her worn, blond face had a look as if the
soil of life had fairly been rubbed into it. All the lines of this
face were lax, displaying utter lassitude and no energy. She,
however, had her evanescent streaks of life, as now. Once in a while
a bubble of ancestral blood seemed to come to the surface, although
it soon burst. She had come, generations back, of a good family. She
was the run out weed of it, but still, at times, the old colors of
the blossom were evident. She turned to Maria.

"If," said she, "your ma sent her out with this young one, I don't
see why you went to pullin' her hair fur?"

"I gave her a whole half-pound of chocolates," returned Maria, in a
fine glow of indignation, "if she would let me push the baby till
four o'clock, and it isn't four o'clock yet."

"It ain't more than half-past three," said Gladys.

"Shet up!" said her mother. She stood looking rather helplessly at
the three little girls and the situation. Her suddenly wakened mental
faculties were running down like those of a watch which has been
shaken to make it go for a few seconds. The situation was too much
for her, and, according to her wont, she let it drop. Just then a
whiff of strong sweetness came from the house, and her blank face
lighted up.

"We are makin' 'lasses candy," said she. "You young ones all come in
and hev' some, and I'll take the baby. He can get warm, and a little
of thet candy won't do him no harm, nuther." Mrs. Mann used the
masculine pronoun from force of habit; all her children with the
exception of Gladys were boys.

Maria hesitated. She had a certain scorn for the Manns. She eyed Mrs.
Mann's dirty attire and face. But she was in fact cold, and the smell
of the candy was entrancing. "She said never to take the baby in
anywhere," said she, doubtfully.

Josephine having tired of chocolate, realized suddenly an enormous
hunger for molasses candy. She sniffed like a hunting hound. "She
didn't say not to go into Mrs. Mann's," said she.

"She said anywhere; I heard her tell you," said Maria.

"Mrs. Mann's ain't anywhere," said Josephine, who had a will of her
own. She rushed around and caught up the baby. "She's most froze,"
said she. "She'll get the croup if she don't get warmed up."

With that, Josephine carrying the baby, Maria, Gladys, and Mrs. Mann
all entered the little, squalid Mann house, as hot as a conservatory
and reeking with the smell of boiled molasses.

When Josephine and Maria and the baby started out again, Maria turned
to Josephine.

"Now," said she, "if you don't let me push her as far as the corner
of our street, I'll tell how you took her into Mrs. Mann's. You know
what She'll say."

Josephine, whose face was smeared with molasses candy, and who was
even then sucking some, relinquished her hold on the carriage.
"You'll be awful mean if you do tell," said she.

"I will tell if you don't do what you say you'll do another time,"
said she.

When they reached home, Ida had not returned, but she came in radiant
some few minutes later. She had read a paper on a famous man, for the
pleasure and profit of the Edgham Woman's Club, and she had received
much applause and felt correspondingly elated. Josephine had taken
the baby up-stairs to a little room which had recently been fitted up
for a nursery, and, not following her usual custom, Ida went in there
after removing her outer wraps. She stood in her blue cloth dress
looking at the child with her usual air of radiant aloofness, seeming
to shed her own glory, like a star, upon the baby, rather than
receive its little light into the loving recesses of her own soul.
Josephine and also Maria were in a state of consternation. They had
discovered a large, sticky splash of molasses candy on the baby's
white embroidered cloak. They had washed the baby's sticky little
face, but they did not know what was to be done about the cloak,
which lay over a chair. Josephine essayed, with a dexterous gesture,
to so fold the cloak over that the stain would be for the time
concealed. But Ida Edgham had not been a school-teacher for nothing.
She saw the gesture, and immediately took up the cloak herself.

"Why, what is this on her cloak?" said she.

There was a miserable silence.

"It looks like molasses candy. It is molasses candy," said Ida.
"Josephine, did you give this child molasses candy?" Ida's voice was
entirely even, but there was something terrible about it.

Maria saw Josephine turn white. "She wouldn't have given her the
candy if it hadn't been for me," said she.

Ida stood looking from one to the other. Josephine's face was white
and scared, Maria's impenetrable.

"If you ever give this child candy again, either of you," said Ida,
"you will never take her out again." Then she went out, still smiling.

Josephine looked at Maria with enormous gratitude.

"Say," said she, "you're a dandy."

"You're a cheat!" returned Maria, with scorn.

"I'm awful sorry I didn't wait on the corner till four o'clock,
honest."

"You'd better be."

"Say, but you be a dandy," repeated Josephine.



Chapter XII


Maria began to be conscious of other and more vital seasons than
those of the old earth on which she lived--the seasons of the human
soul. Along with her own unconscious and involuntary budding towards
bloom, the warm rush of the blood in her own veins, she realized the
budding progress of the baby. When little Evelyn was put into short
frocks, and her little, dancing feet were shod with leather instead
of wool, Maria felt a sort of delicious wonder, similar to that with
which she watched a lilac-bush in the yard when its blossoms deepened
in the spring.

The day when Evelyn was put into short frocks, Maria glanced across
the school-room at Wollaston Lee, and her innocent passion, half
romance, half imagination, which had been for a time in abeyance,
again thrilled her. All her pulses throbbed. She tried to work out a
simple problem in her algebra, but mightier unknown quantities were
working towards solution in every beat of her heart. Wollaston shot a
sidelong glance at her, and she felt it, although she did not see it.
Gladys Mann leaned over her shoulder.

"Say," she whispered, "Wollaston Lee is jest starin' at you!"

Maria gave a little, impatient shrug of her shoulders, although a
blush shot over her whole face, and Gladys saw distinctly the back of
her neck turn a roseate color.

"He's awful stuck on you, I guess," Gladys said.

Maria shrugged her shoulders again, but she thought of Wollaston and
then of the baby in her short frock and she felt that her heart was
bursting with joy, as a bud with blossom.

Ida, meantime, was curiously impassive towards her child's
attainments. There was something pathetic about this impassiveness.
Ida was missing a great deal, and more because she did not even know
what she missed. However, she began to be conscious of a settled
aversion towards Maria. Her manner towards her was unchanged, but she
became distinctly irritated at seeing her about. When anything
annoyed Ida, she immediately entertained no doubt whatever that it
was not in accordance with the designs of an overruling Providence.
It seemed manifest to her that if anything annoyed her, it should be
removed. However, in this case, the way of removal did not seem clear
for a long time. Harry was undoubtedly fond of Maria. That did not
trouble Ida in the least, although she recognized the fact. She was
not a woman who was capable of jealousy, because her own love and
admiration for herself made her impregnable. She loved herself so
much more than Harry could possibly love her that his feeling for
Maria did not ruffle her in the least. It was due to no jealousy that
she wished Maria removed, at least for a part of the time. It was
only that she was always conscious of a dissent, silent and helpless,
still persistent, towards her attitude as regarded herself. She knew
that Maria did not think her as beautiful and perfect as she thought
herself, and the constant presence of this small element of negation
irritated her. Then, too, while she was not in the least jealous of
her child, she had a curious conviction that Maria cared more for her
than she herself cared, and that in itself was a covert reproach.
When little Evelyn ran to meet her sister when she returned from
school, Ida felt distinctly disturbed. She had no doubt of her
ultimate success in her purpose of ridding herself of at least the
constant presence of Maria, and in the mean time she continued to
perform her duty by the girl, to that outward extent that everybody
in Edgham pronounced her a model step-mother. "Maria Edgham never
looked half so well in her own mother's time," they said.

Lillian White spoke of it to her mother one Sunday. She had been to
church, but her mother had remained at home on account of a cold.

"I tell you she looked dandy," said Lillian. Lillian was still as
softly and negatively pretty as ever. She was really charming because
she was not angular, because her skin was not thick and coarse,
because she did not look anaemic, but perfectly well fed and
nourished and happy.

"Who?" asked her mother.

"Maria Edgham. She was togged out to beat the band. Everything looked
sort of fadged up that she had before her own mother died. I tell you
she never had anything like the rig she wore to-day."

"What was it?" asked her mother interestedly, wiping her rasped nose
with a moist ball of handkerchief.

"Oh, it was the handsomest brown suit I ever laid my eyes on, with
hand-embroidery, and fur, and a big picture hat trimmed with fur and
chrysanthemums. She's an awful pretty little girl anyhow."

"She always was pretty," said Mrs. White, dabbing her nose again.

"If Ida don't look out, her step-daughter will beat her in looks,"
said Lillian.

"I never thought myself that Ida was anything to brag of, anyway,"
said Mrs. White. She still had a sense of wondering injury that Harry
Edgham had preferred Ida to her Lillian.

Lillian was now engaged to be married, but her mother did not feel
quite satisfied with the man. He was employed in a retail clothing
establishment in New York, and had only a small salary. "Foster
Simpkins" (that was the young man's name) "ain't really what you
ought to have," she often said to Lillian.

But Lillian took it easily. She liked the young man very much as she
would have liked a sugar-plum, and she thought it high time for her
to be married, although she was scarcely turned twenty. "Oh, well,
ma," she said. "Men don't grow on every bush, and Foster is real
good-lookin', and maybe his salary will be raised."

"You ain't lookin' very high," said her mother.

"No use in strainin' your neck for things out of your own sky," said
Lillian, who had at times a shrewd sort of humor, inherited from her
father.

"Harry Edgham would have been a better match for you," her mother
said.

"Lord, I'd a good sight rather have Foster than another woman's
leavin's," replied Lillian. "Then there was Maria, too. It would have
been an awful job to dress her, and look out for her."

"That's so," said her mother, "and then the two sets of children,
too."

Lillian colored and giggled. "Oh, land, don't talk about children,
ma!" said she. "I'm contented as it is. But you ought to have seen
that young one to-day."

"What did Ida wear?" asked Mrs. White.

"She wore her black velvet suit, that she had this winter, and the
way she strutted up the aisle was a caution."

"I don't see how Harry Edgham lives the way he does," said Mrs.
White. "Black velvet costs a lot. Do you s'pose it is silk velvet?"

"You bet."

"I don't see how he does it!"

"He looks sort of worn-out to me. He's grown awful old, I noticed it
to-day."

"Well, all Ida cares for is herself. _She_ don't see he's grown old,
you can be sure of that," said Mrs. White, with an odd sort of
bitterness. Actually the woman was so filled with maternal instincts
that the bare dream of Harry as her Lillian's husband had given her a
sort of motherly solicitude for him, which she had not lost. "It's a
shame," said she.

"Oh, well, it's none of my funeral," said Lillian, easily. She took a
chocolate out of a box which her lover had sent her, and began
nibbling it like a squirrel.

"Poor man," said Mrs. White. Tears of emotion actually filled her
eyes and mingled with the rheum of her cold. She took out her moist
ball of handkerchief again and dabbed both her eyes and nose.

Lillian looked at her half amusedly, half affectionately. "Mother,
you do beat the Dutch," said she.

Mrs. White actually snivelled. "I can't help remembering the time
when his poor first wife died," said she, "and how he and little
Maria came here to take their meals, poor souls. Harry Edgham was
just the one to be worked by a woman, poor fellow."

Lillian sucked her chocolate with a full sense of its sweetness. "Ma,
you can't keep track of all creation, nor cry over it," said she.
"You've got to leave it to the Lord. Have you taken your pink pellet?"

"Poor little Maria, too," said Mrs. White.

"Good gracious, ma, don't you take to worryin' over her," said
Lillian. "Here's your pink pellet. A young one dressed up the way she
was to-day!"

"Dress ain't everything, and nothin' is goin' to make me believe that
Ida Slome is a good mother to her, nor to her own child neither. It
ain't in her."

Lillian, approaching her mother at the window with the pink pellet
and a glass of water, uttered an exclamation. "For the land's sake,
there she is now!" she said. "Look, ma, there is Maria in her new
suit, and she's got the baby in a little carriage on runners. Just
look at the white fur-tails hanging over the back. Ain't that a
handsome suit?"

Mrs. White gazed out eagerly. "It must have cost a pile," said she.
"I don't see how he does it."

"She sees you at the window," said Lillian.

Both she and her mother smiled and waved at Maria. Maria bowed, and
smiled with a sweet irradiation of her rosy face.

"She's a little beauty, anyhow," said Lillian.

"Dear child," said Mrs. White, and she snivelled again.

"Ma, either your cold or the stuff you are takin' is making you
dreadful nervous," said Lillian. "You cry at nothin' at all. How
straight she is! No stoop about her."

Maria was, in fact, carrying herself with an extreme straightness
both of body and soul. She was conscious to the full of her own
beauty in her new suit, and of the loveliness of her little sister in
her white fur nest of a sledge. She was inordinately proud. She had
asked Ida if she might take the child for a little airing before the
early Sunday dinner, and Ida had consented easily.

Ida also wished for an opportunity to talk with Harry about her
cherished scheme, and preferred doing so when Maria was not in the
house. For manifest reasons, too, Sunday was the best day on which to
approach her husband on a subject which she realized was a somewhat
delicate one. She was not so sure of his subservience when Maria was
concerned, as in everything else, and Sunday was the day when his
nerves were less strained, when he had risen late. Ida did not insist
upon his going to church, as his first wife had done. In fact, if the
truth was told, Harry wore his last winter's overcoat this year, and
she was a little doubtful about its appearance in conjunction with
her new velvet costume. He sat in the parlor when Ida entered after
Maria had gone out with Evelyn. Harry looked at her admiringly.

"How stunning you do look in that ve

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