IN WHICH I WILLINGLY TURN MY FACE WESTWARD

The years cannot go on without destroying the old landmarks, and I am so old-fashioned that change of any kind saddens me. People move away, strangers take their houses, the girls marry, children grow up, and everything is so mutable that sometimes my cheerfulness has a haze to it.

I am in a mood of retrospection to-night. I am living over the past and knitting up the ravelled ends.

Dear Rachel! I am thankful that she and Percival continue so happy. It is wonderful how every one recognizes and speaks of the completeness of these two. They do not parade their affection. They seem rather to try to hide it even from me, as if it were almost too sacred for even my kindly eyes. It is in the atmosphere, and, though they go their separate ways, they are more thoroughly together than any other married people I know.

Both Percival and Rachel are becoming very generally recognized now. People are discovering how wonderfully clever their work is, and they share themselves with the public, although it is a sacrifice every time they do so. Rachel’s rather turbulent cleverness has softened down. She says it is because it is “billowed in another greater and gentler sort.” She looks at me rather wistfully sometimes. I know what she thinks, but she does not bore me with questions. I wonder if she thinks I regret anything. Unless I consider that the Percivals have redeemed the record I am keeping, there is nothing especially tempting in the marriages I am watching. I cannot think that they are any happier than I am.

Sallie Cox seems contented most of the time. She has a magnificent establishment, handsomer than all the rest of the girls’ put together. Her husband “doesn’t bother” her, she says, and the Osbornes are very popular.

“I’m glad I’m shallow,” she said to me once. “Shallow hearts do not ache long. If I had a deep nature I should go mad or turn into a saint. As it is, I wear the scars.”

Once, when I went with her to Rachel’s, she sat and looked around the simple, inexpensive house, with the walls all lined with books and no room too good to live in every day, and she said,

“This is the prettiest home I ever was in in my life, and there is not a lace curtain in the house!”

We laughed—everybody laughs at Sallie—and Rachel said gently,

“We don’t need them.”

Sallie looked up quickly and took in the full significance of the words, as she answered in the same tone,

“No, you do not, but I do.” And each woman had told her heart history. Now, Rachel must know almost as much about Sallie as I do; but she never will know all.

Sallie said she went home and hated every room in her house separately and specifically; then she had a good cry over “the perfectness of the Percivals,” and issued invitations to a masked ball.

“That ball was full of significance, Ruth,” she told me afterwards with her most whimsically knowing look. “It was bristling with it. But nobody thought of it except a certain little goose I know named Sara Cox Osborne.”

Jack Whitehouse and Pet Winterbotham are married. They had the most beautiful wedding I ever saw; but it was like watching the babes in the wood, for they are such a young-looking pair.

I understand better now what Pet meant when she talked about Jack’s appearance so much. I think he expressed to her the idea of perpetual youth and eternal spring-time. To me, too, it seems as if he ought always to be yachting in blue and white, or lying at full length on the grass at some girl’s feet. And Pet herself makes an admirable companion-piece. When I see her in a misty white ball-dress, with one man bringing her an ice and another holding her flowers and a third bearing her filmy wraps, I feel that things are quite as they should be. Some people seem to be born for fair weather and smooth sailing.

It is too soon to judge them finally. Norris Whitehouse’s nephew will outgrow the ball-room, and Pet will find in Louise an incentive to grow womanly.

The Asburys have built a fine house since Alice’s father died, and go about a great deal, but seldom together. Asbury lives at the club, and Alice has her mother with her. Alice has embraced Theosophy and spells her name “Alys.” She always is interested in something new and advanced, and whenever I meet her I am prepared to go into ecstasies over a plan to save men’s souls by electricity, or something equally speedy in the moral line. She is daft on spiritual rapid transit.

She does these things because she is a disappointed, clever, ambitious woman, who would have made a noble character if she had been surrounded by right influences.

What would have been the result if Alice had taken as her creed: “The situation that has not its duty, its ideals, was never yet occupied by man. Yes, here in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal; work it out therefrom, and working, live, be free. Fool! the Ideal is in thyself; thy condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same ideal out of; what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? Oh, thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, ‘here or nowhere,’ couldst thou only see”?

Ah, well, she could not. She still is crying to the gods and spelling her name “Alys.” Her cleverness must have an outlet, and, with worse than no husband to lavish it upon, she scatters it to the four winds of heaven and gets herself talked about as “queer.”

May Brandt has bitten into her apples of Sodom, and the taste of ashes is bitter indeed to her. She knows now that Brandt never loved her, and did love Alice. I do not know whether she thinks he still cares for Alice or not. May never had much beauty to lose, but she looks worn and unhappy, and watches Alice with a degree of feeling which would appear vulgar to me if I did not know just how miserable she is. She is hopelessly plain now, and Alice is still like a tall, stately lily. Brandt devours her with his eyes, but Alice makes him keep his distance.

Sallie Cox has been diplomatic and harmless enough to make Alice forgive her, and they are quite good friends; but Alice is magnificent in her scorn of Brandt’s wife, who almost cowers in her presence.

Poor May! I wish I could take that look of suffering from her little pinched, three-cornered face for just one hour. But how could I? How could anybody who knew all about it?

She does not understand Alice in all her moods and vagaries, and Alice does not condescend to explain herself even to her friends. I do not believe that Alice and Brandt have ever spoken on the subject which occupies three minds whenever they two are thrown together. Yet I imagine it would be a relief to May if she were told that. However, she is scarcely noble enough to believe it, even if Alice herself should tell her. But Alice never will. She never gives it a thought. Brandt, too, has honor, though, even if he had not, Alice would have it for him and forbid a word.

It is a fortunate thing for some people’s chances for a future life that there are a reasonable number of consciences distributed through the world, although it would be an Old Maid’s suggestion that sometimes they be allowed to drive instead of being used as a liveried tiger—for ornament and always behind. It is a great pity that people who are supplied with them—and well-cultivated consciences too—have not the courage to live up to them, but allow themselves to be gently and feebly miserable all their lives.

Now, Charlie Hardy has periods of being the most miserable man I ever knew. His last interview with Louise must have been as serious a thing as he ever experienced. He has married Frankie Taliaferro, and she makes the sweetest little kitten of a wife you ever saw. In Louise he would have been protected by a coat of mail. In Frankie he finds it turned into a pale-blue eider-down quilt, which suits his temperament much better.

Louise Whitehouse is coming home soon. Her year abroad has lengthened into several years, and they have been the most beautiful of her life, she writes. “Living with a song in one’s life may be the sweetest while it lasts and before one thinks; but to live by a psalm is to find life infinitely more beautiful and worthier. I never can be thankful enough that my life was taken out of my hands at the time when I clung to it most blindly, and ordered anew by One stronger and wiser than I.”

Tears come to my eyes whenever I think of this girl. I do not quite know why, unless it is that there always is something sad in watching the tempering of a bright young enthusiasm, even though it becomes more useful than when so sparkling and high-strung.

I have been at great pains to have Charlie Hardy realize how happy Louise is, but his conscience still troubles him at times. He says he knows he did the right thing for every one concerned, but he dislikes the idea of himself in so disagreeable a rÔle; and Louise’s opinion of him now, after the one she did have, is a constant humiliation to him. Women always have admired him, and he objects very strongly to any exception to the rule. I think he misses the mental ozone which he found in Louise. I often wonder if men who have loved superior women and married average ones do not have occasional wonderings and yearnings over lost “might have beens.”

The Mayos still live in the brown house, which has been enlarged and greatly beautified recently. I have an enthusiastic friendship with the children, who are growing into slim slips of girls and sturdy, clear-eyed boys, and their house is still a home. Frank’s admiration for soubrettes died a sudden and violent death at the masked notoriety of his initial escapade, and for a time he was shocked into better behavior. We hear odd rumors floating around, however, of whose truth we never can be sure, but which we shake our heads over, after the fashion of those whose confidence has been caught napping once. We never knew whether Nellie discovered the truth or not. If Frank denied it, it would not affect matters with her if the world rang with it. Her idolatry has a certain blind stubbornness in it which I should not care to beat against.

Bronson does not stand as straight as he did when I first knew him. Rachel says he has “a scholarly stoop.” But she knows, and I know, that something besides law-books and parchment has taken the elasticity out of his step.

Many years have gone by since I became an Old Maid. I want to call my Alter Ego’s attention to this fact gently but firmly, because I have an idea that she still considers herself “only thirty,” and that she thinks she has just begun to be an Old Maid. Whereas she is old and so am I. I do not mind it at all. Neither does she; it is only that she had not realized it. We have so much to think about more important than our stupid ages. People have grown used to seeing us about, and we like the same things, and keep going at about the same pace and in the same road, and I think we have come to be an Institution.

I have no worries which I do not borrow from my married friends. I keep up with the fashions; my clothes fit me; my fingers still come to the ends of my gloves; I feel no leaning towards all-over cloth shoes; I have not gone permanently into bonnets. I have tried to be a pleasant Old Maid, and my reward is that my friends make me feel as if they liked to have me about. I am not made to feel that I am passÉ. One’s clothes and one’s feelings are all that ever make one passÉ.

Nevertheless, I have turned my face resolutely towards the setting sun. I am resting now. I have given up struggling against the inevitable. That is a privilege and an attribute of youth. I feel as though I were only beginning to live, now that I have passed through the period of turmoil and come out from the rapids into gently gliding water. There is so much in life which we could not see at the beginning, but which grows with our growth and bears us company in the richness of evening-tide. I have learned to love my life and to cultivate it. Who knows what is in her life until she has tended it and made it know that she expects something from it in return for all her aspirations and endeavors? Even my wasted efforts are dear to me.

Yet there is a sadness in looking back. I see the many lost opportunities lifting to me their wistful faces, and dumbly pleading with me to accept them and their promises; yet I carelessly passed them by. I see worse. I see the rents in the hedge, where I forced my wilful way into forbidden fields, and only regained my path after weary wandering, brier-torn, and none the better for my folly. Lost faces come before me which I might have gladdened oftener. Voices sound in my ear whose tones I might have made happier if I would. Withheld sympathy rises up before me deploring its wasted treasure. How can any one be happy in looking back? The only pleasure in looking forward is in hope. Yet now both grief and joy are tempered with a softness which enfolds my fretted spirit gratefully.

And so I am looking forward to-night to an old age more peaceful, less turbulent, than my youth has been. I reach forward gladly, too, for life holds much that is sweet to old age, which youth can in no wise comprehend. Possibly this is one reason why youth is so anxious to concentrate enjoyment. But I am tired of concentration. There is a wear and tear about it which precludes the possibility of pleasure. I want to take the rest of my life gently, and by redoubled tenderness repay it for rude handling in my youth—that youth which lies very far away from me to-night and is wrapped in a rainbow mist.

THE END

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