Not quite two centuries of human life have gone quietly in Wimberton, and for the most part it has been on Main and Chester Streets. Main Street is a quarter of a mile long and three hundred feet wide, with double roads, and between them a clean lawn shaded by old elms. Chester Street is narrow and crowded with shops, and runs from the middle of Main down-hill to the railway and the river. It is the business street for Wimberton and the countryside of fifteen miles about. Main Street is surrounded by old houses of honorable frontage, two churches, and the Solley Institute, which used to be called “Solley's Folly” by frivolous aliens.

Mr. Solley, who owned the mines up the river and the foundries that have been empty and silent these many years, founded it in 1840. At the time I remember best the Institute had twenty-one trustees, lady patronesses, matrons, and nurses; and three beneficiaries, or representatives of the “aged, but not destitute, of Hamilton County.” That seemed odd to the alien.

Mr. Solley need not have been so rigid about the equipment and requirements of admission, except that he had in mind an institution of dignity. It stood at the head of Main Street, with wide piazzas like a hotel. The aristocracy of old Wimberton used to meet there and pass the summer afternoons. The young people gave balls in the great parlors, and the three beneficiaries looked on, and found nothing to complain of in the management. What matter if it were odd? True Wimberton folk never called the Institute a folly, but only newcomers, before years of residence made them endurable and able to understand Wimberton. Failure is a lady of better manners than Success, who is forward, complacent, taking herself with unpleasant seriousness. Imagine the Institute swarming with people from all parts of the county, a staring success in beneficence!

Mr. Solley's idea was touched with delicacy. It was not a home for Hamilton County poor, but for those who, merely lingering somewhat on the slow descent, found it a lonely road. For there is a period in life, of varying length, when, one's purposes having failed or been unfulfilled, the world seems quite occupied by other people who are busy with themselves. Life belongs at any one time to the generation which is making the most of it. A beneficiary was in a certain position of respectable humility. But I suppose it was not so much Mr. Solley's discrimination as that in 1840 his own house was empty of all but a few servants; and so out of his sense of loneliness grew his idea of a society of the superannuated. That was the Solley Institute.

It is not so difficult to recreate old Wimberton of seventy years back, for the same houses stood on Main Street, and the familiar names were then heard—Solley, Gore, Cutting, Gilbert, Cass, Savage. The elms were smaller, with fewer lights under them at night, and gravel paths instead of asphalt.

One may even call up those who peopled the street, whom time has disguised or hidden away completely. Lucia Gore has dimples,—instead of those faded cheeks one remembers at the Institute,—and quick movements, and a bewildering prettiness, in spite of the skirts that made women look like decanters or tea-bells in 1830. She is coming down the gravel sidewalk with a swift step, a singular fire and eagerness of manner, more than one would suppose Miss Lucia to have once possessed.

And there is the elder Solley, already with that worn, wintry old face we know from his portrait at the Institute, and John Solley, the son, both with high-rolled collars, tall hats, and stiff cravats. Women said that John Solley was reckless, but one only notices that he is very tall.

“I'm glad to see you are in a hurry, too, my dear. We might hurry up the wedding among us all,” says the elder Solley, with a grim smile and a bow. “Ha! Glad to see you in a hurry;” and he passes on, leaving the two together. Lucia flushes and seems to object.

Is not that Mrs. Andrew Cutting in the front window of the gabled house directly behind them? Then she is thinking how considerate it is, how respectful to Main Street, that John and Lucia are to marry.

The past springs up quickly, even to little details. Mrs. Cutting wears a morning cap, has one finger on her cheek, and is wondering why John looks amused and Lucia in a temper. “He will have to behave himself,” thinks Mrs. Cutting. “Lucia is—dear me, Lucia is very decided. I don't really know that John likes to behave himself.” And all these people of 1830 are clearly interested in their own affairs, and care little for those who will look back at them, seventy years away.

Love climbs trees in the Hesperides, day in and out, very busy with their remarkable fruit, the dragon lying beneath with indifferent jaws. Do we observe how recklessly the young man reaches out, and how slightly he knows the nature of his footing? The branches of such apple trees as bear golden fruit are notoriously brittle. He might drop into the lazy throat of Fate by as easy an accident as the observer into figures of speech, and the dragon care little about the matter. That indifference of Fate is hard, for it seems an expense for no value received by any one. We are advised to be as little melancholy as possible, and charge it to profit and loss.

It is well known that John Solley left Wimberton late one night in October, 1830. In the morning the two big stuccoed houses of Gore and Solley looked at each other across the street under the yellow arch of leaves with that mysterious expression which they ever after seemed to possess to the dwellers on Main Street. And the Gores' housemaid picked up a glittering something from the fell of the bearskin rug on the parlor floor.

“Land! It's Miss Lucia's engagement ring. She's a careless girl!” Plannah was a single woman of fifty, and spoke with strong moral indignation.

Some mornings later Mr. Solley came stiffly down his front steps, crossed the street under the yellow elms, and went in between the white pillars of the Gore house. Mr. Gore was a middle-aged man, chubby, benevolent, gray-haired, deliberate. He sank back in his easy-chair in fat astonishment.

“Oh, dear me! I don't know.”

Lucia was called.

“Mr. Solley wishes to ask you—a—something.”

“I wish to ask if my son has treated you badly,” said Mr. Solley, most absurdly.

“Not at all, Mr. Solley.”

Lucia's eyes were suddenly hot and shining.

“I beg your pardon, but if John is a scoundrel, you will do me a favor by telling me so.”

“Where is he? I shall do nothing of the kind.”

“I am about to write to my son.”

“And that's nothing to me,” she cried, and went swiftly out of the room.

“Oh, I suppose he's only a fool,” said Mr. Solley, grimly. “I knew that. Spirited girl, Gore, very. Good morning.”

“Dear me!” said Mr. Gore, mildly, rubbing his glasses. “How quickly they do things!”

Elderly gentlemen whose wives are dead and children adventuring in the Hesperides should take advice. Mrs. Cutting might have advised against this paragraph in Mr. Solley's letter:

“I have taken the trouble to inquire whether you have been acting as a gentleman should. Inasmuch as Miss Lucia seemed to imply that the matter no longer interests her, I presume she has followed her own will, which is certainly a woman's right. With respect to the Michigan lands, I inclose surveys. You will do well,” etc.

But Mr. Solley had not for many years thought of the Hesperides as a more difficult piece of property to survey than another. Men and women followed their own wills there as elsewhere, and were quite right, so long as they did business honorably. And Mr. Gore had been a managed and advised man all his wedded life, and had not found, that it increased his happiness. That advice had always tended to embark him on some enterprise that was fatiguing.

“A good woman, Letitia,” often ran Mr. Gore's reflections; and then, with a sense of furtiveness, as if Letitia somewhere in the spiritual universe might overhear his thought, “a little masterful—a—spirited, very.”

But it was hard for Wimberton people to have a secret shut up among them. It was not respectful to Main Street, with John Solley fleeing mysteriously in the night and coming no more to Wimberton, and Lucia going about with her nose in the air, impossible to sympathize with. Some months passed, and Lucia seemed more subdued, then very quiet indeed, with a liking to sit by her father's side, to Mr. Gore's slight uneasiness. She might wish him to do something.

He knew no more than Wimberton what had happened to send John westward and Lucia to sitting beside him in unused silence; but he differed from Wimberton in thinking it perhaps not desirable to know. He would pat her hand furtively, and polish his glasses, without seeming to alter the situation. Once he asked timidly if it were not dull for her.

“No, father.”

“I've thought sometimes—sometimes—a—I don't remember what I was going to say.”

Lucia's head went down till it almost rested on his knee.

“Father—do you know—where John is?”

“Why—a—of course, Mr. Solley—”

“No, no, father! No!”

“Well, I might inquire around—a—somewhere.”

“No! Oh, promise me you won't ask any one! Promise!”

“Certainly, my dear,” said Mr. Gore, very much confused.

“It is no matter,” said Lucia, eagerly.

Mr. Gore thought for several minutes, but no idea seemed to occur to him, and it relieved him to give it up.

Months have a way of making years by a rapid arithmetic, and years that greet us with such little variety of expression are the more apt to step behind with faint reproach and very swiftly. Mr. Solley founded the Institute in 1840, and died. The Solley house stood empty, and Miss Lucia Gore by that time was living alone, except for the elderly maiden, Hannah. Looking at the old elms of Wimberton, grave and orderly, there is much to be said for a vegetable life. There is no right dignity but in the slow growths of time.

The elms increased their girth; the railway crept up the river; the young men went to Southern battle-fields, and some of them returned; children of a second generation walked in the Hesperides; the Institute was reduced to three beneficiaries; Main Street smelled of tar from the asphalt sidewalks; Chester Street was prosperous. Banks failed in '73, and “Miss Lucia has lost everything,” said Wimberton gossip.

The Solley house was alternately rented and empty, the Gore house was sold, Miss Lucia went up to the Institute, and gossip in Wimberton woke again.

“Of course the Institute is not like other places, but then—”

“Miss Lucia was such a lady.”

“But it's a charity, after all.”

“Very sensible of Miss Lucia, I'm sure.”

“She was engaged to old Institute Solley's son once, but it ended with a bump.”

“Then Miss Lucia goes to the Institute who might have gone to the Solley house.”

“Oh, that is what one doesn't know.”

“Miss Lucia a beneficiary! But isn't that rather embarrassing?”

“I wonder if she—”

“My dear, it was centuries ago. One does n't think of love-affairs fifty years old. They dry up.”

“Respectable, and you pay a little.”

“But a charity really.”

That year the public library was built on Main and Gilbert Streets, the great elm fell down in the Institute yard, Mrs. Andrew Cutting died at ninety-eight, with good sense and composure, and here is a letter written by Miss Lucia to Babbie Cutting. Babbie Cutting, I remember, had eyes like a last-century romance, never fancy-free, and her dolls loved and were melancholy, when we were children together under the elms in Wimberton. The letter is written in thin, flowing lines on lavender paper.

My dear Child: I am afraid you thought that your question offended me, but it did not, indeed. I was engaged to Mr. John Solley many years ago. I think I had a very hasty temper then, which I think has quite wasted away now, for I have been so much alone. But then I sometimes fell into dreadful rages. Mr. Solley was a very bold man, not easily influenced or troubled, who laughed at my little faults and whims more than I thought he should.

You seemed to ask what sudden and mysterious thing happened to us, but, my dear, one's life is chiefly moved by trifles and little accidents and whims. Mr. Solley came one night, and I fancied he had been neglecting me, for I was very proud, more so than ordinary life permits women to be. I remember that he stood with his hands behind him, smiling. He looked so easy and strong, so impossible to disturb, and said, “You're such a little spitfire, Lucia,” and I was so angry, it was like hot flames all through my head.

I cried, “How dare you speak to me so!”

“I don't know,” he said, and laughed. “It seems perilous.”

I tore his ring from my finger and threw it in his face. It struck his forehead and fell to the floor without any sound. There was a tiny red cut on his forehead.

“That is your engagement ring,” he said.

“Take it away. I want nothing more to do with you,” I cried—very foolishly, for I did, and my anger was going off in fright. He turned around and went from the house. The maid found the ring in the morning. Mr. Solley had left Wimberton that night. Well, my dear, that is all. I thought he would have come back. It seemed as if he might. I am so old now that I do not mind talking, but I was proud then, and women are not permitted to be very proud. Do your romances tell you that women are foolish and men are sometimes hard on them?

That is not good romance at all, but if you will come to see me again I will tell you much better romances than mine that I have heard, for other people's lives are interesting, even if mine has been quite dull.

Will you put this letter away to remember me by? But do not think of me as a complaining old woman, for I have had a long life of leisure and many friends. I do not think any one who really cares for me will do so the less for my living at the Institute, and only those we love are of real importance to us. It is kind of you to visit me.

Your Affectionate Friend.

So half a century is put lightly aside; Miss Lucia has found it quite dull; and here is the year 1885, when, as every one knows, John Solley came back to Wimberton, a tall old man with a white mustache, heavy brows, and deep eyes. Men thought it an honor to the town that the great and rich Mr. Solley, so dignified a man, should return to spend his last days in Wimberton. He would be its ornamental citizen, the proper leader of its aristocracy. But Babbie Cutting thought of another function. What matter for the melancholy waste of years, fifty leagues across? Love should walk over it triumphant, unwearied, and find a fairer romance at the end. Were there not written in the books words to that effect? Babbie moved in a world of dreams, where knights were ever coming home from distant places, or, at least, where every one found happiness after great trouble. She looked up into Mr. Solley's eyes and thought them romantic to a degree. When she heard he had never married the thing seemed as good as proved. And the little old lady at the Institute with the old-fashioned rolled curls above her ears—what a sequel!

It was a white winter day. The elms looked so cold against the sky that it was difficult to remember they had ever been green, or believe it was in them to put forth leaves once more. The wind drove the sharp-edged particles of snow directly in Babbie's face, and she put her head down, covering her mouth with her furs. She turned in at the Solley house, and found herself in the drawing-room, facing that tall, thin, military-looking old man, and feeling out of breath and troubled what to do first. But Mr. Solley was not a man to let any girl whatever be ill at ease, and surely not one with cheeks and eyes and soft hair like Babbie Cutting. Presently they were experienced friends. Babbie sat in Mr. Solley's great chair and stretched her hands toward the fire. Mr. Solley was persuaded to take up his cigar again.

“I had not dared to hope,” he said, “that my native place would welcome me so charmingly. I have made so many new friends, or rather they seemed to be friends already, though unknown to me, that I seem to begin life again. I seem to start it all over. I should have returned sooner.”

“Oh, I'm sure you should have,” said Babbie, eagerly. “And do you know who is living at the Institute now?”

“The Institute? I had almost forgotten the Institute, and I am a trustee, which is very neglectful of duty. Who is living at the Institute now?”

“Miss Lucia Gore.”

Mr. Solley was silent, and looked at Babbie oddly under his white eyebrows, so that her cheeks began to burn, and she was not a little frightened, though quite determined and eager.

“Miss Lucia lost all her money when the banks failed, and she sold the Gore house, and got enough interest to pay her dues and a little more; but it seems so sad for Miss Lucia, because people will patronize her, not meaning to. But they 're so stupid—or, at least, it doesn't seem like Miss Lucia.”

“I did not know she was living,” said Mr. Solley, quietly.

“Oh, how could you—be that way!”

Mr. Solley looked steadily at Babbie, and it seemed to him as if her face gave him a clue to something that he had groped for in the darkness of late, as if some white mist were lifted from the river and he could see up its vistas and smoky cataracts. How could he be that way? It is every man's most personal and most unsolved enigma—how he came to be that way, to be possible as he is. Up the river he saw a face somewhat like Babbie's, somewhat more imperious, but with the same pathetic eagerness and desire for abundance of life. How could young John Solley become old John Solley? Looking into Babbie's eyes, he seemed able to put the two men side by side.

“At one time, Miss Barbara,” he said, “—you will forgive my saying so,—I should have resented your reference. Now I am only thinking how kind it is of you to forget that I am old.”

Babbie did not quite understand, and felt troubled, and not sure of her position.

“Mr. Solley,” she said, “I—I have a letter from Miss Lucia. Do you think I might show it to you?”

“It concerns me?”

“Y-yes.”

He walked down the room and back again.

“I don't know that you ought, but you have tempted me to wish that you would. Thank you.” He put on his glasses and read it slowly. Babbie thought he read it like a business letter.

“He ought to turn pale or red,” she thought. “Oh, he oughtn't to wear his spectacles on the end of his nose!”

Mr. Solley handed back the letter.

“Thank you, Miss Barbara,” he said, and began to talk of her great-grandmother Cutting.

Babbie blinked back her sudden tears. It was very different from a romance, where the pages will always turn and tell you the story willingly, where the hero always shows you exactly how he feels. She thought she would like to cry somewhere else. She stood up to go.

“I'm sorry I'm so silly,” she said, with a little gulp and trying to be dignified.

Mr. Solley looked amused, so far as that the wrinkles deepened about his eyes.

“Will you be a friend of mine?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Babbie, plaintively, but she did not think she would. How could she, and he so cold, so prosaic! She went out into the snow, which was driving down Main Street from the Institute. It was four by the town clock.

They said in Wimberton that Mr. Solley left his house at seven o'clock in the evening, and that Stephen, the gardener, held an umbrella in front of him to keep off the storm all the way up the hill to the Institute. And they said, too, that the lights were left burning in the Solley house, and the fire on the hearth, and that the book he was reading when Babbie went in lay open on the table. The fire burned itself out. Stephen came in late, closed the book, and put out the lights, and in the morning went about town saying that Mr. Solley was to enter the Institute as a beneficiary.

But it is a secret that on that snowy evening Mr. Solley and Miss Lucia sat in the great east parlor of the Institute, with a lamp near by, but darkness in all the distances about them. His hands were on his gold-headed cane; Miss Lucia's rolls of white curls were very tidy over her ears, and her fingers were knitting something placidly. She was saying it was “quite impossible. One doesn't want to be absurd at seventy-five.”

“I suppose not,” said Mr. Solley. “I shouldn't mind it. What do you think of the other plan?”

“If you want my permission to be a beneficiary,” said Miss Lucia, with her eyes twinkling, “I think it would be a proper humiliation for you. I think you deserve it.”

“It would be no humiliation.”

“It was for me—some.”

“It shall be so no more. I'll make them wish they were all old enough to do the same—hem—confound them!”

“Did you think of it that way, John?”

Mr. Solley was silent for some moments.

“Do you know, I have been a busy man,” he said at last, “but there was nothing in it all that I care to think over now. And to-day, for the first time, that seemed to me strange. It was shown to me—that is, I saw it was strange. We have only a few years left, and you will let me be somewhat near you while they pass. Isn't that enough? It seems a little vague. Well, then, yes. I thought of it that way, as you say. Do you mind my thinking of it that way?”

Miss Lucia's eyes grew a little tearful, but she managed to hide it by settling her glasses. Seventy-five years in a small town make the opinions of one's neighbors part of the structure of existence. It was bitter, the thought that Main Street tacitly patronized her.

“Why, no, I don't mind.”

She dropped her knitting and laughed suddenly.

“I think, John,” she said, “that I missed marrying a very nice man.”

Mr. Solley's glasses fell off with surprise. He put them on again and chuckled to himself.

“My father used to call me a—hem—a fool. He used to state things more accurately than you did.”

After all, there was no other institute like Wimberton's. The standards of other places were no measure for our conduct, and the fact that such things were not seen elsewhere was a flattering reason why they should be seen in Wimberton; namely, only five beneficiaries, and one of them a rich man and a trustee. It was singular, but it suited Wimberton to be singular. One thing was plain to all, that if Mr. Solley was a beneficiary, then to be a beneficiary was a dignified, well-bred, and suitable thing. But one thing was not plain to all, why he chose to be a beneficiary. Babbie Cutting went up to the Institute, and coming back, wept for pure sentiment in her white-curtained room, with the picture on the wall of Sir Lancelot riding down by the whirling river, the island, and the gray-walled castle of Shalott.

I remember well the great ball and reception that Mr. Solley gave at the Institute to celebrate his entry, and how we all paid our respects to the five beneficiaries, four old men, who were gracious, but patronizing,—one with gold eye-glasses and gold-headed cane,—and Miss Lucia, with the rolled curls over her ears. The Institute, from that time on, looked down on Main Street with a different air, and never lost its advantage. It seemed to many that the second Solley had refounded it for one of those whims that are ornamental in the rich. Babbie Cutting said to her heart, “He refounded it for Miss Lucia.”

There was nowhere in Wimberton such dignified society as at the Institute. Even so that the last visitor of all seemed only to come by invitation, and to pay his respects with proper ceremony: “Sir, or madam, I hope it is not an inconvenient time,” or similar phrase.

“Oh, not at all. It seems very dark around.”

“Will you take my arm? The path is steep and worn, and here is a small matter of a river, as you see. I regret that the water is perhaps a trifle cold. Yes, one hears so much talk about the other side that one hardly knows what to think. There is no hurry. But at this point I say good night and leave you. When you were young you often heard good night said when the morning was at hand. May it be so. Good night.”