“Dear Uncle Peter,” the letter ran, “I am very, very homesick and lonely for you to-day. It seems to me that I would gladly give a whole year of my life just for the privilege of being with you, and talking instead of writing,—but since that can not be, I am going to try and write you about the thing that is troubling me. I can’t bear it alone any longer, and still I don’t know whether it is the kind of thing that it is honorable to tell or not. So you see I am very much troubled and puzzled, and this trouble involves some one else in a way that it is terrible to think of.

“Uncle Peter, dear, I do not want to be married. Not until I have grown up, and seen something of the world. You know it is one of my dearest wishes to be self-supporting, not because I am a Feminist or a new woman, or have ‘the unnatural belief of an antipathy to man’ that you’re always talking about, but just because it will prove to me once and for all that I belong to myself, and that my soul isn’t, and never has been cooperative. 235 You know what I mean by this, and you are not hurt by my feeling so. You, I am sure, would not want me to be married, or to have to think of myself as engaged, especially not to anybody that we all knew and loved, and who is very close to me and you in quite another way. Please don’t try to imagine what I mean, Uncle Peter—even if you know, you must tell yourself that you don’t know. Please, please pretend even to yourself that I haven’t written you this letter. I know people do tell things like this, but I don’t know quite how they bring themselves to do it, even if they have somebody like you who understands everything—everything.

“Uncle Peter, dear, I am supposed to be going to be married by and by when the one who wants it feels that it can be spoken of, and until that happens, I’ve got to wait for him to speak, unless I can find some way to tell him that I do not want it ever to be. I don’t know how to tell him. I don’t know how to make him feel that I do not belong to him. It is only myself I belong to, and I belong to you, but I don’t know how to make that plain to any one who does not know it already. I can’t say it unless perhaps you can help me to. 236

“I am different from the other girls. I know every girl always thinks there is something different about her, but I think there are ways in which I truly am different. When I want anything I know more clearly what it is, and why I want it than most other girls do, and not only that, but I know now, that I want to keep myself, and everything I think and feel and am,—sacred. There is an inner shrine in a woman’s soul that she must keep inviolate. I know that now.

“A liberty that you haven’t known how, or had the strength to prevent, is a terrible thing. One can’t forget it. Uncle Peter, dear, twice in my life things have happened that drive me almost desperate when I think of them. If these things should happen again when I know that I don’t want them to, I don’t think there would be any way of my bearing it. Perhaps you can tell me something that will make me find a way out of this tangle. I don’t see what it could be, but lots of times you have shown me the way out of endless mazes that were not grown up troubles like this, but seemed very real to me just the same.

“Uncle Peter, dear, dear, dear,—you are all I have. I wish you were here to-night, though you 237 wouldn’t be let in, even if you beat on the gate ever so hard, for it’s long after bedtime. I am up in my tower room all alone. Oh! answer this letter. Answer it quickly, quickly.”

Eleanor read her letter over and addressed a tear splotched envelope to Peter. Then she slowly tore letter and envelope into little bits.

“He would know,” she said to herself. “I haven’t any real right to tell him. It would be just as bad as any kind of tattling.”

She began another letter to him but found she could not write without saying what was in her heart, and so went to bed uncomforted. There was nothing in her experience to help her in her relation to David. His kiss on her lips had taught her the nature of such kisses: had made her understand suddenly the ease with which the strange, sweet spell of sex is cast. She related it to the episode of the unwelcome caress bestowed upon her by the brother of Maggie Lou, and that half forgotten incident took on an almost terrible significance. She understood now how she should have repelled that unconscionable boy, but that understanding did not help her with the problem 238 of her Uncle David. Though the thought of it thrilled through her with a strange incredible delight, she did not want another kiss of his upon her lips.

“It’s—it’s—like that,” she said to herself. “I want it to be from somebody—else. Somebody realer to me. Somebody that would make it seem right.” But even to herself she mentioned no names.

She had definitely decided against going to college. She felt that she must get upon her own feet quickly and be under no obligation to any man. Vaguely her stern New England rearing was beginning to indicate the way that she should tread. No man or woman who did not understand “the value of a dollar,” was properly equipped to do battle with the realities of life. The value of a dollar, and a clear title to it—these were the principles upon which her integrity must be founded if she were to survive her own self-respect. Her Puritan fathers had bestowed this heritage upon her. She had always felt the irregularity of her economic position; now that the complication of her relation with David had arisen, it was beginning to make her truly uncomfortable. 239

David had been very considerate of her, but his consideration frightened her. He had been so afraid that she might be hurt or troubled by his attitude toward her that he had explained again, and almost in so many words that he was only waiting for her to grow accustomed to the idea before he asked her to become his wife. She had looked forward with considerable trepidation to the Easter vacation following the establishment of their one-sided understanding, but David relieved her apprehension by putting up at his club and leaving her in undisturbed possession of his quarters. There, with Mademoiselle still treating her as a little girl, and the other five of her heterogeneous foster family to pet and divert her at intervals, she soon began to feel her life swing back into a more accustomed and normal perspective. David’s attitude to her was as simple as ever, and when she was with the devoted sextet she was almost able to forget the matter that was at issue between them—almost but not quite.

She took quite a new kind of delight in her association with the group. She found herself suddenly on terms of grown up equality with them. Her consciousness of the fact that David was 240 tacitly waiting for her to become a woman, had made a woman of her already, and she looked on her guardians with the eyes of a woman, even though a very newly fledged and timorous one.

She was a trifle self-conscious with the others, but with Jimmie she was soon on her old familiar footing.

“Uncle Jimmie is still a great deal of fun,” she wrote in her diary. “He does just the same old things he used to do with me, and a good many new ones in addition. He brings me flowers, and gets me taxi-cabs as if I were really a grown up young lady, and he pinches my nose and teases me as if I were still the little girl that kept house in a studio for him. I never realized before what a good-looking man he is. I used to think that Uncle Peter was the only handsome man of the three, but now I realize that they are all exceptionally good-looking. Uncle David has a great deal of distinction, of course, but Uncle Jimmie is merry and radiant and vital, and tall and athletic looking into the bargain. The ladies on the Avenue all turn to look at him when we go walking. He says that the gentlemen all turn to look 241 at me, and I think perhaps they do when I have my best clothes on, but in my school clothes I am quite certain that nothing like that happens.

“I have been out with Uncle Jimmie Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday,—four days of my vacation. We’ve been to the Hippodrome and Chinatown, and we’ve dined at Sherry’s, and one night we went down to the little Italian restaurant where I had my first introduction to eau rougie, and was so distressed about it. I shall never forget that night, and I don’t think Uncle Jimmie will ever be done teasing me about it. It is nice to be with Uncle Jimmie so much, but I never seem to see Uncle Peter any more. Alphonse is very careful about taking messages, I know, but it does seem to me that Uncle Peter must have telephoned more times than I know of. It does seem as if he would, at least, try to see me long enough to have one of our old time talks again. To see him with all the others about is only a very little better than not seeing him at all. He isn’t like himself, someway. There is a shadow over him that I do not understand.”

“Don’t you think that Uncle Peter has changed?” 242 she asked Jimmie, when the need of speaking of him became too strong to withstand.

“He is a little pale about the ears,” Jimmie conceded, “but I think that’s the result of hard work and not enough exercise. He spends all his spare time trying to patch up Beulah instead of tramping and getting out on his horse the way he used to. He’s doing a good job on the old dear, but it’s some job, nevertheless and notwithstanding—”

“Is Aunt Beulah feeling better than she was?” Eleanor’s lips were dry, but she did her best to make her voice sound natural. It seemed strange that Jimmie could speak so casually of a condition of affairs that made her very heart stand still. “I didn’t know that Uncle Peter had been taking care of her.”

“Taking care of her isn’t a circumstance to what Peter has been doing for Beulah. You know she hasn’t been right for some time. She got burning wrong, like the flame on our old gas stove in the studio when there was air in it.”

“Uncle David thought so the last time I was here,” Eleanor said, “but I didn’t know that Uncle Peter—” 243

“Peter, curiously enough, was the last one to tumble. Dave and I got alarmed about the girl and held a consultation, with the result that Doctor Gramercy was called. If we’d believed he would go into it quite so heavily we might have thought again before we sicked him on. It’s very nice for Mary Ann, but rather tough on Abraham as they said when the lady was deposited on that already overcrowded bosom. Now Beulah’s got suffrage mania, and Peter’s got Beulah mania, and it’s a merry mess all around.”

“Is Uncle Peter with her a lot?”

“Every minute. You haven’t seen much of him since you came, have you?—Well, the reason is that every afternoon as soon as he can get away from the office, he puts on a broad sash marked ‘Votes for Women,’ and trundles Beulah around in her little white and green perambulator, trying to distract her mind from suffrage while he talks to her gently and persuasively upon the subject. Suffrage is the only subject on her mind, he explains, so all he can do is to try to cuckoo gently under it day by day. It’s a very complicated process but he’s making headway.” 244

“I’m glad of that,” Eleanor said faintly. “How—how is Aunt Gertrude? I don’t see her very often, either.”

“Gertrude’s all right.” It was Jimmie’s turn to look self-conscious. “She never has time for me any more; I’m not high-brow enough for her. She’s getting on like a streak, you know, exhibiting everywhere.”

“I know she is. She gave me a cast of her faun’s head. I think it is lovely. Aunt Margaret looks well.”

“She is, I guess, but don’t let’s waste all our valuable time talking about the family. Let’s talk about us—you and me. You ask me how I’m feeling and then I’ll tell you. Then I’ll ask you how you’re feeling and you’ll tell me. Then I’ll tell you how I imagine you must be feeling from the way you’re looking,—and that will give me a chance to expatiate on the delectability of your appearance. I’ll work up delicately to the point where you will begin to compare me favorably with all the other nice young men you know,—and then we’ll be off.”

“Shall we?” Eleanor asked, beginning to sparkle a little. 245

“We shall indeed,” he assured her solemnly. “You begin. No, on second thoughts, I’ll begin. I’ll begin at the place where I start telling you how excessively well you’re looking. I don’t know, considering its source, whether it would interest you or not, but you have the biggest blue eyes that I’ve, ever seen in all my life,—and I’m rather a judge of them.”

“All the better to eat you with, my dear,” Eleanor chanted.

“Quite correct.” He shot her a queer glance from under his eyebrows. “I don’t feel very safe when I look into them, my child. It would be a funny joke on me if they did prove fatal to me, wouldn’t it?—well,—but away with such nonsense. I mustn’t blither to the very babe whose cradle I am rocking, must I?”

“I’m not a babe, Uncle Jimmie. I feel very old sometimes. Older than any of you.”

“Oh! you are, you are. You’re a regular sphinx sometimes. Peter says that you even disconcert him at times, when you take to remembering things out of your previous experience.”

“‘When he was a King in Babylon and I was a Christian Slave?’” she quoted quickly. 246

“Exactly. Only I’d prefer to play the part of the King of Babylon, if it’s all the same to you, niecelet. How does the rest of it go, ‘yet not for a—’ something or other ‘would I wish undone that deed beyond the grave.’ Gosh, my dear, if things were otherwise, I think I could understand how that feller felt. Get on your hat, and let’s get out into the open. My soul is cramped with big potentialities this afternoon. I wish you hadn’t grown up, Eleanor. You are taking my breath away in a peculiar manner. No man likes to have his breath taken away so suddint like. Let’s get out into the rolling prairie of Central Park.”

But the rest of the afternoon was rather a failure. The Park had that peculiar bleakness that foreruns the first promise of spring. The children, that six weeks before were playing in the snow and six weeks later would be searching the turf for dandelions, were in the listless between seasons state of comparative inactivity. There was a deceptive balminess in the air that seemed merely to overlay a penetrating chilliness.

“I’m sorry I’m not more entertaining this afternoon,” Jimmie apologized on the way home. “It isn’t that I am not happy, or that I don’t feel the 247 occasion to be more than ordinarily propitious; I’m silent upon a peak in Darien,—that’s all.”

“I was thinking of something else, too,” Eleanor said.

“I didn’t say I was thinking of something else.”

“People are always thinking of something else when they aren’t talking to each other, aren’t they?”

“Something else, or each other, Eleanor. I wasn’t thinking of something else, I was thinking—well, I won’t tell you exactly—at present. A penny for your thoughts, little one.”

“They aren’t worth it.”

“A penny is a good deal of money. You can buy joy for a penny.”

“I’m afraid I couldn’t—buy joy, even if you gave me your penny, Uncle Jimmie.”

“You might try. My penny might not be like other pennies. On the other hand, your thoughts might be worth a fortune to me.”

“I’m afraid they wouldn’t be worth anything to anybody.”

“You simply don’t know what I am capable of making out of them.”

“I wish I could make something out of them,” 248 Eleanor said so miserably that Jimmie was filled with compunction for having tired her out, and hailed a passing taxi in which to whiz her home again.

“I have found out that Uncle Peter is spending all his time with Aunt Beulah,” she wrote in her diary that evening. “It is beautiful of him to try to help her through this period of nervous collapse, and just like him, but I don’t understand why it is that he doesn’t come and tell me about it, especially since he is getting so tired. He ought to know that I love him so dearly and deeply that I could help him even in helping her. It isn’t like him not to share his anxieties with me. Aunt Beulah is a grown up woman, and has friends and doctors and nurses, and every one knows her need. It seems to me that he might think that I have no one but him, and that whatever might lie heavy on my heart I could only confide in him. I have always told him everything. Why doesn’t it occur to him that I might have something to tell him now? Why doesn’t he come to me?

“I am afraid he will get sick. He needs a good deal of exercise to keep in form. If he doesn’t 249 have a certain amount of muscular activity his digestion is not so good. There are two little creases between his eyes that I never remember seeing there before. I asked him the other night when he was here with Aunt Beulah if his head ached, and he said ‘no,’ but Aunt Beulah said her head ached almost all the time. Of course, Aunt Beulah is important, and if Uncle Peter is trying to bring her back to normality again she is important to him, and that makes her important to me for his sake also, but nobody in the world is worth the sacrifice of Uncle Peter. Nobody, nobody.

“I suppose it’s a part of his great beauty that he should think so disparagingly of himself. I might not love him so well if he knew just how dear and sweet and great his personality is. It isn’t so much what he says or does, or even the way he looks that constitutes his charm, it’s the simple power and radiance behind his slightest move. Oh! I can’t express it. He doesn’t think he is especially fine or beautiful. He doesn’t know what a waste it is when he spends his strength upon somebody who isn’t as noble in character as he is,—but I know, and it makes me wild to think 250 of it. Oh! why doesn’t he come to me? My vacation is almost over, and I don’t see how I could bear going back to school without one comforting hour of him alone.

“I intended to write a detailed account of my vacation, but I can not. Uncle Jimmie has certainly tried to make me happy. He is so funny and dear. I could have so much fun with him if I were not worried about Uncle Peter!

“Uncle David says he wants to spend my last evening with me. We are going to dine here, and then go to the theater together. I am going to try to tell him how I feel about things, but I am afraid he won’t give me the chance. Life is a strange mixture of things you want and can’t have, and things you can have and don’t want. It seems almost disloyal to put that down on paper about Uncle David. I do want him and love him, but oh!—not in that way. Not in that way. There is only one person in a woman’s life that she can feel that way about. Why—why—why doesn’t my Uncle Peter come to me?”