 | The Eternal Feminine |  |
Brodhead, Eva Wilder. "The Eternal Feminine: A Story of Colorado." Century Magazine 59 (1900): 761-767.
A faint smile glimmered across Mrs. Herritt's fair, faded face as she sat on her porch in the waning light of the October afternoon, rocking tranquilly, and regarding with suave interest a certain active little scene which the main street of the Colorado town presented. She sat long and lax in the low chair. About the soft attenuation of her figure the folds of a daintily sprigged print gown fell loose and starchless, with an effect frankly free of any pretension either esthetic or modish. There was a similar accent, artless and unfashionable, in the slack, smooth coiling of Mrs. Herritt's heavy light hair, in which a dull fawn tint was subduing the yellower hue of youth. She had, upon the whole, the air of one more solicitous to please herself than the public, and the innocent blueness of her eyes, though a little frustrated of convincing candor by reason of the triangular droop of the lids, still added to her outward person a final note of unaspiring simplicity.
Behind Mrs. Herritt the house door stood open. The paint was scaling from its battered panels, and the vista of worn oil-cloth which it disclosed showed a surface through which the canvas structure was nibbling. A child's toys and the scattered leaves of a book lay about the porch floor, and a wiry vine overhead was casting its copper leaves down in a perpetual little clatter. Some of these fell on Mrs. Herritt's folded hands, but her attention remained fixed upon the throng of well-dressed women who were still issuing from the door of the town hall half a square away.
The action and attire of this loquacious group contributed a sudden look of life and color to the almost deserted adobe-colored street. From the snow-patched peaks, drawn up in solemn bivouac along the west, mild shadows were falling. On Old Baldy the sun lay in a last amber haze, the glow of which, crossing the town's commercial block of pink brick, its coal-grimed mine tipples and fans, its gathering of miners' paintless dwellings, of Mexican mud huts, and of pretty, ornate, jig-sawed cottages, widened illimitably on the outer plains. These, vestured in the wan chrome of autumnal grama-and buffalo-grass, were without accident, except for a solitary butte to the north, which, rising in a gray majestic pile, like an aged fortress, conferred the pathos of an extreme contrast upon the town. Everything looked trifling and crude in the face of the hoar mass. The red roofs of the better houses perking through the thin cottonwoods might have been thrust in place by a child's inconsequent hand; the very church spires were fantastic; while the Truex house, a massive aggregation of pink and buff sandstone, looming in aristocratic isolation at the end of the street, offered its florid vulgarity to the vast mournfulness of the scene in a sort of complacent antithesis.
It was very quiet. The voices of the throng of women carried far, in a sound of such enthusiastic accord as made Mrs. Herritt graphically aware of the nature of the business which had, that afternoon, been forward in the Women's Political League. That it had with fervent unanimity declared for Mr. Truex, or rather for the party of which he was a congressional nominee, seemed certain. Such an action on the league's part was indeed natural and inevitable. Truex was the personage of the town, a man of financial account as mine-owner and merchant, and of that genial turn of temper which no sane person finds pleasure in withstanding. He was popular, and might have had political honors long before this had he wished them. The fact that he had not wished them before, and was suspected of not particularly wishing them now, added to his candidacy an element which the women of the league found charming. It was a sort of personal tribute to each of them that the ambitions of his daughter should have coerced his final acquiescence. It showed the power of woman's eloquence, and was a triumph to the whole sex. They all liked to feel that they could have a
Mrs. Herritt could see Helen in the throng. The girl, so long burdened with the rule of her father's widowed house and the formation of his character, already showed in her small, keen face something of the care that yokes with empire. Among the others she seemed a kind of nerve-center, which vibrated force. Every one seemed charged with it—every one except the secretary of the league, who seemed at intervals to be quietly suggesting to Helen the lateness of the hour.
The secretary was tall and beautiful, even at the distance, and Mrs. Herritt, catching the air of dignity and moderation in her attitude, breathed a word of tribute. "If they were all like that!" she said to herself. As she saw how Miss Truex rested her hand on the secretary's arm, Mrs. Herritt remembered that current gossip ascribed to Helen a design of domestic happiness for her father, and that Esther Burley was the one whom she had chosen to add luster to the honors of state and to soothe its cares.
Whatever Esther's own views of this matter might be, Mrs. Herritt could observe no change in her looks when Mr. Truex himself, emerging presently from his office, fell into the applausive hands of the league. His big, cordial face and broad shoulders rose above the stir of flowers and feathers in stalwart relief. He seemed to be making jokes, for a wind of light laughter came up the street.
"They've been serious so long they're ready to be amused at anything," commented Mrs. Herritt. "Ah, they're looking this way! They've been telling Mr. Truex what a rousing vote they mean to give him. They've said there wasn't a woman in town that wouldn't go to the polls on election day, and just then they've remembered me!"
The league was certainly gazing toward the Herritt house, while Truex, escaping from the throng, repeatedly shook his head with a gesture of interdiction.
"They want to appoint a committee to call on me, and he's telling them not to," surmised the lady on the porch; "but they will—they have!" She added presently, in speculative fashion: "Miss Burley and Mrs. Wiles seem to be their choice—the West as it was and as it is. Ah, they've started!"
There was assuredly a certain air of objective about the two women who could now be seen coming down the street. Beside Miss Burley, a stately figure in her severe frock of dark blue, waddled a short, stout person, over whose ears a limp straw hat was firmly tied. Mrs. Wiles's weather-beaten face shone unabashed above the straight neckband of a black calico gown, frankly adjusted down the baggy waist with white agate buttons. As her attire was now, it had been in those early days when she helped her husband to winnow and wash gold from the surface soil of foot-hill streams, working beside him with pan and rocker, or shoveling dirt into the head of their little sluice. Times had changed. The hopes and hazards of the West were equally diminished; a bit of mica in a pebble underfoot, save in favored places, no longer had power to make the heart swell in wild surmise. The land had evolved into a civilization the complexities of which embraced universal suffrage and the ladies' tailor; but Mrs. Wiles, in accepting the privilege of one, had not seen fit to adopt the ideals of the other. She was called very "genuine." The league had a way of drawing the attention of visitors to this quality in the pioneer woman; but its tone was always unconsciously apologetic, as if it realized the incompetence of moral grandeur to atone for so aggressive an oddity of attire and manner.
"We're sent to give you a straight talk," announced Mrs. Wiles, undoing the Herritt gate; "though, 's I told 'em all, 'it won't assay nothing. 'Tain't no use to go prospectin' for votes round Mis' Herritt,' I told 'em. 'You might as well look for free gold in a head of cabbage.'"
Mrs. Herritt stood with hospitably extended hands. "You make a joke, then, of my weakness!" she complained lightly, in a soft, flagging voice.
"Well, we want you should vote for Jim Truex," panted the older woman, sinking on
Esther's glowing young face expanded in laughing appreciation of this. She leaned against the porch post, and its leafy tangles framed with glittering bronze the gloss of her dark hair and the serene oval of her cheek.
"But not if you have convictions against it," she excepted, regarding Mrs. Herritt, who had relapsed into her chair as if seeking sanctuary. "Of course we wouldn't persecute you, but, as Mrs. Wiles forcibly says, we all think so well of Mr. Truex—" her tone had an effect of trembling never so little, and Mrs. Herritt surmised a deeper warmth of color in the young woman's face, though she went on almost at once—"that—that we hope to have a most liberal showing in November. Yet we couldn't ask you to overthrow a principle for us, Mrs. Herritt."
"Indeed, no!" broke in Mrs. Herritt, with an accent of timid impetuosity; "no, no! I've no principles, but only just feelings against women—poor, weak, fallible women—taking part in public affairs. That's all. If I could nerve myself to—to vote at all, I would surely do so for Mr. Truex. But I shrink only to fancy leaving my little, humble sphere for such a thing. I am not like you two—strong and brave, and knowing all about parliamentary usages and that. I have no ambitions. I'm only a home body. I admire and—and respect those who have time for clubs and debates and such; but just for myself I have only one aim and object, and that is my family."
"Well, but our clubs are for our families as much as for ourselves," protested Esther. "What we get from their associations isn't just the personal pleasure. It's all that derived value which finally shows in the good of our households. We can't be narrow without the chance of hurting those we love. It isn't merely to get warm ourselves, though that would be reason enough, that we want to be out in the sunshine of progress!"
"Oh, that word!" mourned Mrs. Herritt. "It makes me quite faint. I can't feel that progress ought to be expected from us women. We are not the ones to push forward; it is our sweeter mission to—to—"
"Stand stock-still and block the hull stream?"
"Not that, Mrs. Wiles, but to maintain the equilibrium of life." Mrs. Herritt sighed her satisfaction in this lofty utterance. "It is for man in his rugged strength to rush forth to battle with the fierce world. Woman's place is to greet him tenderly when he returns scarred and wounded, and draw him into the sanctuary of home. I feel this so strongly, though I say it in a poor little feeble way! I am only one of 'the soft and milky rabble of womankind,' as my noble husband often says in his fond, foolish fashion. I can't argue about it. I couldn't make any telling points; I'm not smart, you know. I can only say over again that my whole life is just to keep a fire aglow upon the sacred hearth of home."
"But, land sakes! Mis' Herritt," demurred Mrs. Wiles, in a sort of exasperation, "a person won't build a fire no worse for knowin' B from a bull's foot!"
"And then, too," cut in Esther, "you forget that industrial conditions have changed since the world was young. Women can't all stay in their tents tending the fire, while their men sally forth to the hunt. And since so many women must themselves go forth, it doesn't seem wise or kind that those who have not to face this necessity should make a virtue of nestling comfortably in the inglenook."
"It would be cruel of them," acquiesced Mrs. Herritt, as composedly as if the analogy were her own. "My heart is so with all women who must rush wearily forth to toil!" She sighed over this disheveled and panting image, and added that what she most feared for her sex thus occupied in daily combat with the world was a loss of the bloom which was its supreme charm.
"Huh! in my opinion, the bloom that can't stay on while a woman's earnin' her livin' is mostly finicky fluff, that's better blowed away. A peach is a heap cleaner eatin' with the fuzz off."
Mrs. Wiles's picturesque outburst failed, perhaps, of full effect by reason of a wild, childish cry which just now arose in the house. There was a patter of feet in the hall, and a small girl of thirteen appeared in the doorway, breathless and agitated, stumbling over the folds of a long checked apron, and exhibiting in her rolled-up sleeves a pair of thin red arms.
"Don't be scared, mother," she besought. "It was only Billy. He was helpin' me make the tea, and he scalded himself. I
"Brave little man!"
"And, mother dear, will I put the steak on now? I got the table set."
"Yes, love. I trust you've remembered, Jenny, what mother likes to see on the table?"
Jenny's anxious little face flushed. She cast a furtive eye at the visitors. "Mother," she said huskily, "Mrs. Lusk wouldn't give me no chrysanthemums. I told her you liked me always to have flowers on the table, and she said she'd robbed her plants for us for 'bout as long as she was going to. She said we'd better turn in and raise our own flowers, and not depend on our neighbors for our decorations. She said she didn't blame me none, but that—"
"Never mind, Jenny. Poor Mrs. Lusk! She doesn't understand. Don't grieve about it. Mother knows you did your best."
The child's face beamed as she turned away.
"Jenny is learning to be a perfect little housewife," explained the mother, with an air of modest pride. "I do feel that our young girls should all be instructed in the simple domestic arts. I am always explaining to Jenny that to be learned in modest household lore is woman's best knowledge. She quite hates her school work now, and I allow her to stay home largely. After all, a girl's truest education is at the mother's side, isn't it?"
"She don't look over-strong to be tacklin' all these here domestic arts," commented Mrs. Wiles, rising.
Her comment fell harmless upon Mrs. Herritt, who scented, it seemed, a rose of compliment in the thorns of her guest's remark.
"Yes, Jenny looks frail. A young girl ought always to suggest something delicate and flower-like, oughtn't she? And must you really go?"
"Why not, when we're weighed down with a sense of failure?" smiled Esther.
Mrs. Herritt had risen also, and the two stood facing each other: the one vigorous and vital in her young freshness; the other listlessly poised, a slight, sinuous shape, which seemed to melt into the creeping dimness of the twilight as into some natural element.
"You won't think hard of me because I want to keep my door shut tight against the distant roaring of life?" she implored.
"Law, no!" groaned Mrs. Wiles, and she added to Esther, as the two emerged into the street. "What'd be the use?"
Miners with scarlet panaches of flame in their flat caps were thronging the way. Along in the press of them shambled a worn, elderly man, whose shoulders bent as if in reminiscence of the desk he had just left in one of the mine offices beyond. He deflected toward the Herritt gate. At its clang Miss Burley looked irresistibly back. Mrs. Herritt, still standing on the steps, was holding forth her long, persuasive hands in fond greeting.
"You are a wee bit late," she complained tenderly, "my big man of men! Yes, I am sitting here in the gloaming, dreaming my little feminine dreams, and waiting for some one. Run in, love, and see if the tea is all right, will you? And be sure the twins have their faces washed, won't you? And, Edward dear, hand me my shawl--it's so lovely here in the twilight!"
"I can't figure that woman out no way in the world," admitted Mrs. Wiles. "She's as plausible as a salted claim. You never know if she's a straight proposition or if she's selling you out. You can't go back of what she says without seeming to go back on your own sex scandalous, and you can't agree with her without— without—"
"Appearing to fix the ideal position of woman somewhere between that of an odalisk and a squaw!"
"That's the time you struck it rich!" applauded the other, while Esther added: "Mrs. Herritt has got more sex than strength of character. You might say that though the weft of her humanity is sleazy, the feminine qualities are splashed on it large, as in fresco, with a scene-painter's brush. She makes a cult of the pattern, and if we admit that the design is good, it is hard to object to the ritual of worship. That's why she's so baffling. Her conventionalism amounts to heterodoxy. But we won't worry about our lack of success with her, Mrs. Wiles. One vote won't matter."
One vote, indeed, as the outcome attested, would have made no feature in the sweep of Truex's majority. Those counties concerned with him showed a flattering unanimity of conviction. The Mexican vote alone might almost have carried the day for him, and Helen, as she went over these returns, commenting upon the largeness of her father's Spanish-American contingency, cried out suddenly that he owed much of it to her friend.
"Esther did it," she said, fastening her eloquent and meaning glance upon him. "Her speaking Spanish gave her a great pull with the Mexicans. She talked to the
"It's certainly good to look at Esther," conceded Truex.
"Good! I believe only the West could produce a woman so wholesome and splendid, with the candor and sweetness of a child, yet like Pallas Athene herself, 'mighty and wise and benignant.' She is cut out for a statesman's wife, papa, and she's going to be one!"
Truex gave way to his mirthful satisfaction either in his daughter's fervor or her plan.
"And how do you know that this goddess is prepared to look with favor on an old mustache like me? See here, Nell; of course you carry me around in your pocket: but how about Esther?"
Helen let the paper slip through her hands. "Papa," she began eagerly, and stopped. "No," she sighed, "no! I can only assure you of her—esteem. If you want to know more, you must inquire further." She roughened his shaggy black hair affectionately. "And you will? Say you will!"
Truex leaned slumberously back in his chair. "I don't see why you want me to marry."
"I want you to be happy."
"Ain't I happy?"
"Well—happier, then."
"Oh, well, we'll see. After we come back from Washington, Nell, we'll lay our heads together."
Helen had the wisdom to rest her plea upon this prospect. It might be madness to defer, but undue pressure was preferably to be avoided in securing her aims. She felt, however, reasonably sure of their success, insomuch as the idea which she set before her father was one certain to grow upon his fancy. The path she had chalked out for him would more and more allure him as he regarded its bowery turns. There could be no doubt of this, and she left her generous sentiment and romantic enterprise hopefully to the adjusting agency of time.
During their absence from the West the subject often came up in a casual and playful way. Of himself Truex would refer to it. The prospect, indeed, seemed to Helen so secure that her greeting of Esther, upon the return from Washington in the spring, had an almost emotional tenderness.
They merged a common feeling of consciousness in a review of what had happened in town during the months of Helen's Eastern experiences.
"Of course you heard of Mr. Herritt's death?" said Esther. "It was early in the winter."
"I suppose he couldn't have left his family very well provided for?" inquired Helen. Her instinct of universal responsibility began already to unfold an anxious wing.
"There was a small insurance, I believe. But no one has ventured to think of such a thing as ways and means in the face of Mrs. Herritt's grief. I never saw any one so smothered in crape! It is enough to kill her, and she told me she hoped it would; that she believed the true wife should fail and fade away when widowed, as a flower does when its stalk is broken. She said she thought the whole idea of the suttee was founded in a beautiful truth."
"Maybe it is when you get to the bottom of it, Esther. All Mrs. Herritt's notions have a fundamental germ of truth. That's what makes her so impregnable. There's always a grain of true ore in her tinsel."
"You should see her now to realize her full scope. She's an idyllic widow. I had to own it, though I knew if I admitted any argument of hers, personal or otherwise, I should soon find myself pledged to the whole social system of the middle ages. But her long, sagging black stuffs, her heavy-lidded eyes, that dull pale hair done carelessly, as if in the abstraction of woe, even the way in which her hands crept piteously together, all this gave me a rich sense of artistic rightness. I was ashamed of myself, Helen, because the tears in my eyes somehow gave me a kind of poetic pleasure."
"I see. Her bereavement is like her wifehood, perfectly selfish, correct, and irrefutable. A bewildering and fascinating exhibition it must be."
"Helen," said Esther, solemnly, "if you could see those black-frocked children hanging about her, not as other children hang about a mother, demanding her attention and making the little appeal of childhood, but pressing their services upon her, stepping on tiptoe, vying with one another for her least absent word or look! It's a revelation. When I saw those baby hearts expanding in love and strength to meet their mother's needs, I began to wonder if courage and devotion on her part might not have failed of so triumphant a result as their opposites secured without effort. I began to understand the force of the theory of which Mrs. Herritt's life is an embodiment; I began to feel its charm; I began to understand the terrible strength that lies in consistent
"No wonder. When one begins to observe how broad and beautiful the moral results of selfishness are, he may well question his sanity."
"Mayn't he! Well, you go to see her, Helen. She'll juggle with your notions, and then you'll understand me. The things you thought you had hold of to all eternity will suddenly appear airy nothings, and what seemed airy nothings become the great dominant facts of life. Go, Helen!"
"I will, I will. Some one ought to find out what she is going to do. Poor thing! She sees herself in a dim romantic mist, and she's got a knack of enforcing this view on others; but she can't hocus-pocus bread into her children's mouths."
"No, dear. Yet somehow I don't seem to worry about her. To relax the system is to meet accident with the minimum shock. I don't believe fate can hurt her much, for she has this truth in her philosophy."
Mrs. Herritt and her affairs, as it fell out, were destined to occupy Helen in short order. Upon that very evening, when Mr. Truex came home about sunset, there was a look so unwontedly grave upon his good-looking face that Helen at once made inquiry concerning it.
"No," said he; "nothing is wrong—that is, with me. But I've had a sad little experience this afternoon. I don't know when anything has touched me so. I am a hard-headed fellow—"
"You haven't a soft fiber in you!" acquiesced his girl, with tender irony.
"—and things don't usually move me much; but the way she came into the office, pale, shrinking—it might have been an ogre's den! You see, she'd got it in her head that I was very bitter about her not voting for me—"
"It was Mrs. Herritt, then?"
"Didn't I say so? And she began by begging me to forgive her. She said that she'd always felt that politics were 'way beyond her depth; that they were for strong men to grapple with; and that Mr. Herritt had always encouraged her little foolish qualms. She said home had always been her shrine—"
"That's her very tone! Go on!"
"Well, she went on to say how she admired independent, courageous, big-brained women, who dared to go right out in the world and offer battle—"
"'Offer battle'!" How like her! She makes us all appear great raw-boned Amazons."
"I don't know where you get such a notion," objected her father, letting down his brows; "I'm telling you she spoke of her great respect for progressive, intelligent women, and could only blush for her own timidity and ignorance."
"She gives an insidious effect of self-effacement, certainly. Maybe I'm hard on her, after all. Go on! Don't puff your lips, papa!"
"Well, my dear, if you haven't any sympathy for a poor, heartbroken little woman!" he exclaimed. "However, she wants to place a mortgage on her cottage, and they sent her to me. It seems Herritt left little, and there are debts."
"It's only seven months since he died. What's become of the insurance, I wonder?"
Truex shook his head amusedly. "That's the pathetic part. This poor soul, without thinking of the future, spent most of it in putting up an expensive monument to her husband. Her only thought, she said, was to express, at any cost, her devotion to his memory. She—she cried when she told me."
"She should have thought of her children before doing such a thing with her little money."
"Women are hard as nails to one another," commented Truex. This venerable sentiment seemed to strike him as fresh, and he repeated it. "Now, even I, hard-fisted old codger as I am, saw something affecting in her forgetting everything but her sorrow. This looking round the corners of your grief to see what's beyond it—oh, it's all right. A wise person would do it. But she isn't that kind. She isn't a woman of resources, but, as she said sadly, just one of those unaspiring souls whose empire is the hearth, and whose emblem is the loom and wheel."
"If she'd said the sewing-machine and cook-stove it wouldn't have sounded so well, would it? And did you make the loan? I hope you did."
"Yes." He rose, stretching his vast frame, while his eyes, as Helen followed their glance, seemed to fasten with a certain half-absent, half-startled expression on the beckoning finger which the new moon bent white from the lilac sky. He seemed aware of seeing something new.
Helen said whimsically: "Isn't it slim and bright? I would like to give it to Esther to wear in her hair." And as her father laughed at this and patted her head, she exulted over the security of her hopes.
As summer passed away, things seemed indeed to be proceeding favorably toward their fruition. Before the departure for the East everything must be settled, and along in late October Helen saw an opportunity of pushing her purpose to achievement. There was to be a social gathering in the big house, and Helen had settled upon this occasion as being singularly appropriate to the announcement of her father's betrothal. To the accomplishment of the scheme nothing was lacking but the consent of those interested, and to secure that of one of them Helen determined on immediate measures.
It happened to be a chill night of fall when she settled this point. A snowy breath whistled down from the divide, rattling crisply in the dying trees, and enhancing with its wintry bluster the homely implication of cheer in the pinon-stick fire, before which Helen sat in the library. It was ten o'clock. She expected momently to hear her father returning from one of those business meetings which of late not only engrossed his evenings, but sent him home with a clouded brow and flagging step. He had seemed unwilling to discuss with her whatever it was in his legislative or commercial pursuits that worried him. She had therefore learned to withdraw her anxious curiosity. And now, as she heard his key in the latch, she smoothed her brow of any hint of questioning and ran to meet him.
For once, however, Mr. Truex bore no air of heaviness; a gladsome alacrity the rather marked his motions. There was even a boyish gaiety in his manner as he surprised Helen with an embrace of unusual warmth. She took this unwonted demonstration fondly.
"Oh, papa," she murmured, "I won't be first much longer! I want it to be so, and yet—"
"Truex sat down by the fire. He laughed. "Well, you'll always be important, I guess. And—er—how do you know there's going to be—some one?"
Helen drew away from him, struck with something significant in his tone.
"Papa! what have you been up to? Oh, you've asked her! I know, I know! And she said? But I know what she said!"
"She was a long time saying it, Nell. I've been on pins and needles for weeks. I've been obliged to you for not asking me questions. But to-night! Yes, it's all right. I never expected to feel as much like a boy again."
The jubilant ring of his voice smote Helen unexpectedly. She had meant him to be happy, but—so happy? She felt herself suddenly projected into a great solitude, and the tears sprang to her eyes.
"I'm glad," she whispered; "but it's a kind of lonesome feeling somehow."
"Lonesome! You'll never be that, Nellie. Indeed, I feel that almost her sole reason for taking me is on your account. A motherless girl, she said in her sweet way, appealed to her beyond words. She understands you perfectly, Nell. I knew I was safe when I made her admit that what you needed was a mother to whom you could devote yourself in loving service. And then finally she whispered that if anything could touch her buried heart to life it would be such an appeal to her womanhood. Why, Helen!"
"'Buried heart'!" What—who? She drew herself together. "Tell me who—I am to serve—so lovingly. It seems not to be Esther."
"Why, you know I mean Mrs. Herritt? Of course you know. Lucy her name is. She laughs and calls it a plain little everyday name, just like herself. Lucy!" He repeated it fatuously, then fetched a breath of resolution and continued in another tone: "That about Miss Burley, now. It couldn't be, Nellie. She is magnificent. Lucy often dwells on her qualities, and says she is exactly like some lines she saw somewhere—something about 'Glowing with valor and beauty, and strong for labor and battle.' But a man doesn't care for that heroic kind of thing in a wife. It's too much of a strain—like living in a cathedral and having oratorios for breakfast. A man like me, weighted with national affairs, wants peace in his home. The immense pressure he's under makes it necessary for him to find rest in the ministrations of a sweet, submissive spirit." He went on hymning his needs and exploiting the range of mild and emollient qualities which these demanded for their alleviation. There was a new effect of importance upon him. Happiness had expanded in him latent sources of joyous egotism. He was authoritative and eloquent; subconscious modes of being seemed to rise and overflow his ordinary surfaces with strange prismatic colors.
Helen stumbled to her feet, a little dazed with the sight of it all. "However it is," she said gently, "I am glad," and she let him reach out for her, and add to his satisfaction the little detail of her assent.
"If you could hear Lucy praise you up, Nell—your cleverness and energy, and a dozen other things! There is so much, she says, that you must teach her—docile little soul!"
"Ah," smiled Helen, darkly, "she has nothing to learn of me— or of any woman!"
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