University of Virginia Library

IT was entirely natural that Henry Peabody of Massachusetts, brought up in the most reasonable and well-regulated of New England households, should fall in love with a tenderly irrational girl of Southern parentage. It was entirely natural that he should tell himself that he loved her all the more for her sweet lack of logic and utter unpracticality. But it was also entirely natural that at the first active manifestation, after their marriage, of this generous ignoring of possibilities, he should stand somewhat aghast.

He had smiled tenderly at her kindly interest in the dumb, awkward stewardess whose ineptness he had remarked with a competent man's dislike of inefficiency.

"What a little angel Agatha is!" he thought to himself afterward, as he paced the deck for a solitary cigar.

The phrase recalled a conversation with Agatha's brother on the day before his wedding. By a reaction as natural as Henry's, Percy had married a plain, practical girl, of whose commonplace virtues he was never tired of talking. Before his sister's wedding he had invited Henry to his comfortable, well-kept home in East Orange, close to his father's, and not far from the house which Henry and Agatha were to occupy. There he had regarded his future brother-in-law with eyes full of a sympathy which Henry had vaguely resented. He had given cloudy hints about Agatha's visionary ideas, and had even, it seemed to the chivalrously alert Henry, been on the point of warning him not to be surprised at any manifestation of them. Henry was indignant.

"As if I didn't know darling Agatha a thousand times better than he! As if I were marrying her to get a housekeeper like his ugly, uninteresting wife!"

The day before the wedding Percy had lingered long over the breakfast-table alone with Henry, evidently trying to say something without offending him. Several times he began.

"You know, Harry, Agatha — well, Agatha is —"

Henry interrupted him firmly, and issued an ultimatum.

"Agatha is an angel, no less!"

For a moment Percy had looked at his future brother-in-law with unfathomable eyes; then he had repeated slowly and enigmatically:

"Yes, Agatha is an angel — no mistake about it!" To which speech he had added incongruously the formula of sympathy

between Americans — "Shake, old man!"

Henry had felt instinctively that it would not be loyal to Agatha to take the proffered hand, and Percy had passed over this refusal with a pitying smile.

The little scene came up before Henry, pacing the deck, an infinite expanse of darkness lying about him and an infinite tenderness for his pretty, unworldly Agatha swelling his heart.

"A good thing to get her away from her family — they can't appreciate her," he thought proudly to himself; although Agatha's father was so blindly devoted to her as to make the practical Percy groan.

When his cigar was finished he went into his cabin, to find his bride still up, a vision of blond braids, blue silk, and soft white laces. His bachelor eyes were for a moment dazzled by the pretty show, and he did not notice that Agatha's cheeks were unusually pink and her eyes very shining.

"Oh, Harry darling!" she cried, as he came in. "I've been talking to Greta — she's the stewardess, you know — and she has such a sad history! It makes my heart ache. She just hates this work, indoors in this smelly ship; she says she's always worked out in the fields in one of those lovely Dutch gardens, and she's so unhappy here! She loves outdoors, and growing things. It's her cruel brother who made her take this position as stewardess because she could earn more money for him. She learned a little English from an English family when she was a child, so she got the place; but she's half seasick all the time, and so homesick for her vegetables and flowers, poor thing! She cried and cried when she was talking about it."

Agatha's own lovely eyes were suffused with tears of pity as she spoke, and her husband felt as if he were looking at a being too good for this world; but in spite of himself he could not repress an exclamation of dismay as Agatha went on confidently:

"So I just told her that she needn't worry a bit more — that we'd take care of her. I said she could go and tell the captain right now that she'd leave the ship at the end of this journey!"

Henry's head whirled.

"Good heavens, Agatha! What in the world can we do with an ignorant Dutch market-garden woman? Surely you're not thinking of pensioning her for life, are you?"

Agatha closed his mouth with a pretty gesture.

"Hush, practical business man! Wait until I tell you my plan. I suppose you think I haven't one, don't you? Well, now I'll show you what a common-sense wife you have. I've thought it all out. We're going to be abroad just eight weeks, aren't we? Well, Greta says she can live well for three dollars a week. That's twenty-four dollars, isn't it? Then a second-class passage back to America on this line costs forty-four dollars. That makes sixty-eight in all — call it seventy for a margin, as Percy would say. Now, dearest, I know you were planning to buy me something in Paris that would cost as much as that, weren't you? Instead, I'll just take Greta's rescue from unhappiness." She put her white arms around the neck of the astonished young man, and laid her head on his shoulder. Instinctively his arm went about her for an embrace which she took to be assent to her plan. "Oh, aren't you good, dear, dear Harry!"

Dear, dear Harry had, however, as he told himself, not quite lost his head. He sat down on the camp-chair, the only furniture of the cabin, and, taking his wife on his knee, endeavored to reason with her.

"Agatha darling, that is a sweet, lovely thought, but it is quite impossible. It's not the money, though that is quite a sum to throw away, but what under the sun could we do with Greta when she landed in New York? It really wouldn't be for her best interests. She could find nothing for herself, so hopelessly awkward and incompetent as she is."

Agatha interrupted again.

"Do you suppose I haven't thought that all out? I'm not a child. Just think of all the vegetables and flowers that are used in New York! It stands to reason that there must be any number of market-gardens to grow them, and any number of people needed to work in the gardens; and any one with as much influence as you have can surely find a place for one more, just one!"

Harry gave a despairing gesture.

"Why, dearest, it's just perfectly wild! I don't know any market-gardeners — how should I? And you don't know if a word that this woman has been telling you is true. She may be a consummate

liar. You don't know a thing about her."

Agatha rose, went to the mirror, and began combing her hair in a silence which alarmed the young husband.

"Agatha, darling, you can't really mean that you want to do this crazy thing?"

There was a pause, during which he grew more and more apprehensive, and then from the depths of shining hair came a half sob that went to his heart.

"Oh, Aggie!" he cried, taking her in his arms.

"It's the very first thing I've asked of you since we were married," she said in a sorrowful voice.

Harry had a sudden revulsion. He felt that he was as bad as Percy.

"You shall have it, dearest! It's a

noble thing for you to ask, and we will do just what you say."

There was a sudden flash of a rosy face and a pair of moist blue eyes from the golden glory on his shoulder, and he exclaimed again as he had to Percy:

"My Agatha is an angel!"

Even the sight of the squat, ugly Greta, and the thought of how she had imposed on Agatha's unworldliness, could not dash the fervor of his devotion. "What Agatha wanted she should have!" became his motto. It upheld him through the ordeal of leaving the vessel amid the golden rain of tips that Agatha insisted upon showering about them. It sustained him while they took care of a sickly and not too clean baby on the train to The Hague. They had no time to look out of the windows, so absorbed were they in their task. The tired mother had relapsed into a sleep of exhaustion.

"Just look at the country and enjoy yourself, dearest," Agatha told Harry; but his anxious eyes saw the strain on his wife's slender frame as she handled the child, and in a passion of tender care he insisted on taking charge of it himself.