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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11514 ***
+
+BALCONY STORIES
+
+BY
+
+GRACE KING
+
+
+1892
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+THE BALCONY
+
+A DRAMA OF THREE
+
+LA GRANDE DEMOISELLE
+
+MIMI'S MARRIAGE
+
+THE MIRACLE CHAPEL
+
+THE STORY OF A DAY
+
+ANNE MARIE AND JEANNE MARIE
+
+A CRIPPLED HOPE
+
+"ONE OF US"
+
+THE LITTLE CONVENT GIRL
+
+GRANDMOTHER'S GRANDMOTHER
+
+THE OLD LADY'S RESTORATION
+
+A DELICATE AFFAIR
+
+PUPASSE
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+"WALKING AWAY WITH A SHRUG OF THE SHOULDERS"
+
+"WHERE IS THAT IDIOT, THAT DOLT, THAT SLUGGARD, THAT SNAIL, WITH MY
+MAIL?"
+
+CHAMPIGNY
+
+"I WEPT, I WEPT, I WEPT"
+
+"HER HEART DROVE HER TO THE WINDOW"
+
+"ALL THAT DAY WAS DESPONDENCY, DEJECTION"
+
+"THIS TIME WE HAVE CAUGHT IT!"
+
+"THE QUIET, DIM-LIGHTED ROOM OF A CONVALESCENT"
+
+"LITTLE MAMMY"
+
+"TO POSE IN ABJECT PATIENCE AND AWKWARDNESS"
+
+THE SISTERS BID HER GOOD-BY
+
+WATCHING A LANDING
+
+"TURNED TO HER DOMESTIC DUTIES"
+
+THE ROOM IN THE OLD GALLERY
+
+THE FIRST COMMUNION
+
+
+
+
+BALCONY STORIES
+
+
+
+
+THE BALCONY
+
+
+There is much of life passed on the balcony in a country where the
+summer unrolls in six moon-lengths, and where the nights have to come
+with a double endowment of vastness and splendor to compensate for the
+tedious, sun-parched days.
+
+And in that country the women love to sit and talk together of summer
+nights, on balconies, in their vague, loose, white garments,--men
+are not balcony sitters,--with their sleeping children within easy
+hearing, the stars breaking the cool darkness, or the moon making a
+show of light--oh, such a discreet show of light!--through the vines.
+And the children inside, waking to go from one sleep into another,
+hear the low, soft mother-voices on the balcony, talking about this
+person and that, old times, old friends, old experiences; and it seems
+to them, hovering a moment in wakefulness, that there is no end of the
+world or time, or of the mother-knowledge; but, illimitable as it
+is, the mother-voices and the mother-love and protection fill it
+all,--with their mother's hand in theirs, children are not afraid even
+of God,--and they drift into slumber again, their little dreams
+taking all kinds of pretty reflections from the great unknown horizon
+outside, as their fragile soap-bubbles take on reflections from the
+sun and clouds.
+
+Experiences, reminiscences, episodes, picked up as only women know how
+to pick them up from other women's lives,--or other women's destinies,
+as they prefer to call them,--and told as only women know how to
+relate them; what God has done or is doing with some other woman whom
+they have known--that is what interests women once embarked on their
+own lives,--the embarkation takes place at marriage, or after the
+marriageable time,--or, rather, that is what interests the women who
+sit of summer nights on balconies. For in those long-moon countries
+life is open and accessible, and romances seem to be furnished real
+and gratis, in order to save, in a languor-breeding climate, the
+ennui of reading and writing books. Each woman has a different way of
+picking up and relating her stories, as each one selects different
+pieces, and has a personal way of playing them on the piano.
+
+Each story _is_ different, or appears so to her; each has some unique
+and peculiar pathos in it. And so she dramatizes and inflects it,
+trying to make the point visible to her apparent also to her hearers.
+Sometimes the pathos and interest to the hearers lie only in
+this--that the relater has observed it, and gathered it, and finds it
+worth telling. For do we not gather what we have not, and is not our
+own lacking our one motive? It may be so, for it often appears so.
+
+And if a child inside be wakeful and precocious it is not dreams
+alone that take on reflections from the balcony outside: through the
+half-open shutters the still, quiet eyes look across the dim forms
+on the balcony to the star-spangled or the moon-brightened heavens
+beyond; while memory makes stores for the future, and germs are sown,
+out of which the slow, clambering vine of thought issues, one day, to
+decorate or hide, as it may be, the structures or ruins of life.
+
+
+
+
+A DRAMA OF THREE
+
+
+It was a regular dramatic performance every first of the month in the
+little cottage of the old General and Madame B----.
+
+It began with the waking up of the General by his wife, standing at
+the bedside with a cup of black coffee.
+
+"Hé! Ah! Oh, Honorine! Yes; the first of the month, and
+affairs--affairs to be transacted."
+
+On those mornings when affairs were to be transacted there was not
+much leisure for the household; and it was Honorine who constituted
+the household. Not the old dressing-gown and slippers, the old, old
+trousers, and the antediluvian neck-foulard of other days! Far from
+it. It was a case of warm water (with even a fling of cologne in it),
+of the trimming of beard and mustache by Honorine, and the black
+broadcloth suit, and the brown satin stock, and that _je ne sais quoi
+de dégagé_ which no one could possess or assume like the old General.
+Whether he possessed or assumed it is an uncertainty which hung over
+the fine manners of all the gentlemen of his day, who were kept
+through their youth in Paris to cultivate _bon ton_ and an education.
+
+It was also something of a gala-day for Madame la Générale too, as it
+must be a gala-day for all old wives to see their husbands pranked
+in the manners and graces that had conquered their maidenhood, and
+exhaling once more that ambrosial fragrance which once so well
+incensed their compelling presence.
+
+Ah, to the end a woman loves to celebrate her conquest! It is the last
+touch of misfortune with her to lose in the old, the ugly, and the
+commonplace her youthful lord and master. If one could look under the
+gray hairs and wrinkles with which time thatches old women, one would
+be surprised to see the flutterings, the quiverings, the thrills, the
+emotions, the coals of the heart-fires which death alone extinguishes,
+when he commands the tenant to vacate.
+
+Honorine's hands chilled with the ice of sixteen as she approached
+scissors to the white mustache and beard. When her finger-tips brushed
+those lips, still well formed and roseate, she felt it, strange to
+say, on her lips. When she asperged the warm water with cologne,--it
+was her secret delight and greatest effort of economy to buy this
+cologne,--she always had one little moment of what she called
+faintness--that faintness which had veiled her eyes, and chained her
+hands, and stilled her throbbing bosom, when as a bride she came from
+the church with him. It was then she noticed the faint fragrance of
+the cologne bath. Her lips would open as they did then, and she would
+stand for a moment and think thoughts to which, it must be confessed,
+she looked forward from month to month. What a man he had been! In
+truth he belonged to a period that would accept nothing less from
+Nature than physical beauty; and Nature is ever subservient to the
+period. If it is to-day all small men, and to-morrow gnomes and
+dwarfs, we may know that the period is demanding them from Nature.
+
+When the General had completed--let it be called no less than the
+ceremony of--his toilet, he took his chocolate and his _pain de
+Paris_. Honorine could not imagine him breakfasting on anything but
+_pain de Paris._ Then he sat himself in his large arm-chair before his
+escritoire, and began transacting his affairs with the usual--
+
+"But where is that idiot, that dolt, that sluggard, that snail, with
+my mail?" Honorine, busy in the breakfast-room:
+
+[Illustration: "WHERE IS THAT IDIOT, THAT DOLT, THAT SLUGGARD, THAT
+SNAIL, WITH MY MAIL?"]
+
+"In a moment, husband. In a moment."
+
+"But he should be here now. It is the first of the month, it is nine
+o'clock, I am ready; he should be here."
+
+"It is not yet nine o'clock, husband."
+
+"Not yet nine! Not yet nine! Am I not up? Am I not dressed? Have I not
+breakfasted before nine?"
+
+"That is so, husband. That is so." Honorine's voice, prompt in
+cheerful acquiescence, came from the next room, where she was washing
+his cup, saucer, and spoon.
+
+"It is getting worse and worse every day. I tell you, Honorine, Pompey
+must be discharged. He is worthless. He is trifling. Discharge him!
+Discharge him! Do not have him about! Chase him out of the yard! Chase
+him as soon as he makes his appearance! Do you hear, Honorine?"
+
+"You must have a little patience, husband."
+
+It was perhaps the only reproach one could make to Madame Honorine,
+that she never learned by experience.
+
+"Patience! Patience! Patience is the invention of dullards and
+sluggards. In a well-regulated world there should be no need of such a
+thing as patience. Patience should be punished as a crime, or at
+least as a breach of the peace. Wherever patience is found police
+investigation should be made as for smallpox. Patience! Patience! I
+never heard the word--I assure you, I never heard the word in Paris.
+What do you think would be said there to the messenger who craved
+patience of you? Oh, they know too well in Paris--a rataplan from the
+walking-stick on his back, that would be the answer; and a, 'My good
+fellow, we are not hiring professors of patience, but legs.'"
+
+"But, husband, you must remember we do not hire Pompey. He only does
+it to oblige us, out of his kindness."
+
+"Oblige us! Oblige me! Kindness! A negro oblige me! Kind to me! That
+is it; that is it. That is the way to talk under the new régime. It is
+favor, and oblige, and education, and monsieur, and madame, now. What
+child's play to call this a country--a government! I would not be
+surprised"--jumping to his next position on this ever-recurring first
+of the month theme--"I would not be surprised if Pompey has failed to
+find the letter in the box. How do I know that the mail has not
+been tampered with? From day to day I expect to hear it. What is to
+prevent? Who is to interpose? The honesty of the officials? Honesty of
+the officials--that is good! What a farce--honesty of officials! That
+is evidently what has happened. The thought has not occurred to me in
+vain. Pompey has gone. He has not found the letter, and--well; that is
+the end."
+
+But the General had still another theory to account for the delay in
+the appearance of his mail which he always posed abruptly after the
+exhaustion of the arraignment of the post-office.
+
+"And why not Journel?" Journel was their landlord, a fellow of means,
+but no extraction, and a favorite aversion of the old gentleman's.
+"Journel himself? You think he is above it, _hé_? You think Journel
+would not do such a thing? Ha! your simplicity, Honorine--your
+simplicity is incredible. It is miraculous. I tell you, I have known
+the Journels, from father to son, for--yes, for seventy-five years.
+Was not his grandfather the overseer on my father's plantation? I was
+not five years old when I began to know the Journels. And this fellow,
+I know him better than he knows himself. I know him as well as God
+knows him. I have made up my mind. I have made it up carefully that
+the first time that letter fails on the first of the month I
+shall have Journel arrested as a thief. I shall land him in the
+penitentiary. What! You think I shall submit to have my mail tampered
+with by a Journel? Their contents appropriated? What! You think there
+was no coincidence in Journel's offering me his post-office box just
+the month--just the month, before those letters began to arrive? You
+think he did not have some inkling of them? Mark my words, Honorine,
+he did--by some of his subterranean methods. And all these five years
+he has been arranging his plans--that is all. He was arranging theft,
+which no doubt has been consummated to-day. Oh, I have regretted it--I
+assure you I have regretted it, that I did not promptly reject his
+proposition, that, in fact, I ever had anything to do with the
+fellow."
+
+It was almost invariably, so regularly do events run in this
+world,--it was almost invariably that the negro messenger made his
+appearance at this point. For five years the General had perhaps
+not been interrupted as many times, either above or below the last
+sentence. The mail, or rather the letter, was opened, and the usual
+amount--three ten-dollar bills--was carefully extracted and counted.
+And as if he scented the bills, even as the General said he did,
+within ten minutes after their delivery, Journel made his appearance
+to collect the rent.
+
+It could only have been in Paris, among that old retired nobility, who
+counted their names back, as they expressed it, "au de çà du déluge,"
+that could have been acquired the proper manner of treating a
+"roturier" landlord: to measure him with the eyes from head to foot;
+to hand the rent--the ten-dollar bill--with the tips of the fingers;
+to scorn a look at the humbly tendered receipt; to say: "The cistern
+needs repairing, the roof leaks; I must warn you that unless such
+notifications meet with more prompt attention than in the past,
+you must look for another tenant," etc., in the monotonous tone of
+supremacy, and in the French, not of Journel's dictionary, nor of
+the dictionary of any such as he, but in the French of Racine and
+Corneille; in the French of the above suggested circle, which inclosed
+the General's memory, if it had not inclosed--as he never tired of
+recounting--his star-like personality.
+
+A sheet of paper always infolded the bank-notes. It always bore, in
+fine but sexless tracery, "From one who owes you much."
+
+There, that was it, that sentence, which, like a locomotive, bore the
+General and his wife far on these firsts of the month to two opposite
+points of the horizon, in fact, one from the other--"From one who owes
+you much."
+
+The old gentleman would toss the paper aside with the bill receipt.
+In the man to whom the bright New Orleans itself almost owed its
+brightness, it was a paltry act to search and pick for a debtor.
+Friends had betrayed and deserted him; relatives had forgotten him;
+merchants had failed with his money; bank presidents had stooped to
+deceive him; for he was an old man, and had about run the gamut of
+human disappointments--a gamut that had begun with a C major of trust,
+hope, happiness, and money.
+
+His political party had thrown him aside. Neither for ambassador,
+plenipotentiary, senator, congressman, not even for a clerkship, could
+he be nominated by it. Certes! "From one who owed him much." He had
+fitted the cap to a new head, the first of every month, for five
+years, and still the list was not exhausted. Indeed, it would have
+been hard for the General to look anywhere and not see some one whose
+obligations to him far exceeded this thirty dollars a month. Could he
+avoid being happy with such eyes?
+
+But poor Madame Honorine! She who always gathered up the receipts, and
+the "From one who owes you much"; who could at an instant's warning
+produce the particular ones for any month of the past half-decade.
+She kept them filed, not only in her armoire, but the scrawled
+papers--skewered, as it were, somewhere else--where women from time
+immemorial have skewered such unsigned papers. She was not original in
+her thoughts--no more, for the matter of that, than the General was.
+Tapped at any time on the first of the month, when she would pause
+in her drudgery to reimpale her heart by a sight of the written
+characters on the scrap of paper, her thoughts would have been found
+flowing thus, "One can give everything, and yet be sure of nothing."
+
+When Madame Honorine said "everything," she did not, as women in such
+cases often do, exaggerate. When she married the General, she in
+reality gave the youth of sixteen, the beauty (ah, do not trust the
+denial of those wrinkles, the thin hair, the faded eyes!) of an angel,
+the dot of an heiress. Alas! It was too little at the time. Had she in
+her own person united all the youth, all the beauty, all the wealth,
+sprinkled parsimoniously so far and wide over all the women in this
+land, would she at that time have done aught else with this than
+immolate it on the burning pyre of the General's affection? "And yet
+be sure of nothing."
+
+It is not necessary, perhaps, to explain that last clause. It is very
+little consolation for wives that their husbands have forgotten, when
+some one else remembers. Some one else! Ah! there could be so many
+some one Else's in the General's life, for in truth he had been
+irresistible to excess. But this was one particular some one else who
+had been faithful for five years. Which one?
+
+When Madame Honorine solves that enigma she has made up her mind how
+to act.
+
+As for Journel, it amused him more and more. He would go away from the
+little cottage rubbing his hands with pleasure (he never saw Madame
+Honorine, by the way, only the General). He would have given far more
+than thirty dollars a month for this drama; for he was not only rich,
+but a great _farceur_.
+
+
+
+
+LA GRANDE DEMOISELLE
+
+
+That was what she was called by everybody as soon as she was seen or
+described. Her name, besides baptismal titles, was Idalie Sainte Foy
+Mortemart des Islets. When she came into society, in the brilliant
+little world of New Orleans, it was the event of the season, and after
+she came in, whatever she did became also events. Whether she went, or
+did not go; what she said, or did not say; what she wore, and did not
+wear--all these became important matters of discussion, quoted as much
+or more than what the president said, or the governor thought. And
+in those days, the days of '59, New Orleans was not, as it is now, a
+one-heiress place, but it may be said that one could find heiresses
+then as one finds type-writing girls now.
+
+Mademoiselle Idalie received her birth, and what education she had, on
+her parents' plantation, the famed old Reine Sainte Foy place, and
+it is no secret that, like the ancient kings of France, her birth
+exceeded her education.
+
+It was a plantation, the Reine Sainte Foy, the richness and luxury of
+which are really well described in those fervid pictures of tropical
+life, at one time the passion of philanthropic imaginations, excited
+and exciting over the horrors of slavery. Although these pictures were
+then often accused of being purposely exaggerated, they seem now to
+fall short of, instead of surpassing, the truth. Stately walls, acres
+of roses, miles of oranges, unmeasured fields of cane, colossal
+sugar-house--they were all there, and all the rest of it, with the
+slaves, slaves, slaves everywhere, whole villages of negro cabins. And
+there were also, most noticeable to the natural, as well as to
+the visionary, eye--there were the ease, idleness, extravagance,
+self-indulgence, pomp, pride, arrogance, in short the whole
+enumeration, the moral _sine qua non_, as some people considered it,
+of the wealthy slaveholder of aristocratic descent and tastes.
+
+What Mademoiselle Idalie cared to learn she studied, what she did not
+she ignored; and she followed the same simple rule untrammeled in her
+eating, drinking, dressing, and comportment generally; and whatever
+discipline may have been exercised on the place, either in fact or
+fiction, most assuredly none of it, even so much as in a threat,
+ever attended her sacred person. When she was just turned sixteen,
+Mademoiselle Idalie made up her mind to go into society. Whether she
+was beautiful or not, it is hard to say. It is almost impossible
+to appreciate properly the beauty of the rich, the very rich. The
+unfettered development, the limitless choice of accessories, the
+confidence, the self-esteem, the sureness of expression, the
+simplicity of purpose, the ease of execution--all these produce a
+certain effect of beauty behind which one really cannot get to measure
+length of nose, or brilliancy of eye. This much can be said: there was
+nothing in her that positively contradicted any assumption of beauty
+on her part, or credit of it on the part of others. She was very tall
+and very thin with small head, long neck, black eyes, and abundant
+straight black hair,--for which her hair-dresser deserved more praise
+than she,--good teeth, of course, and a mouth that, even in prayer,
+talked nothing but commands; that is about all she had _en fait
+d'ornements_, as the modesties say. It may be added that she walked as
+if the Reine Sainte Foy plantation extended over the whole earth, and
+the soil of it were too vile for her tread. Of course she did not buy
+her toilets in New Orleans. Everything was ordered from Paris, and
+came as regularly through the custom-house as the modes and robes to
+the milliners. She was furnished by a certain house there, just as one
+of a royal family would be at the present day. As this had lasted from
+her layette up to her sixteenth year, it may be imagined what took
+place when she determined to make her début. Then it was literally,
+not metaphorically, _carte blanche_, at least so it got to the ears of
+society. She took a sheet of note-paper, wrote the date at the top,
+added, "I make my début in November," signed her name at the extreme
+end of the sheet, addressed it to her dressmaker in Paris, and sent
+it.
+
+It was said that in her dresses the very handsomest silks were
+used for linings, and that real lace was used where others put
+imitation,--around the bottoms of the skirts, for instance,--and silk
+ribbons of the best quality served the purposes of ordinary tapes; and
+sometimes the buttons were of real gold and silver, sometimes set
+with precious stones. Not that she ordered these particulars, but the
+dressmakers, when given _carte blanche_ by those who do not condescend
+to details, so soon exhaust the outside limits of garments that
+perforce they take to plastering them inside with gold, so to speak,
+and, when the bill goes in, they depend upon the furnishings to carry
+out a certain amount of the contract in justifying the price. And it
+was said that these costly dresses, after being worn once or twice,
+were cast aside, thrown upon the floor, given to the negroes--anything
+to get them out of sight. Not an inch of the real lace, not one of the
+jeweled buttons, not a scrap of ribbon, was ripped off to save. And it
+was said that if she wanted to romp with her dogs in all her finery,
+she did it; she was known to have ridden horseback, one moonlight
+night, all around the plantation in a white silk dinner-dress flounced
+with Alençon. And at night, when she came from the balls, tired, tired
+to death as only balls can render one, she would throw herself down
+upon her bed in her tulle skirts,--on top, or not, of the exquisite
+flowers, she did not care,--and make her maid undress her in that
+position; often having her bodices cut off her, because she was too
+tired to turn over and have them unlaced.
+
+That she was admired, raved about, loved even, goes without saying.
+After the first month she held the refusal of half the beaux of New
+Orleans. Men did absurd, undignified, preposterous things for her; and
+she? Love? Marry? The idea never occurred to her. She treated the
+most exquisite of her pretenders no better than she treated her Paris
+gowns, for the matter of that. She could not even bring herself to
+listen to a proposal patiently; whistling to her dogs, in the middle
+of the most ardent protestations, or jumping up and walking away with
+a shrug of the shoulders, and a "Bah!"
+
+[Illustration: "WALKING AWAY WITH A SHRUG OF THE SHOULDERS."]
+
+Well! Every one knows what happened after '59. There is no need to
+repeat. The history of one is the history of all. But there was this
+difference--for there is every shade of difference in misfortune, as
+there is every shade of resemblance in happiness. Mortemart des Islets
+went off to fight. That was natural; his family had been doing that,
+he thought, or said, ever since Charlemagne. Just as naturally he was
+killed in the first engagement. They, his family, were always
+among the first killed; so much so that it began to be considered
+assassination to fight a duel with any of them. All that was in the
+ordinary course of events. One difference in their misfortunes lay
+in that after the city was captured, their plantation, so near,
+convenient, and rich in all kinds of provisions, was selected to
+receive a contingent of troops--a colored company. If it had been a
+colored company raised in Louisiana it might have been different; and
+these negroes mixed with the negroes in the neighborhood,--and negroes
+are no better than whites, for the proportion of good and bad among
+them,--and the officers were always off duty when they should have
+been on, and on when they should have been off.
+
+One night the dwelling caught fire. There was an immediate rush to
+save the ladies. Oh, there was no hesitation about that! They were
+seized in their beds, and carried out in the very arms of their
+enemies; carried away off to the sugar-house, and deposited there. No
+danger of their doing anything but keep very quiet and still in their
+_chemises de nuit_, and their one sheet apiece, which was about all
+that was saved from the conflagration--that is, for them. But it must
+be remembered that this is all hearsay. When one has not been present,
+one knows nothing of one's own knowledge; one can only repeat. It has
+been repeated, however, that although the house was burned to
+the ground, and everything in it destroyed, wherever, for a year
+afterward, a man of that company or of that neighborhood was found,
+there could have been found also, without search-warrant, property
+that had belonged to the Des Islets. That is the story; and it is
+believed or not, exactly according to prejudice.
+
+How the ladies ever got out of the sugar-house, history does not
+relate; nor what they did. It was not a time for sociability, either
+personal or epistolary. At one offensive word your letter, and you,
+very likely, examined; and Ship Island for a hotel, with soldiers for
+hostesses! Madame Des Islets died very soon after the accident--of
+rage, they say; and that was about all the public knew.
+
+Indeed, at that time the society of New Orleans had other things
+to think about than the fate of the Des Islets. As for _la grande
+demoiselle_, she had prepared for her own oblivion in the hearts of
+her female friends. And the gentlemen,--her _preux chevaliers_,--they
+were burning with other passions than those which had driven them to
+her knees, encountering a little more serious response than "bahs" and
+shrugs. And, after all, a woman seems the quickest thing forgotten
+when once the important affairs of life come to men for consideration.
+
+It might have been ten years according to some calculations, or ten
+eternities,--the heart and the almanac never agree about time,--but
+one morning old Champigny (they used to call him Champignon) was
+walking along his levee front, calculating how soon the water would
+come over, and drown him out, as the Louisianians say. It was before a
+seven-o'clock breakfast, cold, wet, rainy, and discouraging. The road
+was knee-deep in mud, and so broken up with hauling, that it was like
+walking upon waves to get over it. A shower poured down. Old Champigny
+was hurrying in when he saw a figure approaching. He had to stop to
+look at it, for it was worth while. The head was hidden by a green
+barege veil, which the showers had plentifully besprinkled with dew; a
+tall, thin figure. Figure! No; not even could it be called a figure:
+straight up and down, like a finger or a post; high-shouldered, and
+a step--a step like a plow-man's. No umbrella; no--nothing more, in
+fact. It does not sound so peculiar as when first related--something
+must be forgotten. The feet--oh, yes, the feet--they were like
+waffle-irons, or frying-pans, or anything of that shape.
+
+Old Champigny did not care for women--he never had; they simply did
+not exist for him in the order of nature. He had been married once,
+it is true, about a half century before; but that was not reckoned
+against the existence of his prejudice, because he was _célibataire_
+to his finger-tips, as any one could see a mile away. But that woman
+_intrigué'd_ him.
+
+He had no servant to inquire from. He performed all of his own
+domestic work in the wretched little cabin that replaced his old home.
+For Champigny also belonged to the great majority of the _nouveaux
+pauvres_. He went out into the rice-field, where were one or two
+hands that worked on shares with him, and he asked them. They knew
+immediately; there is nothing connected with the parish that a
+field-hand does not know at once. She was the teacher of the colored
+public school some three or four miles away. "Ah," thought Champigny,
+"some Northern lady on a mission." He watched to see her return in the
+evening, which she did, of course; in a blinding rain. Imagine the
+green barege veil then; for it remained always down over her face.
+
+[Illustration: CHAMPIGNY.]
+
+Old Champigny could not get over it that he had never seen her before.
+But he must have seen her, and, with his abstraction and old age, not
+have noticed her, for he found out from the negroes that she had been
+teaching four or five years there. And he found out also--how, is not
+important--that she was Idalie Sainte Foy Mortemart des Islets. _La
+grande demoiselle_! He had never known her in the old days, owing to
+his uncomplimentary attitude toward women, but he knew of her,
+of course, and of her family. It should have been said that his
+plantation was about fifty miles higher up the river, and on the
+opposite bank to Reine Sainte Foy. It seemed terrible. The old
+gentleman had had reverses of his own, which would bear the telling,
+but nothing was more shocking to him than this--that Idalie Sainte
+Foy Mortemart des Islets should be teaching a public colored school
+for--it makes one blush to name it--seven dollars and a half a month.
+For seven dollars and a half a month to teach a set of--well! He found
+out where she lived, a little cabin--not so much worse than his own,
+for that matter--in the corner of a field; no companion, no servant,
+nothing but food and shelter. Her clothes have been described.
+
+Only the good God himself knows what passed in Champigny's mind on
+the subject. We know only the results. He went and married _la grande
+demoiselle_. How? Only the good God knows that too. Every first of the
+month, when he goes to the city to buy provisions, he takes her with
+him--in fact, he takes her everywhere with him.
+
+Passengers on the railroad know them well, and they always have a
+chance to see her face. When she passes her old plantation _la grande
+demoiselle_ always lifts her veil for one instant--the inevitable
+green barege veil. What a face! Thin, long, sallow, petrified! And the
+neck! If she would only tie something around the neck! And her plain,
+coarse cottonade gown! The negro women about her were better dressed
+than she.
+
+Poor old Champignon! It was not an act of charity to himself, no
+doubt cross and disagreeable, besides being ugly. And as for love,
+gratitude!
+
+
+
+
+MIMI'S MARRIAGE
+
+
+This how she told about it, sitting in her little room,--her bridal
+chamber,--not larger, really not larger than sufficed for the bed
+there, the armoire here, the bureau opposite, and the washstand behind
+the door, the corners all touching. But a nice set of furniture, quite
+_comme il faut_,--handsome, in fact,--as a bride of good family should
+have. And she was dressed very prettily, too, in her long white
+_negligée_, with plenty of lace and ruffles and blue ribbons,--such as
+only the Creole girls can make, and brides, alas! wear,--the pretty
+honeymoon costume that suggests, that suggests--well! to proceed. "The
+poor little cat!" as one could not help calling her, so _mignonne_,
+so blond, with the pretty black eyes, and the rosebud of a
+mouth,--whenever she closed it,--a perfect kiss.
+
+"But you know, Louise," she said, beginning quite seriously at the
+beginning, "papa would never have consented, never, never--poor papa!
+Indeed, I should never have asked him; it would only have been one
+humiliation more for him, poor papa! So it was well he was dead, if
+it was God's will for it to be. Of course I had my dreams, like
+everybody. I was so blond, so blond, and so small; it seemed like a
+law I should marry a _brun_, a tall, handsome _brun_, with a mustache
+and a fine barytone voice. That was how I always arranged it, and--you
+will laugh--but a large, large house, and numbers of servants, and a
+good cook, but a superlatively good cuisine, and wine and all that,
+and long, trailing silk dresses, and theater every night, and voyages
+to Europe, and--well, everything God had to give, in fact. You know, I
+get that from papa, wanting everything God has to give! Poor papa! It
+seemed to me I was to meet him at any time, my handsome _brun_. I used
+to look for him positively on my way to school, and back home again,
+and whenever I would think of him I would try and walk so prettily,
+and look so pretty! _Mon Dieu!_ I was not ten years old yet! And
+afterward it was only for that that I went into society. What should
+girls go into society for otherwise but to meet their _brun_ or their
+blond? Do you think it is amusing, to economize and economize, and sew
+and sew, just to go to a party to dance? No! I assure you, I went into
+society only for that; and I do not believe what girls say--they go
+into society only for that too.
+
+"You know at school how we used to _tirer la bonne aventure._[1] Well,
+every time he was not _brun, riche, avenant_, Jules, or Raoul, or Guy,
+I simply would not accept it, but would go on drawing until I obtained
+what I wanted. As I tell you, I thought it was my destiny. And when I
+would try with a flower to see if he loved me,--_Il m'aime, un peu,
+beaucoup, passionément, pas du tout_,--if it were _pas du tout_, I
+would always throw the flower away, and begin tearing off the leaves
+from another one immediately. _Passionément_ was what I wanted, and I
+always got it in the end.
+
+[Footnote 1: _La bonne aventure_ is or was generally a very much
+battered foolscap copy-book, which contained a list of all possible
+elements of future (school-girl) happiness. Each item answered a
+question, and had a number affixed to it. To draw one's fortune
+consisted in asking question after question, and guessing a number,
+a companion volunteering to read the answers. To avoid cheating, the
+books were revised from time to time, and the numbers changed.]
+
+"But papa, poor papa, he never knew anything of that, of course. He
+would get furious when any one would come to see me, and sometimes,
+when he would take me in society, if I danced with a 'nobody,'--as he
+called no matter whom I danced with,--he would come up and take me
+away with such an air--such an air! It would seem that papa thought
+himself better than everybody in the world. But it went worse and
+worse with papa, not only in the affairs of the world, but in health.
+Always thinner and thinner, always a cough; in fact, you know, I am a
+little feeble-chested myself, from papa. And Clementine! Clementine
+with her children--just think, Louise, eight! I thank God my mama had
+only me, if papa's second wife had to have so many. And so naughty! I
+assure you, they were all devils; and no correction, no punishment, no
+education--but you know Clementine! I tell you, sometimes on account
+of those children I used to think myself in 'ell [making the Creole's
+attempt and failure to pronounce the h], and Clementine had no pride
+about them. If they had shoes, well; if they had not shoes, well
+also.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"'But Clementine!' I would expostulate, I would pray--
+
+"'But do not be a fool, Mimi,' she would say. 'Am I God? Can I do
+miracles? Or must I humiliate your papa?'
+
+"That was true. Poor papa! It would have humiliated papa. When he had
+money he gave; only it was a pity he had no money. As for what he
+observed, he thought it was Clementine's negligence. For, it is true,
+Clementine had no order, no industry, in the best of fortune as in the
+worst. But to do her justice, it was not her fault this time, only she
+let him believe it, to save his pride; and Clementine, you know, has a
+genius for stories. I assure you, Louise, I was desperate. I prayed to
+God to help me, to advise me. I could not teach--I had no education; I
+could not go into a shop--that would be dishonoring papa--and _enfin_,
+I was too pretty. 'And proclaim to the world,' Clementine would cry,
+'that your papa does not make money for his family.' That was true. The
+world is so malicious. You know, Louise, sometimes it seems to me
+the world is glad to hear that a man cannot support his family; it
+compliments those who can. As if papa had not intelligence, and honor,
+and honesty! But they do not count now as in old times, 'before the
+war.'
+
+"And so, when I thought of that, I laughed and talked and played the
+thoughtless like Clementine, and made bills. We made bills--we had
+to--for everything; we could do that, you know, on our old name and
+family. But it is too long! I am sure it is too long and tiresome!
+What egotism on my part! Come, we will take a glass of anisette, and
+talk of something else--your trip, your family. No? no? You are only
+asking me out of politeness! You are so _aimable_, so kind. Well, if
+you are not _ennuyée_--in fact, I want to tell you. It was too long
+to write, and I detest a pen. To me there is no instrument of torture
+like a pen.
+
+"Well, the lady next door, she was an American, and common, very
+common, according to papa. In comparison to us she had no family
+whatever. Our little children were forbidden even to associate with
+her little children. I thought that was ridiculous--not that I am a
+democrat, but I thought it ridiculous. But the children cared; they
+were so disobedient and they were always next door, and they always
+had something nice to eat over there. I sometimes thought Clementine
+used to encourage their disobedience, just for the good things they
+got to eat over there. But papa was always making fun of them; you
+know what a sharp tongue he had. The gentleman was a clerk; and,
+according to papa, the only true gentlemen in the world had family
+and a profession. We did not dare allow ourselves to think it, but
+Clementine and I knew that they, in fact, were in more comfortable
+circumstances than we.
+
+"The lady, who also had a great number of children, sent one day, with
+all the discretion and delicacy possible, and asked me if I would
+be so kind as to--guess what, Louise! But only guess! But you never
+could! Well, to darn some of her children's stockings for her. It was
+God who inspired her, I am sure, on account of my praying so much to
+him. You will be shocked, Louise, when I tell you. It sounds like a
+sin, but I was not in despair when papa died. It was a grief,--yes,
+it seized the heart, but it was not despair. Men ought not to be
+subjected to the humiliation of life; they are not like women, you
+know. We are made to stand things; they have their pride,--their
+_orgueil_, as we say in French,--and that is the point of honor with
+some men. And Clementine and I, we could not have concealed it much
+longer. In fact, the truth was crying out everywhere, in the children,
+in the house, in our own persons, in our faces. The darning did not
+provide a superfluity, I guarantee you!
+
+"Poor papa! He caught cold. He was condemned from the first. And so
+all his fine qualities died; for he had fine qualities--they were too
+fine for this age, that was all. Yes; it was a kindness of God to take
+him before he found out. If it was to be, it was better. Just so with
+Clementine as with me. After the funeral--crack! everything went to
+pieces. We were at the four corners for the necessaries of life, and
+the bills came in--my dear, the bills that came in! What memories!
+what memories! Clementine and I exclaimed; there were some bills that
+we had completely forgotten about. The lady next door sent her brother
+over when papa died. He sat up all night, that night, and he assisted
+us in all our arrangements. And he came in afterward, every evening.
+If papa had been there, there would have been a fine scene over it; he
+would have had to take the door, very likely. But now there was no one
+to make objections. And so when, as I say, we were at the four corners
+for the necessaries of life, he asked Clementine's permission to ask
+me to marry him.
+
+"I give you my word, Louise, I had forgotten there was such a thing as
+marriage in the world for me! I had forgotten it as completely as the
+chronology of the Merovingian dynasty, alas! with all the other school
+things forgotten. And I do not believe Clementine remembered there was
+such a possibility in the world for me. _Mon Dieu!_ when a girl is
+poor she may have all the beauty in the world--not that I had beauty,
+only a little prettiness. But you should have seen Clementine! She
+screamed for joy when she told me. Oh, there was but one answer
+according to her, and according to everybody she could consult, in her
+haste. They all said it was a dispensation of Providence in my favor.
+He was young, he was strong; he did not make a fortune, it was true,
+but he made a good living. And what an assistance to have a man in
+the family!--an assistance for Clementine and the children. But the
+principal thing, after all, was, he wanted to marry me. Nobody had
+ever wanted that before, my dear!
+
+"Quick, quick, it was all arranged. All my friends did something for
+me. One made my _peignoirs_ for me, one this, one that--_ma foi!_
+I did not recognize myself. One made all the toilet of the bureau,
+another of the bed, and we all sewed on the wedding-dress together.
+And you should have seen Clementine, going out in all her great
+mourning, looking for a house, looking for a servant! But the wedding
+was private on account of poor papa. But you know, Loulou, I had never
+time to think, except about Clementine and the children, and when I
+thought of all those poor little children, poor papa's children, I
+said 'Quick, quick,' like the rest.
+
+"It was the next day, the morning after the wedding, I had time to
+think. I was sitting here, just as you see me now, in my pretty new
+_negligée_. I had been looking at all the pretty presents I have
+shown you, and my trousseau, and my furniture,--it is not bad, as
+you see,--my dress, my veil, my ring, and--I do not know--I do not
+know--but, all of a sudden, from everywhere came the thought of my
+_brun_, my handsome _brun_ with the mustache, and the _bonne aventure,
+ricke, avenant_, the Jules, Raoul, Guy, and the flower leaves, and
+'_il m'aime, un pen, beaucoup, pas du tout,' passionnément_, and the
+way I expected to meet him walking to and from school, walking as if
+I were dancing the steps, and oh, my plans, my plans, my plans,--silk
+dresses, theater, voyages to Europe,--and poor papa, so fine, so tall,
+so aristocratic. I cannot tell you how it all came; it seized my
+heart, and, _mon Dieu!_ I cried out, and I wept, I wept, I wept. How
+I wept! It pains me here now to remember it. Hours, hours it lasted,
+until I had no tears in my body, and I had to weep without them, with
+sobs and moans. But this, I have always observed, is the time for
+reflection--after the tears are all out. And I am sure God himself
+gave me my thoughts. 'Poor little Mimi!' I thought, '_fi done_! You
+are going to make a fool of yourself now when it is all over, because
+why? It is God who manages the world, and not you. You pray to God to
+help you in your despair, and he has helped you. He has sent you a
+good, kind husband who adores you; who asks only to be a brother to
+your sisters and brothers, and son to Clementine; who has given you
+more than you ever possessed in your life--but because he did not come
+out of the _bonne aventure_--and who gets a husband out of the
+_bonne aventure?_--and would your _brun_ have come to you in your
+misfortune?' I am sure God inspired those thoughts in me.
+
+[Illustration: "I wept, I wept, I wept."]
+
+"I tell you, I rose from that bed--naturally I had thrown myself upon
+it. Quick I washed my face, I brushed my hair, and, you see these bows
+of ribbons,--look, here are the marks of the tears,--I turned them.
+_Hé,_ Loulou, it occurs to me, that if you examined the blue bows on
+a bride's _negligée_, you might always find tears on the other side;
+for do they not all have to marry whom God sends? and am I the only
+one who had dreams? It is the end of dreams, marriage; and that is the
+good thing about it. God lets us dream to keep us quiet, but he knows
+when to wake us up, I tell you. The blue bows knew! And now, you see,
+I prefer my husband to my _brun_; in fact, Loulou, I adore him, and I
+am furiously jealous about him. And he is so good to Clementine and
+the poor little children; and see his photograph--a blond, and not
+good-looking, and small!
+
+"But poor papa! If he had been alive, I am sure he never would have
+agreed with God about my marriage."
+
+
+
+
+THE MIRACLE CHAPEL
+
+
+Every heart has a miracle to pray for. Every life holds that which
+only a miracle can cure. To prove that there have never been, that
+there can never be, miracles does not alter the matter. So long as
+there is something hoped for,--that does not come in the legitimate
+channel of possible events,--so long as something does come not to be
+hoped or expected in the legitimate channel of possible events, just
+so long will the miracle be prayed for.
+
+The rich and the prosperous, it would seem, do not depend upon God so
+much, do not need miracles, as the poor do. They do not have to pray
+for the extra crust when starvation hovers near; for the softening of
+an obdurate landlord's heart; for strength in temptation, light in
+darkness, salvation from vice; for a friend in friendlessness; for
+that miracle of miracles, an opportunity to struggling ambition; for
+the ending of a dark night, the breaking of day; and, oh! for God's
+own miracle to the bedside-watchers--the change for the better, when
+death is there and the apothecary's skill too far, far away. The poor,
+the miserable, the unhappy, they can show their miracles by the score;
+that is why God is called the poor man's friend. He does not mind, so
+they say, going in the face of logic and reason to relieve them; for
+often the kind and charitable are sadly hampered by the fetters of
+logic and reason, which hold them, as it were, away from their own
+benevolence.
+
+But the rich have their miracles, no doubt, even in that beautiful
+empyrean of moneyed ease in which the poor place them. Their money
+cannot buy all they enjoy, and God knows how much of their sorrow it
+assuages. As it is, one hears now and then of accidents among them,
+conversions to better thoughts, warding off of danger, rescue of life;
+and heirs are sometimes born, and husbands provided, and fortunes
+saved, in such surprising ways, that even the rich, feeling their
+limitations in spite of their money, must ascribe it privately if not
+publicly to other potencies than their own. These cathedral _tours
+de force_, however, do not, if the truth be told, convince like the
+miracles of the obscure little chapel.
+
+There is always a more and a most obscure little miracle chapel, and
+as faith seems ever to lead unhesitatingly to the latter one, there is
+ever rising out of humility and obscurity, as in response to a demand,
+some new shrine, to replace the wear and tear and loss of other
+shrines by prosperity. For, alas! it is hard even for a chapel to
+remain obscure and humble in the face of prosperity and popularity.
+And how to prevent such popularity and prosperity? As soon as the
+noise of a real miracle in it gets abroad, every one is for hurrying
+thither at once with their needs and their prayers, their candles
+and their picayunes; and the little miracle chapel, perhaps despite
+itself, becomes with mushroom growth a church, and the church a
+cathedral, from whose resplendent altars the cheap, humble ex-voto
+tablets, the modest beginnings of its ecclesiastical fortunes, are
+before long banished to dimly lighted lateral shrines.
+
+The miracle chapel in question lay at the end of a very confusing but
+still intelligible route. It is not in truth a chapel at all, but a
+consecrated chamber in a very small, very lowly cottage, which stands,
+or one might appropriately, if not with absolute novelty, say which
+kneels, in the center of a large garden, a garden primeval in
+rusticity and size, its limits being defined by no lesser boundaries
+than the four intersecting streets outside, and its culture showing
+only the careless, shiftless culture of nature. The streets outside
+were miracles themselves in that, with their liquid contents, they
+were streets and not bayous. However, they protected their island
+chapel almost as well as a six-foot moat could have done. There was a
+small paved space on the sidewalk that served to the pedestrian as an
+indication of the spot in the tall, long, broad fence where a gate
+might be sought. It was a small gate with a strong latch. It required
+a strong hand to open it. At the sound of the click it made, the
+little street ragamuffin, who stood near, peeping through the fence,
+looked up. He had worked quite a hole between the boards with his
+fingers. Such an anxious expression passed over his face that even
+a casual passer-by could not help relieving it by a question--any
+question:
+
+"Is this the miracle chapel, little boy?"
+
+"Yes, ma'am; yes." Then his expression changed to one of eagerness,
+yet hardly less anxious.
+
+"Here. Take this--"
+
+He did not hold out his hand, the coin had to seek it. At its touch he
+refused to take it.
+
+"I ain't begging."
+
+"What are you looking at so through the fence?" He was all sadness
+now.
+
+"Just looking."
+
+"Is there anything to see inside?"
+
+He did not answer. The interrogation was repeated.
+
+"I can't see nothing. I'm blind," putting his eyes again to the hole,
+first one, then the other.
+
+"Come, won't you tell me how this came to be a miracle chapel?"
+
+"Oh, ma'am,"--he turned his face from the fence, and clasped his hands
+in excitement,--"it was a poor widow woman who come here with her baby
+that was a-dying, and she prayed to the Virgin Mary, and the Virgin
+Mary made the baby live--"
+
+He dropped his voice, the words falling slower and slower. As he
+raised his face, one could see then that he was blind, and the
+accident that had happened to him, in fording the street. What
+sightless eyes! What a wet, muddy little skeleton! Ten? No; hardly ten
+years of age.
+
+"The widow woman she picked up her baby, and she run down the walk
+here, and out into the street screaming--she was so glad,"--putting
+his eyes to the peep-hole again,--"and the Virgin Mary come down the
+walk after her, and come through the gate, too; and that was all she
+seed--the widow woman."
+
+"Did you know the widow woman?"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"How do you know it?"
+
+"That was what they told me. And they told me, the birds all begun to
+sing at once, and the flowers all lighted up like the sun was shining
+on them. They seed her. And she come down the walk, and through the
+gate," his voice lowering again to a whisper.
+
+Aye, how the birds must have sung, and the flowers shone, to the
+widowed mother as she ran, nay, leaped, down that rose-hedged walk,
+with her restored baby clasped to her bosom!
+
+"_They_ seed her," repeated the little fellow. "And that is why you
+stand here--to see her, too?"
+
+His shoulder turned uneasily in the clasp upon it.
+
+"They seed her, and they ain't got no eyes."
+
+"Have you no mother?"
+
+"Ain't never had no mother." A thought struck him. "Would that count,
+ma'am? Would that count? The little baby that was dying--yes, ma'am,
+it had a mother; and it's the mothers that come here constant with
+their children; I sometimes hear 'em dragging them in by the hand."
+
+"How long have you been coming here?"
+
+"Ever since the first time I heard it, ma'am."
+
+Street ragamuffins do not cry: it would be better if they did so, when
+they are so young and so blind; it would be easier for the spectator,
+the auditor.
+
+"They seed her--I might see her ef--ef I could see her once--ef--ef
+I could see anything once." His voice faltered; but he stiffened it
+instantly. "She might see me. She can't pass through this gate without
+seeing me; and--and--ef she seed me--and I didn't even see her--oh,
+I'm so tired of being blind!"
+
+"Did you never go inside to pray?" How embarrassing such a question
+is, even to a child!
+
+"No, ma'am. Does that count, too? The little baby didn't pray, the
+flowers didn't go inside, nor the birds. And they say the birds broke
+out singing all at once, and the flowers shined, like the sun was
+shining on 'em--like the sun was shining in 'em," he corrected
+himself. "The birds they can see, and the flowers they can't see, and
+they seed her." He shivered with the damp cold--and perhaps too with
+hunger.
+
+"Where do you live?"
+
+He wouldn't answer.
+
+"What do you live on?"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"Come with me." He could not resist the grasp on his shoulder, and the
+firm directing of his bare, muddy feet through the gate, up the walk,
+and into the chamber which the Virgin found that day. He was turned to
+the altar, and pressed down on his knees.
+
+One should not look at the face of a blind child praying to the Virgin
+for sight. Only the Virgin herself should see that--and if she once
+saw that little boy! There were hearts, feet, hands, and eyes enough
+hanging around to warrant hope at least, if not faith; the effigies of
+the human aches and pains that had here found relief, if not surcease;
+feet and hands beholden to no physician for their exorcism of
+rheumatism; eyes and ears indebted to no oculist or aurist; and the
+hearts,--they are always in excess,--and, to the most skeptical, there
+is something sweetly comforting in the sight of so many cured hearts,
+with their thanks cut deep, as they should be, in the very marble
+thereof. Where the bed must have stood was the altar, rising by easy
+gradations, brave in ecclesiastical deckings, to the plaster figure of
+her whom those yearning hearts were seeing, whom those murmuring lips
+were addressing. Hearts must be all alike to her at such a distance,
+but the faces to the looker-on were so different. The eyes straining
+to look through all the experiences and troubles that their life has
+held to plead, as only eyes can plead, to one who can, if she will,
+perform their miracle for them. And the mouths,--the sensitive human
+mouths,--each one distorted by the tragedy against which it was
+praying.
+
+Their miracles! their miracles! what trifles to divinity! Perhaps
+hardly more to humanity! How far a simple looker-on could supply them
+if so minded! Perhaps a liberal exercise of love and charity by not
+more than half a dozen well-to-do people could answer every prayer in
+the room! But what a miracle that would be, and how the Virgin's heart
+would gladden thereat, and jubilate over her restored heart-dying
+children, even as the widowed mother did over her one dying babe!
+
+And the little boy had stopped praying. The futility of it--perhaps
+his own impotence--had overcome him. He was crying, and past the shame
+of showing it--crying helplessly, hopelessly. Tears were rolling out
+of his sightless eyes over his wordless lips. He could not pray; he
+could only cry. What better, after all, can any of us do? But what
+a prayer to a woman--to even the plaster figure of a woman! And the
+Virgin did hear him; for she had him taken without loss of a moment to
+the hospital, and how easy she made it for the physician to remove the
+disability! To her be the credit.
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF A DAY
+
+
+It is really not much, the story; it is only the arrangement of it, as
+we would say of our dresses and our drawing-rooms.
+
+It began with the dawn, of course; and the skiff for our voyage,
+silvered with dew, waiting in the mist for us, as if it had floated
+down in a cloud from heaven to the bayou. When repeated, this sounds
+like poor poetry; but that is the way one thinks at day dawn, when the
+dew is yet, as it were, upon our brains, and our ideas are still half
+dreams, and our waking hearts, alas! as innocent as waking babies
+playing with their toes.
+
+Our oars waked the waters of the bayou, as motionless as a sleeping
+snake under its misty covert--to continue the poetical language or
+thought. The ripples ran frightened and shivering into the rooty
+thicknesses of the sedge-grown banks, startling the little birds
+bathing there into darting to the nearest, highest rush-top, where,
+without losing their hold on their swaying, balancing perches, they
+burst into all sorts of incoherent songs, in their excitement to
+divert attention from the near-hidden nests: bird mothers are so much
+like women mothers!
+
+It soon became day enough for the mist to rise. The eyes that saw it
+ought to be able to speak to tell fittingly about it.
+
+Not all at once, nor all together, but a thinning, a lifting, a
+breaking, a wearing away; a little withdrawing here, a little
+withdrawing there; and now a peep, and now a peep; a bride lifting her
+veil to her husband! Blue! White! Lilies! Blue lilies! White lilies!
+Blue and white lilies! And still blue and white lilies! And still! And
+still! Wherever the veil lifted, still and always the bride!
+
+Not in clumps and bunches, not in spots and patches, not in banks,
+meadows, acres, but in--yes; for still it lifted beyond and beyond and
+beyond; the eye could not touch the limit of them, for the eye can
+touch only the limit of vision; and the lilies filled the whole
+sea-marsh, for that is the way spring comes to the sea-marshes.
+
+The sedge-roots might have been unsightly along the water's edge,
+but there were morning-glories, all colors, all shades--oh, such
+morning-glories as we of the city never see! Our city morning-glories
+must dream of them, as we dream of angels. Only God could be so
+lavish! Dropping from the tall spear-heads to the water, into the
+water, under the water. And then, the reflection of them, in all their
+colors, blue, white, pink, purple, red, rose, violet!
+
+To think of an obscure little Acadian bayou waking to flow the
+first thing in the morning not only through banks of new-blown
+morning-glories, but sown also to its depths with such reflections as
+must make it think itself a bayou in heaven, instead of in Paroisse
+St. Martin. Perhaps that is the reason the poor poets think themselves
+poets, on account of the beautiful things that are only reflected into
+their minds from what is above? Besides the reflections, there were
+alligators in the bayou, trying to slip away before we could see them,
+and watching us with their stupid, senile eyes, sometimes from under
+the thickest, prettiest flowery bowers; and turtles splashing into
+the water ahead of us; and fish (silver-sided perch), looking like
+reflections themselves, floating through the flower reflections,
+nibbling their breakfast.
+
+Our bayou had been running through swamp only a little more solid than
+itself; in fact, there was no solidity but what came from the roots of
+grasses. Now, the banks began to get firmer, from real soil in them.
+We could see cattle in the distance, up to their necks in the lilies,
+their heads and sharp-pointed horns coming up and going down in the
+blue and white. Nothing makes cattle's heads appear handsomer, with
+the sun just rising far, far away on the other side of them.
+The sea-marsh cattle turned loose to pasture in the lush spring
+beauty--turned loose in Elysium!
+
+But the land was only partly land yet, and the cattle still cattle to
+us. The rising sun made revelations, as our bayou carried us through a
+drove in their Elysium, or it might have always been an Elysium to
+us. It was not all pasturage, all enjoyment. The rising and falling
+feeding head was entirely different, as we could now see, from the
+rising and falling agonized head of the bogged--the buried alive.
+It is well that the lilies grow taller and thicker over the more
+treacherous places; but, misery! misery! not much of the process was
+concealed from us, for the cattle have to come to the bayou for
+water. Such a splendid black head that had just yielded breath! The
+wide-spreading ebony horns thrown back among the morning-glories, the
+mouth open from the last sigh, the glassy eyes staring straight at the
+beautiful blue sky above, where a ghostly moon still lingered, the
+velvet neck ridged with veins and muscles, the body already buried in
+black ooze. And such a pretty red-and-white-spotted heifer, lying on
+her side, opening and shutting her eyes, breathing softly in meek
+resignation to her horrible calamity! And, again, another one was
+plunging and battling in the act of realizing her doom: a fierce,
+furious, red cow, glaring and bellowing at the soft, yielding
+inexorable abysm under her, the bustards settling afar off, and her
+own species browsing securely just out of reach.
+
+They understand that much, the sea-marsh cattle, to keep out of reach
+of the dead combatant. In the delirium of anguish, relief cannot be
+distinguished from attack, and rescue of the victim has been proved to
+mean goring of the rescuer.
+
+The bayou turned from it at last, from our beautiful lily world about
+which our pleasant thoughts had ceased to flow even in bad poetry.
+
+Our voyage was for information, which might be obtained at a certain
+habitation; if not there, at a second one, or surely at a third and
+most distant settlement.
+
+The bayou narrowed into a canal, then widened into a bayou again, and
+the low, level swamp and prairie advanced into woodland and forest.
+Oak-trees began, our beautiful oak-trees! Great branches bent down
+almost to the water,--quite even with high water,--covered with
+forests of oak, parasites, lichens, and with vines that swept our
+heads as we passed under them, drooping now and then to trail in the
+water, a plaything for the fishes, and a landing-place for amphibious
+insects. The sun speckled the water with its flickering patterns,
+showering us with light and heat. We have no spring suns; our sun,
+even in December, is a summer one.
+
+And so, with all its grace of curve and bend, and so--the description
+is longer than the voyage--we come to our first stopping-place. To the
+side, in front of the well-kept fertile fields, like a proud little
+showman, stood the little house. Its pointed shingle roof covered it
+like the top of a chafing-dish, reaching down to the windows, which
+peeped out from under it like little eyes.
+
+A woman came out of the door to meet us. She had had time during our
+graceful winding approach to prepare for us. What an irrevocable
+vow to old maidenhood! At least twenty-five, almost a possible
+grandmother, according to Acadian computation, and well in the grip
+of advancing years. She was dressed in a stiff, dark red calico gown,
+with a white apron. Her black hair, smooth and glossy under a varnish
+of grease, was plaited high in the back, and dropped regular ringlets,
+six in all, over her forehead. That was the epoch when her calamity
+came to her, when the hair was worn in that fashion. A woman seldom
+alters her coiffure after a calamity of a certain nature happens
+to her. The figure had taken a compact rigidity, an unfaltering
+inflexibility, all the world away from the elasticity of matronhood;
+and her eyes were clear and fixed like her figure, neither falling,
+nor rising, nor puzzling under other eyes. Her lips, her hands, her
+slim feet, were conspicuously single, too, in their intent, neither
+reaching, nor feeling, nor running for those other lips, hands, and
+feet which should have doubled their single life.
+
+That was Adorine Mérionaux, otherwise the most industrious Acadian and
+the best cottonade-weaver in the parish. It had been short, her story.
+A woman's love is still with those people her story. She was thirteen
+when she met him. That is the age for an Acadian girl to meet him,
+because, you know, the large families--the thirteen, fourteen,
+fifteen, twenty children--take up the years; and when one wishes
+to know one's great-great-grandchildren (which is the dream of the
+Acadian girl) one must not delay one's story.
+
+She had one month to love him in, and in one week they were to have
+the wedding. The Acadians believe that marriage must come _au point_,
+as cooks say their sauces must be served. Standing on the bayou-bank
+in front of the Mérionaux, one could say "Good day" with the eyes to
+the Zévérin Theriots--that was the name of the parents of the young
+bridegroom. Looking under the branches of the oaks, one could see
+across the prairie,--prairie and sea-marsh it was,--and clearly
+distinguish another little red-washed house like the Mérionaux, with
+a painted roof hanging over the windows, and a staircase going up
+outside to the garret. With the sun shining in the proper direction,
+one might distinguish more, and with love shining like the sun in the
+eyes, one might see, one might see--a heart full.
+
+It was only the eyes, however, which could make such a quick voyage to
+the Zévérin Theriots; a skiff had a long day's journey to reach them.
+The bayou sauntered along over the country like a negro on a Sunday's
+pleasuring, trusting to God for time, and to the devil for means.
+
+Oh, nothing can travel quickly over a bayou! Ask any one who has
+waited on a bayou-bank for a physician or a life-and-death message.
+Thought refuses to travel and turn and double over it; thought, like
+the eye, takes the shortest cut--straight over the sea-marsh; and in
+the spring of the year, when the lilies are in bloom, thought could
+not take a more heavenly way, even from beloved to beloved.
+
+It was the week before marriage, that week when, more than one's whole
+life afterward, one's heart feels most longing--most--well, in fact,
+it was the week before marriage. From Sunday to Sunday, that was all
+the time to be passed. Adorine--women live through this week by
+the grace of God, or perhaps they would be as unreasonable as the
+men--Adorine could look across the prairie to the little red roof
+during the day, and could think across it during the night, and get
+up before day to look across again--longing, longing all the time.
+Of course one must supply all this from one's own imagination or
+experience.
+
+But Adorine could sing, and she sang. One might hear, in a favorable
+wind, a gunshot, or the barking of a dog from one place to the other,
+so that singing, as to effect, was nothing more than the voicing of
+her looking and thinking and longing.
+
+When one loves, it is as if everything was known of and seen by the
+other; not only all that passes in the head and heart, which would
+in all conscience be more than enough to occupy the other, but the
+talking, the dressing, the conduct. It was then that the back hair was
+braided and the front curled more and more beautifully every day, and
+that the calico dresses became stiffer and stiffer, and the white
+crochet lace collar broader and lower in the neck. At thirteen she was
+beautiful enough to startle one, they say, but that was nothing; she
+spent time and care upon these things, as if, like other women, her
+fate seriously depended upon them. There is no self-abnegation like
+that of a woman in love.
+
+It was her singing, however, which most showed that other existence
+in her existence. When she sang at her spinning-wheel or her loom, or
+knelt battling clothes on the bank of the bayou, her lips would kiss
+out the words, and the tune would rise and fall and tremble, as if
+Zepherin were just across there, anywhere; in fact, as if every blue
+and white lily might hide an ear of him.
+
+It was the time of the new moon, fortunately, when all sit up late in
+the country. The family would stop in their talking about the
+wedding to listen to her. She did not know it herself, but it--the
+singing--was getting louder and clearer, and, poor little thing, it
+told everything. And after the family went to bed they could still
+hear her, sitting on the bank of the bayou, or up in her window,
+singing and looking at the moon traveling across the lily prairie--for
+all its beauty and brightness no more beautiful and bright than a
+heart in love.
+
+It was just past the middle of the week, a Thursday night. The moon
+was so bright the colors of the lilies could be seen, and the singing,
+so sweet, so far-reaching--it was the essence of the longing of love.
+Then it was that the miracle happened to her. Miracles are always
+happening to the Acadians. She could not sleep, she could not stay in
+bed. Her heart drove her to the window, and kept her there, and--among
+the civilized it could not take place, but here she could sing as she
+pleased in the middle of the night; it was nobody's affair, nobody's
+disturbance. "Saint Ann! Saint Joseph! Saint Mary!" She heard her song
+answered! She held her heart, she bent forward, she sang again. Oh,
+the air was full of music! It was all music! She fell on her knees;
+she listened, looking at the moon; and, with her face in her hands,
+looking at Zepherin. It was God's choir of angels, she thought, and
+one with a voice like Zepherin! Whenever it died away she would sing
+again, and again, and again--
+
+[Illustration: "HER HEART DROVE HER TO THE WINDOW".]
+
+But the sun came, and the sun is not created, like the moon, for
+lovers, and whatever happened in the night, there was work to be done
+in the day. Adorine worked like one in a trance, her face as radiant
+as the upturned face of a saint. They did not know what it was, or
+rather they thought it was love. Love is so different out there, they
+make all kinds of allowances for it. But, in truth, Adorine was
+still hearing her celestial voices or voice. If the cackling of the
+chickens, the whir of the spinning-wheel, or the "bum bum" of the loom
+effaced it a moment, she had only to go to some still place, round
+her hand over her ear, and give the line of a song, and--it was
+Zepherin--Zepherin she heard.
+
+She walked in a dream until night. When the moon came up she was at
+the window, and still it continued, so faint, so sweet, that answer to
+her song. Echo never did anything more exquisite, but she knew nothing
+of such a heathen as Echo. Human nature became exhausted. She fell
+asleep where she was, in the window, and dreamed as only a bride can
+dream of her groom. When she awoke, "Adorine! Adorine!" the beautiful
+angel voices called to her; "Zepherin! Zepherin!" she answered, as if
+she, too, were an angel, signaling another angel in heaven. It was too
+much. She wept, and that broke the charm. She could hear nothing more
+after that. All that day was despondency, dejection, tear-bedewed
+eyes, and tremulous lips, the commonplace reaction, as all know, of
+love exaltation. Adorine's family, Acadian peasants though they were,
+knew as much about it as any one else, and all that any one knows
+about it is that marriage is the cure-all, and the only cure-all, for
+love.
+
+[Illustration: "ALL THAT DAY WAS DESPONDENCY, DEJECTION."]
+
+And Zepherin? A man could better describe his side of that week; for
+it, too, has mostly to be described from imagination or experience.
+What is inferred is that what Adorine longed and thought and looked
+in silence and resignation, according to woman's way, he suffered
+equally, but in a man's way, which is not one of silence or
+resignation,--at least when one is a man of eighteen,--the last
+interview, the near wedding, her beauty, his love, her house in sight,
+the full moon, the long, wakeful nights.
+
+He took his pirogue; but the bayou played with his impatience,
+maddened his passion, bringing him so near, to meander with him again
+so far away. There was only a short prairie between him and ----, a
+prairie thick with lily-roots--one could almost walk over their
+heads, so close, and gleaming in the moonlight. But this is all only
+inference.
+
+The pirogue was found tethered to the paddle stuck upright in the soft
+bank, and--Adorine's parents related the rest. Nothing else was found
+until the summer drought had bared the swamp.
+
+There was a little girl in the house when we arrived--all else were in
+the field--a stupid, solemn, pretty child, the child of a brother. How
+she kept away from Adorine, and how much that testified!
+
+It would have been too painful. The little arms around her neck, the
+head nestling to her bosom, sleepily pressing against it. And the
+little one might ask to be sung to sleep. Sung to sleep!
+
+The little bed-chamber, with its high mattressed bed, covered with
+the Acadian home-spun quilt, trimmed with netting fringe, its bit of
+mirror over the bureau, the bottle of perfumed grease to keep the
+locks black and glossy, the prayer-beads and blessed palms hanging
+on the wall, the low, black polished spinning-wheel, the loom,--the
+_métier d' Adorine_ famed throughout the parish,--the ever goodly
+store of cotton and yarn hanks swinging from the ceiling, and the
+little square, open window which looked under the mossy oak-branches
+to look over the prairie; and once again all blue and white
+lilies--they were all there, as Adorine was there; but there was
+more--not there.
+
+
+
+
+ANNE MARIE AND JEANNE MARIE
+
+
+Old Jeanne Marie leaned her hand against the house, and the tears
+rolled down her cheeks. She had not wept since she buried her last
+child. With her it was one trouble, one weeping, no more; and her
+wrinkled, hard, polished skin so far had known only the tears that
+come after death. The trouble in her heart now was almost exactly like
+the trouble caused by death; although she knew it was not so bad as
+death, yet, when she thought of this to console herself, the tears
+rolled all the faster. She took the end of the red cotton kerchief
+tied over her head, and wiped them away; for the furrows in her face
+did not merely run up and down--they ran in all directions, and
+carried her tears all over her face at once. She could understand
+death, but she could not understand this.
+
+It came about in this way: Anne Marie and she lived in the little
+red-washed cabin against which she leaned; had lived there alone with
+each other for fifty years, ever since Jeanne Marie's husband had died,
+and the three children after him, in the fever epidemic.
+
+The little two-roomed cabin, the stable where there used to be a cow,
+the patch of ground planted with onions, had all been bought and paid
+for by the husband; for he was a thrifty, hard-working Gascon, and had
+he lived there would not have been one better off, or with a larger
+family, either in that quarter or in any of the red-washed
+suburbs with which Gascony has surrounded New Orleans. His women,
+however,--the wife and sister-in-law,--had done their share in the
+work: a man's share apiece, for with the Gascon women there is no
+discrimination of sex when it comes to work.
+
+And they worked on just the same after he died, tending the cow,
+digging, hoeing, planting, watering. The day following the funeral, by
+daylight Jeanne Marie was shouldering around the yoke of milk-cans to
+his patrons, while Anne Marie carried the vegetables to market; and so
+on for fifty years.
+
+They were old women now,--seventy-five years old,--and, as they
+expressed it, they had always been twins. In twins there is always one
+lucky and one unlucky one: Jeanne Marie was the lucky one, Anne Marie
+the unlucky one. So much so, that it was even she who had to catch the
+rheumatism, and to lie now bedridden, months at a time, while Jeanne
+Marie was as active in her sabots as she had ever been.
+
+In spite of the age of both, and the infirmity of one, every Saturday
+night there was some little thing to put under the brick in the
+hearth, for taxes and license, and the never-to-be-forgotten funeral
+provision. In the husband's time gold pieces used to go in, but they
+had all gone to pay for the four funerals and the quadrupled doctor's
+bill. The women laid in silver pieces; the coins, however, grew
+smaller and smaller, and represented more and more not so much the
+gain from onions as the saving from food.
+
+It had been explained to them how they might, all at once, make a
+year's gain in the lottery; and it had become their custom always, at
+the end of every month, to put aside one silver coin apiece, to buy a
+lottery ticket with--one ticket each, not for the great, but for the
+twenty-five-cent, prizes. Anne Marie would buy hers round about the
+market; Jeanne Marie would stop anywhere along her milk course and buy
+hers, and they would go together in the afternoon to stand with the
+little crowd watching the placard upon which the winning numbers were
+to be written. And when they were written, it was curious, Jeanne
+Marie's numbers would come out twice as often as Anne Marie's. Not
+that she ever won anything, for she was not lucky enough to have them
+come out in the order to win; they only came out here and there,
+singly: but it was sufficient to make old Anne Marie cross and ugly
+for a day or two, and injure the sale of the onion-basket. When she
+became bedridden, Jeanne Marie bought the ticket for both, on the
+numbers, however, that Anne Marie gave her; and Anne Marie had to lie
+in bed and wait, while Jeanne Marie went out to watch the placard.
+
+One evening, watching it, Jeanne Marie saw the ticket-agent write out
+the numbers as they came on her ticket, in such a way that they drew
+a prize--forty dollars.
+
+When the old woman saw it she felt such a happiness; just as she used
+to feel in the old times right after the birth of a baby. She thought
+of that instantly. Without saying a word to any one, she clattered
+over the _banquette_ as fast as she could in her sabots, to tell the
+good news to Anne Marie. But she did not go so fast as not to have
+time to dispose of her forty dollars over and over again. Forty
+dollars! That was a great deal of money. She had often in her mind,
+when she was expecting a prize, spent twenty dollars; for she had
+never thought it could be more than that. But forty dollars! A new
+gown apiece, and black silk kerchiefs to tie over their heads instead
+of red cotton, and the little cabin new red-washed, and soup in the
+pot, and a garlic sausage, and a bottle of good, costly liniment for
+Anne Marie's legs; and still a pile of gold to go under the
+hearth-brick--a pile of gold that would have made the eyes of the
+defunct husband glisten.
+
+She pushed open the picket-gate, and came into the room where her
+sister lay in bed.
+
+"Eh, Anne Marie, my girl," she called in her thick, pebbly voice,
+apparently made purposely to suit her rough Gascon accent; "this time
+we have caught it!"
+
+[Illustration: "THIS TIME WE HAVE CAUGHT IT!"]
+
+"Whose ticket?" asked Anne Marie, instantly.
+
+In a flash all Anne Marie's ill luck ran through Jeanne Marie's mind;
+how her promised husband had proved unfaithful, and Jeanne Marie's
+faithful; and how, ever since, even to the coming out of her lottery
+numbers, even to the selling of vegetables, even to the catching of
+the rheumatism, she had been the loser. But above all, as she looked
+at Anne Marie in the bed, all the misery came over Jeanne Marie of her
+sister's not being able, in all her poor old seventy-five years of
+life, to remember the pressure of the arms of a husband about her
+waist, nor the mouth of a child on her breast.
+
+As soon as Anne Marie had asked her question, Jeanne Marie answered
+it.
+
+"But your ticket, _Coton-Maï!_"[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: _Coton-Maï_ is an innocent oath invented by the good,
+pious priest as a substitute for one more harmful.]
+
+"Where? Give it here! Give it here!"
+
+The old woman, who had not been able to move her back for weeks, sat
+bolt upright in bed, and stretched out her great bony fingers, with
+the long nails as hard and black as rake-prongs from groveling in the
+earth.
+
+
+Jeanne Marie poured the money out of her cotton handkerchief into
+them.
+
+Anne Marie counted it, looked at it; looked at it, counted it; and
+if she had not been so old, so infirm, so toothless, the smile that
+passed over her face would have made it beautiful.
+
+Jeanne Marie had to leave her to draw water from the well to water the
+plants, and to get her vegetables ready for next morning. She felt
+even happier now than if she had just had a child, happier even than
+if her husband had just returned to her.
+
+"Ill luck! _Coton-Maï!_ Ill luck! There's a way to turn ill luck!"
+And her smile also should have beautified her face, wrinkled and ugly
+though it was.
+
+She did not think any more of the spending of the money, only of the
+pleasure Anne Marie would take in spending it.
+
+The water was low in the well, and there had been a long drought.
+There are not many old women of seventy-five who could have watered so
+much ground as abundantly as she did; but whenever she thought of the
+forty dollars and Anne Marie's smile she would give the thirsting
+plant an extra bucketful.
+
+The twilight was gaining. She paused. "_Coton-Maï_" she exclaimed
+aloud. "But I must see the old woman smile again over her good luck."
+
+Although it was "my girl" face to face, it was always "the old woman"
+behind each other's back.
+
+There was a knot-hole in the plank walls of the house. In spite of
+Anne Marie's rheumatism they would never stop it up, needing it, they
+said, for light and air. Jeanne Marie slipped her feet out of her
+sabots and crept easily toward it, smiling, and saying "_Coton-Maï_!"
+to herself all the way. She put her eye to the hole. Anne Marie was
+not in the bed, she who had not left her bed for two months! Jeanne
+Marie looked through the dim light of the room until she found her.
+
+Anne Marie, in her short petticoat and nightsack, with bare legs
+and feet, was on her knees in the corner, pulling up a plank,
+hiding--peasants know hiding when they see it--hiding her money
+away--away--away from whom?--muttering to herself and shaking her old
+grayhaired head. Hiding her money away from Jeanne Marie!
+
+And this was why Jeanne Marie leaned her head against the side of the
+house and wept. It seemed to her that she had never known her twin
+sister at all.
+
+
+
+
+A CRIPPLED HOPE
+
+
+You must picture to yourself the quiet, dim-lighted room of a
+convalescent; outside, the dreary, bleak days of winter in a sparsely
+settled, distant country parish; inside, a slow, smoldering log-fire,
+a curtained bed, the infant sleeping well enough, the mother wakeful,
+restless, thought-driven, as a mother must be, unfortunately,
+nowadays, particularly in that parish, where cotton worms and
+overflows have acquired such a monopoly of one's future.
+
+[Illustration: "THE QUIET, DIM-LIGHTED ROOM OF A CONVALESCENT."]
+
+God is always pretty near a sick woman's couch; but nearer even than
+God seems the sick-nurse--at least in that part of the country, under
+those circumstances. It is so good to look through the dimness and
+uncertainty, moral and physical, and to meet those little black,
+steadfast, all-seeing eyes; to feel those smooth, soft, all-soothing
+hands; to hear, across one's sleep, that three-footed step--the
+flat-soled left foot, the tiptoe right, and the padded end of
+the broomstick; and when one is so wakeful and restless and
+thought-driven, to have another's story given one. God, depend upon
+it, grows stories and lives as he does herbs, each with a mission of
+balm to some woe.
+
+She said she had, and in truth she had, no other name than "little
+Mammy"; and that was the name of her nature. Pure African, but bronze
+rather than pure black, and full-sized only in width, her growth
+having been hampered as to height by an injury to her hip, which
+had lamed her, pulling her figure awry, and burdening her with a
+protuberance of the joint. Her mother caused it by dropping her when a
+baby, and concealing it, for fear of punishment, until the dislocation
+became irremediable. All the animosity of which little Mammy was
+capable centered upon this unknown but never-to-be-forgotten mother of
+hers; out of this hatred had grown her love--that is, her destiny, a
+woman's love being her destiny. Little Mammy's love was for children.
+
+The birth and infancy (the one as accidental as the other, one would
+infer) took place in--it sounds like the "Arabian Nights" now!--took
+place in the great room, caravansary, stable, behind a negro-trader's
+auction-mart, where human beings underwent literally the daily buying
+and selling of which the world now complains in a figure of speech--a
+great, square, dusty chamber where, sitting cross-legged, leaning
+against the wall, or lying on foul blanket pallets on the floor, the
+bargains of to-day made their brief sojourn, awaiting transformation
+into the profits of the morrow.
+
+The place can be pointed out now, is often pointed out; but no emotion
+arises at sight of it. It is so plain, so matter-of-fact an edifice
+that emotion only comes afterward in thinking about it, and then in
+the reflection that such an edifice could be, then as now, plain and
+matter-of-fact.
+
+For the slave-trader there was no capital so valuable as the physical
+soundness of his stock; the moral was easily enough forged or
+counterfeited. Little Mammy's good-for-nothing mother was sold as
+readily as a vote, in the parlance of to-day; but no one would pay
+for a crippled baby. The mother herself would not have taken her as
+a gift, had it been in the nature of a negro-trader to give
+away anything. Some doctoring was done,--so little Mammy heard
+traditionally,--some effort made to get her marketable. There were
+attempts to pair her off as a twin sister of various correspondencies
+in age, size, and color, and to palm her off, as a substitute,
+at migratory, bereaved, overfull breasts. Nothing equaled a
+negro-trader's will and power for fraud, except the hereditary
+distrust and watchfulness which it bred and maintained. And so, in the
+even balance between the two categories, the little cripple remained a
+fixture in the stream of life that passed through that back room,
+in the fluxes and refluxes of buying and selling; not valueless,
+however--rely upon a negro-trader for discovering values as
+substitutes, as panaceas. She earned her nourishment, and Providence
+did not let it kill the little animal before the emancipation of
+weaning arrived.
+
+[Illustration: "LITTLE MAMMY."]
+
+How much circumstances evoked, how much instinct responded, belongs to
+the secrets which nature seems to intend keeping. As a baby she had
+eyes, attention, solely for other babies. One cannot say while she was
+still crawling, for she could only crawl years after she should have
+been walking, but, before even precocious walking-time, tradition or
+the old gray-haired negro janitor relates, she would creep from baby
+to baby to play with it, put it to sleep, pat it, rub its stomach (a
+negro baby, you know, is all stomach, and generally aching stomach at
+that). And before she had a lap, she managed to force one for some
+ailing nursling. It was then that they began to call her "little
+Mammy." In the transitory population of the "pen" no one stayed long
+enough to give her another name; and no one ever stayed short enough
+to give her another one.
+
+Her first recollection of herself was that she could not walk--she was
+past crawling; she cradled herself along, as she called sitting down
+flat, and working herself about with her hands and her one strong
+leg. Babbling babies walked all around her,--many walking before they
+babbled,--and still she did not walk, imitate them as she might and
+did. She would sit and "study" about it, make another trial, fall;
+sit and study some more, make another trial, fall again. Negroes, who
+believe that they must give a reason for everything even if they have
+to invent one, were convinced that it was all this studying upon her
+lameness that gave her such a large head.
+
+And now she began secretly turning up the clothes of every negro
+child that came into that pen, and examining its legs, and still more
+secretly examining her own, stretched out before her on the ground.
+How long it took she does not remember; in fact, she could not have
+known, for she had no way of measuring time except by her thoughts and
+feelings. But in her own way and time the due process of deliberation
+was fulfilled, and the quotient made clear that, bowed or not, all
+children's legs were of equal length except her own, and all were
+alike, not one full, strong, hard, the other soft, flabby, wrinkled,
+growing out of a knot at the hip. A whole psychological period
+apparently lay between that conclusion and--a broom-handle
+walking-stick; but the broomstick came, as it was bound to
+come,--thank heaven!--from that premise, and what with stretching one
+limb to make it longer, and doubling up the other to make it shorter,
+she invented that form of locomotion which is still carrying her
+through life, and with no more exaggerated leg-crookedness than many
+careless negroes born with straight limbs display. This must have been
+when she was about eight or nine. Hobbling on a broomstick, with, no
+doubt, the same weird, wizened face as now, an innate sense of the
+fitness of things must have suggested the kerchief tied around her big
+head, and the burlaps rag of an apron in front of her linsey-woolsey
+rag of a gown, and the bit of broken pipe-stem in the corner of her
+mouth, where the pipe should have been, and where it was in after
+years. That is the way she recollected herself, and that is the way
+one recalls her now, with a few modifications.
+
+The others came and went, but she was always there. It wasn't long
+before she became "little Mammy" to the grown folks too; and the
+newest inmates soon learned to cry: "Where's little Mammy?" "Oh,
+little Mammy! little Mammy! Such a misery in my head [or my back, or
+my stomach]! Can't you help me, little Mammy?" It was curious what a
+quick eye she had for symptoms and ailments, and what a quick ear
+for suffering, and how apt she was at picking up, remembering, and
+inventing remedies. It never occurred to her not to crouch at the
+head or the foot of a sick pallet, day and night through. As for the
+nights, she said she dared not close her eyes of nights. The room they
+were in was so vast, and sometimes the negroes lay so thick on the
+floor, rolled in their blankets (you know, even in the summer they
+sleep under blankets), all snoring so loudly, she would never have
+heard a groan or a whimper any more than they did, if she had slept,
+too. And negro mothers are so careless and such heavy sleepers. All
+night she would creep at regular intervals to the different pallets,
+and draw the little babies from under, or away from, the heavy, inert
+impending mother forms. There is no telling how many she thus saved
+from being overlaid and smothered, or, what was worse, maimed and
+crippled.
+
+Whenever a physician came in, as he was sometimes called, to look at
+a valuable investment or to furbish up some piece of damaged goods,
+she always managed to get near to hear the directions; and she
+generally was the one to apply them also, for negroes always would
+steal medicines most scurvily one from the other. And when death at
+times would slip into the pen, despite the trader's utmost alertness
+and precautions,--as death often "had to do," little Mammy said,--when
+the time of some of them came to die, and when the rest of the
+negroes, with African greed of eye for the horrible, would press
+around the lowly couch where the agonizing form of a slave lay
+writhing out of life, she would always to the last give medicines,
+and wipe the cold forehead, and soothe the clutching, fearsome hands,
+hoping to the end, and trying to inspire the hope that his or her
+"time" had not come yet; for, as she said, "Our time doesn't come just
+as often as it does come."
+
+And in those sad last offices, which somehow have always been under
+reproach as a kind of shame, no matter how young she was, she was
+always too old to have the childish avoidance of them. On the
+contrary, to her a corpse was only a kind of baby, and she always
+strove, she said, to make one, like the other, easy and comfortable.
+
+And in other emergencies she divined the mysteries of the flesh, as
+other precocities divine the mysteries of painting and music, and so
+become child wonders.
+
+Others came and went. She alone remained there. Babies of her
+babyhood--the toddlers she, a toddler, had nursed--were having babies
+themselves now; the middle-aged had had time to grow old and die.
+Every week new families were coming into the great back chamber; every
+week they passed out: babies, boys, girls, buxom wenches, stalwart
+youths, and the middle-aged--the grave, serious ones whom misfortune
+had driven from their old masters, and the ill-reputed ones, the
+trickish, thievish, lazy, whom the cunning of the negro-trader alone
+could keep in circulation. All were marketable, all were bought and
+sold, all passed in one door and out the other--all except her, little
+Mammy. As with her lameness, it took time for her to recognize, to
+understand, the fact. She could study over her lameness, she could in
+the dull course of time think out the broomstick way of palliation.
+It would have been almost better, under the circumstances, for God to
+have kept the truth from her; only--God keeps so little of the truth
+from us women. It is his system.
+
+Poor little thing! It was not now that her master _could_ not sell
+her, but he _would_ not! Out of her own intelligence she had forged
+her chains; the lameness was a hobble merely in comparison. She had
+become too valuable to the negro-trader by her services among his
+crew, and offers only solidified his determination not to sell her.
+Visiting physicians, after short acquaintance with her capacities,
+would offer what were called fancy prices for her. Planters who heard
+of her through their purchases would come to the city purposely to
+secure, at any cost, so inestimable an adjunct to their plantations.
+Even ladies--refined, delicate ladies--sometimes came to the pen
+personally to back money with influence. In vain. Little Mammy was
+worth more to the negro-trader, simply as a kind of insurance against
+accidents, than any sum, however glittering the figure, and he was no
+ignorant expert in human wares. She can tell it; no one else can for
+her. Remember that at times she had seen the streets outside. Remember
+that she could hear of the outside world daily from the passing
+chattels--of the plantations, farms, families; the green fields,
+Sunday woods, running streams; the camp-meetings, corn-shuckings,
+cotton-pickings, sugar-grindings; the baptisms, marriages, funerals,
+prayer-meetings; the holidays and holy days. Remember that, whether
+for liberty or whether for love, passion effloresces in the human
+being--no matter when, where, or how--with every spring's return.
+Remember that she was, even in middle age, young and vigorous. But no;
+do not remember anything. There is no need to heighten the coloring.
+
+It would be tedious to relate, although it was not tedious to hear her
+relate it, the desperations and hopes of her life then. Hardly a day
+passed that she did not see, looking for purchases (rummaging among
+goods on a counter for bargains), some master whom she could have
+loved, some mistress whom she could have adored. Always her favorite
+mistresses were there--tall, delicate matrons, who came themselves,
+with great fatigue, to select kindly-faced women for nurses;
+languid-looking ladies with smooth hair standing out in wide
+_bandeaux_ from their heads, and lace shawls dropping from their
+sloping shoulders, silk dresses carelessly held up in thumb and finger
+from embroidered petticoats that were spread out like tents over huge
+hoops which covered whole groups of swarming piccaninnies on the dirty
+floor; ladies, pale from illnesses that she might have nursed, and
+over-burdened with children whom she might have reared! And not a lady
+of that kind saw her face but wanted her, yearned for her, pleaded for
+her, coming back secretly to slip silver, and sometimes gold, pieces
+into her hand, patting her turbaned head, calling her "little Mammy"
+too, instantly, by inspiration, and making the negro-trader give them,
+with all sorts of assurances, the refusal of her. She had no need for
+the whispered "Buy me, master!" "Buy me, mistress!" "You'll see how I
+can work, master!" "You'll never be sorry, mistress!" of the others.
+The negro-trader--like hangmen, negro-traders are fitted by nature for
+their profession--it came into his head--he had no heart, not even a
+negro-trader's heart--that it would be more judicious to seclude her
+during these shopping visits, so to speak. She could not have had any
+hopes then at all; it must have been all desperations.
+
+That auction-block, that executioner's block, about which so much has
+been written--Jacob's ladder, in his dream, was nothing to what that
+block appeared nightly in her dreams to her; and the climbers up and
+down--well, perhaps Jacob's angels were his hopes, too.
+
+At times she determined to depreciate her usefulness, mar her value,
+by renouncing her heart, denying her purpose. For days she would
+tie her kerchief over her ears and eyes, and crouch in a corner,
+strangling her impulses. She even malingered, refused food, became
+dumb. And she might have succeeded in making herself salable through
+incipient lunacy, if through no other way, had she been able to
+maintain her role long enough. But some woman or baby always was
+falling into some emergency of pain and illness.
+
+How it might have ended one does not like to think. Fortunately, one
+does not need to think.
+
+There came a night. She sat alone in the vast, dark caravansary--alone
+for the first time in her life. Empty rags and blankets lay strewn
+over the floor, no snoring, no tossing in them more. A sacrificial
+sale that day had cleared the counters. Alarm-bells rang in the
+streets, but she did not know them for alarm-bells; alarm brooded in
+the dim space around her, but she did not even recognize that. Her
+protracted tension of heart had made her fear-blind to all but one
+peradventure.
+
+Once or twice she forgot herself, and limped over to some heap to
+relieve an imaginary struggling babe or moaning sleeper. Morning came.
+She had dozed. She looked to see the rag-heaps stir; they lay as still
+as corpses. The alarm-bells had ceased. She looked to see a new gang
+enter the far door. She listened for the gathering buzzing of voices
+in the next room, around the auction-block. She waited for the trader.
+She waited for the janitor. At nightfall a file of soldiers entered.
+They drove her forth, ordering her in the voice, in the tone, of
+the negro-trader. That was the only familiar thing in the chaos of
+incomprehensibility about her. She hobbled through the auction-room.
+Posters, advertisements, papers, lay on the floor, and in the
+torch-light glared from the wall. Her Jacob's ladder, her
+stepping-stone to her hopes, lay overturned in a corner.
+
+You divine it. The negro-trader's trade was abolished, and he had
+vanished in the din and smoke of a war which he had not been entirely
+guiltless of producing, leaving little Mammy locked up behind him. Had
+he forgotten her? One cannot even hope so. She hobbled out into the
+street, leaning on her nine-year-old broomstick (she had grown only
+slightly beyond it; could still use it by bending over it), her head
+tied in a rag kerchief, a rag for a gown, a rag for an apron.
+
+Free, she was free! But she had not hoped for freedom. The plantation,
+the household, the delicate ladies, the teeming children,--broomsticks
+they were in comparison to freedom, but,--that was what she had asked,
+what she had prayed for. God, she said, had let her drop, just as her
+mother had done. More than ever she grieved, as she crept down
+the street, that she had never mounted the auctioneer's block. An
+ownerless free negro! She knew no one whose duty it was to help her;
+no one knew her to help her. In the whole world (it was all she had
+asked) there was no white child to call her mammy, no white lackey or
+gentleman (it was the extent of her dreams) beholden to her as to a
+nurse. And all her innumerable black beneficiaries! Even the janitor,
+whom she had tended as the others, had deserted her like his white
+prototype.
+
+She tried to find a place for herself, but she had no indorsers, no
+recommenders. She dared not mention the name of the negro-trader; it
+banished her not only from the households of the whites, but from
+those of the genteel of her own color. And everywhere soldiers
+sentineled the streets--soldiers whose tone and accent reminded her of
+the negro-trader.
+
+Her sufferings, whether imaginary or real, were sufficiently acute to
+drive her into the only form of escape which once had been possible to
+friendless negroes. She became a runaway. With a bundle tied to the
+end of a stick over her shoulder, just as the old prints represent it,
+she fled from her homelessness and loneliness, from her ignoble past,
+and the heart-disappointing termination of it. Following a railroad
+track, journeying afoot, sleeping by the roadside, she lived on until
+she came to the one familiar landmark in life to her--a sick woman,
+but a white one. And so, progressing from patient to patient (it was a
+time when sick white women studded the country like mile-posts), she
+arrived at a little town, a kind of a refuge for soldiers' wives and
+widows. She never traveled further. She could not. Always, as in the
+pen, some emergency of pain and illness held her.
+
+That is all. She is still there. The poor, poor women of that stricken
+region say that little Mammy was the only alleviation God left them
+after Sheridan passed through; and the richer ones say very much the
+same thing--
+
+But one should hear her tell it herself, as has been said, on a cold,
+gloomy winter day in the country, the fire glimmering on the hearth;
+the overworked husband in the fields; the baby quiet at last; the
+mother uneasy, restless, thought-driven; the soft black hand rubbing
+backward and forward, rubbing out aches and frets and nervousness.
+
+The eyelids droop; the firelight plays fantasies on the bed-curtains;
+the ear drops words, sentences; one gets confused--one sleeps--one
+dreams.
+
+
+
+
+"ONE OF US"
+
+
+At the first glance one might have been inclined to doubt; but at
+the second anybody would have recognized her--that is, with a little
+mental rehabilitation: the bright little rouge spots in the hollow of
+her cheek, the eyebrows well accentuated with paint, the thin lips
+rose-tinted, and the dull, straight hair frizzed and curled and
+twisted and turned by that consummate rascal and artist, the official
+beautifier and rectifier of stage humanity, Robert, the opera
+_coiffeur_. Who in the world knows better than he the gulf between
+the real and the ideal, the limitations between the natural and the
+romantic?
+
+Yes, one could see her, in that time-honored thin silk dress of hers
+stiffened into brocade by buckram underneath; the high, low-necked
+waist, hiding any evidences of breast, if there were such evidences to
+hide, and bringing the long neck into such faulty prominence; and the
+sleeves, crisp puffs of tulle divided by bands of red velvet, through
+which the poor lean arm runs like a wire, stringing them together like
+beads. Yes, it was she, the whilom _dugazon_ of the opera troupe.
+Not that she ever was a _dugazon_, but that was what her voice once
+aspired to be: a _dugazon manquée_ would better describe her.
+
+What a ghost! But they always appeared like mere evaporations of
+real women. For what woman of flesh and blood can seriously maintain
+through life the rôle of sham attendant on sham sensations, and play
+public celebrant of other women's loves and lovers, singing, or rather
+saying, nothing more enlivening than: "Oh, madame!" and "Ah, madame!"
+and "_Quelle ivresse!_" or "_Quelle horreur!_" or, in recitative,
+detailing whatever dreary platitudes and inanities the librettist and
+Heaven connive to put upon the tongues of confidantes and attendants?
+
+[Illustration: "TO POSE IN ABJECT PATIENCE AND AWKWARDNESS."]
+
+Looking at her--how it came over one! The music, the lights, the
+scene; the fat soprano confiding to her the fact of the "amour
+extrême" she bears for the tenor, to which she, the _dugazon_, does
+not even try to listen; her eyes wandering listlessly over the
+audience. The calorous secret out, and in her possession, how she
+stumbles over her train to the back of the stage, there to pose in
+abject patience and awkwardness, while the gallant baritone, touching
+his sword, and flinging his cape over his shoulder, defies the world
+and the tenor, who is just recovering from his "ut de poitrine" behind
+the scenes.
+
+She was talking to me all the time, apologizing for the intrusion,
+explaining her mission, which involved a short story of her life, as
+women's intrusions and missions usually do. But my thoughts, also as
+usual, distracted me from listening, as so often they have distracted
+me from following what was perhaps more profitable.
+
+The composer, of course, wastes no music upon her; flinging to her
+only an occasional recitative in two notes, but always ending in a
+reef of a scale, trill, or roulade, for her to wreck her voice on
+before the audience. The _chef d'orchestre_, if he is charitable,
+starts her off with a contribution from his own lusty lungs, and then
+she--oh, her voice is always thinner and more osseous than her arms,
+and her smile no more graceful than her train!
+
+As well think of the simulated trees, water-falls, and chateaux
+leaving the stage, as the _dugazon_! One always imagines them singing
+on into dimness, dustiness, unsteadiness, and uselessness, until, like
+any other piece of stage property, they are at last put aside and
+simply left there at the end of some season--there seems to be a
+superstition against selling or burning useless and dilapidated stage
+property. As it came to me, the idea was not an impossibility.
+The last representation of the season is over. She, tired beyond
+judgment--haply, beyond feeling--by her tireless rôle, sinks upon her
+chair to rest in her dressing-room; sinks, further, to sleep. She has
+no maid. The troupe, hurrying away to France on the special train
+waiting not half a dozen blocks away, forget her--the insignificant
+are so easily forgotten! The porter, more tired, perhaps, than any
+one of the beautiful ideal world about him, and savoring already in
+advance the good onion-flavored _grillade_ awaiting him at home, locks
+up everything fast and tight; the tighter and faster for the good
+fortnight's vacation he has promised himself.
+
+No doubt if the old opera-house were ever cleaned out, just such a
+heap of stiff, wire-strung bones would be found, in some such hole
+as the _dugazon's_ dressing-room, desiccating away in its last
+costume--perhaps in that very costume of _Inez_; and if one were
+venturesome enough to pass Allhallowe'en there, the spirit of those
+bones might be seen availing itself of the privilege of unasperged
+corpses to roam. Not singing, not talking--it is an anachronism to say
+that ghosts talk: their medium of communication must be pure thought;
+and one should be able to see their thoughts working, just as one sees
+the working of the digestive organs in the clear viscera of
+transparent animalcule. The hard thing of it is that ghosts are
+chained to the same scenes that chained their bodies, and when they
+sleep-walk, so to speak, it must be through phases of former
+existence. What a nightmare for them to go over once again the lived
+and done, the suffered and finished! What a comfort to wake up and
+find one's self dead, well dead!
+
+I could have continued and put the whole opera troupe in "costume de
+ghost," but I think it was the woman's eyes that drew me back to her
+face and her story. She had a sensible face, now that I observed her
+naturally, as it were; and her hands,--how I have agonized over those
+hands on the stage!--all knuckles and exaggerated veins, clutching her
+dress as she sang, or, petrified, outstretched to _Leonore's_ "Pourquoi
+ces larmes?"--her hands were the hands of an honest, hard-working
+woman who buckrams her own skirts, and at need could scrub her own
+floor. Her face (my description following my wandering glance)--her
+face was careworn, almost to desuetude; not dissipation-worn, as,
+alas! the faces of the more gifted ladies of opera troupes too often
+are. There was no fattening in it of pastry, truffles, and bonbons;
+upon it none of the tracery left by nightly champagne tides and
+ripples; and consequently her figure, under her plain dress, had not
+that for display which the world has conventioned to call charms.
+Where a window-cord would hardly have sufficed to girdle _Leonore_, a
+necklace would have served her. She had not beauty enough to fear the
+flattering dangers of masculine snares and temptations,--or there may
+have been other reasons,--but as a wife--there was something about her
+that guaranteed it--she would have blossomed love and children as a
+fig-tree does figs.
+
+In truth, she was just talking about children. The first part of her
+story had passed: her birthplace, education, situation; and now she
+was saying:
+
+"I have always had the temptation, but I have always resisted it.
+Now,"--with a blush at her excuse,--"it may be your spring weather,
+your birds, your flowers, your sky--and your children in the streets.
+The longing came over me yesterday: I thought of it on the stage,
+I thought of it afterward--it was better than sleeping; and this
+morning"--her eyes moistened, she breathed excitedly--"I was
+determined. I gave up, I made inquiry, I was sent to you. Would it be
+possible? Would there be any place" ("any rôle," she said first) "in
+any of your asylums, in any of your charitable institutions, for me?
+I would ask nothing but my clothes and food, and very little of that;
+the recompense would be the children--the little girl children," with
+a smile--can you imagine the smile of a woman dreaming of children
+that might be? "Think! Never to have held a child in my arms more than
+a moment, never to have felt a child's arms about my neck! Never to
+have known a child! Born on a stage, my mother born on a stage!" Ah,
+there were tragic possibilities in that voice and movement! "Pardon,
+madam. You see how I repeat. And you must be very wearied hearing
+about me. But I could be their nurse and their servant. I would bathe
+and dress them, play with them, teach them their prayers; and when
+they are sick they would see no difference. They would not know but
+what their mother was there!"
+
+Oh, she had her program all prepared; one could see that.
+
+"And I would sing to them--no! no!" with a quick gesture, "nothing
+from the stage; little songs and lullabys I have picked up
+traveling around, and," hesitating, "little things I have composed
+myself--little things that I thought children would like to hear some
+day." What did she not unconsciously throw into those last words? "I
+dream of it," she pursued, talking with as little regard to me as
+on the stage she sang to the prima donna. "Their little arms, their
+little faces, their little lips! And in an asylum there would be so
+many of them! When they cried and were in trouble I would take them in
+my lap, and I would say to them, with all sorts of tenderness--" She
+had arranged that in her program, too--all the minutiae of what she
+would say to them in their distress. But women are that way. When once
+they begin to love, their hearts are magnifying-lenses for them to
+feel through. "And my heart hungers to commence right here, now, at
+once! It seems to me I cannot wait. Ah, madam, no more stage, no more
+opera!" speaking quickly, feverishly. "As I said, it may be your
+beautiful spring, your flowers, your birds, and your numbers of
+children. I have always loved that place most where there are most
+children; and you have more children here than I ever saw anywhere.
+Children are so beautiful! It is strange, is it not, when you consider
+my life and my rearing?"
+
+Her life, her rearing, how interesting they must have been! What a
+pity I had not listened more attentively!
+
+"They say you have much to do with asylums here."
+
+Evidently, when rôles do not exist in life for certain characters, God
+has to create them. And thus He had to create a rôle in an asylum for
+my friend, for so she became from the instant she spoke of children
+as she did. It was the poorest and neediest of asylums; and the poor
+little orphaned wretches--but it is better not to speak of them. How
+can God ever expect to rear children without their mothers!
+
+But the rôle I craved to create for my friend was far different--some
+good, honest bourgeois interior, where lips are coarse and cheeks are
+ruddy, and where life is composed of real scenes, set to the real
+music of life, the homely successes and failures, and loves and hates,
+and embraces and tears, that fill out the orchestra of the heart;
+where romance and poetry abound _au naturel_; and where--yes, where
+children grow as thick as nature permits: the domestic interior of the
+opera porter, for instance, or the clockmaker over the way. But what
+a loss the orphan-asylum would have suffered, and the dreary lacking
+there would have been in the lives of the children! For there must
+have been moments in the lives of the children in that asylum when
+they felt, awake, as they felt in their sleep when they dreamed their
+mothers were about them.
+
+
+
+
+THE LITTLE CONVENT GIRL
+
+She was coming down on the boat from Cincinnati, the little convent
+girl. Two sisters had brought her aboard. They gave her in charge of
+the captain, got her a state-room, saw that the new little trunk was
+put into it, hung the new little satchel up on the wall, showed her
+how to bolt the door at night, shook hands with her for good-by
+(good-bys have really no significance for sisters), and left her
+there. After a while the bells all rang, and the boat, in the awkward
+elephantine fashion of boats, got into midstream. The chambermaid
+found her sitting on the chair in the state-room where the sisters
+had left her, and showed her how to sit on a chair in the saloon. And
+there she sat until the captain came and hunted her up for supper.
+She could not do anything of herself; she had to be initiated into
+everything by some one else.
+
+She was known on the boat only as "the little convent girl." Her name,
+of course, was registered in the clerk's office, but on a steamboat no
+one thinks of consulting the clerk's ledger. It is always the little
+widow, the fat madam, the tall colonel, the parson, etc. The captain,
+who pronounced by the letter, always called her the little _convent_
+girl. She was the beau-ideal of the little convent girl. She never
+raised her eyes except when spoken to. Of course she never spoke
+first, even to the chambermaid, and when she did speak it was in the
+wee, shy, furtive voice one might imagine a just-budding violet to
+have; and she walked with such soft, easy, carefully calculated steps
+that one naturally felt the penalties that must have secured
+them--penalties dictated by a black code of deportment.
+
+[Illustration: THE SISTERS BID HER GOOD-BY.]
+
+She was dressed in deep mourning. Her black straw hat was trimmed with
+stiff new crape, and her stiff new bombazine dress had crape collar
+and cuffs. She wore her hair in two long plaits fastened around her
+head tight and fast. Her hair had a strong inclination to curl, but
+that had been taken out of it as austerely as the noise out of her
+footfalls. Her hair was as black as her dress; her eyes, when one saw
+them, seemed blacker than either, on account of the bluishness of the
+white surrounding the pupil. Her eyelashes were almost as thick as the
+black veil which the sisters had fastened around her hat with an extra
+pin the very last thing before leaving. She had a round little face,
+and a tiny pointed chin; her mouth was slightly protuberant from the
+teeth, over which she tried to keep her lips well shut, the effort
+giving them a pathetic little forced expression. Her complexion was
+sallow, a pale sallow, the complexion of a brunette bleached in
+darkened rooms. The only color about her was a blue taffeta ribbon
+from which a large silver medal of the Virgin hung over the place
+where a breast pin should have been. She was so little, so little,
+although she was eighteen, as the sisters told the captain; otherwise
+they would not have permitted her to travel all the way to New Orleans
+alone.
+
+Unless the captain or the clerk remembered to fetch her out in front,
+she would sit all day in the cabin, in the same place, crocheting
+lace, her spool of thread and box of patterns in her lap, on the
+handkerchief spread to save her new dress. Never leaning back--oh, no!
+always straight and stiff, as if the conventual back board were there
+within call. She would eat only convent fare at first, notwithstanding
+the importunities of the waiters, and the jocularities of the captain,
+and particularly of the clerk. Every one knows the fund of humor
+possessed by a steamboat clerk, and what a field for display the table
+at meal-times affords. On Friday she fasted rigidly, and she never
+began to eat, or finished, without a little Latin movement of the lips
+and a sign of the cross. And always at six o'clock of the evening she
+remembered the angelus, although there was no church bell to remind
+her of it.
+
+She was in mourning for her father, the sisters told the captain,
+and she was going to New Orleans to her mother. She had not seen
+her mother since she was an infant, on account of some disagreement
+between the parents, in consequence of which the father had brought
+her to Cincinnati, and placed her in the convent. There she had been
+for twelve years, only going to her father for vacations and holidays.
+So long as the father lived he would never let the child have any
+communication with her mother. Now that he was dead all that was
+changed, and the first thing that the girl herself wanted to do was to
+go to her mother.
+
+The mother superior had arranged it all with the mother of the girl,
+who was to come personally to the boat in New Orleans, and receive her
+child from the captain, presenting a letter from the mother superior,
+a facsimile of which the sisters gave the captain.
+
+It is a long voyage from Cincinnati to New Orleans, the rivers doing
+their best to make it interminable, embroidering themselves _ad
+libitum_ all over the country. Every five miles, and sometimes
+oftener, the boat would stop to put off or take on freight, if not
+both. The little convent girl, sitting in the cabin, had her
+terrible frights at first from the hideous noises attendant on these
+landings--the whistles, the ringings of the bells, the running to and
+fro, the shouting. Every time she thought it was shipwreck, death,
+judgment, purgatory; and her sins! her sins! She would drop her
+crochet, and clutch her prayer-beads from her pocket, and relax the
+constraint over her lips, which would go to rattling off prayers with
+the velocity of a relaxed windlass. That was at first, before the
+captain took to fetching her out in front to see the boat make a
+landing. Then she got to liking it so much that she would stay all day
+just where the captain put her, going inside only for her meals. She
+forgot herself at times so much that she would draw her chair a little
+closer to the railing, and put up her veil, actually, to see better.
+No one ever usurped her place, quite in front, or intruded upon her
+either with word or look; for every one learned to know her shyness,
+and began to feel a personal interest in her, and all wanted the
+little convent girl to see everything that she possibly could.
+
+[Illustration: WATCHING A LANDING.]
+
+And it was worth seeing--the balancing and _chasséeing_ and waltzing
+of the cumbersome old boat to make a landing. It seemed to be
+always attended with the difficulty and the improbability of a new
+enterprise; and the relief when it did sidle up anywhere within
+rope's-throw of the spot aimed at! And the roustabout throwing the
+rope from the perilous end of the dangling gang-plank! And the
+dangling roustabouts hanging like drops of water from it--dropping
+sometimes twenty feet to the land, and not infrequently into the river
+itself. And then what a rolling of barrels, and shouldering of sacks,
+and singing of Jim Crow songs, and pacing of Jim Crow steps; and black
+skins glistening through torn shirts, and white teeth gleaming through
+red lips, and laughing, and talking and--bewildering! entrancing!
+Surely the little convent girl in her convent walls never dreamed of
+so much unpunished noise and movement in the world!
+
+The first time she heard the mate--it must have been like the first
+time woman ever heard man--curse and swear, she turned pale, and ran
+quickly, quickly into the saloon, and--came out again? No, indeed!
+not with all the soul she had to save, and all the other sins on her
+conscience. She shook her head resolutely, and was not seen in her
+chair on deck again until the captain not only reassured her, but
+guaranteed his reassurance. And after that, whenever the boat was
+about to make a landing, the mate would first glance up to the guards,
+and if the little convent girl was sitting there he would change his
+invective to sarcasm, and politely request the colored gentlemen not
+to hurry themselves--on no account whatever; to take their time about
+shoving out the plank; to send the rope ashore by post-office--write
+him when it got there; begging them not to strain their backs; calling
+them mister, colonel, major, general, prince, and your royal highness,
+which was vastly amusing. At night, however, or when the little
+convent girl was not there, language flowed in its natural curve, the
+mate swearing like a pagan to make up for lost time.
+
+The captain forgot himself one day: it was when the boat ran aground
+in the most unexpected manner and place, and he went to work to
+express his opinion, as only steamboat captains can, of the pilot,
+mate, engineer, crew, boat, river, country, and the world in general,
+ringing the bell, first to back, then to head, shouting himself
+hoarser than his own whistle--when he chanced to see the little black
+figure hurrying through the chaos on the deck; and the captain stuck
+as fast aground in midstream as the boat had done.
+
+In the evening the little convent girl would be taken on the upper
+deck, and going up the steep stairs there was such confusion, to keep
+the black skirts well over the stiff white petticoats; and, coming
+down, such blushing when suspicion would cross the unprepared face
+that a rim of white stocking might be visible; and the thin feet,
+laced so tightly in the glossy new leather boots, would cling to each
+successive step as if they could never, never make another venture;
+and then one boot would (there is but that word) hesitate out, and
+feel and feel around, and have such a pause of helpless agony as if
+indeed the next step must have been wilfully removed, or was nowhere
+to be found on the wide, wide earth.
+
+It was a miracle that the pilot ever got her up into the pilot-house;
+but pilots have a lonely time, and do not hesitate even at miracles
+when there is a chance for company. He would place a box for her to
+climb to the tall bench behind the wheel, and he would arrange the
+cushions, and open a window here to let in air, and shut one there to
+cut off a draft, as if there could be no tenderer consideration in
+life for him than her comfort. And he would talk of the river to her,
+explain the chart, pointing out eddies, whirlpools, shoals, depths,
+new beds, old beds, cut-offs, caving banks, and making banks, as
+exquisitely and respectfully as if she had been the River Commission.
+
+It was his opinion that there was as great a river as the Mississippi
+flowing directly under it--an underself of a river, as much a
+counterpart of the other as the second story of a house is of the
+first; in fact, he said they were navigating through the upper story.
+Whirlpools were holes in the floor of the upper river, so to speak;
+eddies were rifts and cracks. And deep under the earth, hurrying
+toward the subterranean stream, were other streams, small and
+great, but all deep, hurrying to and from that great mother-stream
+underneath, just as the small and great overground streams hurry to
+and from their mother Mississippi. It was almost more than the little
+convent girl could take in: at least such was the expression of her
+eyes; for they opened as all eyes have to open at pilot stories. And
+he knew as much of astronomy as he did of hydrology, could call the
+stars by name, and define the shapes of the constellations; and she,
+who had studied astronomy at the convent, was charmed to find that
+what she had learned was all true. It was in the pilot-house, one
+night, that she forgot herself for the first time in her life, and
+stayed up until after nine o'clock. Although she appeared almost
+intoxicated at the wild pleasure, she was immediately overwhelmed
+at the wickedness of it, and observed much more rigidity of conduct
+thereafter. The engineer, the boiler-men, the firemen, the stokers,
+they all knew when the little convent girl was up in the pilot-house:
+the speaking-tube became so mild and gentle.
+
+With all the delays of river and boat, however, there is an end to the
+journey from Cincinnati to New Orleans. The latter city, which at one
+time to the impatient seemed at the terminus of the never, began,
+all of a sudden, one day to make its nearingness felt; and from that
+period every other interest paled before the interest in the immanence
+of arrival into port, and the whole boat was seized with a panic of
+preparation, the little convent girl with the others. Although so
+immaculate was she in person and effects that she might have been
+struck with a landing, as some good people might be struck with death,
+at any moment without fear of results, her trunk was packed and
+repacked, her satchel arranged and rearranged, and, the last day, her
+hair was brushed and plaited and smoothed over and over again until
+the very last glimmer of a curl disappeared. Her dress was whisked,
+as if for microscopic inspection; her face was washed; and her
+finger-nails were scrubbed with the hard convent nail-brush, until
+the disciplined little tips ached with a pristine soreness. And still
+there were hours to wait, and still the boat added up delays. But she
+arrived at last, after all, with not more than the usual and expected
+difference between the actual and the advertised time of arrival.
+
+There was extra blowing and extra ringing, shouting, commanding,
+rushing up the gangway and rushing down the gangway. The clerks,
+sitting behind tables on the first deck, were plied, in the twinkling
+of an eye, with estimates, receipts, charges, countercharges, claims,
+reclaims, demands, questions, accusations, threats, all at topmost
+voices. None but steamboat clerks could have stood it. And there were
+throngs composed of individuals every one of whom wanted to see the
+captain first and at once: and those who could not get to him shouted
+over the heads of the others; and as usual he lost his temper and
+politeness, and began to do what he termed "hustle."
+
+"Captain! Captain!" a voice called him to where a hand plucked his
+sleeve, and a letter was thrust toward him. "The cross, and the name
+of the convent." He recognized the envelop of the mother superior. He
+read the duplicate of the letter given by the sisters. He looked at
+the woman--the mother--casually, then again and again.
+
+The little convent girl saw him coming, leading some one toward her.
+She rose. The captain took her hand first, before the other greeting,
+"Good-by, my dear," he said. He tried to add something else, but
+seemed undetermined what. "Be a good little girl--" It was evidently
+all he could think of. Nodding to the woman behind him, he turned on
+his heel, and left.
+
+One of the deck-hands was sent to fetch her trunk. He walked out
+behind them, through the cabin, and the crowd on deck, down the
+stairs, and out over the gangway. The little convent girl and her
+mother went with hands tightly clasped. She did not turn her eyes to
+the right or left, or once (what all passengers do) look backward at
+the boat which, however slowly, had carried her surely over dangers
+that she wot not of. All looked at her as she passed. All wanted to
+say good-by to the little convent girl, to see the mother who had been
+deprived of her so long. Some expressed surprise in a whistle; some
+in other ways. All exclaimed audibly, or to themselves, "Colored!"
+
+It takes about a month to make the round trip from New Orleans to
+Cincinnati and back, counting five days' stoppage in New Orleans. It
+was a month to a day when the steamboat came puffing and blowing up to
+the wharf again, like a stout dowager after too long a walk; and the
+same scene of confusion was enacted, as it had been enacted twelve
+times a year, at almost the same wharf for twenty years; and the
+same calm, a death calmness by contrast, followed as usual the next
+morning.
+
+The decks were quiet and clean; one cargo had just been delivered,
+part of another stood ready on the levee to be shipped. The captain
+was there waiting for his business to begin, the clerk was in his
+office getting his books ready, the voice of the mate could be heard
+below, mustering the old crew out and a new crew in; for if steamboat
+crews have a single principle,--and there are those who deny them
+any,--it is never to ship twice in succession on the same boat. It was
+too early yet for any but roustabouts, marketers, and church-goers;
+so early that even the river was still partly mist-covered; only in
+places could the swift, dark current be seen rolling swiftly along.
+
+"Captain!" A hand plucked at his elbow, as if not confident that the
+mere calling would secure attention. The captain turned. The mother of
+the little convent girl stood there, and she held the little convent
+girl by the hand. "I have brought her to see you," the woman said.
+"You were so kind--and she is so quiet, so still, all the time, I
+thought it would do her a pleasure."
+
+She spoke with an accent, and with embarrassment; otherwise one would
+have said that she was bold and assured enough.
+
+"She don't go nowhere, she don't do nothing but make her crochet and
+her prayers, so I thought I would bring her for a little visit of 'How
+d' ye do' to you."
+
+There was, perhaps, some inflection in the woman's voice that might
+have made known, or at least awakened, the suspicion of some latent
+hope or intention, had the captain's ear been fine enough to detect
+it. There might have been something in the little convent girl's face,
+had his eye been more sensitive--trifle paler, maybe, the lips a
+little tighter drawn, the blue ribbon a shade faded. He may have
+noticed that, but-- And the visit of "How d' ye do" came to an end.
+
+They walked down the stairway, the woman in front, the little convent
+girl--her hand released to shake hands with the captain--following,
+across the bared deck, out to the gangway, over to the middle of
+it. No one was looking, no one saw more than a flutter of white
+petticoats, a show of white stockings, as the little convent girl went
+under the water.
+
+The roustabout dived, as the roustabouts always do, after the
+drowning, even at the risk of their good-for-nothing lives. The mate
+himself jumped overboard; but she had gone down in a whirlpool.
+Perhaps, as the pilot had told her whirlpools always did, it may have
+carried her through to the underground river, to that vast, hidden,
+dark Mississippi that flows beneath the one we see; for her body was
+never found.
+
+
+
+
+GRANDMOTHER'S GRANDMOTHER
+
+
+As the grandmother related it fresh from the primeval sources that
+feed a grandmother's memory, it happened thus:
+
+In the early days of the settlement of Georgia--ah, how green and
+rustic appears to us now the world in the early days of the settlement
+of Georgia! Sometimes to women, listening to the stories of their
+grandmothers, it seems better to have lived then than now--her
+grandmother was at that time a young wife. It was the day of arduous,
+if not of long, courtship before marriage, when every wedding
+celebrated the close of an original romance; and when young couples,
+for bridal trips, went out to settle new States, riding on a pillion
+generally, with their trousseaux following as best they could on
+sumpter mules; to hear the grandmother describe it made one long to be
+a bride of those days.
+
+The young husband had the enumeration of qualities that went to the
+making of a man of that period, and if the qualities were in the
+proportion of ten physical to one intellectual, it does not follow
+that the grandmother's grandfather was not a man of parts. For, to
+obtain the hand of his bride, an only child and an heiress, he had to
+give test of his mettle by ignoring his fortune, studying law, and
+getting his license before marriage, and binding himself to live the
+first year afterward on the proceeds of his practice; a device of the
+time thought to be a wholesome corrective of the corrupting influence
+of over-wealth in young domesticities.
+
+Although he had already chosen the sea for his profession, and was a
+midshipman at the time, with more of a reputation for living than for
+learning, such was he, and such, it may be said, was the incentive
+genius of his choice, that almost before his resignation as midshipman
+was accepted, his license as a lawyer was signed. As for practice, it
+was currently remarked at his wedding, at the sight of him flying down
+the room in the reel with his bride for partner, that his tongue was
+as nimble as his heels, and that if he only turned his attention to
+criminal practice, there was no man in the country who would make
+a better prosecuting attorney for the State. And with him for
+prosecuting attorney, it was warranted that sirrahs the highwaymen
+would not continue to hold Georgia judge-and-jury justice in quite
+such contemptible estimation, and that the gallows would not be left
+so long bereft of their legitimate swingings. As for fees, it was
+predicted that the young fellow as he stood, or rather "chassé'd,"
+could snap his fingers at both his and his bride's trustees.
+
+He did turn his attention to criminal law, was made prosecuting
+attorney for the State in his county, and, before his six months
+had passed, was convincing the hitherto high and mighty, lordly,
+independent knights of the road that other counties in Georgia
+furnished more secure pasturage for them.
+
+It was a beautiful spring morning. The young wife bade him a hearty
+good-by, and stood in the doorway watching him, gay and _debonair_,
+riding off, on his stout black charger Beetle, in the direction of the
+town in which court was to be held that week.
+
+She herself feeling as full of ambition and work as if she also were
+prosecuting attorney, with a perennial spring of eloquence bubbling in
+her brain, turned to her domestic duties, and, without going into
+the detail of them, it suffices to say that, according to the
+grandmother's estimation, one morning's list of duties for a healthy
+young bride of that period would shame the week's work of a syndicate
+of them to-day. Finding herself nearing the limit of diminution of
+several household necessities, and the spring suggesting the beginning
+of new ones, she made up her mind to profit by her husband's absence
+and the fair weather to make a trading visit to the neighboring town
+next day.
+
+[Illustration: "TURNED TO HER DOMESTIC DUTIES."]
+
+So, early in a morning as beautiful as the preceding one, mounted on
+her own stanch mare Maid Marion, she ambled down the green over-hung
+forest-road, in the vista of which she had watched her husband
+disappear the day before; thinking about what she had to buy, and
+thinking, no doubt, much more, as brides will, of the absent lord and
+master--as brides of those days loved to consider and denominate their
+husbands.
+
+Coming into the little town, the freshly painted, swinging sign-board
+of the new tavern, "The Honest Georgian," as usual was the thing to
+catch her eye; but the instant after what should she see but Black
+Beetle hitched to the rack under the tree that shadowed the hostelry!
+
+It was not decorous; but she was young, and the day of her first
+separation from her husband had been so long; and was he not also,
+against the firmest of resolutions and plans, hastening back to her,
+the separation being too long for him also?
+
+Slipping her foot from the stirrup, she jumped to the ground, and ran
+into the tavern. There he stood calling hastily for a drink; and
+her heart more than her eyes took in his, to her, consecrated
+signalment--the riding-boots, short clothes, blue coat, cocked hat,
+ruffles. She crept up behind to surprise him, her face, with its
+delight and smiles, beyond her control. She crept, until she saw his
+watch-fob dangling against the counter, and then her heart made a
+call. He turned. He was not her husband! Another man was in her
+husband's clothes, a man with a villainous countenance! With a scream
+she gave the alarm. The stranger turned, dropped his drink, bounded to
+the door and out, leaped to the back of Beetle, gave rein and spur,
+and the black horse made good his reputation. In a second all was
+hue-and-cry and pursuit. While men and horses made, for all they were
+worth, down the road after Beetle, she on Maid Marion galloped for
+her life in the opposite direction, the direction of the court town
+whither her husband had journeyed. The mare's hide made acquaintance
+with the whip that day if never before, for not even the willing Maid
+Marion could keep pace with the apprehensions on her back.
+
+Scouring with her eyes the highway ahead of her, shooting hawk's
+glances into the forest on each side of her, the wife rode through
+the distance all, all day, praying that the day might be long enough,
+might equal the distance. The sun set, and night began to fall; but
+she and Maid Marion were none the less fresh, except in the heart.
+
+The moon rose straight before them down the road, lighting it and them
+through the threatened obscurity. And so they came to trampled earth
+and torn grass, and so she uncovered concealed footsteps, and so,
+creeping on her hands and knees, she followed traces of blood, through
+thicket and glade, into the deep forest, to a hastily piled hillock of
+earth, gravel, and leaves. Burrowing with her hands, she came to it,
+the naked body of her young husband, cold and stiff, foully murdered.
+Maid Marion approached at her call. She wrapped him in her cloak,
+and--a young wife of those times alone would do it--put him in the
+saddle before her: the good mare Maid Marion alone knows the rest. In
+the early gray dawn, from one highway there rode into the town the
+baffled pursuers, from the other the grandmother's grandmother,
+clasping the corpse of her husband with arms as stiff as his own;
+loving him, so the grandmother used to say, with a love which, if ever
+love could do so, would have effected a resurrection.
+
+
+
+
+THE OLD LADY'S RESTORATION
+
+
+The news came out in the papers that the old lady had been restored
+to her fortune. She had been deprived of it so long ago that the real
+manner of her dispossession had become lost, or at least hidden under
+the many versions that had been invented to replace lapses of memory,
+or to remedy the unpicturesqueness of the original truth. The face of
+truth, like the face of many a good woman, is liable to the accident
+of ugliness, and the desire to embellish one as well as the other
+need not necessarily proceed from anything more harmful than an
+overweighted love of the beautiful.
+
+If the old lady had not been restored to her fortune, her _personalia_
+would have remained in the oblivion which, as one might say, had
+accumulated upon everything belonging to her. But after that newspaper
+paragraph, there was such a flowering of memory around her name as
+would have done credit to a whole cemetery on All Saints. It took
+three generations to do justice to the old lady, for so long and so
+slow had been her descent into poverty that a grandmother was needed
+to remember her setting out upon the road to it.
+
+She set out as most people do, well provided with money, diamonds,
+pretty clothing, handsome residence, equipage, opera-box, beaus (for
+she was a widow), and so many, many friends that she could never
+indulge in a small party--she always had to give a grand ball
+to accommodate them. She made quite an occasion of her first
+reverse,--some litigation decided against her,--and said it came from
+the court's' having only one ear, and that preempted by the other
+party.
+
+She always said whatever she thought, regardless of the consequences,
+because she averred truth was so much more interesting than falsehood.
+Nothing annoyed her more in society than to have to listen to the
+compositions women make as a substitute for the original truth. It was
+as if, when she went to the theater to hear Shakspere and Molière,
+the actors should try to impose upon the audience by reciting lines
+of their own. Truth was the wit of life and the wit of books. She
+traveled her road from affluence so leisurely that nothing escaped her
+eyes or her feelings, and she signaled unhesitatingly every stage in
+it.
+
+"My dear, do you know there is really such a thing as existence
+without a carriage and horses?"--"I assure you it is perfectly new to
+me to find that an opera-box is not a necessity. It is a luxury. In
+theory one can really never tell the distinction between luxuries and
+necessities."--"How absurd! At one time I thought hair was given
+us only to furnish a profession to hair-dressers; just as we wear
+artificial flowers to support the flower-makers."--"Upon my word,
+it is not uninteresting. There is always some _haute nouveauté_ in
+economy. The ways of depriving one's self are infinite. There is wine,
+now."--"Not own your residence! As soon not own your tomb as your
+residence! My mama used to scream that in my ears. According to her,
+it was not _comme il faut_ to board or live in a rented house.
+How little she knew!"
+
+When her friends, learning her increasing difficulties, which they did
+from the best authority (herself), complimented her, as they were
+forced to do, upon her still handsome appearance, pretty laces,
+feathers, jewelry, silks, "Fat," she would answer--"fat. I am living
+off my fat, as bears do in winter. In truth, I remind myself of an
+animal in more ways than one."
+
+And so every one had something to contribute to the conversation about
+her--bits which, they said, affection and admiration had kept alive in
+their memory.
+
+Each city has its own roads to certain ends, its ways of Calvary, so
+to speak. In New Orleans the victim seems ever to walk down Royal
+street and up Chartres, or _vice versa_. One would infer so, at least,
+from the display in the shops and windows of those thorough-fares.
+Old furniture, cut glass, pictures, books, jewelry, lace, china--the
+fleece (sometimes the flesh still sticking to it) left on the
+brambles by the driven herd. If there should some day be a trump of
+resurrection for defunct fortunes, those shops would be emptied in
+the same twinkling of the eye allowed to tombs for their rendition of
+property.
+
+The old lady must have made that promenade many, many times, to judge
+by the samples of her "fat or fleece" displayed in the windows. She
+took to hobbling, as if from tired or sore feet.
+
+"It is nothing," in answer to an inquiry. "Made-to-order feet learning
+to walk in ready-made shoes: that is all. One's feet, after all, are
+the most unintelligent part of one's body." Tea was her abomination,
+coffee her adoration; but she explained: "Tea, you know, is so
+detestable that the very worst is hardly worse than the very best;
+while coffee is so perfect that the smallest shade of impurity is not
+to be tolerated. The truly economical, I observe, always drink tea."
+"At one time I thought if all the luxuries of the world were exposed
+to me, and but one choice allowed, I should select gloves. Believe me,
+there is no superfluity in the world so easily dispensed with."
+
+As may be supposed, her path led her farther and farther away from her
+old friends. Even her intimates became scarce; so much so, that these
+observations, which, of course, could be made only to intimates,
+became fewer and fewer, unfortunately, for her circumstances were
+becoming such that the remarks became increasingly valuable. The last
+thing related of her was apropos of friends.
+
+"My friends! My dear, I cannot tell you just so, on the spur of the
+moment, but with a little reflection and calculation I could tell you,
+to a picayune, the rent of every friend in the market. You can lease,
+rent, or hire them, like horses, carriages, opera-boxes, servants, by
+year, month, day, or hour; and the tariff is just as fixed.
+
+"Christians! Christians are the most discreet people in the world. If
+you should ask me what Christianity has most promoted in the world, I
+should answer without hesitation, discretion. Of course, when I say
+the world I mean society, and when I say Christianity I mean our
+interpretation of it. If only duns could be pastors, and pastors duns!
+But of course you do not know what duns are; they are the guardian
+angels of the creditor, the pursuing fiends of the debtor."
+
+After that, the old lady made her disappearance under the waves of
+that sea into the depths of which it is very improbable that a single
+friend ever attempted to pursue her. And there she remained until the
+news came that she was restored to fortune.
+
+A week passed, two weeks; no sight or sound of her. It was during this
+period that her old friends were so occupied resuscitating their old
+friendships for her--when all her antique sayings and doings became
+current ball-room and dinner-table gossip--that she arose from her
+obscurity like Cinderella from her ashes, to be decked with every gift
+that fairy minds could suggest. Those who had known her intimately
+made no effort to conceal their importance. Those who did not know her
+personally put forward claims of inherited friendship, and those who
+did not know her traditionally or otherwise--the _nouveaux riches_
+and _parvenus_, who alone feel the moneyed value of such social
+connections--began making their resolutions to capture her as soon as
+she came in sight of society.
+
+The old residence was to be re-bought, and refurnished from France;
+the _avant scène_ at the opera had been engaged; the old cook was to
+be hired back from the club at a fabulous price; the old balls and the
+old dinners were to gladden the city--so said they who seemed to know.
+Nothing was to be spared, nothing stinted--at her age, with no child
+or relative, and life running short for pleasure. Diamonds, laces,
+velvets, champagne, Château Yquem--"Grand Dieu Seigneur!" the old
+Creole servants exclaimed, raising their hands at the enumeration of
+it.
+
+Where the news came from nobody knew, but everything was certified
+and accepted as facts, although, as between women, the grain of salt
+should have been used. Impatience waxed, until nearly every day some
+one would ring the bell of the old residence, to ask when the mistress
+was going to move in. And such affectionate messages! And people would
+not, simply could not, be satisfied with the incomprehensible answers.
+And then it leaked out. The old lady was simply waiting for everything
+to arrive--furniture, toilets, carriage, etc.--to make a grand
+_entrée_ into her old sphere; to come riding on a throne, as it were.
+And still the time passed, and she did not come. Finally two of the
+clever-heads penetrated the enigma: _mauvaise honte_, shyness--so long
+out of the world, so old; perhaps not sure of her welcome. So they
+determined to seek her out.
+
+[Illustration: THE ROOM IN THE OLD GALLERY.]
+
+"We will go to her, like children to a grandmother, etc. The others
+have no delicacy of sentiment, etc. And she will thus learn who really
+remember, really love her, etc."
+
+Provided with congratulatory bouquets, they set forth. It is very hard
+to find a dweller on the very sea-bottom of poverty. Perhaps that is
+why the effort is so seldom made. One has to ask at grocers' shops,
+groggeries, market-stalls, Chinese restaurants; interview corner
+cobblers, ragpickers, gutter children. But nothing is impossible to
+the determined. The two ladies overcame all obstacles, and needled
+their way along, where under other circumstances they would not have
+glanced, would have thought it improper to glance.
+
+They were directed through an old, old house, out on an old, old
+gallery, to a room at the very extreme end.
+
+"Poor thing! Evidently she has not heard the good news yet. We will
+be the first to communicate it," they whispered, standing before the
+dilapidated, withered-looking door.
+
+Before knocking, they listened, as it is the very wisdom of discretion
+to do. There was life inside, a little kind of voice, like some one
+trying to hum a song with a very cracked old throat.
+
+The ladies opened the door. "Ah, my friend!"
+
+"Ah, my friend!"
+
+"Restored!"
+
+"Restored!"
+
+"At last!"
+
+"At last!"
+
+"Just the same!"
+
+"Exactly the same!"
+
+It was which one would get to her first with bouquet and kiss,
+competition almost crowding friendship.
+
+"The good news!"
+
+"The good news!"
+
+"We could not stay!"
+
+"We had to come!"
+
+"It has arrived at last!"
+
+"At last it has arrived!"
+
+The old lady was very much older, but still the same.
+
+"You will again have a chance!"
+
+"Restored to your friends!"
+
+"The world!"
+
+"Your luxuries!"
+
+"Your comforts!"
+
+"Comforts! Luxuries!" At last the old lady had an opportunity to slip
+in a word. "And friends! You say right."
+
+There was a pause--a pause which held not a small measure of
+embarrassment. But the two visitors, although they were women of the
+world, and so dreaded an embarrassment more than they did sin, had
+prepared themselves even to stand this.
+
+The old lady standing there--she was very much thinner, very much
+bent, but still the same--appeared to be looking not at them, but at
+their enumeration.
+
+"Comfort!" She opened a pot bubbling on the fire. "Bouillon! A good
+five-cent bouillon. Luxury!" She picked up something from a chair,
+a handful of new cotton chemises. "Luxury!" She turned back her
+bedspread: new cotton sheets. "Did you ever lie in your bed at night
+and dream of sheets? Comfort! Luxury! I should say so! And friends! My
+dear, look!" Opening her door, pointing to an opposite gallery, to
+the yard, her own gallery; to the washing, ironing, sewing women, the
+cobbling, chair-making, carpentering men; to the screaming, laughing,
+crying, quarreling, swarming children. "Friends! All friends--friends
+for fifteen years. Ah, yes, indeed! We are all glad--elated in fact.
+As you say. I am restored."
+
+The visitors simply reported that they had found the old lady, and
+that she was imbecile; mind completely gone under stress of poverty
+and old age. Their opinion was that she should be interdicted.
+
+
+
+
+A DELICATE AFFAIR
+
+
+"But what does this extraordinary display of light mean?" ejaculated
+my aunt, the moment she entered the parlor from the dining-room. "It
+looks like the kingdom of heaven in here! Jules! Jules!" she called,
+"come and put out some of the light!"
+
+Jules was at the front door letting in the usual Wednesday-evening
+visitor, but now he came running in immediately with his own invention
+in the way of a gas-stick,--a piece of broom-handle notched at the
+end,--and began turning one tap after the other, until the room was
+reduced to complete darkness.
+
+"But what do you mean now, Jules?" screamed the old lady again.
+
+"Pardon, madame," answered Jules, with dignity; "it is an accident. I
+thought there was one still lighted."
+
+"An accident! An accident! Do you think I hire you to perform
+accidents for me? You are just through telling me that it was accident
+made you give me both soup and gumbo for dinner today."
+
+"But accidents can always happen, madame," persisted Jules, adhering
+to his position.
+
+The chandelier, a design of originality in its day, gave light by what
+purported to be wax candles standing each in a circlet of pendent
+crystals. The usual smile of ecstatic admiration spread over Jules's
+features as he touched the match to the simulated wicks, and lighted
+into life the rainbows in the prisms underneath. It was a smile that
+did not heighten the intelligence of his features, revealing as it did
+the toothless condition of his gums.
+
+"What will madame have for her dinner tomorrow," looking benignantly
+at his mistress, and still standing under his aureole.
+
+"Do I ever give orders for one dinner, with the other one still on my
+lips?"
+
+"I only asked madame; there is no harm in asking." He walked away, his
+long stiff white apron rattling like a petticoat about him. Catching
+sight of the visitor still standing at the threshold: "Oh, madame,
+here is Mr. Horace. Shall I let him in?"
+
+"Idiot! Every Wednesday you ask me that question, and every Wednesday
+I answer the same way. Don't you think I could tell you when not to let
+him in without your asking?"
+
+"Oh, well, madame, one never knows; it is always safe to ask."
+
+The appearance of the gentleman started a fresh subject of excitement.
+
+"Jules! Jules! You have left that front door unlocked again!"
+
+"Excuse me," said Mr. Horace; "Jules did not leave the front door
+unlocked. It was locked when I rang, and he locked it again most
+carefully after letting me in. I have been standing outside all the
+while the gas was being extinguished and relighted."
+
+"Ah, very well, then. And what is the news?" She sank into her
+arm-chair, pulled her little card-table closer, and began shuffling
+the cards upon it for her game of solitaire. "I never hear any news,
+you know. She [nodding toward me] goes out, but she never learns
+anything. She is as stupid tonight as an empty bottle."
+
+After a few passes her hands, which were slightly tremulous, regained
+some of their wonted steadiness and brilliancy of movement, and the
+cards dropped rapidly on the table. Mr. Horace, as he had got into
+the habit of doing, watched her mechanically, rather absent-mindedly
+retailing what he imagined would interest her, from his week's
+observation and hearsay. And madame's little world revolved, complete
+for her, in time, place, and personality.
+
+It was an old-fashioned square room with long ceiling, and broad, low
+windows heavily curtained with stiff silk brocade, faded by time into
+mellowness. The tall white-painted mantel carried its obligation of
+ornaments well: a gilt clock which under a glass case related some
+brilliant poetical idyl, and told the hours only in an insignificant
+aside, according to the delicate politeness of bygone French taste;
+flanked by duplicate continuations of the same idyl in companion
+candelabra, also under glass; Sèvres, or imitation Sèvres vases, and
+a crowd of smaller objects to which age and rarity were slowly
+contributing an artistic value. An oval mirror behind threw replicas
+of them into another mirror, receiving in exchange the reflected
+portrait of madame in her youth, and in the partial nudity in which
+innocence was limned in madame's youth. There were besides mirrors on
+the other three walls of the room, all hung with such careful intent
+for the exercise of their vocation that the apartment, in spots,
+extended indefinitely; the brilliant chandelier was thereby
+quadrupled, and the furniture and ornaments multiplied everywhere
+and most unexpectedly into twins and triplets, producing such
+sociabilities among them, and forcing such correspondences between
+inanimate objects with such hospitable insistence, that the effect was
+full of gaiety and life, although the interchange in reality was the
+mere repetition of one original, a kind of phonographic echo.
+
+The portrait of monsieur, madame's handsome young husband, hung out
+of the circle of radiance, in the isolation that, wherever they hang,
+always seems to surround the portraits of the dead.
+
+Old as the parlors appeared, madame antedated them by the sixteen
+years she had lived before her marriage, which had been the occasion
+of their furnishment. She had traveled a considerable distance over
+the sands of time since the epoch commemorated by the portrait.
+Indeed, it would require almost documentary evidence to prove that
+she, who now was arriving at eighty, was the same Atalanta that had
+started out so buoyantly at sixteen.
+
+Instead of a cap, she wore black lace over her head, pinned with gold
+brooches. Her white hair curled naturally over a low forehead. Her
+complexion showed care--and powder. Her eyes were still bright, not
+with the effete intelligence of old age, but with actual potency. She
+wore a loose black sack flowered in purple, and over that a black lace
+mantle, fastened with more gold brooches.
+
+She played her game of solitaire rapidly, impatiently, and always won;
+for she never hesitated to cheat to get out of a tight place, or
+into a favorable one, cheating with the quickness of a flash, and
+forgetting it the moment afterward.
+
+Mr. Horace was as old as she, but he looked much younger, although
+his dress and appearance betrayed no evidence of an effort in that
+direction. Whenever his friend cheated, he would invariably call her
+attention to it; and as usual she would shrug her shoulders, and say,
+"Bah! lose a game for a card!" and pursue the conversation.
+
+He happened to mention mushrooms--fresh mushrooms. She threw down
+her cards before the words were out of his mouth, and began to call,
+"Jules! Jules!" Mr. Horace pulled the bell-cord, but madame was
+too excitable for that means of communication. She ran into the
+antechamber, and put her head over the banisters, calling, "Jules!
+Jules!" louder and louder. She might have heard Jules's slippered feet
+running from the street into the corridor and up-stairs, had she not
+been so deaf. He appeared at the door.
+
+"But where have you been? Here I have been raising the house a
+half-hour, calling you. You have been in the street. I am sure you
+have been in the street."
+
+"Madame is very much mistaken," answered Jules, with resentful
+dignity. He had taken off his white apron of waiter, and was
+disreputable in all the shabbiness of his attire as cook. "When madame
+forbids me to go into the street, I do not go into the street. I was
+in the kitchen; I had fallen asleep. What does madame desire?" smiling
+benevolently.
+
+"What is this I hear? Fresh mushrooms in the market!"
+
+"Eh, madame?"
+
+"Fresh mushrooms in the market, and you have not brought me any!"
+
+"Madame, there are fresh mushrooms everywhere in the market," waving
+his hand to show their universality.
+
+"Everybody is eating them--"
+
+"Old Pomponnette," Jules continued, "only this morning offered me a
+plate, piled up high, for ten cents."
+
+"Idiot! Why did you not buy them?"
+
+"If madame had said so; but madame did not say so. Madame said, 'Soup,
+Jules; carrots, rice,'" counting on his fingers.
+
+"And the gumbo?"
+
+"I have explained that that was an accident. Madame said 'Soup,'"
+enumerating his menu again; "madame never once said mushrooms."
+
+"But how could I know there were mushrooms in the market? Do I go to
+market?"
+
+"That is it!" and Jules smiled at the question thus settled.
+
+"If you had told me there were mushrooms in the market--" pursued
+madame, persisting in treating Jules as a reasonable being.
+
+"Why did not madame ask me? If madame had asked me, surely I would
+have told madame. Yesterday Caesar brought them to the door--a whole
+bucketful for twenty-five cents. I had to shut the door in his face to
+get rid of him," triumphantly.
+
+"And you brought me yesterday those detestable peas!"
+
+"Ah," shrugging his shoulders, "madame told me to buy what I saw. I
+saw peas. I bought them."
+
+"Well, understand now, once for all: whenever you see mushrooms, no
+matter what I ordered, you buy them. Do you hear?"
+
+"No, madame. Surely I cannot buy mushrooms unless madame orders them.
+Madame's disposition is too quick."
+
+"But I do order them. Stupid! I do order them. I tell you to buy them
+every day."
+
+"And if there are none in the market every day?"
+
+"Go away! Get out of my sight! I do not want to see you. Ah, it is
+unendurable! I must--I must get rid of him!" This last was not
+a threat, as Jules knew only too well. It was merely a habitual
+exclamation.
+
+During the colloquy Mr. Horace, leaning back in his arm-chair, raised
+his eyes, and caught the reflected portrait of madame in the mirror
+before him--the reflection so much softer and prettier, so much more
+ethereal, than the original painting. Indeed, seen in the mirror, that
+way, the portrait was as refreshing as the most charming memory. He
+pointed to it when madame, with considerable loss of temper, regained
+her seat.
+
+"It is as beautiful as the past," he explained most unnaturally, for
+he and his friend had a horror of looking at the long, long past,
+which could not fail to remind them of--what no one cares to
+contemplate out of church. Making an effort toward some determination
+which a subtle observer might have noticed weighing upon him all the
+evening, he added: "And, apropos of the past--"
+
+"_Hein_?" interrogated the old lady, impatiently, still under the
+influence of her irascibility about the mushrooms.
+
+He moved his chair closer, and bent forward, as if his communication
+were to be confidential.
+
+"Ah, bah! Speak louder!" she cried. "One would suppose you had some
+secret to tell. What secrets can there be at our age?" She took up her
+cards and began to play. There could be no one who bothered herself
+less about the forms of politeness.
+
+"Yes, yes," answered Mr. Horace, throwing himself back into his chair;
+"what secrets can there be at our age?"
+
+The remark seemed a pregnant one to him; he gave himself up to it. One
+must evidently be the age of one's thoughts. Mr. Horace's thoughts
+revealed him the old man he was. The lines in his face deepened into
+wrinkles; his white mustache could not pretend to conceal his mouth,
+worsened by the loss of a tooth or two; and the long, thin hand that
+propped his head was crossed with blue, distended veins. "At the last
+judgment"--it was a favorite quotation with him--"the book of our
+conscience will be read aloud before the whole company."
+
+But the old lady, deep in her game, paid no more heed to his quotation
+than to him. He made a gesture toward her portrait.
+
+"When that was painted, Josephine--"
+
+Madame threw a glance after the gesture. The time was so long ago, the
+mythology of Greece hardly more distant! At eighty the golden age of
+youth must indeed appear an evanescent myth. Madame's ideas seemed to
+take that direction.
+
+"Ah, at that time we were all nymphs, and you all demigods."
+
+"Demigods and nymphs, yes; but there was one among us who was a god
+with you all."
+
+The allusion--a frequent one with Mr. Horace--was to madame's husband,
+who in his day, it is said, had indeed played the god in the little
+Arcadia of society. She shrugged her shoulders. The truth is so little
+of a compliment The old gentleman sighed in an abstracted way, and
+madame, although apparently absorbed in her game, lent her ear. It is
+safe to say that a woman is never too old to hear a sigh wafted in her
+direction.
+
+"Josephine, do you remember--in your memory--"
+
+She pretended not to hear. Remember? Who ever heard of her forgetting?
+But she was not the woman to say, at a moment's notice, what she
+remembered or what she forgot.
+
+"A woman's memory! When I think of a woman's memory--in fact, I do not
+like to think of a woman's memory. One can intrude in imagination into
+many places; but a woman's memory--"
+
+Mr. Horace seemed to lose his thread. It had been said of him in
+his youth that he wrote poetry--and it was said against him. It was
+evidently such lapses as these that had given rise to the accusation.
+And as there was no one less impatient under sentiment or poetry
+than madame, her feet began to agitate themselves as if Jules were
+perorating some of his culinary inanities before her.
+
+"And a man's memory!" totally misunderstanding him. "It is not there
+that I either would penetrate, my friend. A man--"
+
+When madame began to talk about men she was prompted by imagination
+just as much as was Mr. Horace when he talked about women. But what a
+difference in their sentiments! And yet he had received so little, and
+she so much, from the subjects of their inspiration. But that seems to
+be the way in life--or in imagination.
+
+"That you should"--he paused with the curious shyness of the old
+before the word "love"--"that you two should--marry--seemed natural,
+inevitable, at the time."
+
+Tradition records exactly the same comment by society at the time on
+the marriage in question. Society is ever fatalistic in its comments.
+
+"But the natural--the inevitable--do we not sometimes, I wonder,
+perform them as Jules does his accidents?"
+
+"Ah, do not talk about that idiot! An idiot born and bred! I won't
+have him about me! He is a monstrosity! I tell his grandmother that
+every day when she comes to comb me. What a farce--what a ridiculous
+farce comfortable existence has become with us! Fresh mushrooms in
+market, and bring me carrots!"
+
+The old gentleman, partly from long knowledge of her habit, or from an
+equally persistent bend of his own, quietly held on to his idea.
+
+"One cannot tell. It seems so at the time. We like to think it so; it
+makes it easier. And yet, looking back on our future as we once looked
+forward to it--"
+
+"Eh! but who wants to look back on it, my friend? Who in the world
+wants to look back on it?" One could not doubt madame's energy of
+opinion on that question to hear her voice. "We have done our future,
+we have performed it, if you will. Our future! It is like the dinners
+we have eaten; of course we cannot remember the good without becoming
+exasperated over the bad: but"--shrugging her shoulders--"since we
+cannot beat the cooks, we must submit to fate," forcing a queen that
+she needed at the critical point of her game.
+
+"At sixteen and twenty-one it is hard to realize that one is arranging
+one's life to last until sixty, seventy, forever," correcting himself
+as he thought of his friend, the dead husband. If madame had ever
+possessed the art of self-control, it was many a long day since she
+had exercised it; now she frankly began to show ennui.
+
+"When I look back to that time,"--Mr. Horace leaned back in his chair
+and half closed his eyes, perhaps to avoid the expression of her
+face,--"I see nothing but lights and flowers, I hear nothing but music
+and laughter; and all--lights and flowers and music and laughter--seem
+to meet in this room, where we met so often to arrange
+our--inevitabilities." The word appeared to attract him.
+"Josephine,"--with a sudden change of voice and manner,--"Josephine,
+how beautiful you were!"
+
+The old lady nodded her head without looking from her cards.
+
+"They used to say," with sad conviction of the truth of his
+testimony--"the men used to say that your beauty was irresistible.
+None ever withstood you. None ever could."
+
+That, after all, was Mr. Horace's great charm with madame; he was so
+faithful to the illusions of his youth. As he looked now at her, one
+could almost feel the irresistibility of which he spoke.
+
+"It was only their excuse, perhaps; we could not tell at the time; we
+cannot tell even now when we think about it. They said then, talking
+as men talk over such things, that you were the only one who could
+remain yourself under the circumstances; you were the only one who
+could know, who could will, under the circumstances. It was their
+theory; men can have only theories about such things." His voice
+dropped, and he seemed to drop too, into some abysm of thought.
+
+Madame looked into the mirror, where she could see the face of the one
+who alone could retain her presence of mind under the circumstances
+suggested by Mr. Horace. She could also have seen, had she wished it,
+among the reflected bric-a-brac of the mantel, the corner of the frame
+that held the picture of her husband, but peradventure, classing it
+with the past which held so many unavenged bad dinners, she never
+thought to link it even by a look with her emotions of the present.
+Indeed, it had been said of her that in past, present, and future
+there had ever been but the one picture to interest her eyes--the
+one she was looking at now. This, however, was the remark of the
+uninitiated, for the true passion of a beautiful woman is never so
+much for her beauty as for its booty; as the passion of a gamester is
+for his game, not for his luck.
+
+"How beautiful _she_ was!"
+
+It was apparently down in the depths of his abysm that he found the
+connection between this phrase and his last, and it was evidently to
+himself he said it. Madame, however, heard and understood too; in
+fact, traced back to a certain period, her thoughts and Mr. Horace's
+must have been fed by pretty much the same subjects. But she had
+so carefully barricaded certain issues in her memory as almost to
+obstruct their flow into her life; if she were a cook, one would
+say that it was her bad dinners which she was trying to keep out of
+remembrance.
+
+"You there, he there, she there, I there." He pointed to the places on
+the carpet, under the chandelier; he could have touched them with a
+walking-stick, and the recollection seemed just as close.
+
+"She was, in truth, what we men called her then; it was her eyes
+that first suggested it--Myosotis, the little blue flower, the
+for-get-me-not. It suited her better than her own name. We always
+called her that among ourselves. How beautiful she was!" He leaned his
+head on his hand and looked where he had seen her last--so long, such
+an eternity, ago.
+
+It must be explained for the benefit of those who do not live in the
+little world where an allusion is all that is necessary to put one in
+full possession of any drama, domestic or social, that Mr. Horace was
+speaking of the wedding-night of madame, when the bridal party stood
+as he described under the chandelier; the bride and groom, with each
+one's best friend. It may be said that it was the last night or time
+that madame had a best friend of her own sex. Social gossip, with
+characteristic kindness, had furnished reasons to suit all tastes, why
+madame had ceased that night to have a best friend of her own sex. If
+gossip had not done so, society would still be left to its imagination
+for information, for madame never tolerated the smallest appeal to her
+for enlightenment. What the general taste seemed most to relish as a
+version was that madame in her marriage had triumphed, not conquered;
+and that the night of her wedding she had realized the fact, and, to
+be frank, had realized it ever since. In short, madame had played then
+to gain at love, as she played now to gain at solitaire; and hearts
+were no more than cards to her--and, "Bah! Lose a game for a card!"
+must have been always her motto. It is hard to explain it delicately
+enough, for these are the most delicate affairs in life; but the image
+of Myosotis had passed through monsieur's heart, and Myosotis does
+mean "forget me not." And madame well knew that to love monsieur once
+was to love him always, in spite of jealousy, doubt, distrust, nay,
+unhappiness (for to love him meant all this and more). He was that
+kind of man, they said, whom women could love even against conscience.
+Madame never forgave that moment. Her friend, at least, she could put
+aside out of her intercourse; unfortunately, we cannot put people out
+of our lives. God alone can do that, and so far he had interfered in
+the matter only by removing monsieur. It was known to notoriety that
+since her wedding madame had abandoned, destroyed, all knowledge of
+her friend. And the friend? She had disappeared as much as is possible
+for one in her position and with her duties.
+
+"What there is in blue eyes, light hair, and a fragile form to impress
+one, I cannot tell; but for us men it seems to me it is blue-eyed,
+light-haired, and fragile-formed women that are the hardest to
+forget."
+
+"The less easy to forget," corrected madam. He paid no attention
+to the remark.
+
+"They are the women that attach themselves in one's memory. If
+necessary to keep from being forgotten, they come back into one's
+dreams. And as life rolls on, one wonders about them,--'Is she happy?
+Is she miserable? Goes life well or ill with her?'"
+
+Madame played her cards slowly, one would say, for her, prosaically.
+
+"And there is always a pang when, as one is so wondering, the response
+comes,--that is, the certainty in one's heart responds,--'She is
+miserable, and life goes ill with her.' Then, if ever, men envy the
+power of God."
+
+Madame threw over the game she was in, and began a new one.
+
+"Such women should not be unhappy; they are too fragile, too
+sensitive, too trusting. I could never understand the infliction
+of misery upon them. I could send death to them, but not--not
+misfortune."
+
+Madame, forgetting again to cheat in time, and losing her game, began
+impatiently to shuffle her cards for a new deal.
+
+"And yet, do you know, Josephine, those women are the unhappy ones of
+life. They seem predestined to it, as others"--looking at madame's
+full-charmed portrait--"are predestined to triumph and victory.
+They"--unconscious, in his abstraction, of the personal nature of his
+simile--"never know how to handle their cards, and they always play a
+losing game."
+
+"Ha!" came from madame, startled into an irate ejaculation.
+
+"It is their love always that is sacrificed, their hearts always that
+are bruised. One might say that God himself favors the black-haired
+ones!"
+
+As his voice sank lower and lower, the room seemed to become stiller
+and stiller. A passing vehicle in the street, however, now and then
+drew a shiver of sound from the pendent prisms of the chandelier.
+
+"She was so slight, so fragile, and always in white, with blue in her
+hair to match her eyes--and--God knows what in her heart, all the
+time. And yet they stand it, they bear it, they do not die, they live
+along with the strongest, the happiest, the most fortunate of us,"
+bitterly; "and"--raising his eyes to his old friend, who thereupon
+immediately began to fumble her cards--"whenever in the street I see
+a poor, bent, broken woman's figure, I know, without verifying it
+any more by a glance, that it is the wreck of a fair woman's figure;
+whenever I hear of a bent, broken existence, I know, without asking
+any more, that it is the wreck of a fair woman's life."
+
+Poor Mr. Horace spoke with the unreason of a superstitious bigot.
+
+"I have often thought, since, in large assemblies, particularly in
+weddings, Josephine, of what was going on in the women's hearts there,
+and I have felt sorry for them; and when I think of God's knowing what
+is in their hearts, I have felt sorry for the men. And I often think
+now, Josephine,--think oftener and oftener of it,--that if the
+resurrection trumpet of our childhood should sound some day, no matter
+when, out there, over the old St. Louis cemetery, and we should all
+have to rise from our long rest of oblivion, what would be the first
+thing we should do? And though there were a God and a heaven awaiting
+us,--by that same God, Josephine, I believe that our first thought in
+awakening would be the last in dying,--confession,--and that our first
+rush would be to the feet of one another for forgiveness. For there
+are some offenses that must outlast the longest oblivion, and a
+forgiveness that will be more necessary than God's own. Then our
+hearts will be bared to one another; for if, as you say, there are
+no secrets at our age, there can still be less cause for them after
+death."
+
+His voice ended in the faintest whisper. The table crashed over, and
+the cards flew wide-spread on the floor. Before we could recover,
+madame was in the antechamber, screaming for Jules.
+
+One would have said that, from her face, the old lady had witnessed
+the resurrection described by Mr. Horace, the rush of the spirits with
+their burdens of remorse, the one to the feet of the other; and she
+must have seen herself and her husband, with a unanimity of purpose
+never apparent in their short married life, rising from their common
+tomb and hastening to that other tomb at the end of the alley, and
+falling at the feet of the one to whom in life he had been recreant in
+love, she in friendship.
+
+Of course Jules answered through the wrong door, rushing in with his
+gas-stick, and turning off the gas. In a moment we were involved in
+darkness and dispute.
+
+"But what does he mean? What does the idiot mean? He--" It was
+impossible for her to find a word to do justice to him and to her
+exasperation at the same time.
+
+"Pardon, madame; it is not I. It is the cathedral bell; it is ringing
+nine o'clock."
+
+"But--"
+
+"Madame can hear it herself. Listen!" We could not see it, but we were
+conscious of the benign, toothless smile spreading over his face as
+the bell-tones fell in the room.
+
+"But it is not the gas. I--"
+
+"Pardon, madame; but it is the gas. Madame said, 'Jules, put out the
+gas every night when the bell rings.' Madame told me that only last
+night. The bell rings: I put out the gas."
+
+"Will you be silent? Will you listen?"
+
+"If madame wishes; just as madame says."
+
+But the old lady had turned to Mr. Horace. "Horace, you have seen--you
+know--" and it was a question now of overcoming emotion. "I--I--I--a
+carriage, my friend, a carriage."
+
+"Madame--" Jules interrupted his smile to interrupt her.
+
+She was walking around the room, picking up a shawl here, a lace
+there; for she was always prepared against draughts.
+
+"Madame--" continued Jules, pursuing her.
+
+"A carriage."
+
+"If madame would only listen, I was going to say--but madame is too
+quick in her disposition--the carriage has been waiting since a long
+hour ago. Mr. Horace said to have it there in a half hour."
+
+It was then she saw for the first time that it had all been prepared
+by Mr. Horace. The rest was easy enough: getting into the carriage,
+and finding the place of which Mr. Horace had heard, as he said, only
+that afternoon. In it, on her bed of illness, poverty, and suffering,
+lay the patient, wasted form of the beautiful fair one whom men had
+called in her youth Myosotis.
+
+But she did not call her Myosotis.
+
+"_Mon Amour!_" The old pet name, although it had to be fetched across
+more than half a century of disuse, flashed like lightning from
+madame's heart into the dim chamber.
+
+"_Ma Divine!_" came in counter-flash from the curtained bed.
+
+In the old days women, or at least young girls, could hazard such pet
+names one upon the other. These--think of it!--dated from the first
+communion class, the dating period of so much of friendship.
+
+"My poor Amour!"
+
+"My poor, poor Divine!"
+
+The voices were together, close beside the pillow.
+
+"I--I--" began Divine.
+
+"It could not have happened if God had not wished it," interrupted
+poor Amour, with the resignation that comes, alas! only with the last
+drop of the bitter cup.
+
+And that was about all. If Mr. Horace had not slipped away, he might
+have noticed the curious absence of monsieur's name, and of his own
+name, in the murmuring that followed. It would have given him some
+more ideas on the subject of woman.
+
+At any rate, the good God must thank him for having one affair the
+less to arrange when the trumpet sounds out there over the old St.
+Louis cemetery. And he was none too premature; for the old St. Louis
+cemetery, as was shortly enough proved, was a near reach for all three
+of the old friends.
+
+
+
+
+PUPASSE
+
+
+Every day, every day, it was the same overture in Madame Joubert's
+room in the Institute St. Denis; the strident:
+
+"Mesdemoiselles; à vos places! Notre Père qui est dans le ciel--Qui a
+fait ce bruit?"
+
+"It's Pupasse, madame! It's Pupasse!" The answer invariably was
+unanimous.
+
+"But, Madame Joubert,--I assure you, Madame Joubert,--I could not help
+it! They know I could not help it!"
+
+By this time the fresh new fool's cap made from yesterday's "Bee"
+would have been pinned on her head.
+
+"Quelle injustice! Quelle injustice!"
+
+This last apostrophe in a high, whining nasal voice, always procured
+Pupasse's elevation on the tall three-legged stool in the corner.
+
+It was a theory of the little girls in the primary class that Madame
+Joubert would be much more lenient to their own little inevitabilities
+of bad conduct and lessons if Pupasse did not invariably comb her
+the wrong way every morning after prayers, by dropping something,
+or sniffling, or sneezing. Therefore, while they distractedly got
+together books, slates, and copy-books, their infantile eyes found
+time to dart deadly reproaches toward the corner of penitence, and
+their little lips, still shaped from their first nourishment, pouted
+anything but sympathy for the occupant of it.
+
+Indeed, it would have been a most startling unreality to have ever
+entered Madame Joubert's room and not seen Pupasse in that corner, on
+that stool, her tall figure shooting up like a post, until her tall,
+pointed _bonnet d' âne_ came within an inch or two of the ceiling.
+It was her hoop-skirt that best testified to her height. It was the
+period of those funnel-shaped hoop-skirts that spread out with such
+nice mathematical proportions, from the waist down, that it seemed
+they must have emanated from the brains of astronomers, like the
+orbits, and diameters, and other things belonging to the heavenly
+bodies. Pupasse could not have come within three feet of the wall with
+her hoop-skirt distended. To have forced matters was not to be thought
+of an instant. So even in her greatest grief and indignation, she had
+to pause before the three-legged black stool, and gather up steel
+after steel of her circumference in her hands behind, until her calico
+skirt careened and flattened; and so she could manage to accommodate
+herself to the limited space of her punishment, the circles drooping
+far over her feet as she stood there, looking like the costumed stick
+of a baby's rattle.
+
+Her thinness continued into her face, which, unfortunately, had
+nothing in the way of toilet to assist it. Two little black eyes fixed
+in the sides of a mere fence of a nose, and a mouth with the shape and
+expression of all mouths made to go over sharp-pointed teeth planted
+very far apart; the smallest amount possible of fine, dry, black
+hair--a perfect rat-tail when it was plaited in one, as almost all
+wore their hair. But sometimes Pupasse took it into her head to plait
+it in two braids, as none but the thick-haired ventured to wear it.
+As the little girls said, it was a petition to Heaven for "eau
+Quinquina." When Marcelite, the hair-dresser, came at her regular
+periods to visit the hair of the boarders, she would make an effort
+with Pupasse, plaiting her hundred hairs in a ten-strand braid. The
+effect was a half yard of black worsted galloon; nothing more, or
+better. Had Pupasse possessed as many heads as the hydra, she could
+have "coiffe'd" them all with fools' caps during one morning's
+recitations. She entirely monopolized the "Daily Bee." Madame Joubert
+was forced to borrow from "madame" the stale weekly "Courrier des
+Etats-Unis" for the rest of the room. From grammar, through sacred
+history, arithmetic, geography, mythology, down to dictation, Pupasse
+could pile up an accumulation of penitences that would have tasked the
+limits of the current day had not recreation been wisely set as a term
+which disbarred, by proscription, previous offenses. But even after
+recreation, with that day's lessons safely out, punished and expiated,
+Pupasse's doom seemed scarcely lightened; there was still a whole
+criminal code of conduct to infract. The only difference was that
+instead of books, slates, or copy-books, leathern medals, bearing
+various legends and mottos, were hung around her neck--a travestied
+decoration worse than the books for humiliation.
+
+The "abécédaires," their torment for the day over, thankful for any
+distraction from the next day's lessons, and eager for any relief
+from the intolerable ennui of goodness, were thankful enough now for
+Pupasse. They naturally watched her in preference to Madame Joubert,
+holding their books and slates quite cunningly to hide their faces.
+Pupasse had not only the genius, but that which sometimes fails
+genius, the means for grimacing: little eyes, long nose, foolish
+mouth, and pointed tongue. And she was so amusing, when Madame
+Joubert's head was turned, that the little girls, being young and
+innocent, would forget themselves and all burst out laughing. It
+sounded like a flight of singing birds through the hot, close, stupid
+little room; but not so to Madame Joubert.
+
+"Young ladies! But what does this mean?"
+
+And, terror-stricken, the innocents would call out with one voice,
+"It's Pupasse, madame! It's Pupasse who made us laugh!" There was
+nothing but fools' caps to be gained by prevaricating, and there was
+frequently nothing less gained by confession. And oh, the wails and
+the sobs as the innocents would be stood up, one by one, in their
+places! Even the pigtails at the backs of their little heads were
+convulsed with grief. Oh, how they hated Pupasse then! When their
+_bonnes_ came for them at three o'clock,--washing their tear-stained
+faces at the cistern before daring to take them through the
+streets,--how passionately they would cry out, the tears breaking
+afresh into the wet handkerchiefs:
+
+"It's that Pupasse! It's that _vilaine_ Pupasse!"
+
+To Pupasse herself would be meted out that "peine forte et dure," that
+acme of humiliation and disgrace, so intensely horrible that many a
+little girl in that room solemnly averred and believed she would kill
+herself before submitting to it. Pupasse's voluminous calico skirt
+would be gathered up by the hem and tied up over her head! Oh, the
+horrible monstrosity on the stool in the corner then! There were no
+eyes in that room that had any desire to look upon it. And the cries
+and the "Quelle injustice!" that fell on the ears then from the hidden
+feelings had all the weirdness of the unseen, but heard. And all the
+other girls in the room, in fear and trembling, would begin to move
+their lips in a perfect whirlwind of study, or write violently
+on their slates, or begin at that very instant to rule off their
+copy-books for the next day's verb.
+
+Pupasse--her name was Marie Pupasse but no one thought of calling
+her anything but Pupasse, with emphasis on the first syllable and
+sibilance on the last--had no parents only a grandmother, to describe
+whom, all that is necessary to say is that she was as short as Pupasse
+was tall, and that her face resembled nothing so much as a little
+yellow apple shriveling from decay. The old lady came but once a week,
+to fetch Pupasse fresh clothes, and a great brown paper bag of nice
+things to eat. There was no boarder in the school who received
+handsomer bags of cake and fruit than Pupasse. And although, not two
+hours before, a girl might have been foremost in the shrill cry, "It
+is Pupasse who made the noise! It is Pupasse who made me laugh!" there
+was nothing in that paper bag reserved even from such a one. When the
+girl herself with native delicacy would, under the circumstances,
+judge it discreet to refuse, Pupasse would plead, "Oh, but take it to
+give me pleasure!" And if still the refusal continued, Pupasse would
+take her bag and go into the summer-house in the corner of the garden,
+and cry until the unforgiving one would relent. But the first offering
+of the bag was invariably to the stern dispenser of fools' caps and
+the unnamed humiliation of the reversed skirt: Madame Joubert.
+
+Pupasse was in the fifth class. The sixth--the abécédaires--was
+the lowest in the school. Green was the color of the fifth;
+white--innocence--of the abécédaires. Exhibition after exhibition, the
+same green sash and green ribbons appeared on Pupasse's white muslin,
+the white muslin getting longer and longer every year, trying to keep
+up with her phenomenal growth; and always, from all over the room,
+buzzed the audience's suppressed merriment at Pupasse's appearance
+in the ranks of the little ones of nine and ten. It was that very
+merriment that brought about the greatest change in the Institute
+St. Denis. The sitting order of the classes was reversed. The first
+class--the graduates--went up to the top step of the _estrade_; and
+the little ones put on the lowest, behind the pianos. The graduates
+grumbled that it was not _comme il faut_ to have young ladies of their
+position stepping like camels up and down those great steps; and the
+little girls said it was a shame to hide them behind the pianos after
+their mamas had taken so much pains to make them look pretty. But
+madame said--going also to natural history for her comparison--that
+one must be a rhinoceros to continue the former routine.
+
+Religion cannot be kept waiting forever on the intelligence. It was
+always in the fourth class that the first communion was made; that is,
+when the girls stayed one year in each class. But Pupasse had spent
+three years in the sixth class, and had already been four in
+the fifth, and Madame Joubert felt that longer delay would be
+disrespectful to the good Lord. It was true that Pupasse could not
+yet distinguish the ten commandments from the seven capital sins, and
+still would answer that Jeanne d'Arc was the foundress of the "Little
+Sisters of the Poor." But, as Madame Joubert always said in the little
+address she made to the catechism class every year before handing it
+over to Father Dolomier, God judged from the heart, and not from the
+mind.
+
+Father Dolomier--from his face he would have been an able contestant
+of _bonnets d'âne_ with Pupasse, if subjected to Madame Joubert's
+discipline--evidently had the same method of judging as God, although
+the catechism class said they could dance a waltz on the end of his
+long nose without his perceiving it.
+
+There is always a little air of mystery about the first communion: not
+that there is any in reality, but the little ones assume it to render
+themselves important. The going to early mass, the holding their
+dog-eared catechisms as if they were relics, the instruction from the
+priest, even if he were only old Father Dolomier--it all put such a
+little air of devotion into their faces that it imposed (as it did
+every year) upon their companions, which was a vastly gratifying
+effect. No matter how young and innocent she may be, a woman's
+devotion always seems to have two aims--God and her own sex.
+
+The week of retreat came. Oh, the week of retreat! That was the _bonne
+bouche_ of it all, for themselves and for the others. It was the same
+every year. By the time the week of retreat arrived, interest and
+mystery had been frothed to the point of indiscretion; so that the
+little girls would stand on tiptoe to peep through the shutters at the
+postulants inside, and even the larger girls, to whom first communion
+was a thing of an infantile past, would condescend to listen to their
+reports with ill-feigned indifference.
+
+As the day of the first communion neared, the day of the general
+confession naturally neared too, leading it. And then the little
+girls, peeping through the shutters, and holding their breath to see
+better, saw what they beheld every year; but it was always new and
+awesome--mysterious scribbling in corners with lead-pencils on scraps
+of paper; consultations; rewritings; copyings; the list of their sins,
+of all the sins of their lives.
+
+"_Ma chère!_"--pigtails and sunbonnets hiving outside would shudder.
+"Oh, _Mon Dieu!_ To have to confess all--but _all_ your sins! As for
+me, it would kill me, sure!"
+
+And the frightful recoils of their consciences would make all
+instantly blanch and cross themselves.
+
+"And look at Pupasse's sins! Oh, but they are long! _Ma chère_, but
+look! But look, I ask you, at them!"
+
+The longest record was of course the most complimentary and honorable
+to the possessor, as each girl naturally worked not only for
+absolution but for fame.
+
+Between catechisms and instructions Madame Joubert would have "La Vie
+des Saints" read aloud, to stimulate their piety and to engage their
+thoughts; for the thoughts of first communicants are worse than flies
+for buzzing around the forbidden. The lecture must have been a great
+quickener of conscience; for they would dare punishment and cheat
+Madame Joubert, under her own eyes, in order surreptitiously to add a
+new sin to their list. Of course the one hour's recreation could not
+afford time enough for observation now, and the little girls were
+driven to all sorts of excuses to get out of the classroom for one
+moment's peep through the shutters; at which whole swarms of them
+would sometimes be caught and sent into punishment.
+
+Only two days more. Madame Joubert put them through the rehearsal,
+a most important part of the preparation, almost as important as
+catechism--how to enter the church, how to hold the candle, how to
+advance, how to kneel, retire--everything, in fact.
+
+Only one day more, the quietest, most devotional day of all. Pupasse
+lost her sins!
+
+Of course every year the same accident happened to some one. But it
+was a new accident to Pupasse. And such a long list!
+
+The commotion inside that retreat! Pupasse's nasal whine, carrying her
+lament without any mystery to the outside garden. Such searching of
+pockets, rummaging of corners, microscopic examination of the floor!
+Such crimination and recrimination, protestation, asseveration,
+assurances, backed by divine and saintly invocations! Pupasse accused
+companion after companion of filching her sins, which each after
+each would violently deny, producing each her own list from her own
+pocket,--proof to conviction of innocence, and, we may say, of guilt
+also.
+
+Pupasse declared they had niched it to copy, because her list was the
+longest and most complete. She could not go to confession without her
+sins; she could not go to communion without confession. The tears
+rolled down her long thin nose unchecked, for she never could remember
+to use her handkerchief until reminded by Madame Joubert.
+
+She had committed it to memory, as all the others had done theirs;
+but how was she to know without the list if she had not forgotten
+something? And to forget one thing in a general confession they knew
+was a mortal sin.
+
+"I shall tell Madame Joubert! I shall tell Madame Joubert!"
+
+"_Ma chère_!'" whispered the little ones outside. "Oh, but look at
+them! _Elles font les quatre cents coups_!" which is equivalent to
+"cutting up like the mischief."
+
+And with reason. As if such an influx of the world upon them at this
+moment were not sufficient of itself to damn them. But to tell Madame
+Joubert! With all their dresses made and ready, wreaths, veils,
+candles, prayer-books, picture-cards, mother-of-pearl prayer-beads,
+and festival breakfasts with admiring family and friends prepared.
+Tell Madame Joubert! She would simply cancel it all. In a body they
+chorused:
+
+"But, Pupasse!"
+
+"_Chère_ Pupasse!"
+
+"_Voyons_, Pupasse!"
+
+"I assure you, Pupasse!"
+
+"On the cross, Pupasse!"
+
+"Ah, Pupasse!"
+
+"We implore you, Pupasse!"
+
+The only response--tears, and "I shall tell Madame Joubert."
+
+Consultations, caucuses, individual appeals, general outbursts.
+Pupasse stood in the corner. Curiously, she always sought refuge in
+the very sanctum of punishment, her face hidden in her bended arms,
+her hoops standing out behind, vouchsafing nothing but tears, and the
+promise to tell Madame Joubert. And three o'clock approaching! And
+Madame Joubert imminent! But Pupasse really could not go to confession
+without her sins. They all recognized that; they were reasonable, as
+they assured her.
+
+A crisis quickens the wits. They heard the cathedral clock strike the
+quarter to three. They whispered, suggested, argued--bunched in the
+farthest corner from Pupasse.
+
+"Console yourself, Pupasse! We will help you, Pupasse! Say no more
+about it! We will help you!"
+
+A delegate was sent to say that. She was only four feet and a half
+high, and had to stand on tiptoe to pluck the six-foot Pupasse's dress
+to gain her attention.
+
+And they did help her generously. A new sheet of fool's-cap was
+procured, and torn in two, lengthwise, and pinned in a long strip. One
+by one, each little girl took it, and, retiring as far as possible,
+would put her hand into her pocket, and, extracting her list, would
+copy it in full on the new paper. Then she would fold it down, and
+give it to the next one, until all had written.
+
+"Here, Pupasse; here are all our sins. We give them to you; you can
+have them."
+
+Pupasse was radiant; she was more than delighted, and the more she
+read the better pleased she was. Such a handsome long list, and so
+many sins she had never thought of--never dreamed of! She set herself
+with zeal to commit them to memory. But a hand on the door--Madame
+Joubert! You never could have told that those little girls had not
+been sitting during the whole time, with their hands clasped and eyes
+cast up to the ceiling, or moving their lips as the prayer-beads
+glided through their fingers. Their versatility was really marvelous.
+
+[Illustration: THE FIRST COMMUNION.]
+
+Poor Pupasse! God solved the dilemma of her education, and madame's
+increasing sensitiveness about her appearance in the fifth class, by
+the death of the old grandmother. She went home to the funeral, and
+never returned--or at least she returned, but only for madame. There
+was a little scene in the parlor: Pupasse, all dressed in black, with
+her bag of primary books in her hand, ready and eager to get back to
+her classes and fools' caps; madame, hesitating between her interests
+and her fear of ridicule; Madame Joubert, between her loyalty to
+school and her conscience. Pupasse the only one free and untrammeled,
+simple and direct.
+
+That little school parlor had been the stage for so many scenes!
+Madame Joubert detested acting--the comedy, as she called it. There
+was nothing she punished with more pleasure up in her room. And
+yet--
+
+"Pupasse, _ma fille_, give me your grammar."
+
+The old battered, primitive book was gotten out of the bag, the string
+still tied between the leaves for convenience in hanging around the
+neck.
+
+"Your last punishment: the rule for irregular verbs. Commence!"
+
+"I know it, Madame Joubert; I know it perfectly, I assure you."
+
+"Commence!"
+
+"Irregular verbs--but I assure you I know it--I know it by heart--"
+
+"Commence, _ma fille!_"
+
+"Irregular verbs--irregular verbs--I know it, Madame Joubert--one
+moment--" and she shook her right hand, as girls do to get
+inspiration, they say. "Irregular verbs--give me one word, Madame
+Joubert; only one word!"
+
+"That--"
+
+"Irregular verbs, that--irregular verbs, that--"
+
+"See here, Pupasse; you do not know that lesson any more than a cat
+does"--Madame Joubert's favorite comparison.
+
+"Yes, I do, Madame Joubert! Yes, I do!"
+
+"Silence!"
+
+"But, Madame Joubert--"
+
+"Will you be silent!"
+
+"Yes, Madame Joubert; only--"
+
+"Pupasse, one more word--and--" Madame Joubert was forgetting her
+comedy--"Listen, Pupasse, and obey! You go home and learn that lesson.
+When you know it, you can reënter your class. That is the punishment I
+have thought of to correct your 'want of attention.'"
+
+That was the way Madame Joubert put it--"want of attention."
+
+Pupasse looked at her--at madame, a silent but potent spectator. To
+be sent from home because she did not know the rule of the irregular
+verbs! To be sent from home, family, friends!--for that was the
+way Pupasse put it. She had been in that school--it may only be
+whispered--fifteen years. Madame Joubert knew it; so did madame,
+although they accounted for only four or five years in each class.
+That school was her home; Madame Joubert--God help her!--her mother;
+madame, her divinity; fools' caps and turned-up skirts, her life.
+The old grandmother--she it was who had done everything for her (a
+_ci-devant_ rag-picker, they say); she it was who was nothing to her.
+
+Madame must have felt something of it besides the loss of the
+handsome salary for years from the little old withered woman.
+But conventionality is inexorable; and the St. Denis's great
+recommendation was its conventionality. Madame Joubert must have felt
+something of it,--she must have felt something of it,--for why should
+she volunteer? Certainly madame could not have imposed _that_ upon
+_her. It must_ have been an inspiration of the moment, or a movement,
+a _tressaillement_, of the heart.
+
+"Listen, Pupasse, my child. Go home, study your lesson well. I shall
+come every evening myself and hear it; and as soon as you know it, I
+shall fetch you back myself. You know I always keep my word."
+
+Keep her word! That she did. Could the inanimate past testify, what a
+fluttering of fools' caps in that parlor--"Daily Bees," and "Weekly
+Couriers," by the year-full!
+
+What could Pupasse say or do? It settled the question, as Madame
+Joubert assured madame, when the tall, thin black figure with the bag
+of books disappeared through the gate.
+
+Madame Joubert was never known to break her word; that is all one
+knows about her part of the bargain.
+
+One day, not three years ago, ringing a bell to inquire for a servant,
+a familiar murmuring fell upon the ear, and an old abécédaire's eyes
+could not resist the temptation to look through the shutters. There
+sat Pupasse; there was her old grammar; there were both fingers
+stopping her ears--as all studious girls do, or used to do; and there
+sounded the old words composing the rule for irregular verbs.
+
+And you all remember how long it is since we wore funnel-shaped
+hoop-skirts!
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Balcony Stories, by Grace E. King
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11514 ***