"Uncle David said that he thought you were not like yourself lately, but you seemed just the same to me Christmas, only more affectionate.

I love you very much. I was really only joking about the chocolates.

Eleanor."

"Dear Uncle David:

"I was glad to get your nice letter. You did not have to write in response to my bread and b.u.t.ter letter, but I am glad you did. When I am at school, and getting letters all the time I feel as if I were living two beautiful lives all at once, the life of a 'cooperative child' and the life of Eleanor Hamlin, schoolgirl, both together.

Letters make the people you love seem very near to you, don't you think they do? I sleep with all my letters under my pillow whenever I feel the least little bit homesick, and they almost seem to breathe sometimes.

"School is the same old school. Maggie Lou had a wrist watch, too, for Christmas, but not so pretty as the one you gave me. Miss Hadley says I do remarkable work in English whenever I feel like it. I don't know whether that's a compliment or not. I took Kris Kringle for the subject of a theme the other day, and represented him as caught in an iceberg in the grim north, and not being able to reach all the poor little children in the tenements and hovels. The Haddock said it showed imagination.

"There was a lecture at school on Emerson the other day. The speaker was a noted literary lecturer from New York. He had wonderful waving hair, more like Pader--I can't spell him, but you know who I mean--than Uncle Jimmie's, but a little like both. He introduced some very n.o.ble thoughts in his discourse, putting perfectly old ideas in a new way that made you think a lot more of them. I think a tall man like that with waving hair can do a great deal of good as a lecturer, because you listen a good deal more respectfully than if they were plain looking. His voice sounded a good deal like what I imagine Romeo's voice did. I had a nice letter from Madam Bolling. I love you, and I have come to the bottom of the sheet. Eleanor."

"Dear Uncle Peter:

"I have just written to my other uncles, so I won't write you a long letter this time. They deserve letters because of being so unusually prompt after the holidays. You always deserve letters, but not specially now, any more than any other time.

"Uncle Peter, I wrote to my grandfather. It seems funny to think of Albertina's aunt taking care of him now that Grandma is gone. I suppose Albertina is there a lot. She sent me a post card for Christmas. I didn't send her any.

"Uncle Peter, I miss my grandmother out of the world. I remember how I used to take care of her, and put a soapstone in the small of her back when she was cold. I wish sometimes that I could hold your hand, Uncle Peter, when I get thinking about it.

"Well, school is the same old school. Bertha Stephens has a felon on her finger, and that lets her out of hard work for a while. I will enclose a poem suggested by a lecture I heard recently on Emerson. It isn't very good, but it will help to fill up the envelope. I love you, and love you. Eleanor.

"Life

"Life is a great, a n.o.ble task, When we fulfill our duty.

To work, that should be all we ask, And seek the living beauty.

We know not whence we come, or where Our dim pathway is leading, Whether we tread on lilies fair, Or trample love-lies-bleeding.

But we must onward go and up, Nor stop to question whither.

E'en if we drink the bitter cup, And fall at last, to wither.

"P. S. I haven't got the last verse very good yet, but I think the second one is pretty. You know 'love-lies-bleeding' is a flower, but it sounds allegorical the way I have put it in. Don't you think so?

You know what all the crosses stand for."

Eleanor's fifteenth year was on the whole the least eventful year of her life, though not by any means the least happy. She throve exceedingly, and gained the freedom and poise of movement and spontaneity that result from properly balanced periods of work and play and healthful exercise. From being rather small of her age she developed into a tall slender creature, inherently graceful and erect, with a small, delicate head set flower-wise on a slim white neck.

Gertrude never tired of modeling that lovely contour, but Eleanor herself was quite unconscious of her natural advantages. She preferred the snappy-eyed, stocky, ringleted type of beauty, and spent many unhappy quarters of an hour wishing she were pretty according to the inexorable ideals of Harmon.

She spent her vacation at David's apartment in charge of Mademoiselle, though the latter part of the summer she went to Colha.s.sett, quite by herself according to her own desire, and spent a month with her grandfather, now in charge of Albertina's aunt. She found Albertina grown into a huge girl, sunk in depths of sloth and sn.o.bbishness, who plied her with endless questions concerning life in the gilded circles of New York society. Eleanor found her disgusting and yet possessed of that vague fascination that the a.s.sumption of prerogative often carries with it.

She found her grandfather very old and shrunken, yet perfectly taken care of and with every material want supplied. She realized as she had never done before how the faithful six had a.s.sumed the responsibility of this household from the beginning, and how the old people had been warmed and comforted by their bounty. She laughed to remember her simplicity in believing that an actual salary was a perquisite of her adoption, and understood for the first time how small a part of the expense of their living this faithful stipend had defrayed. She looked back incredulously on that period when she had lived with them in a state of semi-starvation on the corn meal and cereals and very little else that her dollar and a half a week had purchased, and the "garden sa.s.s," that her grandfather had faithfully hoed and tended in the straggling patch of plowed field that he would hoe and tend no more.

She spent a month practically at his feet, listening to his stories, helping him to find his pipe and tobacco and gla.s.ses, and reading the newspaper to him, and felt amply rewarded by his final acknowledgment that she was a good girl and he would as soon have her come again whenever she felt like it.

On her way back to school she spent a week with her friend, Margaret Louise, in the Connecticut town where she lived with her comfortable, commonplace family. It was while she was on this visit that the most significant event of the entire year took place, though it was a happening that she put out of her mind as soon as possible and never thought of it again when she could possibly avoid it.

Maggie Lou had a brother of seventeen, and one night in the corner of a moonlit porch, when they happened to be alone for a half hour, he had asked Eleanor to kiss him.

"I don't want to kiss you," Eleanor said. Then, not wishing to convey a sense of any personal dislike to the brother of a friend to whom she was so sincerely devoted, she added, "I don't know you well enough."

He was a big boy, with mocking blue eyes and rough tweed clothes that hung on him loosely.

"When you know me better, will you let me kiss you?" he demanded.

"I don't know," Eleanor said, still endeavoring to preserve the amenities.

He took her hand and played with it softly.

"You're an awful sweet little girl," he said.

"I guess I'll go in now."

"Sit still. Sister'll be back in a minute." He pulled her back to the chair from which she had half arisen. "Don't you believe in kissing?"

"I don't believe in kissing _you_," she tried to say, but the words would not come. She could only pray for deliverance through the arrival of some member of the family. The boy's face was close to hers. It looked sweet in the moonlight she thought. She wished he would talk of something else besides kissing.

"Don't you like me?" he persisted.

"Yes, I do." She was very uncomfortable.

"Well, then, there's no more to be said." His lips sought hers and pressed them. His breath came heavily, with little irregular catches in it.

She pushed him away and turned into the house.

"Don't be angry, Eleanor," he pleaded, trying to s.n.a.t.c.h at her hand.

"I'm not angry," she said, her voice breaking, "I just wish you hadn't, that's all."

There was no reference to this incident in the private diary, but, with an instinct which would have formed an indissoluble bond between herself and her Uncle Jimmie, she avoided dimly lit porches and boys with mischievous eyes and broad tweed covered shoulders.

For her guardians too, this year was comparatively smooth running and colorless. Beulah's militant spirit sought the a.s.suagement of a fierce expenditure of energy on the work that came to her hand through her new interest in suffrage. Gertrude flung herself into her sculpturing.

She had been hurt as only the young can be hurt when their first delicate desires come to naught. She was very warm-blooded and eager under her cool veneer, and she had spent four years of hard work and hungry yearning for the fulness of a life she was too constrained to get any emotional hold on. Her fancy for Jimmie she believed was quite over and done with.

Margaret, warmed by secret fires and nourished by the stuff that dreams are made of, flourished strangely in her attic chamber, and learned the wisdom of life by some curious method of her own of apprehending its dangers and delights. The only experiences she had that year were two proposals of marriage, one from a timid professor of the romance languages and the other from a young society man, already losing his waist line, whose sensuous spirit had been stirred by the ethereal grace of hers; but these things interested her very little. She was the princess, spinning fine dreams and waiting for the dawning of the golden day when the prince should come for her. Neither she nor Gertrude ever gave a serious thought to the five-year-old vow of celibacy, which was to Beulah as real and as binding as it had seemed on the first day she took it.

Peter and David and Jimmie went their own way after the fashion of men, all of them identified with the quickening romance of New York business life. David in Wall Street was proving to be something of a financier to his mother's surprise and amazement; and the pressure relaxed, he showed some slight initiative in social matters. In fact, two mothers, who were on Mrs. Bolling's list as suitable parents-in-law, took heart of grace and began angling for him adroitly, while their daughters served him tea and made unabashed, modern-debutante eyes at him.

Jimmie, successfully working his way up to the top of his firm, suffered intermittently from his enthusiastic abuse of the privileges of liberty and the pursuit of happiness. His mind and soul were in reality hot on the trail of a wife, and there was no woman among those with whom he habitually foregathered whom his spirit recognized as his own woman. He was further rendered helpless and miserable by the fact that he had not the slightest idea of his trouble. He regarded himself as a congenital Don Juan, from whom his better self shrank at times with a revulsion of loathing.

Peter felt that he had his feet very firmly on a rather uninspired earth. He was getting on in the woolen business, which happened to be the vocation his father had handed down to him. He belonged to an amusing club, and he still felt himself irrevocably widowed by the early death of the girl in the photograph he so faithfully cherished.

Eleanor was a very vital interest in his life. It had seemed to him for a few minutes at the Christmas party that she was no longer the little girl he had known, that a lovelier, more illusive creature--a woman--had come to displace her, but when she had flung her arms around him he had realized that it was still the heart of a child beating so fondly against his own.

The real trouble with arrogating to ourselves the privileges of parenthood is that our native instincts are likely to become deflected by the subst.i.tution of the artificial for the natural responsibility.

Both Peter and David had the unconscious feeling that their obligation to their race was met by their communal interest in Eleanor. Beulah, of course, sincerely believed that the filling in of an intellectual concept of life was all that was required of her. Only Jimmie groped blindly and bewilderedly for his own. Gertrude and Margaret both understood that they were unnaturally alone in a world where lovers met and mated, but they, too, hugged to their souls the flattering unction that they were parents of a sort.

Thus three sets of perfectly suitable and devoted young men and women, of marriageable age, with dozens of interests and sympathies in common, and one extraordinarily vital bond, continued to walk side by side in a state of inhuman preoccupation, their gaze fixed inward instead of upon one another; and no Divine Power, happening upon the curious circ.u.mstance, believed the matter one for His intervention nor stooped to take the respective puppets by the back of their unconscious necks, and so knock their sluggish heads together.