"You're the only one who comes anywhere near knowing," she said, "or who ever will, I guess. I try so hard, Peter, and now when I don't seem to be accomplishing as much as I want to, as much as it's necessary for me to accomplish if I am to go on respecting myself, every one enters into a conspiracy to stop my doing anything at all.

The only thing that makes me nervous is the way I am thwarted and opposed at every turn. I haven't got nervous prostration."

"Perhaps not, but you have something remarkably like _idee fixe_,"

Peter said to himself compa.s.sionately.

He found her actual condition less dangerous but much more difficult than he had antic.i.p.ated. She was living wrong, that was the sum and substance of her malady. Her life was spent confronting theories and discounting conditions. She did not realize that it is only the interest of our investment in life that we can sanely contribute to the cause of living. Our capital strength and energy must be used for the struggle for existence itself if we are to have a world of balanced individuals. There is an arrogance involved in a.s.suming ourselves more humane than human that reacts insidiously on our health and morals. Peter, looking into the twitching hectic face before him with the telltale glint of mania in the eyes, felt himself becoming helpless with pity for a mind gone so far askew. He felt curiously responsible for Beulah's condition.

"She wouldn't have run herself so far aground," he thought, "if I had been on the job a little more. I could have helped her to steer straighter. A word here and a lift there and she would have come through all right. Now something's got to stop her or she can't be stopped. She'll preach once too often out of the tail of a cart on the subject of equal guardianship,--and--"

Beulah put her hands to her face suddenly, and, sinking back into the depths of the big cushioned chair on the edge of which she had been tensely poised during most of the conversation, burst into tears.

"You're the only one that knows," she sobbed over and over again.

"I'm so tired, Peter, but I've got to go on and on and on. If they stop me, I'll kill myself."

Peter crossed the room to her side and sat down on her chair-arm.

"Don't cry, dear," he said, with a hand on her head. "You're too tired to think things out now,--but I'll help you."

She lifted a piteous face, for the moment so startlingly like that of the dead girl he had loved that his senses were confused by the resemblance.

"How, Peter?" she asked. "How can you help me?"

"I think I see the way," he said slowly.

He slipped to his knees and gathered her close in his arms.

"I think this will be the way, dear," he said very gently.

"Does this mean that you want me to marry you?" she whispered, when she was calmer.

"If you will, dear," he said. "Will you?"

"I will,--if I can, if I can make it seem right to after I've thought it all out.--Oh! Peter, I love you. I love you."

"I had no idea of that," he said gravely, "but it's wonderful that you do. I'll put everything I've got into trying to make you happy, Beulah."

"I know you will, Peter." Her arms closed around his neck and tightened there. "I love you."

He made her comfortable and she relaxed like a tired child, almost asleep under his soothing hand, and the quiet spell of his tenderness.

"I didn't know it could be like this," she whispered.

"But it can," he answered her.

In his heart he was saying, "This is best. I am sure this is best. It is the right and normal way for her--and for me."

In her tri-cornered dormitory room at the new school which she was not sharing with any one this year Eleanor, enveloped in a big brown and yellow wadded bathrobe, was writing a letter to Peter. Her hair hung in two golden brown braids over her shoulders and her pure profile was bent intently over the paper. At the moment when Beulah made her confession of love and closed her eyes against the breast of the man who had just asked her to marry him, two big tears forced their way between Eleanor's lids and splashed down upon her letter.

CHAPTER XIX

MOSTLY UNCLE PETER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She began another letter to him but found she could not write without saying what was in her heart, and so went to bed uncomforted. There was nothing in her experience to help her in her relation to David.

His kiss on her lips had taught her the nature of such kisses: had made her understand suddenly the ease with which the strange, sweet spell of s.e.x is cast. She related it to the episode of the unwelcome caress bestowed upon her by the brother of Maggie Lou, and that half forgotten incident took on an almost terrible significance. She understood now how she should have repelled that unconscionable boy, but that understanding did not help her with the problem of her Uncle David. Though the thought of it thrilled through her with a strange incredible delight, she did not want another kiss of his upon her lips.

"It's--it's--like that," she said to herself. "I want it to be from somebody--else. Somebody _realer_ to me. Somebody that would make it seem right." But even to herself she mentioned no names.

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

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

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

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

"Uncle Jimmie is still a great deal of fun," she wrote in her diary.

"He does just the same old things he used to do with me, and a good many new ones in addition. He brings me flowers, and gets me taxi-cabs as if I were really a grown up young lady, and he pinches my nose and teases me as if I were still the little girl that kept house in a studio for him. I never realized before what a good-looking man he is.

I used to think that Uncle Peter was the only handsome man of the three, but now I realize that they are all exceptionally good-looking.

Uncle David has a great deal of distinction, of course, but Uncle Jimmie is merry and radiant and vital, and tall and athletic looking into the bargain. The ladies on the Avenue all turn to look at him when we go walking. He says that the gentlemen all turn to look at me, and I think perhaps they do when I have my best clothes on, but in my school clothes I am quite certain that nothing like that happens.

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

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