"She is almost, thanks to Peter."

"But--oh! I can't pretend to think of anything else,--who--who--who--are our boys going to marry?"

"I don't know, Gertrude."

"But you care?"

"It's a blow."

"I always thought that you and David--"

Margaret met her eyes bravely but she did not answer the implicit question.

"I always thought that you and Jimmie--" she said presently. "Oh!

Gertrude, you would have been so good for him."

"Oh! it's all over now," Gertrude said, "but I didn't know that a living soul suspected me."

"I've known for a long time."

"Are you really hurt, dear?" Gertrude whispered as they clung to each other.

"Not really. It could have been--that's all. He could have made me care. I've never seen any one else whom I thought that of. I--I was so used to him."

"That's the rub," Gertrude said, "we're so used to them. They're so--so preposterously necessary to us."

Late that night clasped in each other's arms they admitted the extent of their desolation. Life had been robbed of a magic,--a mystery. The solid friendship of years of mutual trust and understanding was the background of so much lovely folly, so many unrealized possibilities, so many nebulous desires and dreams that the sudden dissolution of their circle was an unthinkable calamity.

"We ought to have put out our hands and taken them if we wanted them,"

Gertrude said, out of the darkness. "Other women do. Probably these other women have. Men are helpless creatures. They need to be firmly turned in the right direction instead of being given their heads.

We've been too good to our boys. We ought to have snitched them."

"I wouldn't pay that price for love," Margaret said. "I couldn't. By the time I had made it happen I wouldn't want it."

"That's my trouble too," Gertrude said. Then she turned over on her pillow and sobbed helplessly. "Jimmie had such ducky little curls,"

she explained incoherently. "I do this sometimes when I think of them.

Otherwise, I'm not a crying woman."

Margaret put out a hand to her; but long after Gertrude's breath began to rise and fall regularly, she lay staring wide-eyed into the darkness.

CHAPTER XXI

ELEANOR HEARS THE NEWS

"Dear Uncle Jimmie:

"I said I would write you, but now that I have taken this hour in which to do it, I find it is a very, very hard letter that I have got to write. In the first place I can't believe that the things you said to me that night were real, or that you were awake and in the world of realities when you said them. I felt as if we were both dreaming; that you were talking as a man does sometimes in delirium when he believes the woman he loves to be by his side, and I was listening the same way. It made me very happy, as dreams sometimes do. I can't help feeling that your idea of me is a dream idea, and the pain that you said this kind of a letter would give you will be merely dream pain.

It is a shock to wake up in the morning and find that all the lovely ways we felt, and delicately beautiful things we had, were only dream things that we wouldn't even understand if we were thoroughly awake.

"In the second place, you can't want to marry your little niecelet, the funny little 'kiddo,' that used to burn her fingers and the beefsteak over that old studio gas stove. We had such lovely kinds of make-believe together. That's what our a.s.sociation always ought to mean to us,--just chumship, and wonderful and preposterous _pretends_.

I couldn't think of myself being married to you any more than I could Jack the giant killer, or Robinson Crusoe. You're my truly best and dearest childhood's playmate, and that is a great deal to be, Uncle Jimmie. I don't think a little girl ever grows up quite _whole_ unless she has somewhere, somehow, what I had in you. You wouldn't want to marry Alice in Wonderland, now would you? There are some kinds of playmates that can't marry each other. I think that you and I are that kind, Uncle Jimmie.

"My dear, my dear, don't let this hurt you. How can it hurt you, when I am only your little adopted foster child that you have helped support and comfort and make a beautiful, glad life for? I love you so much,--you are so precious to me that you _must_ wake up out of this distorted, though lovely dream that I was present at!

"We must all be happy. n.o.body can break our hearts if we are strong enough to withhold them. n.o.body can hurt us too much if we can find the way to be our bravest all the time. I know that what you are feeling now is not real. I can't tell you how I know, but I do know the difference. The roots are not deep enough. They could be pulled up without too terrible a havoc.

"Uncle Jimmie, dear, believe me, believe me. I said this would be a hard letter to write, and it has been. If you could see my poor inkstained, weeping face, you would realize that I am only your funny little Eleanor after all, and not to be taken seriously at all. I hope you will come up for my graduation. When you see me with all the other lumps and frumps that are here, you will know that I am not worth considering except as a kind of human joke.

"Good-by, dear, my dear, and G.o.d bless you.

"Eleanor."

It was less than a week after this letter to Jimmie that Margaret spending a week-end in a town in Connecticut adjoining that in which Eleanor's school was located, telephoned Eleanor to join her overnight at the inn where she was staying. She had really planned the entire expedition for the purpose of seeing Eleanor and preparing her for the revelations that were in store for her, though she was ostensibly meeting a motoring party, with which she was going on into the Berkshires.

She started in abruptly, as was her way, over the salad and cheese in the low studded Arts and Crafts dining-room of the fashionable road house, contrived to look as self-conscious as a pretty woman in new sporting clothes.

"Your Uncle David and your Uncle Jimmie are going to be married," she told her. "Did you know it, Eleanor?"

"No, I didn't," Eleanor said faintly, but she grew suddenly very white.

"Aren't you surprised, dear? David gave a dinner party one night last week in his studio, and announced his intentions, but we don't know the name of the lady yet, and we can't guess it. He says it is not a society girl."

"Who do you think it is?"

"Who do you think it is, Eleanor?"

"I--I can't think, Aunt Margaret."

"We don't know who Jimmie is marrying either. The facts were merely insinuated, but he said we should have the shock of our lives when we knew."

"When did he tell you?"

"A week ago last Wednesday. I haven't seen him since."

"Perhaps he has changed his mind by now," Eleanor said.

"I don't think that's likely. They were both very much in earnest.

Aren't you surprised, Eleanor?"

"I--I don't know. Don't you think it might be that they both just thought they were going to marry somebody--that really doesn't want to marry them? It might be all a mistake, you know."

"I don't think it's a mistake. David doesn't make mistakes."