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THE JOYS OF BEING A WOMAN by WINIFRED KIRKLAND

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This text is in the PUBLIC DOMAIN, posted December 1993.



                              The
                     Joys of Being a Woman
                       AND OTHER PAPERS

                              BY
                WINIFRED {Margaretta} KIRKLAND
                          {1872-1943}

                  Essay Index Reprint Series


                   BOOKS FOR LIBRARIES PRESS
                      FREEPORT, NEW YORK



                     First Published 1918
                        Reprinted 1968








           LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER:
                            68-8477

            PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA


                           FOREWORD

                    _The Ego in the Essay_

We are each launched in life with an elfin shipmate--
set jogging upon earth beside a fairy comrade.  When
our ears are clear, he pipes magic music; when our feet
are free he pleads with us to follow him on witching
paths.  We cannot often hear, we cannot often follow,
but when we do, we know him for what he is; when we
sail or run or fly with him, we know him for the
gladdest fellow with whom life ever paired us, a
companion rarely glimpsed, but glorious, for he is our
own true Self.  Poets and dreamers have sometimes
snared him in a sonnet, but for the most part, for his
waggishness and his wanderings, he demands, not the
strait-jacketing of poetry, but the flexible garment of
prose.  It is the shifting subtleties of the essay that
have ever best expressed him.
    One man there was in that peopled past, where
friendship's best doors fly open at our knock, who knew
how to catch his elusive Ego and keep it glad even on
ways that led<v> through sordid counting-house and
sadder madhouse; and who knew also, better than any one
since has ever known, how to envisage and investure
that exquisite Self of his, sweet, quaint sprite that
it was, in an essay.  Ever since that time those of us
who love essays say, of one possessing special grace,
it is like Elia's, meaning not that it imitates Lamb's
style, the inimitable, but that it reveals, as only the
essay can do, personality.
    Of all literary forms the personal essay appears
the most artless, a little boat that sails us into
pleasant havens, without any sound of machinery and
without any chart or compass.  To read is as if we
overheard some one chatting with that little
merry-heart, his own particular Ego.  We do not stop to
think what childlike simplicities any grown-up must
attain before he can hear that fairy divinity, his own
Self, speak at all, for the only true tongue in which
the Self speaks is joy.  Only childlike feet can follow
the feet of fairies.  The self-annalist whose essays
warm our hearts with friendship, must be one who sips
the wine of mirth when all alone with his own Self.
Not many such are born, and fewer of them write essays.
The essay is no easy thing.  The true mood and the true
manner of it are rare.  It is as difficult to write an
essay on<vi> purpose as it is to be a person on
purpose, a teasing game and unsatisfactory.
    Yet the difficulties of essay-writing are offset by
the delights: for there is nothing so compelling to
expression as chuckle, and that is what the true essay
is, sheer chuckle; it is what we felt and saw that time
the elfin Ego floated in on a sun-mote, and showed us,
laughing, how all our life is gilded with fun.  Then
off we fly to write it, with the spell still upon us!
The poising of a word on the tip of our pen until the
very most genial sunbeam of all shall touch it, the
weaving the thread of a golden thought in and out
through all the quips and nonsense, the wrapping a
whole life experience in the hollow shaft of some
light-barbed phrase!  The best quality of the humorous
essay is that the reader shall smile, not laugh, and,
moreover, that he shall remember no one passage at
which he smiles: it is far better that he should feel
that he has touched a personality tipped with mirth.
Ariel never laughed.  The fun that makes the soul
expand must have in it the lift of wings and the
glimpsing fantasy of flight.
    More than any other of the shapes prose takes, the
essay should give the reader a sense of
good-fellowship.  Probably the writer who as an actual
man is shyest, gives this com-<vii>radeship best.  The
shy man sheds forth his personality most opulently in
print, and preferably, as certain wise editors have
perceived, in anonymous print.  One is sensitive to
having an everyday friend see one's soul in public,
because the everyday friend knows too well the everyday
self, to which the elusive essay-self is too often a
stranger.
    That skittish elfin Ego, so alien to the humdrum
man or woman who bears our mortal name, if he only came
to visit us oftener, stayed with us longer, what essays
we might write!  A snatch of song, a tinkle of
laughter, a flutter of wings, if he would only linger
until I could clearly see what he is, this Ego of mine,
who tells such happy secrets!  Poor babykin, poor
fairykin--that Ego sent forth with us to make blithe
the voyage, we cannot go a-dancing with him out to
fairy fields, because our feet are heavy with Other
People's clogs and fetters, we cannot hear when he
would whisper at our ear gentle philosophies--our own
Self's and no one's else, because of the grave grubby
Book-people who thunder at us from our shelves.
Sometimes I catch him casting a waggish twinkle at me
over the very shoulder of my blackest worry, rainbow
wings and head that is devil-may-care trying to get at
me from behind her sable-stoled form.<viii>  Even in
the thought of death I catch his cherub chuckle, "Could
a grave hold me?"  For is not death also a bugbear of
Other People, not at all of my own Self's making?
    Gay little voyager!  He seems, when he visits me,
to be the prince of the kingdom of fun.  He does not
stay long, but long enough sometimes for me to write an
essay.  But whence he comes, or whither he goes, or
what he is, whether demonic or divine, I only know that
he is mine.



                            CONTENTS

      FOREWORD:  THE EGO IN THE ESSAY v
    I.  THE JOYS OF BEING A WOMAN 1
    II. A MAN IN THE HOUSE......... 23

    III. OLD-CLOTHES SENSATIONS........ 29

    IV.LUGGAGE AND THE LADY......... 35

    V.DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOARDING 49

    VI.THE LADY ALONE AT NIGHT 62

    VII. IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH 68

    VIII. AN EDUCATIONAL FANTASY 75

    IX. MY CLOTHES.................... 87

    X.THE TENDENCY TO TESTIFY .  107

    XI.LETTERS AND LETTER-WRITERS  113

    XII. THE TYRANNY OF TALENT 124

    XIII. THE WOMAN WHO WRITES 129

    XIV.PICNIC PICTURES................ 154

    XV.THE FARM FEMININE............. 17I

    XVI.A LITTLE GIRL AND HER GRAND-
        MOTHER......................  183
    XVII. THE WAYFARING WOMAN........ 194
    XVIII. THE ROAD THAT TALKED....... 205
<xi>


    XIX. MY MOTHER'S GARDENERS   214
    XX. My LITTLE TOWN...... 227
    XXI. GENUS CLERICUM.......   244
    XXII. SOME DIFFICULTIES IN DOING  WITH-
        OUT ETERNITY......   264


    NOTE.--  _Several of these essays have appeared in_
    THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW,
    THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW, and THE CHURCHMAN, _and are
    here reprinted with the kind permission of the
    editors of those magazines._



                                I

                   _The Joys of Being a Woman_

    Some years ago there appeared in the "Atlantic" an
essay entitled "The joys of Being a Negro."  With a
purpose analogous to that of the author, I am moved to
declare the real delights of the apparently
downtrodden, and in the face of a bulky literature
expressive of pathos and protest, to confess frankly
the joys of being a woman.  It is a feminist argument
accepted as axiomatic that every woman would be a man
if she could be, while no man would be a woman if he
could help it.  Every woman knows this is not fact but
falsehood, yet knows also that it is one of those
falsehoods on which depends the stability of the
universe.  The idea that every woman is desirous of
becoming a man is as comforting to every male as its
larger corollary is alarming, namely, that women as a
mass have resolved to become men.  The former notion
expresses man's view of femininity, and is flattering;
the latter expresses his view of feminism, and is
fearsome.  Man's panic, indeed, before the hosts he
thinks he<1> sees advancing, has lately become so acute
that there is danger of his paralysis.  Now his
paralysis would defeat not only the purposes of
feminism, but also the sole purpose of woman's conduct
toward man from Eve's time to ours, a course of which
feminism is only a modern and consistent example.
    It is for man's reassurance that I shall endeavor
gradually to unfold this age-old purpose, showing that
while the privileges which through slow evolution we
have amassed are so enjoyable as to preclude our
envying any man his dusty difficulties, still our
attitude toward these our toys is that of a friend of
mine a woman aged four.  Left unprotected in her hands
for entertainment, a male coeval was heard to burst
into cries of rage.  Her parents, rushing to his
rescue, found their daughter surrounded by all the
playthings, which she loftily withheld from her
visitor's hand.  Rebuke produced the virtuous response,
"I am only trying to teach Bobby to be unselfish."
    The austere moral intention of my little friend was
her direct heritage from her mother Eve, whose much
maligning would be regrettable if this very maligning
were not the primary purpose of the artful allegory:
Adam and all his sons had to believe that they<2>
amounted to more than Eve, as the primary condition of
their amounting to anything.  Eve, in her campaign for
Adam's education, was the first woman to perceive his
need for complacency, and so, from Eden to eternity,
she undertook to immolate her reputation for his sake.
Eve, I repeat, was the first woman to perceive Adam's
fundamental need, but she was not the last.
    The romance of Adam and Eve was written by so
subtle a psychologist that I feel sure the novelist
must have been a woman.  Her deathless allegory of Eden
contains the whole situation of the sexes: it shows the
superiority of woman, while seeming, for his own good,
to show the superiority of man.  As it must have
required a woman to write the parable, so perhaps it
requires a woman to expound it.
    I pass over the initial fact that the
representation of Eve as the last in an ascending order
of creation, plainly signifies that she is to be
considered the most nearly, if not the absolutely,
perfect, of created things.  The first thing of real
importance in the narrative is the purpose of Eve's
creation, to fill a need, Adam's.  "It was not good
that the man should be alone."  The whole universe was
not enough for Adam without Eve.  It neither<3>
satisfied nor stimulated him.  He was mopish, dumpish,
unconscionably lazy.  If he had been merely lonely, why
would it not have been enough to create another Adam?
Because the object was not simple addition, whereby
another Adam would merely have meant two Adams, both
mopish, dumpish, unconscionably lazy; the object was
multiplication by stimulation, whereby, by combining
Eve with Adam, Adam, as all subsequent history shows,
was raised to the _n_th power.
    Intimately analyzed, the details of the temptation
redound entirely to Eve's credit.  Woman rather than
man is selected as the one more open to argument, more
capable of initiative, the one bolder to act, as well
as braver to accept the consequences of action.  The
sixth verse of the third chapter cuts away forever all
claim for masculine originality, and ascribes
initiative in the three departments of human endeavor
to woman.  For no one knows how long, Adam had been
bumping into that tree without once seeing that it was:
(_a_)  "good for food"; this symbolizes the awakening
of the practical instincts, the availing one's self of
one's physical surroundings, the germ, clearly, of all
commercial activity, in which sphere man has always
been judged the more active; (_b_) "the tree was<4>
pleasant to look upon"; here it is Eve, not Adam, who
perceives the aesthetic aspect; if man has been
adjudged the more eminent in art, plainly he did not
even see that a thing was beautiful until woman told
him so; (_c_) "a tree to be desired to make one wise";
Adam had no desire to be wise until Eve stimulated it,
whereas her own desire for knowledge was so passionate
that she was ready to die to attain it.  We all know
how Eve's motives have been impugned, for when a man is
ready to die for knowledge, he is called scientific,
but when a woman is ready to die for knowledge, she is
called inquisitive.  The Eden narrative concludes with
the penalty, "He shall rule over thee, that is, the
price Eve must pay for Adam's seeming superiority is
her own seeming inferiority.  The risk and the
responsibility and the recompense for man's growing
pains, woman has always taken in inscrutable silence,
wise to see that she would defeat her own ends if she
explained.

    "And what was my reward when they had won--
    Freedom that I had bought with torturing bonds?
    --They stormed through centuries brandishing their
            deeds,
    Boasting their gross and transient mastery
    To girls, who listened with indulgent ears
    And laughing hearts--Lord, they were ever blind--
    Women have they known, but never Woman."<5>

    The methods and the motives of Eve toward Adam have
been the methods and the motives of woman with man ever
since.  Eve's purposes, summarized, are fourfold:
first, she must educate Adam; second, she must conceal
his education from him, as the only practical way of
developing in man the self-esteem necessary to keep him
in his sex; third, Eve must never bore Adam, to keep
him going she must always keep him guessing; and
fourth, Eve must not bore herself; this last view of
the temptation is perhaps the truest, namely, that Eve
herself was so bored by the inertness of Adam and the
ennui of Eden that she had to give him the apple to see
what he and she would do afterwards.

    The imperishable philosophy of the third chapter of
Genesis clearly establishes the primary joy of being a
woman, the joy of conscious superiority.  That it is
the most profound joy known to human nature will be
readily attested by any man who has felt his own sense
of superiority shaking in its shoes as he has viewed
the recent much-advertised achievements of women.  How
could any man help envying a woman a self-approval so
absolute that it can afford to let man seem superior at
her expense?<6>
    Woman's conviction of advantage supports her in
using her prerogatives first as if they were
deficiencies, and then in employing them to offset
man's deficiencies.  Man is a timorous,
self-distrustful creature, who would never have
discovered his powers if not stimulated by woman's
weakness.  Probably prehistoric woman voluntarily gave
up her own muscle in order that man might develop his
by serving her.  It is only recently that we have dared
to be as athletic as we might, and the effort is still
tentative enough to be relinquished if we notice any
resulting deterioration, muscular or moral, in men.
Women, conscious how they hold men's welfare in their
hands, simply do not dare to discover how strong they
might be if they tried, because they have so far used
their physical weakness not only as a means of arousing
men's good activities, but also as a means of turning
to nobler directions their bad ones.  Men are naturally
acquisitive, impelled to work for gain and gold, gain
and more gain, gold and more gold.  Unable to deter
them from this impulse, we turn it to an unselfish end,
that is, we let men support us, preserving for their
sakes the fiction that we are too frail to support
ourselves.  If they had neither child nor wife, men
would still be rolling up wealth, but it is very much
better for<7> their characters that they should suppose
they are working for their families rather than for
themselves.  We might be Amazons, but for men's own
sakes we refrain from what would be for ourselves a
selfish indulgence in vigor.  Man is not only naturally
acquisitive but is naturally ostentatious of his
acquisitions.  Having bled for his baubles, he wishes
to put them on and strut in them.  Again we step in and
redirect his impulse; we put on his baubles and strut
for him.  We let him think that our delicate physique
is better fitted for jewels and silk than his sturdier
frame, and that our complex service to the Society
which must be established to show off his jewels and
silk, is really a lighter task than his simple slavery
to an office desk.  How reluctantly men have delegated
to women dress and all its concomitant luxury may
readily be proved by an examination of historic
portraits--behold Raleigh in all his ruffles!--and by
the tendency to top-hat and tin-can decoration
exhibited by the male savage.  The passionate attention
given by our own household males to those few articles
of apparel in which we have thought it safe to allow
them individual choice, unregulated by requirements of
uniform, articles such as socks or cravats, must prove
even to men themselves how much safer it is that
their<8> clothes-craze should be vicariously expressed,
that women should do their dressing for them.

    Not only for the moral advantages gained by men in
supporting us do women preserve the fallacy of physical
feebleness, but also for the spiritual exaltation men
may enjoy by protecting us and rescuing us from perils.
For this purpose it is quite unnecessary that the man
should think the peril real, but it is absolutely
necessary that he should think the woman thinks it
real.  It does a man more good to save a woman from a
mouse than from a tiger, as contributing more to the
sense of superiority so necessary to him.  The truth is
that women are not really afraid of anything, but they
perceive how much splendid incentive would be lost to
the world if they did not pretend to be.  For example,
if women were actually afraid of serpents, would the
Tempter have chosen that form just when he wished to be
most ingratiating?  But think how many heroes would be
unmade if women should let men know that they are
perfectly capable of killing their own snakes.  The
universality of the mouse fear roves its prehistoric
origin, showing how consistently and successfully women
have been educating men in heroism; in earliest times
it probably required a whole<9> dinotherium ramping at
the cave-mouth to induce primitive man to draw weapon
in his mate's defense, but now to evoke the
quintessence of chivalry, all a woman has to do is to
hop on a chair at sight of a mouse.

    Woman's motive for suppressing her intellectual
powers is exactly the same as her motive for not
developing her physical powers.  She is ready to enjoy
and to employ her own genius in secret for the sake of
the free and open growth of man's.  She has wrought so
conscientiously to this end that it is probable that
the average man's belief in woman's mental inferiority
is even stronger than his belief in her physical
inferiority, for well woman has perceived the peril to
man of his ever discovering the truth of her
intellectual endowment.  Man's energy cannot survive
the strain of thinking his brain inferior, or even
equal, to a woman's.  This fact is the reason why women
so long renounced all educational advantages; that at
last their minds were too much for them, and that they
were driven by pure ebullience of suppressed genius to
invade the university, will more and more be seen by
women to have been a regrettable mistake.  There is
much current newspaper discussion of the failure of the
men's colleges<10> to-day to educate the young male,
his utter obduracy before stimulus is despairingly
compared with the effect of college upon the youth of
past generations.  I fear that the reason is simple to
seek: men's colleges have deteriorated exactly in the
ratio that women's colleges have improved.  The course
for women and women's colleges is therefore clear.
    Our history shows that we have, with only
occasional lapses into genius, nobly sustained the
requirements of our unselfishness.  On rare occasions
our ability has been so irresistible, and our honesty
so irrepressible, that in an unguarded moment we have
tossed off a Queen Elizabeth, a Rosa Bonheur, a Madame
Curie, a Joan of Arc, a Hetty Green; but for the most
part we have preserved a glorious mediocrity that
allows man to believe himself dominant in
administration, art, science, war, and finance.  The
women who have so far forgotten themselves as almost to
betray woman's genius to the world, are fortunately for
the moral purpose of the sex, exceptional, and the
average woman makes a very creditable concealment of
intellect.  I am hopeful that as women grow in wisdom,
their outbreaks of ability will be more and more
controlled and sporadic, and man's paralysis before
them be correspondingly infrequent, so that at some<11>
future day, we may see woman again relinquish all
educational privileges, and become wisely illiterate
for man's sake.
    Our own intellectual advantages are as much greater
than man's as they are more secret.  No woman would put
up with the clumsiness and crudity of a man's brain,
knowing so well the superexcellence of her own, in the
delicacy of its machinery, the subtle science required
in its employment, the absorbing interest of the
material on which it is employed, and the noble purpose
to which it is solely devoted.
    As to our mental mechanism, it is so much finer
than man's that, out of pure pity for his clogging
equipment, we let him think logic and reason better
means of traveling from premise to conclusion than the
air flights we encourage him to scorn as woman's
intuition.  Nothing is more painful to a woman than an
argument with a man, because he journeys from given
fact to deduced truth by pack-mule, and she by
aeroplane.  When he finds her at the destination, he is
so irritated by the swiftness of her passage that he
accuses her of not having followed the right direction,
and demands as proof that she describe the weeds by the
roadside, which he has amply studied,--he calls this
study his reasoning<12> process.  Of course no woman
stops to botanize when the object is to get there.  No
man ever wants to be a woman?  No man ever longs to
exchange his ass for our airship?  No man ever envies
us the nimbleness by which we can elude logic and get
at truth?
    Our mental operations are keyed to the very
sublimation of delicacy and rapidity, and they need to
be, considering the subtleties of the skill with which
we must employ them.  Eve left it to us to educate Adam
without his knowing it, and to keep him endlessly
entertained.  To educate, to amuse, and forever, calls
for such exquisite manipulation of our own minds, calls
for such individual initiative, such originality, as to
provide woman with an aspiration that makes man's
creative concern with such gross matters as art or
letters, science or government, seem puerile and
pitiable.  What skill do the tasks of man, so stupidly
tangible and public, evoke?  How stimulating to be a
woman!  How dull to amble along like a man, with only
logic to carry you, and only success to attain!

    Poor man is to be pitied not only for the crudity
of his mental machinery and the creaking clumsiness of
its movement, but for the dullness of the material in
which he must<13> work.  The truth is that there would
be no sex to do the unskilled labor of the world, if
women ever once let men be tempted by their superior
employments.  The surest way of keeping man to his
hod-carrying is to let him think that woman spends all
her secret hours sobbing for bricks and mortar.  As a
child must respect his toys if he is to be happy, so a
man must respect the material he works in, and thus
women foster his pride in making books, pictures,
machines, states, philosophies, while women--make him!
The subject to which we devote all our heads is man
himself.

    Mine to protect, to nurture, to impel;
    My lord and lover, yes, but first my child.
    Man remains Man, but Woman is the Mother,
    There is no mystery she dare not read;
    No fearful fruit can grow, but she must taste;
    No secret knowledge can be held from her;
    For she must learn all things that she may teach."

    Our material, human, living, plastic, is
immeasurably more marvelous than man's cold stone, cold
laws, cold print.  Unlike man's, therefore, our work
can never be finished, can not be qualified and made
finite by any standard of perfection.  It is more fun
to make a Plato than to make his philosophy, and at the
same time to be skillful enough to con<14>ceal our
creatorship, knowing that the condition of producing
another and greater Plato is to let him have the
inflation of supposing he produced himself.  Now unless
woman's efforts through all the ages to instill into
man the self-satisfaction necessary to his success have
gone for naught--which I cannot from observation
believe--man could hardly help envying woman the
splendor and the scope of the subject to which her
intelligence is directed, to wit, himself.

    The ultimate purpose of woman's education of man
transcends the grosser aims to which man's intellect is
devoted.  Woman wants man to be good, so that he may be
happy.  He was not happy in Eden, and so she drove him
out of it.  Woman's education of man she has for the
most part succeeded in hiding from him, but the object
of that education, man's happiness, has been so
permeating that even man himself has perceived it.  Man
thinks he can manufacture his own career, his own
money, his own clothes, and his own food, but no man
thinks he can make his own happiness.  Every man thinks
either that some actual woman makes or unmakes his joy,
or that some potential woman could make it.  For a
woman, love's young dream<15> is of making some man
happy; for a man, love's young dream is of letting some
woman make him happy.  These views plainly argue that
in relation to the supply of gladness, woman is the
almoner, man the beggar.  Since every one would rather
be a giver than a getter, it seems impossible that no
man ever wants to be a woman, in order to experience
the most indisputable of her joys, the joy of
dispensing joy.

    Reasons, however, why men should want to be women
are more numerous and more cogent than it would be safe
to let men know, so I am cannily concealing many.
Among the few it may not be impolitic to divulge, is
one that of course any man who reads has seen for
himself.  While we shall continue conscientiously
devoted to our pedagogical duties, we have pretty well
determined Adam's limitations, and need only apply to
him a pretty well established curriculum, whereas we
ourselves remain an undeveloped mystery that more and
more attracts our imagination.  Looking far into the
future one may see man finished and fossilized, when
woman is still at the stage of eohippus as

            "On five toes he scampered
             Over Tertiary rocks."
<16>

    Even now women, looking far out to space, sometimes
echo the glee of little cohippus:--


        "I am going to be a horse!
    And on my middle finger nails
        To run my earthly course!
    I 'm going to have a flowing tail!
        I 'm going to have a mane!
    I 'm going to stand fourteen hands high
            On the psychozoic plain!"

    Now if any man, clearly perceiving his own
possibilities, must envy woman the joy of having him
for an experiment, how could the same man, if he should
as clearly perceive woman's greater possibilities, help
envying woman the joy of having herself for experiment?

    With this paragraph I have plumply arrived at
feminism, and at the object of all my revelations,
namely, to reassure men by stating that women do not
intend to take themselves up as a serious experiment
for ten thousand years or so; we shall not feel free to
do so until we have taught Bobby to be unselfish enough
to let us; he is not yet strong enough to try his own
wings, much less strong enough to let us try ours.  To
allay man's fears, it may be well to elucidate some
aspects of our actions.
    While there may be a little of eohippus<17>
exaltation in feminism, it is so little as to be
negligible; our main purpose is still our age-old
business of teaching by indirection.  There are
recurrent occasions when Adam grows sluggish in his
Eden, and women have to contrive new spurs both for his
action and his appreciation.  As whips to make a
lethargic Adam move where he should move, Eve is
brandishing two threats, one her economic independence,
the other, her use of the ballot.  Adam thinks she
really means to have both.  Now our threatening to
march from The Home and invade business, and by that
action to let business invade The Home, is very simply
explained.  Once again our purpose is unselfish: it
gives Adam false notions of economic justice to form a
habit of not paying for services rendered, so Eve
conquers her shyness and pretends that she will leave
The Home if he does not pay her some scanty shillings
to stay in it.  Even the dullest man has now become
convinced that women can earn money, so that we hope
that in time even the most penurious husband will
perceive the wisdom of giving his wife an allowance,
and that 's all we 've been after; and yet we have to
make all this fuss to get it.  If Adam were only a
little easier to move, he would save us and himself a
great deal of pushing.<18>
    Our suffrage agitation is as simple as our economic
one.  We mean only to wake you to the use of the ballot
in your hands, when we ask you to give it to our hands.
Already we have aroused you to two facts: if politics
is too soiled a spot for your women to enter, then it
is too soiled a spot for our men to enter, and
therefore it is high time you did a little scrubbing;
and also that if you refuse to enlarge the suffrage to
admit desirable women, it is high time to consent to
restrict it so as not to admit undesirable men.  Again
this is all we have been after, but again we have had
to make a great deal of noise in order to wake you up.
    But feminism to the male mind suggests not only
commercial and professional and political careers for
women, but something less tangible and more terrible,
the advent of a bugaboo called the New Woman, who shall
devastate The Home and happiness.  It is a strong
argument for our superiority that there is nothing that
frightens a man so much as a woman's threatening to
become like him.  Yet the time has come for frightening
him, and we are doing it conscientiously, for, to
confess truth, there is nothing that frightens a woman
so much as becoming like a man.  However, for his
soul's sake, she can manage<19> to assume the externals
of man's conduct, but not even for his soul's sake,
much less her own, would she ever adopt his mental or
spiritual equipment.  Adam has such a tendency to ennui
that the only way to keep him really comfortable is
every now and then to make him a little uncomfortable.
He was so well off in Eden, and consequently so dour
and dumpish, that Eve had no choice whatever but to
remove him from The Home entirely in order to save his
character.  We are hoping that we women of the present
shall not be driven to such an extremity; for we know
what her exile meant for Eve!  We are busily fostering
man's fear of losing The Home, as the best way of
making him appreciate it, and so of preserving it for
him, and for ourselves.
    As with The Home, so with the woman called New.
She never was, she never will be, but to present her to
man's future seems the only way of making man satisfied
with the woman of the past.  We have had to stir men to
appreciate us as women, by showing them how easily we
could be men if we would.  The creator granted to
Adam's loneliness an Eve, not another Adam, and should
we at this late day fail the purpose of our making, and
cease to be women?  We have changed our manners<20> and
conversation a little, for the better success of our
scare, but the woman who sits chuckling while she tends
man's hearth and him, is still as old-fashioned as Eve,
and as new.

    Men, who always take themselves as seriously as
children, have been easy enough to frighten by means of
a feminism that seems to take itself seriously.  A
really penetrating man might guess that when women seem
to be so much in earnest, they must be up to something
quite different from their seeming, and he might safely
divine that, however novel woman's purposes may appear
to be, they will always be explicable in the light of
her oldest purpose--man's improvement.  Now man's
improvement is a heavy task, and when nature entrusted
it to woman, she gave her a compensating advantage.  To
become a genuine feminist, a woman would have to forego
her most enviable possession--her sense of humor.  Man
can laugh, of course, noisily enough; but what man
possesses the gift and the grace of seeing himself as a
joke?  Men who must do the work of the world are better
off without humor, because they can thus more easily
keep their eyes on the road, just as a horse needs
blinders; but woman,<21> who directs the work of man,
needs to have her eyes everywhere at once.  By another
figure, such rudimentary humor as man does have is
merely an external armor against circumstance; but
woman's humor is permeating, her armor is all through
her system, as if her sinews were wrought of steel and
sunbeams.  A man never wishes to be a woman?  Is it not
an argument for the joys of being a woman, that no man
seems to have had such fun in being a man that it has
occurred to him to write an essay on the subject?



                               II
                      _A Man in the House_

    There persists much of the harem in every
well-regulated home.  In every house arranged to make a
real man really happy, that man remains always a
visitor, welcomed, honored, but perpetually a guest.
He steps in from the great outside for rest and
refreshment, but he never belongs.  For him the click
and hum of the harem machinery stops, giving way to
love and laughter, but there is always feminine relief
when the master departs and the household hum goes on
again.  The anomaly lies in the fact that in theory all
the machinery exists but for the master's comfort; but
in practice, it is much easier to arrange for his
comfort when he is not there.  A house without a man is
savorless, yet a man in a house is incarnate
interruption.  No matter how closely he incarcerates
himself, or how silently, a woman always feels him
there.  He may hide beyond five doors and two flights
of stairs, but his presence somehow leaks through, and
unconsciously dominates every domestic detail.  He<23>
does not mean to, the woman does not mean him to; it is
merely the nature of him.  Keep a man at home during
the working hours of the day, and there is a blight on
that house, not obvious, but subtle, touching the mood
and the manner of maidservant and manservant, cat, dog,
and mistress, and affecting even the behavior of
inanimate objects, so that there is a constraint about
the sewing-machine, a palsy on the vacuum-cleaner, and
a _gaucherie_ in the stove-lids.  Over the whole
household spreads a feeling of the unnatural, and a
resulting sense of ineffectuality.  Let the man go out,
and with the closing of the front door, the wheels grow
brisk again, and smooth.  To enjoy a home worth
enjoying, a man should be in it as briefly as possible.
    By nature man belongs to the hunt in the open, and
woman to the fire indoors, and just here lies one of
the best reasons for being a woman rather than a man,
because a woman can get along without a man's
out-of-doors much better than a man can get along
without a woman's indoors, which proves woman of the
two the better bachelor, as being more self-contained
and self-contented.  Every real man when abroad on the
hunt is always dreaming of a hearth and a hob and a
wife, whereas no real woman, if she has the hearth and
the<24> hob, is longing for man's hunting spear or
quarry.  If she is indeed a real woman she is very
likely longing to give a man the comfort of the fire,
provided he will not stay too long at a stretch, but
get out long enough to give her time to brush up his
hearth and rinse his teapot satisfactorily to herself.
    A man's home-coming is not an end in itself, its
objective is the woman; but a woman's home-making
exists both for the man and for itself.  A woman needs
to be alone with her house because she talks to it, and
in a tongue really more natural than her talk with her
husband, which is always better for having a little the
company flavor, as in the seraglio.  The most devoted
wives are often those frankest in their abhorrence of a
man in the house.  It is because they do not like to
keep their hearts working at high pressure too long at
a time; they prefer the healthy relief of a glorious
day of sorting or shopping between the master's
breakfast and his dinner.
    It is a rare _menage_ that is not incommoded by
having its males lunch at home.  It is much better when
a woman may watch their dear coat-tails round the
corner for the day, with an equal exaltation in their
freedom for the fray and her own.  A woman whose males
have their places of business neither on the<25> great
waters nor in the great streets, but in their own
house, is of all women the most perpetually pitied by
other women, and the most pathetically patient.  She
never looks quite like other women, this doctor's,
minister's, professor's, writer's wife.  Her eyes have
a harassed patience, and her lips a protesting
sweetness, for she does not belong to her house, and so
she does not belong to herself.  When a man's
business-making and a woman's home-making live under
the same roof, they never go along in parallel
independence: always the man's overlaps, invades.
Kitchen and nursery are hushed before the needs of
office and study, and the professional telephone call
postpones the orders to the butcher.  The home suffers,
but the husband suffers more, for he is no longer a
guest in his own house, with all a guest's
prerogatives; he now belongs there, and must take the
consequences.
    Fortunately the professional men-about-the-house
are in small minority, and so are their housekeepers,
but all women have sometimes to experience the upheaval
incident on a man's vacation at home; whether father's,
or husband's, or college brother's, or son's, the
effect is always the same: the house stands on its
head, and for two days it kicks up its heels and enjoys
it, but after two-weeks, two<26> months, that is, on
the removal of the exciting stimulus, it sinks to coma
for the rest of the season.  The different professions
differ in their treatment of a holiday, except that all
men at home on a vacation act like fish on land or cats
in water, and expect their womenfolk either to help
them pant, or help them swim.  They seem to go out a
great deal,--at least they are always clamoring to have
their garments prepared for sorties, social or
piscatorial,--and yet they always seem to be under
heel.  Some men on a home holiday tinker all day long,
others bring with them a great many books which they
never read, and the result in both cases is that
housekeeping becomes a prolonged picking up.  All men
at home on a vacation eat a great deal more than other
men, or than at other times; but with the sole
exception of the anomalous academic, who is always
concerned for his gastronomy, they will eat anything
and enjoy it,--and say so.  A man at home for his
holidays is always vociferously appreciative.  His
happiness is almost enough to repay a woman for the
noise he makes, and the mess; yet statistics would show
that during any man's home vacation the women of the
house lose just about as many pounds as the man gains.
But what are women for, or homes?<27>
    After all, you can have a house without a man in it
if you are quite sure you want to, but you cannot have
a home without one.  You cannot make a home out of
women alone, or men alone; you have to mix them.  Still
every woman must admit, and every man with as much
sense as a woman, that it 's very hard to make a home
for any man if he is always in it.  Every honest front
door must confess that it is glad to see its master go
forth in the morning; but this is only because it is so
much gladder to see him come back at night.



                               III
                    _Old-Clothes Sensations_

    People whom penury has never compelled in infancy
or adolescence to wear other people's clothes have
missed a valuable lesson in social sympathy.  In our
journey from the period when we first strutted
thoughtlessly in our Cousin Charles's castoff coat on
to the time when we resented its misfit, and thence to
that latest and best day when we could bestow our own
discarded jacket on poor little Cousin Billy, we have
successively experienced all the gradations of soul
between pauper and philanthropist.  Most of us are
fortunate enough to put away other people's clothes
when we put away the rest of childhood's indignities;
but our early experiences should make us thoughtful of
those who have no such luck, who seem ordained from
birth to be all the world's poor relations.  In
gift-clothes there is something peculiarly
heart-searching both for giver and recipient.
    This delicacy inherent in the present of castoff
suit or frock is due perhaps to the subtle<29> clinging
of the giver's self to the serge or silk.  It is a
strong man who feels that he is himself in another
man's old coat.  If an individuality is fine enough to
be worth retaining, it is likely to be fine enough to
disappear utterly beneath the weight of another man's
shoulders upon one's own.  Most of us would rather have
our creeds chosen for us than our clothes.  Most of us
would rather select our own tatters than have another's
cast-off splendors thrust upon us.  It is no light
achievement, the living up to and into other people's
clothes.  Clothes acquire so much personality from
their first wearer,--adjust themselves to the swell of
the chest, the quirk of the elbow, the hitch in the
hip-joint,--that the first wearer always wears them, no
matter how many times they may be given away.  He is
always felt to be inside, so that the second wearer's
ego is constantly bruised by the pressure resulting
from two gentlemen occupying the same waistcoat.
    Middle children are to be pitied for being
condemned to be constantly made over out of the luckier
eldest's outgrown raiment.  How can Tommy be sure he is
Tommy, when he is always walking around in Johnny's
shoes?  Or Polly, grown to girlhood, ever find her own
heart, when all her life it has beaten under Anna's
pinafore?<30>
    The evil is still worse when the garments come from
outside the family, for one may readily accept from
blood-kin bounty which, bestowed by a stranger, would
arouse a corroding resentment.  This is because one can
always revenge one's self on one's relatives for an
abasement of gratitude by means of self-respecting
kicks and pinches.  A growing soul may safely wear his
big brother's ulster, but no one else's; for there are
germs in other people's clothes,--the big bad yellow
bacilli of covetousness.  People give you their old
clothes because they have new ones, and this fact is
hard to forgive.
    There may, of course, exist mitigating
circumstances that often serve to solace or remove this
basic resentment.  To receive gown or hat or boots
direct from the donor is degrading, but in proportion
as they come to us through a lengthening chain of
transferring hands the indignity fades out, the
previous wearer's personality becomes less insistent;
until, when identification is an impossibility, we may
even take pleasure in conjecturing who may have
previously occupied our pockets, may even feel the pull
of real friendliness toward the unknown heart that beat
beneath the warm woolen bosom presented to us.
    Further, the potential bitterness of the<31>
recipient is dependent on the stage of his racial
development and the color of his skin.  The Ethiopian
prefers old clothes to new.  The black cook would
rather have her mistress's cast-off frock than a new
one, and the cook is therein canny.  She trusts the
correctness of the costume that her lady has chosen for
herself, but distrusts the selection the lady might
make for her maid.  On assuming the white woman's
clothes, the black woman feels that she succeeds also
to the white woman's dignity.  The duskier race stands
at the same point of evolution with the child who falls
upon the box of cast-off finery and who straightway
struts about therein without thought of his own
discarded independence.
    I may be perceived to write from the point of view
of one clothed in childhood out of the missionary box.
Those first old clothes received were donned with
gloating and glory; but later, in my teens,--that
period so strangely composed for all of us out of
spiritual shabbiness and spiritual splendor,--
sensations toward the cast-off became uneasy,
uncomfortable, at last unbearable.  The sprouting
personality resisted the impact of that other
personality who had first worn my garments.  I wanted
raiment all my own, dully at first, then fiercely.<32>
    No one who has passed from a previous condition of
servitude to the dignity of his own earnings will ever
forget the pride of his first self-bought clothes.  At
last one is one's self and belongs not to another man's
coat, or another woman's gown.  It is a period of
expansion, of pride: when one's clothes are altogether
one's own, one's pauper days are done.  But it is best
for sympathy not to forget them, not only for the sake
of the pauper, but for the sake of the plutocrat we are
on the verge of becoming; for our sensations in regard
to old clothes are about to enter a new phase; we are
about to undergo the ordeal of being ourselves the
donors of our own old clothes.
    It was not alone for the new coat's intrinsic sake
that we desired it; we coveted still more the
experience of giving it away when we were done with it.
There is no more soul-warming sensation than that of
giving away something that you no longer want.  The
pain of a recipient's feelings on receiving a thing
which you can afford to give away, but which he himself
cannot afford to buy, is exactly balanced by your pride
in presenting him with something that you can't use.
    The best way to get rid of the pauper spirit is to
pauperize some one else.  This is cynical <33>
philanthropy, but veracious psychology.  It follows
that the best way to restore a pauper's self-respect is
to present him with some old clothes to give to some
one still poorer; for clothes are, above all gifts, a
supreme test of character.  It was the custom of epics
to represent the king as bestowing upon his
guest-friends gifts of clothes, but they were never old
clothes.  If you could picture some Homeric monarch in
the act of giving away his worn-out raiment, in that
moment you would see his kingliness dwindle.
    The man who can receive another man's old clothes
without thereby losing his self-respect is fit to be a
prince among paupers, but the man who can give another
man his old clothes without wounding that man's
self-respect is fit to be the king of all
philanthropists.



                               IV
                     _Luggage and the Lady_

I write as one pursued through life by the malevolence
of inanimate objects.  My singular subjection to things
was never brought so painfully home to me as during
four months in Europe.  Of course, my soul had been to
Europe a great many times, but my body never, and now I
was taking it, as well as certain scrip and scrippage
for its journey.  I chained up my soul and held it
under lock and key while I took counsel with certain
seductive guidebooks.  These paternal manuals left no
detail untouched, until there was no fear left for me
of cabs or custom-houses, of money-tables or
time-tables.  It was all as simple as bread and milk.
One thing all my guides inveighed against, a
superfluity of baggage; with them I utterly agreed.  A
trunk was an expensive luxury on foreign railways:
there stood ready always an army of porters to escort
one's handbags.  A lady could travel gayly with a
single change of raiment; after a day's dust and soil,
merely the transformation of a blouse, and behold<35> a
toilet fit for any table d'hote.  Moreover, so
remarkable were foreign laundry facilities that on
tumbling to bed all you had to do was to summon an
obliging maid, deliver, sleep, and on the morrow morn,
behold yourself all crisply washed and ironed.  As to
the expense of a trunk and the battalions of porters,
the guidebooks were correct; as to the rest, they lied.
The single blouse theory is all very well if you don't
wear out or tear out by the way; and as to the laundry
fallacy, do I not still see myself roaming the streets
of Antwerp searching vainly for one single
_blanchisserie?_  My conclusion is that one needs
clothes and a right mind about as much on one side of
the Atlantic as on the other.
    But I had not reached this conclusion when I bought
my baggage, therefore I limited myself to two
hand-pieces.  For the first of these I had not far to
search.  It was that frail, slim, dapper thing, a straw
suitcase.  It was very light, just how light I was
afterwards to discover, but before embarkation I
regarded it with joy; it seemed to me suitable and
genteel, with its sober gray sides and trim leather
corners.  With it I was satisfied, whereas from the
first I felt misgiving about my second article of
impedimenta.  There was nothing genteel or ladylike
about this, that was certain,<36> but perhaps I am not
the first traveler who has yielded to the mendacious
promises of a telescope.  It looks as if it would so
obligingly yield to the need either of condensation or
expansion.  You may inflate or contract at will, and
it's all the same to the telescope.  My telescope was
peculiarly unbeautiful.  Its material was a shiny
substance looking like linoleum, called wood fiber, and
having a bright burnt-orange color.  Its corners were
strengthened with sheet iron, lacquered black.  You
have seen the same in use by rural drummers, but rarely
in a female hand.  I don't know why I bought it.  It is
part of my quarrel with inanimate objects that they
always exert an hypnotic influence upon me in the shop,
and always excite loathing so soon as they arrive at my
home.  In this instance it was both the saleswoman and
the purchase that excited the hypnotism.  She was of
that florid, expansive, pompadoured type that always
reduces my mind to feebleness.  Moreover, she jumped up
and down on my prospective telescope, bouncing before
my eyes in all her bigness.  Now, in my sober senses I
do know that one's primary motive in purchasing a
handbag is not that one may dance upon it; but at that
moment, as I watched her pirouetting as if on a
springboard, I felt that<37> no piece of luggage was
anything worth unless you could jump upon it.  I
bought.
    Almost at once that tawny bedemoned box began its
career of naughtiness.  The first thing it did on
shipboard was to disappear.  It stopped just long
enough to be entered in the agent's book, and then it
leaped down into the hold and hid.  I searched; the
purser searched; so did six several stewards and
stewardesses.  The stewards searched the staterooms; I
searched the passages; together we searched the hold,
penetrating even the steerage to see if the missing
article were congregating with the motley collection
down there.  We were four days out when, in a passage
repeatedly searched, on a ledge near a porthole, behold
my tawny telescope leering at me!  My steward was
genuinely superstitious over it.  So was I.
    It was during my first travels on land that I
discovered that a capacity for being jumped upon, far
from being a recommendation in a piece of luggage, is
distinctly a detraction.  I did a great deal of jumping
during three weeks in Scotland.  I am sure I shall have
sympathizers when I declare my difficulties in packing
a telescope.  In the first place, it is very hard, when
both ends are lying on the floor, supine and gaping, to
distinguish which<38> is top and which is bottom.  It
is only after sad repacking that you discover that
while top will sometimes go over bottom, bottom will
never go over top.  Having ascertained which is bottom,
you begin to pack.  You soon are even with the edge;
but in a telescope this is nothing.  You continue to
pack, up, up into the air, a tremulous mountain of
garments upon which at length you gingerly place top.
Firmly seating yourself at one end, you grasp the
straps that girdle the other, and bravely you seek to
buckle them.  Result, while that end of the telescope
on which you are sitting undoubtedly settles under your
weight, from the gaping mouth which you are attempting
to muzzle there is belched forth an array of
petticoats, blouses, collars, postcards.  You dismount,
reopen, replace scattered articles, and reseat yourself
on the opposite end.  Result, the end which sank under
you before now pops wide, and spouts forth a stream of
Baedekers red as collops.  Again you repack all,
replace top.  Starting from across the room, with a
running high jump, you aim to land on the very middle
of the thing.  Result, the top goes down, it is true,
but from all edges there dips a fringe of garments.  In
the privacy of your room, with the assistance of Heaven
and the chambermaid and the Boots,<39> you may
sometimes contrive to shut a telescope; but I once had
to open and restrap mine, sole and unaided, in the
waiting room of a station.  It happened that I had
placed my ticket to London in the toe of one shoe,
placed the shoe in the bottom of the straw suitcase,
locked this, placed the key in the toe of the other
shoe, and placed that in the bottom of my telescope.
Why did I do this?  Simply because I had just visited
Melrose Abbey.  I frequently suffer from a tendency of
my costume to disruption in moments of stress.  At
times of great muscular exertion and mental excitement
my hat tends to take an inebriate lunge, each several
hairpin stands on end, my collar rises rowdyish from
its moorings, impeccable glove fingers gape wantonly.
All these circumstances attended the closing of my
telescope on that occasion.  It was immediately after
that I decided upon the necessity of a third piece of
baggage.
    I bought it in Edinburgh, on Princes Street, the
wonderful street where you vainly seek to apply
yourself to mundane shopping with Edinburgh Castle ever
filling your vision, standing over there on its craggy
hill, all misty with legend, while a hundred memories
of Mary Queen of Scots come whispering at your ear as
you soberly endeavor to buy gloves.  If <40> my
previous impedimenta had been outrageously American, my
third handbag was Scotch, every inch of him.  He was
gentlemanly and distinguished, frank and accommodating.
I have never seen anything like him over here,--shiny
black sides of oilcloth, bound by leather strips,
plentifully studded with tacks, but otherwise strictly
unornamented.  But his chief charm was the way he
opened, the whole top flapping easily apart at will,
and afterwards the two sides closing over all as easily
as if his only desire were to please.  In capacity he
was unlimited; you could pour into him, on and on, and
always he closed upon his contents smilingly, without
protest.
    For a brief space, as I trickled down through
England from cathedral to cathedral, my Scotch
companion was my chiefest comfort, the mere sight of
his black, rising-sunshiny face cheering me as it
looked down upon me from the luggage rack of a
third-class carriage.  More and more I came to impose
upon the generosity of his interior, until one day my
confidence in his Scotch integrity was rudely
shattered; for I discovered that the reason he could
hold so much was that he had quietly kicked out his
bottom!  He continued to accompany me, it is true, but
thrust from<41> his high gentlemanly estate, resembling
now rather those bleary, dilapidated Glasgow porters
that greet one's arriving vessel, his frail form, like
theirs, begirt and bandaged in order to support the few
light belongings I now dared to entrust to his
feebleness.
    Meanwhile, the strength of my yellow telescope
continued unabated, but so did also its averseness to
accommodating my possessions, which daily, all
unwittingly and unwillingly, increased.  My dapper
suitcase had suffered by the way, its neat sides were
bruised and staved in, one leather corner was missing,
another stood up like an attentive ear.  It still
smiled, "brave in ragged luck," but its own America
would not have known it.  It now appeared that England,
and as it happened, rural Devon, must contribute
another article to my retinue.
    Now, ever since I had touched Great Britain, my
unaccustomed eye had been fascinated by a piece of
luggage quite new to me.  I mean that most British
thing, the tin trunk.  We have nothing like it in
luggage, but we have copied it exactly in cake boxes;
the only difference is that the English original has a
bulge top and a lock and key.  In character my British
baggage was much better natured than my American
telescope, but in color it<42> was much the same,
orange tawny; it had grown very easy for me to spot my
belongings in the miscellany of the luggage van.
    These representatives of the American, Scotch, and
English nations followed in my wake from Southampton to
St. Malo, and perhaps their company need never have
been increased on the continent if in Brittany I had
not bought a pair of sabots, life size.  Nothing so
unaccommodating as sabots!  Seemingly each was big
enough to sleep in, but if I attempted to pack the
inside of one, behold, it would hold nothing at all; it
was built to hold a foot, and if it could n't have a
foot, it would have nothing.  In true peasant
insolence, each sabot demanded a whole handbag to
itself, and, once in, refused to accommodate its
substantial bulk to the needs of any of my other
possessions.  In much difficulty I managed to get
across France, but once in Paris, especially in view of
certain aristocratic purchases that absolutely refused
to consort with wooden shoes, the need of still a fifth
handpiece was evident.
    Paris luggage, like a Paris lady, is built to show
a pleasing exterior.  Diversion rather than utility is
its motive.  My Paris handbag still preserves its
suggestion of perpetual picnic.  It looks as if it were
always just off<43> for a Sunday in the Bois.  It is a
woven wicker thing, exactly like an American
lunch-basket, vastly magnified.  The handle must be
grasped from the top, and is not the handy side
appendage of all American grips.  I never look at it
without seeing within dozens upon dozens of boiled eggs
and sandwiches.  As a matter of fact, it has never held
anything of the sort; rather it carried my new Parisian
costume safely from Paris to New York.
    By dint of fast and furious touring through Belgium
I managed not to acquire anything more to pack or to be
packed, but in Holland once again I fell.  I was within
a few days of sailing when I visited Alkmaar.  There a
tall polyglot young Dutchman showed me through a most
delicious cheese factory.  Innocent and round, ruby or
orange, smiled those cheeses down at me from their long
shelves.  My guide gave me to eat.  Thus it was that
the last thing I bought on the other side was cheeses!
Oh, he assured me, they were perfectly well behaved;
even had they so desired they could not get out of
their strong cases; no more innocent gift to be taken
home to appreciative friends.  That Dutchman understood
American credulity better than he did the American
language.  Those cheeses did not stay in their cases.
They came out<44> and performed in all ways after the
manner of cheeses.  Now throughout my trip, whatever
inconveniences I might suffer by reason of possessions
acquired, I could never make up my mind to abandon any.
Having bought them, I did not desert my cheeses, but it
became increasingly apparent that they would have to
travel in a home of their own, together with such of my
goods as would not be corrupted by evil communications.
I purchased my last bit of luggage in Rotterdam.  It
was a gray canvas bag, in shape like a dachshund
without the appendages.  It was capable of as much
lateral expansion as a Marken fisherman.  It received
and held the cheeses, but frankly, so that their
contour was clear to the eye.  To all appearances I was
taking home a bushel of turnips out of brave little
Holland.
    I embarked at Rotterdam, and for ten days sank into
that state of coma to which ocean travel stimulates me.
It was not till we had touched the Hoboken dock that I
became once more acutely alert.  I had donned my Paris
traveling dress, had walked through the great shed
until I found my letter X, and then turned about to
wait with the rest for the arrival of my luggage.  Then
for the first time realization overwhelmed me.  I was
waiting<45> for my bags, _my_ bags; those six
disreputable traveling companions would here and now
seek me out and claim my society, right here in
America, with V and W to right of me, Y and Z to left,
my haughty steamer acquaintance, looking on!  Over on
the other side one is not known by one's baggage, but
here one is!  I had faced many a white continental
porter with nonchalance, but with which one of my
motley collection in my hand could I face the black
Pullman porter of my own country?  I cowered with
shame, so slowly they arrived, each several one of the
six, tediously threading its way to X, never losing
itself, never losing me, always hunting me down!  The
joy of home-coming was turned to gall.  I saw V and W,
Y and Z, turn away their faces.  To my eyes each
several hand-piece looked more bizarre than the last.
Which one should I select to accompany me on an
American railroad?  Which of the motley crew would
least endanger the respectability of a lady traveling
alone in an American car?  Through the crowd my
Parisian lunch-basket came mincing up to me, still
ready for perpetual picnic.  Silly chit!  I would n't
travel with her.  My Rotterdam purchase, bulging and
redolent with cheeses, came waddling up, respectable
perhaps, but with it I should have been as<46>
conspicuous as with one of the Marken imps in copious
trousers that it so much resembled.  My former pride of
Scotch travel was now so fallen away that he looked as
if he were in the last stages of his native whiskey,
and as if his physique would hardly have supported the
weight of a hairpin.  No help to be had in him!  My
American suitcase, in May so trig and debonair, had
been punched and pounded out of all semblance to
anything belonging either to America or a suitcase.  My
British cakebox had suffered likewise, and in its
decrepitude supported the loss of a lock, and appeared
to my horrified eyes carefully roped with clothesline
by a friendly steward.  Even though I promptly sat down
upon it, spreading my Paris skirt wide, I could not
conceal that yellow cake-box from the fashionable
steamer folk that swarmed about me.  Suitcase and tin
trunk both had lost all distinction of nation; they
both belonged now to the international species, tramp.
There remained to me only my evil genius, the
orange-tawny telescope.  Foreign labels had but
scantily subdued the natural aggressiveness of his
demeanor.  He was possible--perhaps.  Then I considered
how he had flouted me, scorned me, spilled out at me,
jeered at me in my helplessness.  I pictured opening
and shutting<47> him in the berth of a sleeping car;
then quietly, inconspicuously, and virulently, I kicked
him.
    I fastened the last strap the customs officers had
loosened.  Just one moment I hesitated, regarding my
rakish European retinue, then I fell upon the waiting
baggage-agent.  "Check them all," I cried,  "all!"
Free as a bird, as a gypsy, as an American, I traveled
from New York to Chicago, a lady luggage-less.



                                V

                 _Detached Thoughts on Boarding_

Boarding is a puzzling and provocative subject for any
student of human nature.  Some clue to its psychology
is revealed by the fact that even Adam and Eve got
tired of it.  Eden itself could not keep them from
wanting their own menage.  One can conjecture the
course of their growing ennui and irritation as the
suspicion dawned upon them that in Paradise they were
not getting all the comforts of home.  Having nothing
to do but board, they probably conversed a great deal
about their food, when the celestial ministrants were
out of earshot, and eventually decided that they could
have run the table a great deal better themselves.
Then, too, they had no privacy, they were absolutely at
the mercy of any archangel who might choose to drop in
on them.  Possibly, also, Eve felt that Eden was no
sort of place for bringing up children.  They might be
spoiled by the attentions of other boarders, elephant
or ape, fish or fowl, any one of a perfectly
indiscriminate menagerie,<49> while she herself, as a
mother, might be subjected to constant advice from
angels who did not know one thing more about human
babies than she did herself.  After Eve had thought
over these matters for some time, and whispered them
all to Adam, she did what many another boarder has done
since; she up and precipitated a crisis.
    The case of Adam and Eve is sufficiently typical to
afford some light upon the puzzling effects of
boarding, but not quite enough illumination to satisfy
the psychologist.  He is teased by the conviction that
there is more in this matter than he can get at.
Without an ultimate analysis of causes it may still be
of interest to examine some results to the human spirit
of both the selling and the buying of house-room, and
to offer some tentative explanation of the curious
phenomena that for many of us are too familiar for
attention.
    We all recognize as a distinct human type the woman
who keeps boarders.  One writes woman rather than man,
not that in strict accuracy one could say that men
never keep boarders; when men do engage in the
business, however, they do so by wholesale, never by
retail, while it is precisely the increased personal
intimacy of the retail relation that<50> occasions the
peculiar blight incurred by the proprietor of a
boarding-house, but escaped by the proprietor of a
hotel.  There is an expression familiar to our tongues,
distressing in its figurative suggestion, which is
frequently descriptive of the class under discussion,
"decayed gentlewoman."  No one knows whether a
gentlewoman takes boarders because she has decayed or
whether she decays because she takes them.  Of course,
not all women who take boarders are decrepit either in
soul or body,--some of them are very buxom indeed; and,
equally, not all are refined,--some of them are
refreshingly vulgar; still, as a whole, the attributes
inherent in the term "decayed gentlewoman" so generally
characterize the profession that in whatever country
one travels one is received by ladies so consciously
redolent of better days as to shame a boarder for not
having had better days himself.  However adroitly they
conceal their emotions, women who entertain paying
guests generally have toward their occupation a feeling
of perpetual apology or of perpetual resentment.
Sometimes the apology element predominates, and then a
blundering boarder had better be mindful of the
sensitive toes of his hostess; sometimes the resentment
is uppermost, and<51> then the boarder had better be
mindful for his own toes.  There is no reason why these
facts should characterize so worthy a business, and
there are conspicuous exceptions in which both the
woman and the domicile remain invincibly warm-hearted
and welcoming, but the rule still holds that only the
rarest of women can invite the public into her home and
not herself suffer from the exposure, only the rarest
of women can as the mistress of a boarding-house still
be perfectly herself.
    Having boarders, however, is not so demoralizing as
being a boarder.  The chronic boarder is an easily
recognizable type, fat, fussy, futile, and usually
feminine.  This caustic characterization does not apply
to women who go out by the day to any form of
scrubbing, as doctors, lawyers, or what-not,
professional women too busy for carping; it is the
woman who has no profession except boarding that
suffers its utmost injury.  To give primary attention
to the manner in which one is, fed and lodged has the
same effect as any other reversion to an animal
attitude.  The faces of women who do nothing but keep
house are always harassed; the faces of women who do
nothing but board are always vacuous.  Men-boarders in
a house are<52> generally preferred to women; a
he-boarder is more to be desired than a she-boarder
because there is less of him underfoot.  On the other
hand, since a man can always beat a woman on her own
ground whenever he thinks it worth while, a man who
gives his undivided attention to his boarding can in
fume and fuss out-boarder any woman.
    The insidious influence of boarding upon the spirit
is most evident when we watch it operate upon a child.
We all know the type of youngster that even the very
best of boarding-houses is prone to produce.  He is
noisy, aggressive, self-conscious, and yet to
sympathetic penetration profoundly pathetic.  He knows
that all his little life is overheard, that every room
knows when he is scolded or spanked or entreated.  A
grown-up learns how to conceal his soul from even
boarding-house scrutiny, but a child has no refuge
except in slamming doors and thundering on the stairs
and jumping into the secrets of those who have
trespassed upon his own.
    The effect of boarding upon our own soul may best
be seen by contrasting our reactions to our geography,
according as we wake in the morning to find ourselves
at home, in a friend's home, or in a boarding-house.
At home our attitude toward the ensuing day is<53> one
of absolute sincerity,--we expect to be our best self
or our worst, for frankness is the chief comfort of
kinship; if, on the other hand, we open our eyes in
somebody's guest chamber, we marshal our forces to
insure our good behavior, we owe it to our host to put
out best foot foremost; but if we wake in a
boarding-house?  There our morning resolve reduces
itself to the single sordid intention to get our
money's worth.  This latent hostility is ignominious
and unworthy, but it is true.  Yet we all know that any
hostelry is richer in Samaritan opportunities than the
road to Jericho.
    The detriment due to boarding does not confine
itself to animate beings, but extends to the inanimate.
In a boarding-house even the chairs look protesting and
sat upon.  The curtains seem exhausted by enforced
welcome.  The overworked kitchen has not enough pride
left to keep its savors to itself.  The piano has
clattered until it has forgotten it was ever meant for
music.  The doom of dejection falls upon a
boarding-house both without and within, so that one
always regrets its entrance into a street cozy with
homes.  Its windows stare forth so blankly that the
homes grow uncomfortable and move away.  There is a
blur over the face-walls of<54> a boarding-place
obliterating the individuality to which every house has
a right.
    This very absence of personality gives the
boarding-house a certain personality of its own.  The
effort to analyze this character has made the
boarding-house a favorite background with
story-writers.  Balzac, in "Pere Goriot," caught and
reproduced its very soul as well as the soul of the
homeless home-lover that it harbored.  The frequency of
the hall bedroom and the long table in magazine stories
to-day suggests the wistful familiarity with both of
writer and reader.  The juxtaposition of types in a
group bound together by no more congenial tie than the
brute need of food and shelter has always opened a
fascinating field to the romancer from Chaucer's day to
ours.
    The mere mention of Chaucer's name is eloquent with
contrast, for surely the Tabard was no bleak spot, but
warm and tingling with hospitality.  Yet even Chaucer's
blithe company had a sharp eye and a gossipy tongue
ready for each other's foibles, and if they had
remained together too long, it would have taken more
than mine host to keep them in order, but fortunately
they had their picnic and parted.  Another week or two
and even the Canterbury pilgrims might have
degen<55>erated into boarders, and dear knows what
metamorphosis mine host the merry, might have
undergone.
    To place Balzac's boarding-house and Chaucer's
Tabard side by side is to produce a pregnant contrast.
Yet if the primary purpose of both is akin, why the
world of difference connoted by the word
"boarding-house" and the world{sic} "inn"?  Inn
suggests comfort, coziness, congenial conversation,
but, alas, it also suggests a dear departed day.  The
only inns left are survivors from dead decades, and
they themselves have no descendants.  "Mine ease in
mine inn" is a phrase from the past.
    It is interesting to examine the difference in
meaning of the three types of hostelry--hotel,
boarding-house, and inn.  The hotel does not try to be
something it is not.  It neither offers nor expects
anything personal.  Its purpose is to make money out of
the visitor, as his purpose is to get comfort out of
it.  A hotel is not a home, and it does not pretend to
be.  Now a boarding-house is pathetic because it is
always trying to be a home when it is not.  It is we,
the boarders, who are responsible for its being the
wistful anomaly that it is, for at one moment we demand
of it the indifference of a hotel and the next the
coziness<56> of a home, and at all moments we ask of it
that which money cannot buy--hospitality.
    The little word inn stands apart from those other
two, hotel and boarding-house, and its charm lies as
much in its literary aroma as its actuality.  We visit
inns oftener in books than in life, but in both they
have the same characteristics.  The tiniest inn is
always big enough for personality.  The innkeeper is a
person, the guest is a person, the cook, the boots, the
hostler, they are all real persons.  There is time for
flavoring food with conversation.  The chairs are
friendly and inviting.  The hearth leaps warm with
welcome.  But note well, one sometimes lives at a
hotel, one often lives at a boarding-house, but one
never lives at an inn, one merely stops.  The reason
why the welcome and the speeding of an inn can be so
warm and genuine is that host and guest never have too
much of each other.  Both can present their best foot
for three days when a stretch of three weeks would
strain its tendons.  In an inn food never seems
skimped, the financial aspect never seems prominent,
because the guest never stays long enough to discover
sordid secrets, nor long enough to have his own private
affairs invaded.  Company manners, the outward and
visible sign of hospitality's inward and spiritual
grace, can<57> prevail in an inn, for the simple reason
that no matter how often one returns, exactly as often
one departs.
    It is clearly easier to enumerate the effects of
boarding upon human nature than to ascertain the
psychological causes underlying them.  One ventures to
hazard a few random reasons, all interrelated and all
growing out of the fact that we are still cave-dwellers
at heart.  The cave household feared and hated the
stranger; and with good cause.  They eyed him askance,
exactly as the other boarders in a house eye the recent
comer.  The newest boarder never coalesces with the
group until the advent of another still newer, when he
is tentatively admitted to ranks needing union against
the latest intruder.  This survival of prehistoric
manners may be observed and experienced in any
boarding-house.
    The hostility of older occupants toward the
stranger is exactly matched by his suspicion of them,
hostile suspicion always, no matter how obsequiously
concealed.  When a cave-dweller penetrated the
seclusion of another cave, he was wary, on the
defensive, and this attitude made him critical of the
inmates, of course, and therefore, for them, a person
to fear.  We are still afraid of the stranger, of his
eye that may see, and his tongue that may<58> tell, our
secrets.  Boarding hurts us because we suffer continual
abrasion of our reserve.  In a boarding-house, family
life has to go on in whispers; strangers are in our
midst looking and listening, and even if they are
friendly their attention is irksome:  Eve got tired of
having even the angels around all the time.
    The human soul demands retirement, but is often
unwilling to pay the price.  Homemaking is to be had
only by house-keeping.  In order to live by ourselves
we have to take care of ourselves, and the effort to
evade this issue drives us to the boarding-house.  The
home-keeping instinct is, however, as active in us as
in our cave-dwelling ancestors, only they knew better
than to try to suppress it.  They knew they wanted
seclusion, and so they rolled a rock to the cave-mouth,
and possessed their souls in privacy.  It is our doom
to inherit from them a desire for our own front door,
in order that we may not have to sue for entrance at
some one else's door, and also that we may never have
to open ours except when we do so in free and voluntary
welcome.  Boarding is often necessary, but it goes
contrary to impulses as ineradicable in us as
nest-making in a bird.  Even the feminists, when they
inveigh against family life, will be found riot free
from prehistoric impulses toward<59> privacy.  They do
not advocate caravansary existence, but rather the
group system, in all its cave-dweller isolation; only
the group must be based on congeniality, not on mere
arbitrary and accidental kinship.
    The joy of slamming our own front door upon the
world is only equaled by the joy of flinging that door
wide to the world when we wish to.  Of all commodities
hospitality should be free from money-taint.  The
trouble with boarding is that it attempts to buy and
sell a welcome.  Everything is cheapened the moment we
can pay a price for it.  The instant we lay our dollars
on the counter, we have the right to criticize our
purchase.  A buyer does not have to say thank you with
his lips nor yet with his heart, and this is why a
certain uncouthness is to be incurred in any purely
commercial relation.  Hospitality is essentially not
sordid, but spiritual: a host is gracious with the
generosity that offers what money cannot buy, a guest
is gracious with the gratitude that accepts what money
cannot pay for.  Boarding is an anomalous and enforced
relation between people who offer and accept
house-room, and only those can escape its blight who
have the power always to elevate the commercial to the
plane of the human and the friendly.  Luckily, among
this<60> small but noble company are many persons that
board and many that take boarders.  The existence of
this minority does not alter the fact that for most of
us boarding is a demoralizing occupation.  The reason
lies deep: hospitality, given or received, is too
sacred for barter.



                               VI

                    _The Lady Alone at Night_

I am a lady, and a coward.  The two facts have no
relation to each other, but both are necessary to a
comprehension of my sentiments about to be delivered.
Soberly revolving the universe in my mind, I find only
one thing of which I am sure I am not afraid, and that
is--dying.  I mean merest dying, for I am as fearsome
as any of being tossed in air, _disjecta membra_, by an
automobile; of furnishing lingering sweetness to an
epicurean tiger; of being played with, and pawed and
tweaked by disease, cat-and-mouse-like; it is only the
actual slipping by the portal of which I am not afraid.
With this sole exception, I am afraid of everything:
firecrackers, reptiles, drunken cooks, dogs, tunnels,
trolleys, and caterpillars.  About ghosts I am a little
uncertain; experience leads me to conjecture that
ghosts are usually your own fault: that is, they are a
little like rattlesnakes; if you don't intrude, neither
will they.  But that circumstance which is to me the
very quintes<62>sence of terror is Night and A Man.  I
speak hypothetically--it has never happened.
    Strange what a difference mere plurality of a noun
and mere presence or absence of an article make to my
mind.  Now Men, Man, and A Man stand for most diverse
conceptions.  _Man_,--I think of Mr. Alexander Pope,
and of a creature of watery intellect, whose vitality
is something between that of a frog and a jumping-jack,
and who is diddled puppet-wise by an equally anaemic
deity.  Man is humanity dehumanized, but Men are about
the most human thing there is.  Men are the big people,
clean-scrubbed spiritually and physically, who come to
see you and take you about, and look after the
universe, and keep it in a good humor; who, when you
are making a fool of yourself, laugh at you in a
genial, masculine fashion.  In a thin, tentative,
feminine way, you try to imitate, and the effort,
however quavering, somehow makes you feet better.
_Men_, of your own family or out of it, sometimes put
you on trains, and take care of you--sometimes.  Thus
Men.
    But _A Man_-- ugh!  I saw him first in a nightmare
when I was six.  He wore a black Prince Albert, and on
his head three high hats jammed down one on top of the
other.  He stood on the cone of a hill, black as a
coal<63> against the red light of fires in the rear.
From under his three hats he grinned at me, and on that
black hill, against that lurid sky, he danced and
danced and danced.  He frightens me still.  It is since
then that Night and A Man have been my crown of
terrors.  A Man lurks in every darkened doorway,
stretches an arm from every tree trunk, pursues me,--
pat, pat, pat,--and fades into the common light of lamp
and fire only when I am safely under my own roof-tree.
Even in the daytime, A Man never deserts me: he haunts
the solitary country lanes, lush and lovely with
spring; he pops out upon me from mountain woods; on the
stretches of beach he lurks just around the point.  He
is always there; at least, I suppose he is, for I never
am--alone.
    By day, A Man is a leering horror, but at night he
becomes, like that figure in my dream, pure devil.  I
am a suburbanite, and as I said before, a lady, a
laboring lady.  This is why I find myself not
infrequently alone at night.  The alarm set a-quiver
when I descend from the social, bright-lit, suburban
car and plunge forth into the dark is something that
custom cannot stale.  Yet sometimes the spell of the
night is as a buckler against fear, making me wonder if
solitude is really terror, genuine solitude, solitude
belonging to me,<64> and not to A Man.  I remember one
early winter evening, white with a recent snowfall;
there had been an ice storm, and our trees were all
incased, each tiniest twig, and the full moon rode low:
I forgot A Man, in every nerve I was glad to be alone,
but hark, a step in the distance, and earth again!
    It is worth some study, the sensation of that
approaching step, that emerging shadow,--bifurcated or
petticoated, two feet or four?  I am never afraid of
two men: neither actually nor, grammatically can A Man
be two.  Joseph and the Babes in the Wood for
precedent, dissension steps in between violence and its
victim so soon as the aggressive party is multiplied by
even two.  And as for a group of men, whatever their
caste or condition, however socially uncouth, by mere
virtue of numbers they become a protection rather than
a peril; by mere aggregate of protective instinct, A
Man sufficiently multiplied equals _Men (supra)._
    In addition to these distinctions in regard to the
number of your potential aggressor, there are also
distinctions geographic and geometric.  I appeal to any
lady of my sex and condition, whether there is not the
greatest possible difference in amount of peril to be
inferred between the man who is walking in<65> front of
you on a lonely street, and the man who is walking
behind.  If a man paces on soberly and regularly some
few discreet rods ahead, straightway he is enhaloed
with succor and salvation,--you are safe, you need only
to call him in your need, and he will save.  But should
he go more slowly, fall behind, then in the very
instant of passing you this same protecting saint
becomes decanonized, and worse.  There is nothing so
suspicious as this dropping behind.  True, you preserve
a bold back, walk no faster,--note, sir, my valiancy,
my unconcern,--but still your knee crooks for flight,
and your vocal cords contract for that scream you
wonder if you could ever really utter.  A corresponding
transformation in moral intention, blackguard and
chevalier, is possible for the man in your rear.  On a
recent evening I was hurrying home along the solitary
street--steps behind!  Flying, pursuing steps!  Nearer,
nearer!  Upon me, and my heart sickened and stopped
beating!  But past me, fleeting on and on,
disappearing, oh, too swiftly!  For as he left me so
quickly again to solitude, I could hardly resist an
impulse to gather up my skirts and scamper after, after
my retreating protector.  I think he made his train.
    I have been at some pains to prove the sec<66>ond
of my introductory assertions.  The reason I have not
tried to prove the first is explained by the difference
between the essay and polite society.  In polite
society, one is under the obligation of confessing
one's virtues, not blatantly, but none the less
persistently, wearily,--one's dogging old virtues, as
if it were not enough of a bore to live with them in
private without having to be seen with them in public.
In the essay one may have the exquisite pleasure of
confessing one's vices.  In society I must be a lady;
in the essay I may be, as here and now, a coward.



                               VII

                   _In Sickness and in Health_

I have been sick, but not utterly,--a tooth.  I am in
the convalescent's mood of confidence and confession;
therefore, I write in haste, for in health I am buoyant
and amiable, and not fluently penitent; indeed, there
is little then to be penitent about.  For a week I have
been very unpleasant, and the circumstance leads to
remarks on the moral disintegration attendant upon
indisposition.  I speak of petty disorders, for
illnesses of dramatic magnitude, a run of typhoid for
instance, sometimes tend to spiritual upbuilding,--at
least, it is so demonstrated in fiction.  Doubtless the
pawing of the white horse in the dooryard has a
soothing effect upon the patient's nerves, but
illnesses in which one has not the comfort of composing
one's epitaph are not composing to the soul.  The
lesser ailments make appalling holes in our integrity:
myself last week threw a teaspoon at my most immediate
forbear.  Ferocious, but it was the elemental ferocity
of suffering.  It is a fact, belonging rather to
the<68> science of psychology than of medicine, that
small sicknesses hurt more than big ones.  I appeal to
all connoisseurs in invalidism whether a tooth, an ear,
an ankle, are not more direct in their methods of
torture than pneumonia, smallpox, or appendicitis.
Believing this, I have always had much sympathy for the
vilified hero of a certain novelette of my
acquaintance; in this romance, the husband has a tooth;
the wife, a heart,--a literal heart, mechanical,
physiological.  Everybody knows which suffered more,
and yet because the gentleman got a little crusty over
a most outrageous molar, how joyously the author
trounced him through page after page!  I am hot with
indignation.  There ought to be a Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Creations.  Manufacturers of
heroes and heroines should not be allowed to flay and
burn and quarter so wantonly as they do; a humane
reading public should take from them the prerogative of
so unnatural a parenthood.
    This one man should have been forgiven; he had a
toothache, and non-fatal illnesses may make monsters of
the meekest of us; but fortunately, the illness being
temporary, so is the monster.  Only the recollection is
humiliating; I am recovered, but I shudder at the
legion so recently cast out of me.  Sickness<69> sets
free all the processes of atavism, and whirls us back
into savagery at a breathless rate.  The first bit of
baggage we leave behind us on this rapid return journey
is family affection.  Last week my kin stood about my
couch day and night with poultices and sympathy in
their hands.  I took the poultices and tossed back evil
words out of my mouth.  I looked upon my relatives with
frankest loathing.  Why?  Their insulting forbearance,
their aggressive meekness, their
poor-sufferer-here-is-my-other-cheek attitude stirred
the foundations of my bile.  Their serene patience
provoked my utmost effort to destroy it, and I was
impotent; their invulnerability was an affront to my
powers of invention.  My own possibilities of
vituperation were only less surprising to me than the
endurance of the abused.  And all the time that I
listened to my own reviling tongue, my self-respect was
ebbing from me most uncomfortably,--and it was all
their fault.
    A concomitant loss in this dissolving of our
civilization is that of the sense of humor.  Being so
recently returned from barbarism and its beyond, I can
confidently assert that the ape and the savage, while
they may be laughable, do not laugh.  In the sickroom
of the not very sick, the brightest witticisms<70> seem
only studied banalities.  There is no comedy in the
incidents of ministration; it is all unrelieved
tragedy.  Yet it is not the humorous, but the humor
that is lacking, for frequently the situations are
appreciated at recovery, and furnish us amusement at
intervals for a lifetime.  I doubt whether this
suspension of the processes of humor could be
established in the case of serious illness, admitting
of disastrous outcome.  There are soldiers a-plenty who
have jested at their wounds, and instances enough on
record where a timely jest or a merry incident has
saved the day.  I cite one such situation.  A husband
lay at death's door, and the door was ajar.  It was
midnight, and the wife watched.  Suddenly the patient
seemed to be sinking, slipping from her.  She put the
hartshorn bottle to his nostrils, but he could smell
nothing.  Both were terrified as they realized the
import of this.  Then the wife glancing down discovered
that the bottle contained witch-hazel.  The man
laughed--and lived.
    In serious illness there is perhaps sometimes a
positive stimulus to the comic sensibilities; there is
such a thing as dying game, or the fight for life may
be worth some bravado.  But imagine feeling gamy with
tonsillitis or a felon on your finger; there is
absolutely no histri<71>onic appeal.  If your sickness
has no spice of fatality, you might just as well give
up; you won't see the light of humor again until you
recover.
    No love in our heart, no humor in our head, there
is another evil of savagery thrust upon us by illness.
It is the sudden acquisition of personality by
inanimate objects.  What possibilities of abusive
conduct lurk within the four walls of a room yesterday,
in health, perfectly inoffensive!  What malevolence in
the wall-paper!  Such a sneaking, underhand, leering
pattern for curtains with any pretensions to
respectability!  How tipsy the books look, crowding and
pushing themselves askew for very perversity!  No
amount of chastisement will make the pillows conduct
themselves comfortably.  There is something about the
billows of that malicious counterpane that makes me
think of the oozy, oily, shiny unpleasantness of the
ocean when the sailboat is becalmed.  I am as much at
the mercy of my furniture as any Fiji before his
fetish.
    Thus sickness reduces us to cave-dwellers or
gorillas rampant, by perhaps just a day of pain no
greater in compass than one's little finger-nail,--
soulful, strenuous, high-stepping beings though we are!
Sad enough to think about; yet on the other hand, of
all<72> insupportables, the people whom sickness makes
saints are the most contemptible.  I know men and
ladies, in health normal, human, unworthy, likable,--
but give them so much as a cold in the head, and at
once their smile smacks of Heaven, and their eyes are
uplift with the watery mysticism of those about to be
canonized.  When a small boy I know voluntarily allows
his younger sister a canter on his rocking-horse, his
nurse immediately applies red flannel and turpentine;
generosity with him is a sure presage of sore throat.
I have seen great strapping lads, full of sin, reduced
to sudden and spurious sainthood by a black eye.  There
is no more unfeeling conduct than patient suffering,---

there is nothing more alarming to an anxious family
than a course of virtuous endurance obstinately
persisted in.  So long as you rage and are unseemly
your kinsfolk will never pipe their eye, but docility
under the minor physical afflictions makes a stubbed
toe as much a matter of apprehension as angina
pectoris.  This being good when sick is a bid for
unmerited martyrdom.  These gentle sufferers are likely
to employ the emaciated voice of those who ail, knowing
well that the bellow of rebellion is much too
reassuring.  I am glad I am not as one of these; sick,
I throw things.<73>
    Thus all mankind and all woman and child kind, too,
are divided, though unevenly, into those who are better
in sickness and those who are worse.  The marriage
service on examination will be found to be a very canny
document, and its compilers nowhere showed greater
shrewdness than in just that little phrase which
insures conjugal devotion in sickness and in health.
For of some, sickness makes Mr. Hydes, and of others,
Dr. Jekylls, and in the matter of spouses, how in the
world can the contracting parties foresee, demon or
angel, which will develop, or, having developed, which
will be better company?



                              VIII

                     _A Educational Fantasy_

    When I look back upon a half-century of wasted
life, I find that there are no years that accuse me of
neglected opportunity more poignantly than those
between five and twelve.  If only I had had the
foresight then to apply myself with earnestness to the
tasks set before me!  If only now I possessed, those
priceless stores of knowledge that I feel sure must
then have been pumped into me!  That I must have
received abundant elementary instruction I feel
confident, although I do not in the least remember
receiving it.  My purely academic activities at this
period remain wrapped in obscurity, while other
memories are lively enough.  I distinctly recall the
scientific invention displayed in our efforts, to
produce new shades and colors in the soapy water with
which we cleaned our slates.  It was I who discovered
that the yolk of an egg well beaten made a more
satisfactory admixture than butter, even though both
are equally yellow to begin with.  I remember how one
may by judicious spooning out with a pin, extract<75>
the inner riches of a chocolate drop without visible
disturbance of the outer crust.  Despite my scholastic
indifference, I can have been no sluggard, without
spirit, for of my fifty coevals there was not one who
could tag me in the open except Percy Dent alone, and
that only (but in my wisdom I never let him discover
the fact) when I would let him; well do I recollect
with what _eclat_, with what flutter of petticoats and
pinafore, I could execute a _pas seul_ at hop-scotch.
These attainments, the thrill of which still warms me,
prove me not without ambition;--

            "Not for such hopes and fears,
             Annulling youth's brief years,
             Do I remonstrate,"

but for
            "Those obstinate questionings
             Of sense and outward things,"--

such as the multiplication table, and the capital of
Arizona, and the difference between an adjective and an
adverb,--questionings so obstinate that I am convinced
that not even at ten years old did I know the answers;
_hinc illae lacrimae._
    To some extent it is possible to go back and piece
out the stitches dropped in the course of an education;
only, one is not allowed to go<76> back so far as I
desire.  Roughly speaking, I should say that life does
not allow one to relearn what one has failed to learn
before sixteen, whereas it is the knowledge belonging
to eight years, and ten and twelve, after which I
hunger and thirst.  I wish some one would open a school
for able-minded but ignorant grown-ups.  Believe me,
enough of us could be found to attend, enough of us
glad to jump down from our college chairs, to leave out
laboratories with their clutter of advanced research,
our counting-houses with their problems, and gladly go
to school, gladly learn once and forever how much nine
times thirteen is, and build Vesuvius past and present
out of clay, and follow out of doors some charming
young lady who would tell us exactly what the birds and
the wild waves are saying.
    But I stipulate at the outset that I will have no
offensive superiority in my instructors.  If I am to
learn as a child I will be treated as a child.  I will
have no one caviling at me, for instance, because I do
not know when Washington was born.  I never did know
when Washington was born, but I desire now to amend
this my iniquity of ignorance, and I am even minded, if
only my teachers will be patient, to plod on from the
Revolution to the Civil War, and to learn the
succession of bat<77>tles thereof, and which side won
them.  I wish my instructors to understand that my
humility of spirit needs no augmenting on their part.
I wish them to be as sweetly patient and cheerily
maternal as they would be to my daughter's daughter.  I
wish my teachers to administer boundary lines but
mildly, and to give me their minimum doses of mental
arithmetic; for in mathematics and geography my mind is
willing but weak.  I think I could promise that
patience in my instructors would have a reward in a
proficiency of pupil such as they could never hope to
win from the iniquitous immature, on whose preoccupied
minds and thankless hearts they squander such devotion.
    What a joyous picture it is, as I conjure it up,
this going to school again!  What happiness to slip out
of our grown-up households, and go forth into the
morning, with bookstrap and luncheon in hand, to meet
by the way our harried and over-busy acquaintance, men
and women, some whiteheaded in ignorance, perhaps, all
skipping and dancing along to the same glad place.
Gleeful, we enter a sunny room with geraniums on the
windowsill, bright maps on the wall, and a beautiful
young lady at the desk.  We are no longer hard and
hardened children: our hearts as<78> well as our
intellects are softened by the debility of age, and we
appreciate the graciousness of our instructor with the
rose in her belt, the milk of human kindness in her
eye, and the carefully preserved smile upon her lips.
It is with responsive smiles of gratitude that we feel
arithmetic and history and geography trickling into our
craniums from the cranium of our teacher.  Then, when
she feels that, still willing, we are perhaps grown
weary with well-doing, she gives a signal, and with one
accord we raise our cracked voices in ecstatic, yet
instructive song, in which perhaps we are poetically
informed of some new fact about the firefly, or the
green grass, or perhaps our own gastronomy, or in
glittering phrase we unweave the rainbow into the
colors of the spectrum.  Or, to forestall the ennui
resulting from our too earnest effort, our instructor
bids us stretch our cramped, rheumatic limbs, and with
graceful contortions of her lithe young body, directs
us as we prance stiffly through a calisthenic exercise.
    But it is not on these diversions that my fancy
lingers most fondly, but on those more solid parts of
our education.  How happy I should be, for example, if
I could only add, both in my head and on paper!  How
many bewildered and distrustful moments would<79> thus
be eliminated from my existence!  And if to a
proficiency in addition I superadded an adeptness in
subtraction, then perhaps on some proud day might my
opinion of the bulk of my bank account approximate more
nearly the opinion of the cashier.  And if my
rudimentary bump of mathematics were carefully
manipulated according to the newest system of
educational massage, I might even progress as far as
percentage.  I might learn how to be richer if I could
once understand the allurements of compound interest.
So much depends on the attitude of mind that I wonder
whether, if I approached fractions in a spirit of
friendliness rather than of enmity to the knife, they
would reward me by allowing me an entrance into their
intricacies, so that I could with impunity buy things
on the bias, or estimate the reduction by the dozen of
merchandise that tags a half-cent to its price when
purchased singly.  There are, besides, other valuable
facts to be gleaned from the study of arithmetic, the
possession of which would be matter for gloating.  How
proudly I should proclaim to some ignorant companion of
a country stroll the number of feet in a mile!  I
should be happy to know under all circumstances the
number of ounces in a pound, grocer's or apothecary's:
how exalted I should<80> be if I knew the exact amount
of a scruple, that being a fact of which I am sure most
of my friends are ignorant.  An exhaustive knowledge of
weights and measures would not only entitle one to
distinction among one's acquaintance, but would open up
many new avenues of interest in one's daily life.
    History is another of the subjects for which I
hanker; not history as it is administered to me now,
spiced for the mature palate, with philosophy and
evolution, the ebb and flow of tendencies, but history
for the infant mind, the bread and milk of history, as
it were.  I have sometimes thought that historic
research would be easier for me if sometimes I knew
what men did before I was forced to understand why they
did it; and a simple statement of what the actual fact
is under consideration would clarify for me much of the
historian's discussion of cause and effect.  I have a
distinct conception of the development of the great and
glorious English people, but even such knowledge would
be materially strengthened if I were able instantly to
sort out all the Henrys and Edwards and stow them away
in their proper cubbyholes among the embarrassment of
decades.  As to my own respected fatherland, I have
discussed intelligently the growth of the spoils
system,<81> skipping from presidential term to
presidential term with all a grown-up's airy
superiority; but ask me by whom and when and why North
Carolina was colonized, or just what Captain John Smith
was about when Pocahontas intercepted the executioner,
and you have me.  I want to study history at last
fairly and squarely, out of a dapper little textbook
that I can stow away handily in my brain, with fine
fair outlines at beginning and end of it, and all
important events made salient by heavy type, and a
brisk brushing together of one's information by a
_resume_ after each chapter.  Such a primer would
greatly assist me in my study of the metaphysics of
history.
    Yet perhaps I do but hanker after impossibilities;
perhaps this school I so happily image forth would
refuse to teach me what I want to know.  Possibly such
information belongs only to the period of my negligent
infancy.  Perhaps my charming young teacher, exuding
the wit and wisdom of the newest normal school, would
refuse to stand and deliver the knowledge I long for.
If I desired the facts of the French and Indian War, I
might merely be set to building wigwams and drawing
braves in war-paint with colored crayons on the
blackboard.  Perhaps after all<82> there is nobody left
who knows how to teach the things I have forgotten.
For example, do they now acknowledge in the primary
curriculum that fair, old-fashioned study called
penmanship?  I yearn to be put once more into a
copybook.  I long to set forth once more wise saws in
round _v_'s and unquestioned _e_'s and _i_'s.  My
fingers long since became callous and conscienceless to
distinguish t from _l_, _b_ from _p_, and I wish
somebody would reform the rascally old digits.  It
would be a great relief to my friends and myself if I
could only become legible in my old age.
    One branch of knowledge little emphasized in my
youth, however, I could be sure of receiving at the
hands of my fair instructress of to-day,--I refer to
that varied information known as "nature-study."  I am
greatly deficient in nature-study.  I own to an
unanalytical habit of mind as regards out-of-doors.  So
long as the wild flowers make a glory at my feet, I
have never cared much to shred them into pistil and
corolla and stamen.  So long as the small fowls make me
melody, I have never cared to know the color of their
pin-feathers.  But I would fain amend all this and die
knowing something.  I picture our band of eager
grown-ups pouring over the countryside in the wake of
our animated and instruc<83>tive conductor,--peering
into the grass to lay bare the soul in the sod,
blinking our old eyes to discover the bird in his
coverts, cocking our dull ears to classify the notes of
his song.  I see us disporting ourselves over the
landscape, busily seeking some curious knowledge, and
then scampering back to our teacher with treasure trove
of leaf or flower or pebble or captured insect.
Sweetly she commends our application, and explains the
exact nature of our find.  We swell with knowledge
momentarily, and return to more prosaic tasks elate,
having hung its proper label on blade and bush, bird
and bough.  What a satisfaction it would be, after
having lived with nature for a lifetime in awesome
ignorance, to feel that one had at last assailed her
and ascertained her secrets!
    As a young child, I must have been singularly
limited in mental scope; I cannot otherwise explain my
well-remembered aversion to geography.  Those
parti-colored maps streaked with inky rivers, and
bordered by the wiggling lines of the Gulf Stream,
filled me with loathing.  The revolving globe, and that
oft-repeated image which likens the earth to an orange
flattened at the poles, seemed to me almost sickening.
How bitterly do I repent my obstinacy!  Besides, there
is not one trace<84> left now of my former aversion.
In fact, geography appeals to me to-day as if it were a
brand-new branch of study, so well did I succeed in not
learning it as a child.  I have tried ever since
reaching maturity to make up my geographical
deficiencies, but with small success.  Often do I find
myself relegated to the dunce-seat in the minds of the
company present.  Despite my constant effort, there are
certain countries that always elude my grasp, notably
Burma and New Zealand, and there is always for me an
airy insubstantiality about the entire continent of
South America.  Within my own beloved country, certain
rivers have a way of turning up in unexpected States
when I supposed that they had long comfortably emptied
themselves into the ocean; and there are some cities
which always flit with agility to and fro across the
map.
    I wonder if my early antagonism to geography might
perhaps have been due to a shrewd sense of its
uselessness to me at that stage of my existence.
Stay-at-home as I was, why trouble myself with strange
lands until necessary?  Yet I was lacking in foresight,
and should be grateful now if only I had packed away
some information against the day I should need it,
whereas nowadays I find traveling without any knowledge
of geog<85>raphy stimulating but inconvenient.  This
observation leads me to a broader one on the
topsy-turvy nature of our present educational sequence:
those studies most astute and useless we put in the
college curriculum, and those most immediate and
practical to the college graduate about to grapple with
life, we relegate to the elementary school, where the
children neither desire nor need to master them.  I
would suggest a turning about.  Let the college youth
and maid who will suffer from a lack of practical
arithmetic learn to add a column accurately; let the
irresponsible infant sport with trigonometry and conic
sections.  These subjects unlearned or forgotten, one
could still go through life unfretted by the loss.  So
with other subjects forever lost to us because
entrusted to the intelligence of careless infancy.  I
would teach geography and handwriting in the senior
year at college, and put philosophy in the primary
school.  So would the young collegian go forth upon
life well equipped, and not come to fifty years
burdened with regrets for knowledge lost forever,--as
I.  I have kept afloat in higher mathematics, I have
delved into the mines of science, I have trod air with
many a prancing philosopher,--therefore who so well
fitted as I to appreciate at last the peace of having a
foundation!



                               IX

                          _My Clothes_

In the dear, naughty memoirs of Madame de Brillaye, not
inaptly named by the author the "Journal of a Wicked
Old Woman," you remember that scene in the pleasaunce
at Chateau Vernot, where the turf was like fairy velvet
and the trees were tortured into all manner of shapes
unarboreal,--she liked to have her trees dressed, she
said,--"There is something indecent in great naked
branches sprawling the good God knows where."  The
little old lady is sitting with her great, old-ivory
cane across her knees; she rolls it back and forth with
her little old-ivory hands, while she scolds Aimee--as
always.  Aimee has just come through that brisk little
encounter of hers with de Brontignac, and seems to have
allowed her raiment to look a little battle-worn.  "Go
dress yourself, baby," cries Madame Great-Aunt.  "Will
you let your very laces whimper?  Into your rose velvet
brocade, and your chin will be jerked up as if by a
string.  Gowns have healed more hearts than they 've
ever broken: the second, men's;<87> the first, women's.
Now you think you have a soul; when you are my age, you
will know that women are not souls, but dresses.  I
look back; my history is the history of my gowns:
undressed, I do not exist; my clothes are myself."  (A
few lines above I used the word remember," but merely
for the sake of an effective start-off.  Madame and her
memoirs do not exist outside of this paragraph.  I am
not the first to perpetrate a spurious quotation; I am
merely the first to confess it.  To proceed.)  It is
not the first time that the little old de Brillaye has
set me thinking.  Is she true in this passage, or
merely epigrammatic?  If my history is the history of
my clothes, let me so study it out, formulate, as it
were, the meditations of the pupa upon its successive
integumenta.  Yet the figure is infelicitous.  In fact,
the chrysalis image is not over-pretty as regards this
side of eternity: pupa suggests the pulpy tenantry of
the chestnut; this worminess may be liturgical, but it
is unpleasant, is opposed to that sociability with
one's self which makes life entertaining; there is
nothing chat-worthy in a worm.  Be it granted me to
regard these accidental rags of lawn or wool or silk I
find adherent, these hardly less transitory hands and
feet, this hardly more durable incasing occipital,
not<88> as a worm incarcerate, but with the detachment
and uplift of the incipient butterfly.
    Why not _my_ philosophy of _my_ clothes, the
pronoun italicized, meaning not Teufelsdrockh's, but my
own, both the clothes and the philosophy?  Let me here
and now make some effort toward system and definition,
toward order out of chaos, in that long chapter in a
woman's story, my lady's wardrobe.  How far have these
successive wrappings around, and prankings out of
diverse colors and tissues that are to my fellow
passengers labels of my lone pilgrim soul, stating of
what age, sex, nation, education, and caste I may be,--
how far have these clothes of mine served for triumph
or undoing in my spiritual history, the life-history of
this "celestial amphibian," myself?
    The clothes of babyhood first.  It is a
strong-minded adult who does not grow sentimental in
regarding the garments of his infancy, those caps and
bibs and socks reminding us of the wabbling heads, the
aching gums, the simian feet, of the days when we, for
all our present arrogance of maturity, were the sport
of colic and nutritive experiment.
    How explain the repugnance of the newly born to
clothing, the birth-wail that pleads for the sincerity
of the nude, protests against<89> the cloakings of
convention?  Strange  paradox that the first emotion of
the baby soul should be bitterness against all those
contrivances of decency, those hemstitched linens and
embroidered flannels, through which the mother heart
eased its brooding love.  The little pink, squirming
creature, fresh out of eternity, cannot be too quickly
incased in the wrappings of finite human care.  That is
why we are so long in seeing ourselves as we really
are; all the clothes and the conventions were ready for
us; before we had a glimpse at ourselves we were popped
into them; it is a merciful long while before we are
old enough to undress sufficiently to discover, away
inside, the little shy soul-thing, the naked ego, with
its eerie eyes.
    Thus it is that when I first find myself in those
early, misty recesses I see myself all dressed, dressed
for company inspection; I am a little girl wearing a
crispness of brown curl and a crispness of white
muslin; I wear white stockings and Burt's shoes.--I
recognize also, quite in the same way, as enveloping
facts, without which I may not present myself unclothed
to my fellows, that I have a peppery, passionate
temper, and an imagination,--that is what seeing people
in void air and talking to them is called.  Thus
clad<90> and ticketed, I go pattering along the
pilgrimage.
    How little clothes mattered then!  All spun about
with fairy films and the witchery of talking trees and
singing winds, I did not remember my clothes.  But at
times clothes broke in abruptly on my unconsciousness.
I well remember a certain mitten.  It was a brown
mitten on my left hand.  My mother and I were walking
down a flight of stone steps.  I slipped; my mother
caught my hand, retained, not it, but the mitten, and I
bumped unimpeded to the bottom.  My baby resentment
against that mitten endured long.  It was a surprise, a
disappointment, this treachery of the accepted; so my
clothes were not to be trusted; it was well to keep
half an eye on them.  The mitten episode marks a step
in my spiritual adjustment; my clothes might at any
moment go back on me.  It is a lesson I have not yet
found it safe to unlearn.
    In those days there was a pleasant interest
attached to the Burt's shoes,--not when new and shiny,
but later, when they had become well worn.  Some
unexpected morning I would espy a peering bit of white
stocking looking out from the blackness of the leather
toe.  The hole being not yet so large or so alarming as
the cobbler's charges, a piece<91> of black silk was
adjusted over the stocking, the foot deftly slipped
into the shoe, a dash of blacking applied to the whole,
and behold only mother and I knew the difference.
    Penury as such was not yet known to me.  The
consciousness of shabbiness had not yet frayed the
elbows of my soul.  The device was merely interesting,
beguiling the tedium of the sanctuary, and affording
meditation on the ingenuity of mothers.
    Here succeeded several years of tranquillity in my
relations to my garments, until, at the age of six, I
found myself--infelix!--removed to a town possessing a
bleak climate and many woolen manufactories.  It was
the custom of the house mothers to buy flannel by the
piece direct from the factory, red flannel, hot, thick,
felled like a Laplander, and the invention of Lucifer.
Out of this flannel was cut a garment, a continuous,
all-embracing garment, of neuter gender, in which every
child in that town might have been observed flaming
Mephistophelian-like after the morning bath.  A pattern
was given to our mother.
    The hair shirt--I laugh when I read!  By definition
the hair shirt must have possessed geographical limits
of attack, but my flannels left no pore untickled,
untortured; they heated<92> the flesh until scarlet
fever paled into a mere pleasantry; and they soured the
milk of amiability within me forever.  The rotation of
the seasons reduced itself to terms of red flannel.  In
the autumn, when the happy fowls and foliage alike
moulted, shed the superfluous, when bracing October set
the body in a glow, I alone of living things must be
done up in flannel!  And more,--did you ever try to
draw on your stocking smoothly over a red flannel tumor
at the ankle, and then attempt to button over the whole
the shoe that fitted snugly enough over nothing at all?
Did you ever tear off shoe and stocking, and, dancing
red-legged and barefooted, cry out in frenzy that you
would eschew breakfast and school, aliment and
enlightenment, but never, never, never again would you
wear footgear?  Thus autumn.  And spring, that season
of vernal bourgeoning, was the time when I, too, like
any other seedkin, slipped free of all stuffy
incasings, and could sprout and spring in air and sun,
clad in blessed, blessed muslin.  I shall never forget
the corroding bitterness induced by flannels.  At times
they absolutely reduced me to fisticuffs with my
religion, so that filial piety, the ordaining of the
seasons, and the very catechism itself, hung in the
balance of<93> the conflict.  I believe I can hardly
over-estimate the spiritual detriment done me by my
flannels.
    One incident of this, my first decade, I recall
with mingled respect and envy:--

        "It is not now as it hath been of yore."

    "Choose," commanded my mother, "will you have a new
dress this winter or `St. Nicholas' for next year?"  I
was stung at the implication that for such as me there
could have been a doubt of the choice.  "St. Nicholas,"
of course!  A magazine doth not wax old as doth a
garment, and besides, is not reading more than raiment?
Alas for the high intellectuality of eight years old!
If the choice lay now between the dress and the book,
would I hug the volume and walk among my fellows gladly
shabby?  I would not.
    About at this same period we were visited by a
family of strange little girls.  There were three of
them; they stayed three days, they changed their
dresses three times a day, and they never wore the same
dress twice.  We regarded them as we might have
regarded the fauna of Mars,--they were an utterly new
thing.  It was wonder at first, then pity, then wonder
again, for we found that they liked it!  Being little
human animals even as we, they<94> would rather be
tricked out in fresh frocks than play tag!  What were
we going to wear that evening, they asked.  Why, how in
the world should we know?  Something clean, of course.
Our visitors' bits of frocks were embroidered,
beribboned, bevelveted in a manner simply
incomprehensible.  What in the world happened when they
got dirty?  That visit filled me with prophetic
misgivings; some day I should have to wear stuff goods.
In a vision I saw the great gulf that separates the
grown-up who cannot be put through the wash-tub from
the child who can.  Horror of the unwashable!  "Shades
of the prison-house,"--Oh, no!
    Just here the retrospect reaches the place where
the road turned; I do not say, forked, for it was not a
question of alternatives; I was a woman-child, and I
had to keep on in the only way.  Hitherto my clothes
had been as much or as little myself as the down of the
chick, or the fur of the rabbit.  Providence and my
parents had provided my apparel without the faintest
solicitude on my part, leaving me free to attend to my
body and soul.  This could not long endure.  It is the
era of Mother Hubbards that bridges together the old
time and the new.  The Mother Hubbard was so
noteworthy, so startling, in fact,<95> after the
trimness to which we were accustomed, this

            "Robe ungirt from clasp to hem."

It swayed with a truly Hellenic undulation like the
pictures in the mythology.  I first admired, then
coveted, then teased my mother into making me one.  It
was finished just after dinner, and though it was yet
early for dressing, I put it on, and turned out upon
the street, which, to my disappointment, was empty of
children.  There I strutted, and swelled, and waited
for the others to come and see, and was exalted, not
recognizing the first shackles of my slavery.  Now,
first, I become acquainted with Fashion; now, first, I
regard other people's clothes as the most important
factor in the production of my own.  Too truly it is
the close of the first chapter, the end of innocence,
the end of joy, the end of sexlessness.  I am
irrevocably a woman: imitation and emulation are
henceforth the distinguishing motives of my costume.
Now, first, I look in the glass to see my frock, and
then I look a little higher to see that face and that
mop of curls I wear, and I wonder what colors best suit
them.  I look at the eyes, too, and at the secrets they
tell me, and I wonder what external clothes<96> and
conduct are most becoming to those eyes and to that
inner meshed personality they reveal.  What is
becoming!  The word is epitome of all that the grown-up
is and the child is not.
    The period of my teens was the period when my
wardrobe was continually in abeyance upon the higher
claims of my education.  It was not possible
simultaneously to beautify my brain and my body.  I
acquiesced in the circumstance, for the most part, with
occasional fits of passionate revolt, and more or less
constant misanthropy.  I blush to recall that at one
time the light which was in me turned to darkness for a
year or more, and all on account of my clothes.  I
found myself at a great city school, I a shy little
country waif, most curiously clad.  I looked at the
clothes of my compeers, and I locked my lips and my
heart against all converse with my fellows, and I
walked to the top of my classes in a desolation of
spirit that was tragic.  I would have exchanged my
monthly reports with those of my most addle-pated
classmate if I could have had her clothes.  Never since
have I approached the intellectual achievement of
fourteen; but the shabbiness of my motives was greater
than that of my costume.  The effect was not wholly<97>
evil, but I here confess that I never should have
learned Latin rules if I had been prettily dressed.  I
wanted to show those stylish misses that there was no
backwoods brain under my backwoods hat--that was all!
I attributed to others a snobbishness wholly my own,
and for that once clothes came perilously near costing
me all human joy in human friendship.  If my wardrobe
had never bettered, I might now be a female Diogenes,--
and incidentally have furnished meteoric display for a
dozen universities.  My clothes improved; I am not
friendless, but dull and illiterate, and all through
the shaping destiny of dress.
    This paragraph in my history yields me this much of
philosophy as regards the influence of clothes on the
social relations.  My dress, so long as it be not
conspicuous for disorder, disruption, or display, has
much less effect on others than on myself.  But as for
myself, since I am a woman, and it is ordained of fate
that I be forever subdued to what I wear, I shall
never, except when I believe myself suitably dressed,
be able to look my fellow creature in the eye with the
level gaze of conscious equality which alone gains
friendship.  No woman was ever so proud as not to
cringe in an ugly hat.  No woman is ever so<98> happy
as not to be made unhappy by her clothes.  Let the
dress reformers prattle to the breezes,--there is no
exaltation like that of knowing one's costume stylish,
becoming, and, if possible, expensive.  Only by
recognizing our limitations may we women successfully
cope with them; one's own respect is surest guarantee
of other people's; for women self-respect is soonest
secured by clothes: therefore, O women, dress!
    I have digressed from the contemplation of my
girlhood, but I have not exhausted that time, for I
have not touched upon second-hand clothes or long
dresses.  As a girl I was perpetually made over.  I
came to regard fresh material as something almost
sacrilegious.  Of all gift-horses, clothes are the most
difficult not to criticize, and especially old clothes.
My prosperous cousins did not possess my complexion, my
tastes, or my figure, and yet I inevitably succeeded to
their clothes, so that I came to watch their
expenditures with morbid interest, and if they asked
for my advice, the strings of my sincerity were
severely strained by "a lively sense of favors yet to
come."  In such circumstances it is well to have in the
family one who is mother, dressmaker, and genius, all
in one, for only such a combination of inspiration and
devo<99>tion could have kept my head up in those days
when I was always second-hand.
    To be honest, am I anything else now?  What else is
it to be fashionable?  With brain or scissors every
woman is snipping and clipping and cutting over other
people's clothes to fit her figure; real clothes or
clothes existent only in the fashion papers or her
dressmaker's brain, but what is the difference?  Every
woman wears what somebody else has worn.  What woman
would wear a dress she had not first seen on another
woman?  Old clothes, making over, copying, copying,
copying,--dear me, how second-hand we women are!
    The years from sixteen to twenty are those years in
a woman's life when dress becomes an ecstasy--as never
afterwards.  We always look in the glass when we put on
our hats, but at sixteen we look at the face, not the
hat.  It is not such a bad face to look at, at sixteen,
with its eyes and lips of wonder.  For some few years
Heaven lets dress be a sheer delight, not the mere
sordid comfort and decency of childhood, or the studied
concealment of imperfections of maturity, but a
revelation of the new self of which we are neither
unconscious nor ashamed.  It is but the working of
natural laws; in the spring do<100> not the very trees
prank themselves out in a vain glory of blossoms, do
they not prink and preen in the mirroring water,
arranging their leafy tresses, and bedecking themselves
for the masculine regard of sunbeams and breezes?  So
girls, and many a one quite as unconsciously.  The sap
stirs and the leaf sprouts, and the stirring of the sap
is a thrilling of new joy, and the leaf is a new and
beautiful thing.  What is it, what am I becoming?  Look
in the glass and see.  That is womanhood burning in my
eyes, on my cheeks,--Oh, yes, sir, you may look, too,
if you wish.  When my skirts have grown all the way
down, and my braids all the way up, then there will be
coronation robes ready, and a kingdom, and a king.  Now
I am only a schoolgirl, but it is all coming, coming,
coming!  Do you wonder that she counts each inch on her
skirt in an agony of impatience, that she arranges her
hair high on her head at night before her mirror?
Schoolgirl nonsense, and something else.  Then one day
it is the hour at last,--it is the first long dress,
cut to show the regal throat, trained like a queen's.
The hair is piled up diadem-wise.  The princess is
ready.  The color comes and goes, the slipper taps the
floor--"I am all dressed for you.  I am waiting.  Come,
Prince, hurry, hurry!"<101>
    But, O little Princess, it is not at all like what
you think, really; so soon your long skirts will have
ceased to tickle your toes with delight, and your
coroneted tresses will seem to have grown that way.
The Prince will have come, and you will have got used
to him, or he will not have come, and you will have
forgotten that you ever expected him; the clothes of
womanhood will no longer be a rapture, but an
obligation and a habit.  You will find yourself wearing
a personality restricted by that thing you have somehow
acquired, called a style of your own, and restricted
also by the style of all the other women in the world,
so that you will find yourself wearing those dresses
only, and saying those words only, that both yourself
and others expect of you; it will not seem a very
wonderful thing to be a woman, after all.  But
remember, Miss or Madam Princess, that you must still
go on dressing, dressing, dressing to the end.
    What mockery to prate of the equality of the sexes
when one sex possesses the freedom of uniform, and the
other is the slave of ever-varying costume!  Think of
the great portion of a lifetime we women are condemned
to spend merely on keeping our sleeves in style!  Talk
of our playing with scholarship<102> or politics when
we are all our days panting disheveled after scampering
Dame Fashion, who, all our broken-winded lives, is just
a little ahead!  Yet dress-reform is the first article
in our creed of antipathies, and I, for one, am last of
ladies to declare myself a heretic.  I am not
ungrateful for the gift of sex and species.  Suppose I
were a fowl of the air, what condemnation of hodden
gray, and soul unexpressed either by vocal throat or
personality of plumage!  Among things furred or
feathered it is the male who dresses and the lady who
wears uniform; that it is otherwise with human beings
is due, I suppose, to some freakish bit of chivalry on
the part of the autocrat Evolution, the ring-master who
puts the entire menagerie through their tricks.  No, I
would not be a fowl; let me not repine; let me at this
business of dressing, pluckily.
    Women are nobler than men; it is because we are
purified in the fires of more severe temptation.  Man
does not encounter the demoralizing influence of the
dressmaker, that creature with mouth of pins and suave
words.  To what degrading subterfuge are we not reduced
to get our own way with the dressmaker, seeing with
what delight and dexterity she lifts her spurning foot
against our desires!  Do we presume to know what
we<103> want to wear?--alternately she sporteth and
scorneth--and yet we lift not against her her proper
scissors.  She practices dark arts; she runs an
hypnotic finger along the seam, and the wrinkle is no
more seen--until the dress comes home.  Lies are about
her head.  Her promises are vanity, and her bills
elastic as a fluted flounce.  Counter-mendacity alone
can move her; the gown must be sent home, for we attend
a wedding in twenty minutes; even now the caterer "hath
paced into the hall"; or we leave for California in an
hour, and even now our sleeper paws the track.  By the
ways of unrighteousness alone may we be clothed, and
yet so signal is female virtue that after centuries of
dressmakers we are still unscathed in our integrity,
and are still the churchgoers of the species.
    There is something stirring to contemplate in
woman's devotion to dress,--to see how we lay down
health and comfort, and clamber up and frizzle for a
lifetime on the altar of the aesthetic.  That is what
our dressing is to us, an art and an aspiration.  If
our sex doffed its radiance, and did on "blacks," what
loss to popular culture!  What of the universal hunger
for color and form if so many curiosities of craft, so
many animated works of art no longer whisked about the
streets of the world?<104>
    For another reason, also, we are preoccupied of our
costume,--our invincible frankness; for we would have
our clothes the expression of our souls.  With what
fondness we cling to the frock that suits us!  Such a
bundle of subtleties is woman that words are too
gross--a black coat and trousers an insincerity for the
hundred shades of shifting color and form that we are
inside.  Though it take half our life, let us be true
to our clothes, our clothes to us; let the dress be the
lady, and the lady a symphony of soul and silk.
    Verily, "my soul on its lone way" has traveled far
from the days of babyhood, kicking against all
wrappings, to the days of womanhood, when personality
exists not, separate from frocks and hats and gloves
and shoes, and both the inner layer of individuality
and the outer layer of costume have become cosy and
comfortable, so that by no means do I wish to lay them
aside.
    What next?  Some day I shall be given into the
hands of those who

        "fashion the birth-robes for them
         Who are just born, being dead."

Shall I be again enfolded in garments all ready for me,
of skyey tissues and opalescent tints?  Shall I squirm
and struggle again, and again<105> be slowly subdued to
the clothing and conventions of another world?
    Or when I pop up the lid of this upholstered
bone-box, my body, shall my soul be then and there set
free,--escaped, volatile, elemental, as wind or
moonshine, having cast from it--one by one as a
garment--age, sex, race,  creed, and culture?  But what
if in this off-shedding I strip from me my personality,
myself?  This involuted wrapping in which I am duly
done up and ticketed and passed about among my
acquaintance,--what if to rend this were to leave me in
the shivering nakedness of the impersonal?



                                X

                    _The Tendency to Testify_

    People and periods sometimes think strange things
about themselves.  I am constantly astounded by the
contrast between my view of my friend and his view of
himself.  Tact is the bridge that spans the chasm
between a man's opinion of himself and his neighbor's
opinion of him.  In truth each opinion suffers from the
lie of the label.  There is nothing so volatile as
human personality, yet it has a passion for ranging
itself in bottles on a shelf, each with its little
gummy ticket.  If the peril of the pigeon-hole is great
for the individual, it is even greater for a whole
period, which is but the aggregate of personalities,
each of them only a breath, a vapor, the shaping of a
cloud.
    One of the largest, loudest labels with which we
placard the present age is its irreligion.  Because we
don't build cathedrals?  But let any one of us look
about into the hearts of say twenty of his immediate
friends: are there no churches building there?  As for
me, I am quite dinned by their hammers, and often,<107>
when I want to steal into some one's soul, for a little
quiet communion, I am incommoded by the obtrusive
scaffolding.  No religion?  Never so many religions,
and from that very fact, never so genuine.  Obviously,
if you make a religion yourself, it's your business to
believe it.  There is an analogy between clothes and
creeds: you wear with a different air those your father
has bought for you and those you have earned for
yourself.
    I do not find people indifferent to religion, I
find them profoundly responsible for it; my friends
stand each at the door of a temple exacting tribute,
although there is not one who would not be horrified by
the blatancy of the metaphor.  They do not call
themselves religious, but they do call to me to come
in.  The trouble perhaps is with my listening ear.  I
was born with it, and without my will, or knowledge, it
has become an inconveniently obvious appendage.  It
takes a great deal of time to have a listening ear.  It
has heard so many creeds of late that I must perforce
counter-label this irreligious age devout.  I am not
inventing the list, and I do not believe the variety
among my acquaintance exceptional,--Neo-Hellenic,
Neo-Hebrew, Catholic, Christian Scientist, Episcopal,
high, hot, and holy, Episcopal, low, hot, and holy,
Swe<108>denborgian, Baptist, Presbyterian, and, latest,
a sect that scorns a name, but that I would call
Destinarian.  Miss Sinclair is of this communion, for,
in "The Three Brontes," does she not call upon Destiny
to account for every mystery of those three strange
lives?  The religion of the Destinarian consists in not
having one, yet not one of my friends pronounces so
reverently the name of deity as my friend of this
no-faith murmurs the word, Destiny.  "It is ordained,
she says of some circumstance, and says it with awe,
the humility before omniscience with which the Hebrew
prophets spoke his name Jah.
    There they stand, my twenty men and women,
beckoning me to the doors of their temples; and yes, of
course, I go in; it saves argument.  I go into each and
each friend is so busy pointing out the architecture
that no one ever notices when I slip out, out into the
open.  When one stops to think of it, it is curiously
old-fashioned and orthodox, the open, whether it is sea
or sun.  The planets are conspicuously conservative,
but the morning stars still sing together.
    Now, not one of my friends here listed is that good
old-fashioned work of God, a shouting Methodist, and
yet, in effect, there is not one of them who is not
exactly this.  As a child,<109> I attended
camp-meetings, I heard people testify.  The tendency to
testify is older than camp-meetings, and it will
outlast them.  Today, though long grown-up, I find my
friends still shouting their experiences, I find myself
still the shy and wondering congregation.  As in the
word "camp-meeting" there is military reminiscence, so
the "professor" is lineal descendant of _miles
gloriosus_, his survivor in the church militant.  A
puzzling number of people still like to exhibit their
scars; a larger number like to exhibit the particular
philosophic armor by which they--by implication--win in
the battle of life still ever merrily waging.  But he
who shows a scar deserves another, and no sword ever
equally fitted two hands.
    It is the implication that I resent in all
testifying,--super-sensitive doubtless.  I do not want
to be converted.  I grow shy and secret when I suspect
my friend of wanting to remodel me to the pattern of
his creed.  The most perilous thing in friendship is to
let a friend know that we want to reform him.  The very
essence of friendship is in the lines,--

        "Take me as you find me, quick,
         If you find me good!"

and in a recent dedication to one who was "Guide,
philosopher, _but_ friend."  In all testi<110>fying,
there is an implied "Copy me," which our own skittish
_ego_ resents.  We all incorporate in ourselves our
friends' virtues, but only those of which they are most
unconscious; whereas people are always conscious of
their battles; they always want to talk about them; and
yet how many different ways there are of winning the
same battle.  If I admire your bravery, I may copy the
creed that created it, but you need not hold up that
creed for my inspection, for it is you yourself who are
under my inspection.  You are your sole argument, you
need no testifying.
    I have been much talked to of late, and much talked
at.  I have seen the fanatic spark in eyes that would
have been aghast to know its presence there.  Once upon
a time there was only one church, and excommunication
from that was a simple and straightforward matter; it
can hardly be an irreligious age when one can feel, in
listening to the testimony from the score of temples
one's friends have built, that one is in danger of
being excommunicated from all twenty.  But better
excommunication than that, entering and accepting, I,
too, might feel called upon to testify.
    I, too, _could_ testify,--I, a mere sunworshiper.
I could point out the vaulted sky of<111> my private
chapel, most ancient and most orthodox.  I could repeat
for you the liturgies the wind has made, much the same
that it chanted for Moses on Sinai; for are any of your
creeds so new, my friends?  I could point out to you
altar-lights genial and tolerant, the taper-flames of
stars.  There was once One long ago who went to the
mountain for prayer, for there is nothing new about the
temple of out-of-doors; but if I, its worshiper, do not
carry forth some peace from its great silence, some joy
from its godly mirth, then would not even my infinite
temple shrink to the size of words, if I should
testify?



                               XI

                  _Letters and Letter-Writers_

It is a popular fallacy that letter-writing is a bygone
art.  Arguments for this opinion point to the array of
picture-cards expressing every sentiment known to
experience, and saving, by the neatness and dispatch of
their machine-made couplets, all the fumbling effort we
used to expend in saying thank you to a hostess, _bon
voyage_ to a friend, or even in offering sympathy to
one bereaved.  The night-message also seems to indicate
a sorry substitution for the formality of the post.
The truth is that the picture-card, by doing the work
of the duty letter, clears the way for the real letter,
so spontaneous that it can't help being written; while
the night-message contributes to epistolary art a
terseness and vigor that should not be undervalued.
While we continue to look back at the voluminous
eighteenth century and to regret the decay of
letter-writing, we are every one of us every week
receiving from a dozen different correspondents letters
vibrant with personality, vivid, readable, inviting
preservation.  Far<113> from not writing letters,
people never wrote more letters than they do to-day,
nor better ones; if ours are not so long as the letters
of the past, they are far livelier.  Both in theory and
in fact the present time is peculiarly fitted to be
epistolary.
    If each one of us will examine that packet of
letters we are loath to destroy because they have made
us see pictures or think thoughts or chuckle with
appreciation, we shall pause to ponder how diverse in
character are the authors.  One missive, guiltless of
grammar, is racy with backwoods wisdom; another shows
the rapier wit and apt allusiveness of the Hellenist;
another is as crisp and keen as the typewriter that
clicked it forth; still another peals with freshman
skylarking.  It is not at first easy to perceive
underlying all the variety the essential
characteristics which belong alike to all these
correspondents and which differentiate that happily
constituted being, the born letter-writer; man or
woman, young or old, educated or illiterate, certain
qualities he must inalienably possess.
    The letter-writer is always an observant person.
He has the pictorial eye and the pictorial pen.  The
view framed by his window sash must never grow stale
for him, across it the clouds must always roll as if
across a<114> painter's canvas, and its commonplace
roof-line must keep always its quaintness and its
quirks.  Of the groups of people that crowd his day, he
must see each as if staged for a play, he must perceive
the color of hair and the cut of clothes and the
connotation of attitudes as vividly as if he were
always seated before a rising curtain.  This freshness
of vision varies in different people.  It is always
found in every good letter, but of the writers, some
require the stimulus of an unusual scene; while they
have not the power to see or to paint the pictures of
Dulltown Center, they can portray Tokio or Archangel
till it glows on the wall before the reader's eye;
others, more really gifted, see drama everywhere, even
if they have never been twenty miles from their own
farm and forest.  Whether our correspondent is
stay-at-home or traveler, he must so combine his gift
of observation with his gift of representation that his
angle of vision is unique.  We have all of us received
narratives of travel that were colorless as guide-books
and narratives of a village sewing society that were
palpitant with portraiture.  The true letter-writer
makes us feel not only that we have been present at a
scene but that we have been present with him.
    The genuine epistolary endowment shows<115>
qualities in pleasant poise.  A letter should be
personal, but not over-personal.  A self-analyst may
cover many pages of notepaper, but we read him only
under protest, and drop him promptly into the
waste-basket.  We enjoy the record of personal
observation just so long as it is balanced by
detachment.  We like to see our friend moving across
the scene he describes, but we don't want to see him
bulking large in his own landscape.  In a well-penned
letter the people written about stand forth as vividly
as does the author.  It is this power of amused
detachment that makes all true letter-writers true
humorists as well.
    To write letters it is not enough to be observant,
objective, humorous: one must have the impulse to
express the observation and the fun.  This impulse is,
of course, the literary will to write, but there is a
sharp distinction between the litterateur and the
letter-writer.  The latter does not merely wish to
write, he wishes to write to somebody.  He is not
lyric, for it is not enough for him to burst into song
unheard; he is not a diarist, for it is not enough for
him to talk to himself; he is not a genius, for it is
not enough for him to talk to a vast, formless creature
called the Public.  A letter-writer is one who finds
life so entertaining that he must talk about it to a
friend.  Never<116> a self-sufficient person, he is as
genial as he is shy; it would therefore no more occur
to him to pour himself out upon paper that nobody was
to read than to pour himself into print that everybody
was to read.  He has the literary impulse without the
literary ambition.  He must be sure of his auditor
before his pen will move, and yet when it once begins
to gambol, it carries him off and away, after the
manner of all pens, until the friendly listener becomes
idealized from homely reality into very quintessence of
sympathy.
    The individual auditor is not only the first
requisite for the letter-writer, but the determining
influence that gives to letters themselves the
qualities which distinguish them from other forms of
literature.  Letters stand halfway between the
formlessness of conversation and the formality of essay
or fiction.  A letter to a friend has this advantage
over a chat with him, that you can choose the
impression you wish to make and make it without
interference from the interlocutor's telepathy, or
interruption through his rejoinders.  Conversation
gives and takes, but a letter only gives, and gives
exactly what it wishes, no more.  In a letter one
employs words, weaving them happily to one's will, but
it is a mistake to suppose that conversation is much
con<117>cerned with words.  It is a far more shifting
and subtle thing than that, for mere speech is
constantly supplemented or corrected or contradicted by
the twinkle in our eyes, the tautness or tremor in our
voice, the twisting of our lips.  The attention of the
listener is diverted by watching all these
manifestations.  While it has all the camaraderie of
chat, the letter, in the clarity and singleness of its
impression, is distinctly different from talk.
    The epistolary form differs as much from the memoir
as it does from conversation.  The diarist is a
self-important person, talking to himself and to the
future, and conscious of his effect upon both.  If he
is great enough, that effect is worth making, and we
read his account of himself and his times with the
reverence we accord to history.  We do not read,
however, with the pleasant personal warmth with which
we peruse a letter, for we know the diarist is not
speaking as comrade to comrade.  We know and he knows
that he is speaking to posterity.
    The letter has the advantage of not belonging at
all to conscious or commercialized literature.  It is
not written to be seen of men, nor yet to be sold to
them.  It is literature intimate, unintentional,
overheard.  In so much as it is personal expression,
plus detachment<118> but minus self-importance, and
also in so much as it endeavors to adapt itself
sympathetically to another person's interest and point
of view, the letter strikes through the merely
individual and touches deep and universal feeling, thus
in all its humbleness fulfilling the ancient dictum for
art.  The letter-writer, scribbling himself forth
merely to please himself and his friend, is not
constrained by servility to the public taste; his
medium allows him ease, fluidity, and a happy
inconsequence, vital artistic qualities impossible to
literature written to meet the market.
    Its spontaneity gives the letter scope for its
particular achievements.  Being written by friend to
friend, it is free from both shyness and stiffness: it
may laugh or cry, be sagacious or absurd, in full
confidence of being understood.  It rings true in its
directness and intimacy, and yet never descends to the
morbidness that sometimes stains the revelations of the
journal.  The letter is intimate, but at bottom
decorous.  In a letter one wears one's old clothes in
comfort, but one does not undress as in a diary.  The
presence of a friend to whom one may open one's heart
is both invitation and wholesome restraint.
    The letter as literature is particularly<119>
adapted to description made piquant by personal
perception of lights and shades.  The letter is
especially fitted for quick portraiture, for flashing
forth a face in an adjective, for touching off a
character in the quirk of a phrase.  Incidents also
stand out by their very compression.  Brevity is the
soul of a letter, which is not saying that a letter may
not be long.  A letter can afford to be long, it can
never afford to be diffuse.  In the nature of things a
good letter never flags because it is written by one
possessing intensified vision and a vibrant pen.  Such
a person knows enough to stop before he is tired.  The
description, incident, comment of a letter are forced
to a concentration that gives them an advantage over
more formal and expansive writing.  People who are
interesting enough to wish to write letters, people who
are interested enough to wish to read them, must by
necessity of character have much else to occupy their
time beside their correspondence.  The value of
epistolary writing lies in the fact that it is not a
grave concern, but an inviting side issue.  Letters,
like friendship, lose their charm when one makes a
business of them.
    It is the greatest mistake to think that our
hurried age is alien to the composition of letters.
Haste is the best thing that can<120> happen to a
letter; it enforces compression.  Actually our own time
is peculiarly adapted to produce letters.  Its very
hurry is inimical to sustained writing.  Thinking
people may put themselves into letters when they have
no time to put themselves into books.  Not only the
rapidity of the present but its intensity stimulates
letter-writing.  Even the most commonplace people are
quickened to observation and to thought at a time when
tragedies are being unrolled before the dullest of us,
and when every day is fateful with pity and fear for
even the most obscure.  Personal reaction to the
portents of the present is not to be escaped, for never
in history was there so much to see and to feel.
    As never before was there so much to see, so never
before was there such an impulse to say something about
it; but the immensity of our time prevents our speaking
in any finished and final form.  Our day is too vast
for comment.  All that we can record is our daily
impressions; and how much more readily these fall into
letter shape than into treatise or play or novel or
poem!  These four forms necessitate structure,
analysis, synthesis; they presuppose penetration into
the significance back of events.  The letter is free
from all these requirements, and therefore is better
fitted to<121> express our times than, for example, the
poem, which to-day, false to its old high calling,
deliberately avoids all divination, all guesses at the
ultimate and the infinite.
    The letter, always humble, informal, inconsequent,
need not strain to recount any but an individual
reaction and interpretation.  It aspires to no
universal wisdom, and by its very modesty and sincerity
may perhaps for the future furnish the truest
historical record obtainable of a period too terrible
to understand itself.
    One would naturally expect letters to be produced
in an age which, bewildered as it is, is singularly
articulate in regard to all its puzzles and its pain.
Ease of expression was never so general as now.  More
people are able to say what they have to say than ever
before, and more people are able to say it, too, with
facility and with force.  The newspapers are crowded by
letters tingling with penetration, often memorable in
phrasing, written by men and women in every class and
place.  The level of intelligence and of expression was
never so high.  People are writing not only to the
press but to each other better letters than ever
before.  Impressions are so intense that they compel
utterance.  One proof of the prevalence and popularity
of letter-writing<122> to-day is in the many books and
articles that are the chance discoveries of the mail
box.  For such revelations, such unintentional
literature, every editor is on the alert.  The history
of our time is being everywhere written to-day in the
best letters that were ever penned; but for one such
collection discovered, how many are fated to be
fugitive always and unpreserved?



                               XII

                     _The Tyranny of Talent_

    We come into life handicapped by many a tyranny,
but by none heavier than the insolence of that
particular ability packed into our still imperfect
cranium.  Although one may observe in rare individuals
the exhibition of a fine independence that from infancy
to age consistently refuses to develop the dominance of
some obvious talent, for the most part we yield to the
conventional views that defy such despotism, and to our
own delight in that little toy, success, which the
autocrat dangles before our eyes.  The only people
never disillusioned are the unsuccessful.  Every time
we succeed we take a tuck in a dream.  Of all domains,
the most desirable is the kingdom of dreams, and the
only people who never lose it, who, rather, reinherit
it from day to day, are the people who consistently and
conscientiously fail.
    There are, however, only an enviable few of us who
are not able to do some one thing well.  It does not
need, of course, to be anything notable.  We need not
be the fools of<124> fame, in order to taste all the
depths of success.  We may merely be able to tie up
parcels with neatness and dispatch,--rest assured we
shall be enforced to tie up everybody's parcels until
we totter into our graves.  Most households can boast a
member with an ability to find things; the demands upon
the time and the resourcefulness of such a professional
finder prevent her ever finding peace (a finder is, of
course, always feminine).  One could multiply
indefinitely examples from immediate experience that
prove the argument for inefficiency.
    The tyranny of talent has beset our path with many
little proverbs that bark at our lagging heels.
"Nothing succeeds like success" has hounded many a man
to a desolate eminence.  "Whatever is worth doing is
worth doing well" is a maxim that we allow to control
our activities as thoroughly as we refuse to allow it
to convince our intelligence: for obviously whatever is
worth doing is _not_ worth doing well; on the one hand
the statement may authorize a wasteful and
indiscriminate energy; and, far worse, it is manifestly
false, because everything that gives you joy is worth
doing, and ten to one the thing that gives you most joy
in the doing, is the thing that you do very ill
indeed.<125>
    Superficially considered, success appears to be a
consequence of self-expression necessarily gratifying;
intimately experienced, success is found to be a
consequence of self-repression most painful.  The
trouble is that one never knows in time.  Often one
goes gambolling into success unwittingly as a young
animal, only to have one's first joyous neigh, or bray,
of achievement cut short by feeling sudden hands bind
one to a treadmill--the treadmill that impels one to
grind out similar achievements, tramp-tramp-tramp, all
the rest of one's life.  The worst is that no one ever
suspects the excellently efficient middle-aged nag of
still sniffing a larking canter through the mad spring
meadows of the unattempted.  Our best friends suppose
the treadmill contents us.  Yet we are always
cherishing our own little dreams of a medium of
expression better suited to our individuality than that
skill with which nature has endowed us.  Browning
acknowledges the phenomenon in "One Word More," in
noting the dissatisfaction of the artist with his
proper medium:--

        "Does he paint?  He fain would write a poem,--
        Does he write?  He fain would paint a picture,
        Put to proof art alien to the artist's,
        Once and only once, and for one only,
        So to be the man and leave the artist,
        Gain the man's joy, miss the artist's sorrow."

<126>
    The psychological experience described is more
fundamental than its application in the poem merely to
love and a lady.
    The harshness of a controlling talent is severe in
restricting us not alone to what we can do well, but to
what we can do best.  If we paint, we must not only not
write a poem, but we must not attempt a picture
different from our best; if we write, we must continue
to write in the type and the tone of our first
successful experiment.  The chef may long to be an
astronomer, but not only must he stick to his
flesh-pots, but if, in the gusto of some early
egg-beating, he has stumbled upon the omelet
superlative, he must continue to furnish the world with
omelets, no matter if eggs become for him an utter
banality, and no matter how his fancy be seething with
voluptuous dishes of air-drawn cabbage, or super-sheep.
    The world is too much against us if we try to lay
down the burdens the task-master Talent has imposed.
The successful man belongs to the public: he no longer
belongs to himself.  Talent, tried and proved and
acclaimed, is too strong for us; we continue its
savorless round, against all our inward protest.  We
are its slaves, and through the amiability ineradicable
in most bosoms, the slaves<127> also of our admiring
kinsfolk and friends and public; most of all, perhaps,
the slaves of our own self-doubt, for possibly after
all they are right, possibly we are justly the chattels
of Talent, and not of that whispered self of the air,
taunting, teasing us, "What you have done is sordid, is
savorless!  Come with me to attempt the unexplored!"
This desire denied is both acknowledgment that all our
lordly labeled triumphs may have had a false acclaim,
and is also a protest against all mundane and mortal
valuations.  Our unshackled ego, scorning things done
that took the eye and had the price, seems to have the
truer voice.  Is not art itself the assurance that we
are no petty slaves of efficiency, but heirs of a
serene domain where the unaccomplished is forever the
only thing worth accomplishing?



                              XIII

                     _The Woman Who Writes_

I often wonder how other women write.  Workers in art
material are chary of revealing processes that might
save other workers wasted effort and vain experiment,
or, better yet, provoke challenge still more conducive
to success.  I venture to believe that any woman's
literary product is a matter of constant, and often
desperate, compromise between writing and living; and
some examination into the wherefore of this fact may
throw light on the nature of writing processes, if not
also on the nature of woman processes.  Since there are
scant data for analyzing the methods of other women
writers, I give only my own, the experiment and
experience of a woman who has chosen to earn a living
as a literary free lance.
    Such conclusions must necessarily be personal and
practical, pretending to no theories except those made
by immediate need.  Driven to earn to-day's bread and
butter, I really have no time to study the superiority
of prehistoric woman in the struggle for
existence.<129>  Nor can I give undivided attention to
the achievements of my sex as promised by the feminist
millennium, when my 9 A.M. problem is to write a story
that shall please some editor, presumably male.  I do
not know whether or not woman's intellect is the equal
of man's; I know only that mine is not.
    While observation teaches me that every woman
worker may gain by adopting to a certain degree the
methods of men, the feminist promise of an eventual
equal productiveness is to me a promise barren, if
true.  So far as I can see, individual men and women
have, alike, just so much vitality.  If women devote
this vitality to doing what men do, they will have just
so much less to devote to being what women are.  As a
writer I aspire to write a book; as a woman I shall
forever prefer to be a person rather than a book.
    In an examination into the psychology and methods
of the woman writer, two things should be clearly kept
in mind.  The first is that of all professions open to
both sexes, writing should furnish the most reliable
conclusions in regard to the relative accomplishment of
men and women; for from Sappho's day to ours a woman
has been as free to write as a man.  Life is the only
university in which a writer can be trained, and that
univer<130>sity has always been strictly coeducational.
Neither have there ever been any restrictions,
commercial or social, to bar a woman's way to the
literary career.  It follows that any restrictions that
exist must be imposed, not from without, but from
within, must be due to the nature of the creature,
physical, mental, and spiritual.
    The second fact not to be forgotten is that of all
the professions practiced by women writing is the one
most intimately affected by a woman's personal life and
philosophy.  It is far easier to detach yourself from
your own dailyness for the purposes of music, painting,
or science, than to separate yourself from the book you
are writing, which is necessarily self-expressive.
Consequently a woman's literary productiveness is far
more precariously dependent upon her peace of mind than
any other form of professional activity.  There are too
many mute Miltons, too easily silenced, among my sex;
but on the other hand--a fact equally due to the
feminine fusion of living and writing--history has
shown, perhaps will always show, that woman's most
valid intellectual achievement is in literature.
    As a writer-worker, I have found no way of getting
even with my limitations except by<131> frankly
shouldering them.  The body my soul bears upon its back
is a heavier burden to carry than a man's, and I find I
cannot accomplish the pilgrimage if I give up my own
little jog-trot for a man's stride.  All that happens
is that I lose my breath, and break my back, and have
to lie down by the roadside to be mended.  But when I
do keep my own small pace, I have time and strength to
pick a few fence-row flowers, too fine and frail and
joyous for any striding man to notice.
    I turn sharply from my own figures of speech to Mr.
W. L. George's airier fancies, to the most vital facts
of feminine existence brushed so lightly by the
masculine intelligence that it can say, "_in passing_,
that we do not attach undue importance to woman's
physical disabilities. . . .  I suspect that this is
largely remediable, for I am not convinced that it is
woman's peculiar physical conditions that occasionally
warp her intellect: it is equally possible that a
warped intellect produces unsatisfactory physical
conditions.  Therefore if, as I firmly believe that we
can, we develop this intellect, profound changes may
with time appear in these physical conditions."
    My own warped intellect, belonging to a woman who
must write stories for a living,<132> points out that,
if it has taken aeons of differentiation under the
guidance of Dame Nature to accomplish my own personal
physical disabilities, I can hardly afford to wait for
aeons of differentiation under the guidance of Mr.
George to accomplish my own personal physical freedom.
    Looking at things as they are, I find my body
constantly pushing upon my work; but it is possible to
treat a body with a certain humorous detachment.  It is
possible to say to yourself, this is a headache that
you have, don't do it the honor of letting it become a
heartache, your own or--far more fateful peril--your
heroine's.  It is quite practicable for a woman to live
apart from her body even when it hurts, quite
practicable to give it sane and necessary attention,
while keeping the soul separate from it, exactly as if
she were ministering to some tired baby; this course is
one of the only two solutions I have ever discovered of
the problem of preserving a worker's spirit in a
woman's body.  The other solution lies in the frank
concession to certain physical incapacities as the
price one pays for certain psychological capacities.
    A woman's talent both for being a woman and for
being a writer is measured by the force and the
accuracy of her intuitions.  My<133> intuitions in
regard to the people about me, when duly transformed
into story-stuff, have a definite market value.  If I
did not possess them, I could not conceive, make, or
sell a single manuscript.  Supersensitive impressions
necessitate the supersensitive channels by which a
woman's outer world connects with her inner one.  If I
will have woman's intuitions, I must have my woman's
nervous system.  So long as I think telepathy the best
of sport, I must consent to give house-room to its
delicate machinery, even to the extent of keeping cool
when that machinery gets out of order and buzzes with
neuritis or neuralgia or insomnia.  The additional fact
is only superficially paradoxical, that when the woman
worker takes the disorder of her nervous machinery thus
philosophically, it is much less likely to have any
disorder.
    The fallibility of a woman's body seems beyond
disputing.  If a man does dispute it, it is because he
never had one; if a woman disputes it, well,
personally, if I can't be as strong as a man I should
like to be as honest as one!  The fallibility of a
woman's intellect is a little more open to argument,
but only a little.  I keep to my primary assumption
that I am not trying to see further than my nose, or to
voice any observations but my own.<134>  Among the men
and women of history and among those of my vicinity, I
cannot see that woman's brain is the equal of man's in
originality, in concentration, or in power of sustained
effort.  As a worker, I find that I can write for only
a few hours and no more: beyond that limit stands
disaster for the woman, and, far more perilous,
disaster for the writing.  In regard to my brain as in
regard to my body, the primary condition of doing my
work at all lies in recognizing the truth that I can't
do so much work, or do it so well, as a man.
    In all matters that can be weighed or measured, a
man's endowment is superior to a woman's; but, on the
other hand, a woman's endowment consists in the quality
and the quantity of an imponderable something that
cannot be weighed or measured.  The chief difficulty
about analyzing a woman's brain is that it is so hard
to separate her brain from the rest of the woman,
whereas men are put together in plainly discernible
pieces--body, mind, and soul.
    The perfection of a woman's intellect depends upon
the perfection of its fusion with her personality.  A
woman amounts to most intellectually when she amounts
to still more personally.  She cannot move in pieces
like a<135> man, or like an earthworm.  It needs the
whole woman, acting harmoniously, to write.  A man can
retire into his brain and make a book, and a good one,
leaving all the rest of his personality in confusion;
but a woman must put her whole house in order before
she can go off upstairs into her intellect and write.
It follows that a woman's artistic achievement is for
her a harder job than a man's achievement is for him,
which would make the other fact--namely, that the
woman's book when written is never so great as the
man's--seem additionally cruel, if we could not discern
that the best of women writers have, in attaining that
best, reached not one result but two: impelled to clean
all her spirit's house before she can feel happy to
write in it, a woman writer achieves both a home that
people like to visit and a book that people like to
read.  Is it not true of all the greatest women authors
that we think of them as women before we think of them
as authors?
    Of fiction-makers in our own tongue the greatest
man is Shakespeare and the greatest woman is Jane
Austen.  In personal revelation both were signally
reserved, the woman the more so, seeing that she did
not even burst into the hieroglyphics of a sonnet
sequence; but of the two our first thought of the
woman<136> is "dear Jane," and of the man, "dear
Rosalind"--or Beatrice or Mercutio.  A man, possessing
a separable intellect and an imagination so original
that it can sometimes create what he personally is
little capable of experiencing, may sometimes write one
thing and be another; but not so a woman.  On the other
hand, has any woman ever attained such greatness that,
at the mention of her name, we think of the books she
wrote before we think of the woman she was?
    It is true that professional women who direct their
toil on the conviction that a woman's brain is of the
same quality as a man's sometimes produce work that
approximates a man's in quantity.  But sober
observation of such women does not make me want to be
one.  I see them too often paying the penalty of being
lopped and warped.  Again I cannot see that, while such
women attain their Ph.D.'s and M.D.'s and LL.D.'s, they
ever attain the highest rank in literature.
Imaginative writing seems to demand inexorably that a
woman writer be inexorably a woman.  On the other hand,
I have reached as a brain-worker the conclusion that,
while my head is different in substance from a man's, I
get most work out of it when I copy a man's mental
methods.  My brain is a vague<137> and volatile mass,
shot through with fancies, whimseys, with flashes of
intuitive and illuminative wisdom, and it is a task
surpassingly difficult to hold all this volatility,
this versatility, to the rigors of artistic expression,
to the stern architectonics of fiction.  To the degree
that a woman shall succeed in imposing upon the matter
of her intellect the method of a man's intellect, to
that degree shall her work show the sanity and serenity
of universal, and sexless, art.
    To impose upon a woman's intellect a man's
discipline and detachment is excellent in theory; it is
staggering in practice.  Convention and his own will
make a man's time his own.  A woman's genius is for
personality, or achievement within herself; a man's is
for work, or achievement outside of himself.  Now it
takes time to be a person, and it takes other people.
A real woman's life is meshed in other people's from
dawn to dark.  These strands of other lives are to her
so vital and precious that for no book's sake will she
ever break them, yet for any book's sake she must
disentangle them.  A woman writer's life is a constant
compromise, due to the fact that if she does not live
with her fellows, she will not have anything to write,
and that if she does not withdraw from them, she will
not have<138> time to write anything.  I do not know
how other writing women manage their time.  I know that
to attain four hours a day at my desk means that I must
be revoltingly stern with myself, my family, and my
friends.  One pays a price for retirement, but one need
not pay too heavily.  A solution lies in retaining
those relations that mean real humanity, while cutting
off those that mean only society: I do not play bridge,
but I do play with children.
    Of course, it always seems plausible to solve the
problem of time to one's self by running off to some
strange place, but this never works very well.  The
reason is that such isolation is sure to prove
evanescent, so that you have to keep packing your trunk
and moving on to new exile, because human tendrils are
so strong and stealthy that they push their way through
the thickest walls you can build, and twine themselves,
wherever you hide, about the fingers that want to
write.  In order to write a love-story of your own
invention, you run away from some friend's too
insistent love-story at home, and the first thing you
know you are deep in the love-affairs of your poor
little chambermaid.  You escape home worries only to
have some stranger's troubles batter down your
hotel<139> door.  You might as well stay at home and
put up with the truth, that if you care enough about
people to wish to write of them, you will care enough
for people to wish to live with them, abroad no less
than at home.  Besides, boarding is bleak and
blighting.  If I were a boarding woman, presently I
should feel too chilly to wish to write; my fancies and
my fingers would be too numb for expression.  I need a
home with its big warm peace and its little warm
frictions before I can feel cozy enough to want to chat
with a pen.
    There is a somewhat different alternative to home
existence; I have heard of communities duly arranged
for the requirements of writers, where they enjoy a
kind of clublike privacy and security from
interruption.  But are not such communities confined to
the near-great?  Are real writers any more than real
persons attracted by such an abnormal existence?
Writers who shun life and people are exactly the sort
that life and people shun.  Personally, I run away from
an author whenever I hear one coming.  Of the really
great ones, I am desperately afraid, and of the
not-so-great ones, far more so.

    Writer communities imply too much of the placard.
I wish I might never have to dangle<140> my profession
on a label.  I am always embarrassed when I am forced
blatantly to expose it--for example, to the frank
questions of the doctor's secretary, or of a customs
official.
    "Profession?" they ask, and I cringe before the
admission, "I am a writer."  I don't feel ladylike when
I say the words.  On such occasions I would give my
entire remuneration for an "Atlantic" essay to be able
to say, "I am a laundress."
    Personally, I am only too glad to forget that I am
a Grub-Streeter, if only other people would forget.  No
matter how obscurely one has ever appeared in print,
one pays the penalty of the pinnacle ever after.
Surely one is no more responsible for the tendency of
one's talents than for the color of one's hair.  I
write because I have found it my best way of making a
living,--and also because I can't help it; therefore
why cannot people accept me as simply as if I were a
dressmaker?  I should be embittered by the curious
attitude of people toward the literary calling, if it
were not as funny as it is puzzling.  Once, at a tea,
an imposing matron hurtled from the front door to my
corner, crying out, "Can you talk as you write?  If so,
please do!"  I was dumb with discomfort for the rest of
the afternoon.<141>
    The subject of attitude toward the writer is worthy
of digression and topical analysis, for there is a
difference among friends, family, and general
acquaintance.  Now, it is not often that I wish to talk
as I write, but the occasions when I do, while rare,
are painful and urgent.  It is precisely on these
occasions that my friends fail me.  Essays are a long
while in being born, and while they are in process I
would give much for some one with whom to talk them
over.  It is not after a thing is published that a
writer needs appreciation: it is before, and especially
before it is written.  For twenty friends who will
loyally enjoy anything I write, I cannot count three
who will listen when I talk.  Yet the ideas are exactly
the same whether uttered by pen or tongue.  No friend
is so valuable as one ready to attend and sympathize
during the incubation and parturition of an idea.  And
yet the majority, knowing too well the author's
temperamental uncertainties, are perhaps to be forgiven
their preference to wait until the editorial
christening.  So much bigger to most minds is print
than person.  A writer's best friends are prone to
treat her with the affectionate inattention they would
give to a Blind Tom.  Yet I would rather my friends
never listened to me, than that they<142> always did;
it is much cozier to be considered an idiot than an
oracle.
    If friends are prone to take the writing more
seriously than they take the writer, her family, on the
contrary, share her throes too intimately to take their
poor sufferer lightly.  Few authors experience the
popular fallacy of a doting family audience.  A
shuddering apprehension of the potential effect upon
editor and reader makes kinfolk intensely critical.
The agonies to which any sympathetic household is
subjected when one member of it is writing a book are
such as to make them question whether any book is worth
the price of its creation.  A writer's family also
lives in the constant, but usually groundless, fear of
being written up.  There is both humor and pathos when
dear Granny retires into a corner with some foible she
knows you admired in infancy.  Relatives are always a
trifle uneasy in the presence of the chiel amang us
takin' notes.  I doubt if any success quite compensates
for the discomfort of being blood-kin to a writer.
True, a family can sometimes be discovered passing the
book or magazine around among the neighbors, but they
don't wish you to catch them with it in their own
hands.  Friends and family are alike in their
complexity of attitude, being insistent that<143> other
people shall admire you, but afraid of making you
conceited if they admire you themselves.  The danger of
conceit can be safely entrusted to editors and
reviewers, not to mention the disillusion that sickens
any author on comparing the finished book with the
fancied one.
    But if a writer is comfortably without honor among
her intimates, she is more than honored by the
attention accorded by chance acquaintance.  The
attitude of the average person toward print as print is
enigmatic.  Not all people place the pen on a pedestal,
but all regard the penman as somehow different.  I once
essayed retirement at a little village hotel.  I was
promptly established in a room made sacred by the
previous occupancy of another lady author.  Her name I
had never before heard, although I heard it daily
during my sojourn.  Her sole producible work was a
railroad advertisement of some remote garden-spot in
California, but it had been enough to confer a halo, as
well as to win more substantial reward, for I
afterwards found out that, solely for the literary
aroma she diffused, the lady had been allowed to remain
two years without paying a cent of board.
Unfortunately I did not discover the fact until I had
paid my own board for two months.<144>  The incident
disproves the charge that the United States has no
popular respect for the fine arts.
    Print is prone to induce curious revelations from
strangers.  You write, perhaps, a story that tries to
be true to simple human emotions, and the next thing
you know, somebody in Idaho is writing you all about
his wife or baby.  It is touching, but quaint.  I have
come to be a little suspicious of letters from
strangers that purport to be simple letters of
appreciation.  I used to be very much flattered by them
until my brief notes of thanks drew forth such
unexpected replies.  It appeared that the writers of
the letters were writers of other works as well; they
were sending these to me forthwith; would I kindly read
and comment?  My experience is, I gather, not unique.
A writer-friend, whose published poetry is marked by
peculiar sanity, has received from more than one
unknown source effusions so bizarre that they can
emanate from nothing but a madhouse.
    It is easy to silence by silence these unseen
acquaintance, but others nearer by demand tact.  Among
these are people who tell me stories they want me to
tell.  They never can understand why I don't use the
material.  As a matter of fact, raw romance striking
enough<145> to impress the lay mind is much too
striking for a writer's employment.  Truth that is
stranger than fiction is what every story-teller must
avoid if he is to write stories true enough to be read.
    What I more and more discover is that nine tenths
of the people one meets want to write, that seven
tenths of them have at some time tried, and that not
more than one tenth of them perceive why they have
failed.  Since they think the impulse to write more
distinctive than its accomplishment, and since they
feel that they have the impulse in all its glory, they
regard with a half-contemptuous envy the person who
actually does write.  They regard creation as purely
inspirational, and look askance at a worker who goes to
her desk every morning like a machine.  For all I know,
they are right.  A good many people think that the only
reason they are not writers is that they never tried to
be.  Others think they would have written if they had
only been taught how, if they had had the opportunity
of certain courses in college.  Still others think
there must be some charmed approach to an editor's
attention.  Who introduced me, they frankly ask.  When
people talk like this it requires some self-control to
repress my conviction that any person who<146> could
have written would have written, and my knowledge that
the only introduction I ever had to any editor was made
by my own manuscripts.
    Friends, family, and general acquaintance have, I
find, one impulse in common, the desire always to hound
down the autobiographic.  They read, beam brightly,
look up at me, and say, "Oh, here is Aunt Sarah's
chicken-pen!"  Actually it is an old well I once saw in
Brittany.  "Oh, here is the story of old Mr. Gresham at
his grandnephew's funeral.  Don't you remember I showed
you Elsie's letter about it?"  I never saw the letter,
never heard of old Mr. Gresham, and the chapter in
question describes the antics of a four-year-old at his
father's wedding.
    "Here is Saidie Lippincott to the life!"
    I gasp, "Who is Saidie Lippincott?"
    "Don't you remember you met her at Rose Earle's tea
when you visited me four years ago?"
    There is no possession people are so unwilling to
let one have as an imagination.  In private, friends
will tear a book to shreds to discover some portrait
they can recognize; and in the case of authors famous
enough to be dead, critics rake the ground wherever
they have trod in an effort to prove that the<147> folk
of their fancy were drawn from the earth rather than
the air.  There seems no means of convincing a reader
that in a writer's head are constantly a thousand faces
he has never seen or heard of, all subtle with story,
all begging for a book, and all so real that they often
make his daily waking seem a dream.

    There is no denying that there is autobiography in
all fiction, but the relation of the two is not so
superficial as the mere introduction of facts and of
characters from one's daily life.  The actual relation
of experience and its expression is deep and intricate,
and, especially for the woman writer, pervasive.  As
one must adjust one's work to a feminine body, to a
feminine brain, and to distinctly feminine social
relations, so one must take into account as still more
determinative a woman's spiritual characteristics.
However potent the impulse to write, the impulse to
live is deeper.  I have dwelt on the negative side of
this problem, the uselessness of fleeing to strange
places to escape other people's burdens; but it is
impossible to over-emphasize the positive side, the
difficulties of staying at home with the burdens that
Providence has provided.  However intense the joys and
sorrows of the people the woman<148> creates, the joys
and sorrows of the people she loves will be still more
intense.  It needs both poise and vitality to be equal
to the demands both of fancy and of fact.  The mere
external tangle of hours and seasons that any human
relations necessitate is nothing compared with the
spiritual tangle of one's sympathies.  The instinct to
soothe and succor and the instinct to think and write
meet in a daily, an hourly, variance.  Heart and head
are equally insistent in their demands, and equally
vengeful if unsatisfied.  Books cry to be written, and
people cry to be loved, and to whichever one I turn a
deaf ear, I am presently paying the penalty of a great
unrest and discontent.  To preserve the balance of
attention between the needs of her head and the needs
of her heart is the biggest problem any woman writer
faces.  I have discovered no ultimate solution; it is
rather a matter of small daily solutions, in which at
one time we sacrifice the friend to the book, and at
another the book to the friend.
     Yet in any crucial choice a real woman chooses
living rather than literature.  My brain itself
approves this yielding of intellect to emotions for the
very simple reason that, if I don't thus yield, the
emotions denied will avenge themselves on the brain,
and the<149> book I write will be unnatural because I
myself am unnatural.
    Once I thought it impossible to write when people
about me were in distress: I proposed to myself to wait
until things should settle down.  I perceived that
things never do settle down; that for women who have
human affections, there will always be somebody
somewhere to worry about.  It is rather inspiring to be
a woman, because it is so difficult.  With the winds
blowing from every direction at once, one must somehow
steer a course that will reveal alike to the reader who
knows one's book and to the friend who knows one's
heart, a halcyon serenity.
    A relative detachment from her own living is as
necessary for a woman writer as an absolute detachment
is stultifying.  Since for a woman expression is fused
with experience, clean hands and a pure heart are for
her the fundamental demands of art, and this fact means
that she must be constantly scouring off her sense of
humor with spiritual sapolio before she can effectively
handle a pen.  Be sure her philosophy will find her out
in her book far more clearly than in a man's.
    The natural fusion of a woman's brain with her
emotions, resisted, leads to intellectual<150>
weakness; accepted, leads to intellectual strength.  In
the history of literature George Sand is the great
example of a woman who won success by the masculine
solution of detachment from experience, and Jane
Austen, the great example of a woman who won success by
the feminine solution of identification with her own
dailyness.
    I am inclined to think the latter by far the
greater artist, just as I am inclined to think that in
literature rather than in any other form of mental
activity will always be found woman's highest
intellectual achievement, for the simple reason that
woman's genius consists in personality, and for the
expression of personality words are the only adequate
medium.  Jane Austen's example is the great
encouragement for the woman who wishes to write without
ceasing to be a simple everyday woman.  Jane Austen was
capable of a detachment that enabled her to write books
that give no hint of the thunder of the Napoleonic wars
even when she had two brothers on fighting ships.  She
was capable of an identification with her surroundings
that enabled her to write novels of universal humanity
and eternal artistry and to keep right on being
everybody's aunt at the same time.  She was sane
and<151> humorous in her novels because she was sane
and humorous out of them.  She achieved fame because
she had first achieved personality.  Still, her fame is
only a thin frail fire set beside the effulgence of a
dozen men of her time.
    Yet I would rather have been Jane Austen than
Shelley or Wordsworth or Keats.  It is perfectly just
that men's books should be greater than women's,
because men are willing to pay the price.  Not to write
"Macbeth" would I willingly give up an afternoon's romp
with a baby.  As a woman I reckon my spirit's capital,
not in terms of accomplishment, but in terms of my own
joy, and a baby brings me more joy than a book.
    Men ought to write better than women because they
care more; in a way women who write have the more
impersonal outside-of-themselves impulsion, because
inside of themselves they don't care.  I acknowledge
the urge of writing and I am willing up to a certain
point to pay by means of a vigorous mental discipline
and a certain self-saving from useless self-spending,
but I don't pretend that writing satisfies me.
Something descends upon me and says, "Write," and
shakes me like a helpless kitten until I do write; but
it's a relief when the shaking is over, and I<152> am
left to the merrier business of merely being myself.
In other words, I am a writer because I can't help it,
but I am a woman because I choose to be.



                               XIV

                        _Picnic Pictures_

Her white house is the same, with a difference.  It was
always a house fitted to the person like a garment, a
friendly house with peace in the corners, a house warm
with sun or firelight; yet I think we always used the
house merely as a starting-place for picnics, for
running away into the out-of-doors with a well-stocked
basket.  We are at best only reformed dryads, my friend
and I, and I am not even reformed.  I think perhaps
that it was in like manner that we used our two selves,
merely as a starting-point for picnics, for the leap
into the infinite, the challenging of space and time,
the tossing of stars like play-balls from one to the
other, always with the joy of the word shaping on the
tongue to the gleam in a friend's eye.  We are lovers
of words, I and she.  True we also had talk in the
library, dusked with books, dead men's spirits packed
shoulder to shoulder on the shelves.  There was brave
firelight in the library, and quiet candles, and there
was also Xerxes.  The great gray Persian curled on
one<154> corner of the big desk.  Even asleep he
dominated the home in his sole masculinity.  Yet to me
he was sexless and sphinxlike except when he forsook
his Oriental calm for strange gambols in the white
moonlight, a bounding gray shape of a tiger grace.
Sometimes Xerxes rose and stretched as if our
conversation bored him, sometimes his great purring
drowned out the Occidental flippancy of our chat.  He
was more king than cat, and he always made me a little
uncomfortable, that Xerxes.  To-day he is not dead but
deposed.  His place on the desk is usurped by a sturdy
box of cigars.
    However happily we might talk in the library we
always knew we were better without a roof, for in the
blood of the born picnicker there is something that
must always be running, dancing, flying.  Out-of-doors,
there were the little brooks to chuckle at us if talk
delved too deep, and the pine-tops to fill all pauses
with quiet music.  We were the better picnickers
because we lived for the most part in life's
schoolroom.  We counted our picnic days and sorted them
into due order of excellence, some better, some not
quite so merry, yet all very good.  But lately I had
begun to wonder about the picnics, for the difference
in the white, hill-girdled house is a<155> husband.
When our friends marry we always wonder about the
picnics, for sorrow is always a third comrade to hold
two friends' hands the tighter, and to keep their feet
more closely in step; it is happiness that may sever
and un-self people.
    This, our first married picnic, dawned as brisk and
bright as any.  The master is not with us.  He departs
each morning for a mysterious place called "The Works."
That is something I have always noticed in husbands,
that tendency to go forth to "The Works."  Somehow no
matter how hard women may toil for their daily bread,
they never seem to belong to "The Works" of the world.
The white house bustles with picnic preparations.  It
has to bustle when Jennie is in it.  Jennie?  Well,
Jennie might be called the steam-engine at the middle
of the merry-go-round.  Some day I think the world will
grow wise enough to stop talking about the servant
question, and begin to study the philosophy that is
still often to be found going about wrapped in a maid's
cap and apron.  Jennie, a little person quick of foot,
bounces up and down like a merry ball, and cries to the
blue May morning while she butters sandwiches, "Picnic
time has come again!  Picnic time has come again!"  Yet
I never heard of Jennie's going<156> on a picnic; do
people ever know, I wonder, how much of other people's
unselfishness must go to the making of anybody's Eden?
    The hall rocks to the bouncings and barkings of
Mac, for he, too, feels picnic in the air.  Mac is a
newcomer, so is Peggy, the mare, ready tied beneath a
tree to carry us over the hills and far away.  When
Adam came to this Eden, he brought his animals with
him, a method much better than the Scriptural one, for
it must have been a strain on any honeymoon, that
influx of indiscriminate elephant and dinosaur,
cormorant and anteater, and what not.  The animals here
were carefully chosen, Mac, the shaggy, clumsy,
warm-hearted Airedale, and Peggy, high-bred as a lady
of the old South, having all such a lady's charm and
grace and fundamental loyalty touched with just the
dash of deviltry considered meet to spice the masculine
palate.  It is with the clatter of Mac's ecstatic
barking as he plunges before Peggy's light hoofs that
we go driving forth toward the blue, hillswept horizon.
    There is a tentative venturesomeness about my
friend's driving, for horsemanship with her is a recent
accomplishment, and a proud one, to the zest of which
Peggy contributes with a pricking of ears and a
graceful dip to<157> the side of the road before every
motor-car.  Mac trots briskly in front or behind, or to
the side.  His path through life is one of friendly
detours.  He will never accomplish any great deeds in
dogdom.  He is one of the simple souls unconscious of
their magnetism.  There is not an animal by the
roadside that does n't come ambling up to his genial
little nose.  Even a herd of Jersey cows lopes clumsily
across the pasture to chat with him at the bars, and no
dog, big or little, fails to wish Mac good-morning.
    It is the kind of morning for good wishes both for
dogs and men.  Knotted old farmers, seeing our picnic
faces and picnic basket, grin and twinkle, sharing the
May sunshine.  The hills are a dim blue against a sky
still softer.  Boulder-strewn pastures, more brown than
green, are starred with bluets.  Far off there, below a
shaggy stretch of pines, is a field so golden with
dandelions that it quivers as if held by midsummer
beat.
    We don't know where we are going; that is always
the charm of our picnics, to follow the will of the
road.  It carries us past a sawmill in the wood.  Its
stridency and the tang of fresh sawdust strike sharp
across the air fragrant with fern.  Then the road is
off again across the open, cleaving farms with their
broad<158> greening fields.  The meadowlarks ring out
their calls to us.  The bobolinks dart and dive and
sing.  I turn to my companion in sudden question:  "Now
that you are married to a woodsman, do you know
anything more about birds?"
    "Oh, no," she answers easily, "we know only the
nice birds"; thus reassuring me that in her company I
need fear, no more than of old, to meet any but the
best bird society, robins and blackbirds and orioles
and the other long-established families, and reassuring
me also as to my fear that the one left behind at "The
Works" might prove to be one of these bugaboo birdmen,
of all beings the most subtly superior.  In fact, it is
very difficult to extract good conversation from any
kind of human encyclopedia, ornithological or other.
    Everywhere the cherry trees and pear are snowed
over with white, but the apple blossoms are unopened,
turning to a deep rose amid the pale-green leaves.  The
orchards are nearly human in their individuality,
whether they form a little battalion of old men, sturdy
and gnarled and steadfast, or a band of little budding
baby trees toddling up a hill.  There are no great
waters in this countryside, but many little glinting
brooks, pattering<159> downhill beside our wheels, then
meandering through meadows beneath their bushy willows.
We are minded to follow a brook and let it lead us to
perfect picnic.  It leads us, of course, up a hill and
up, away from all farms, all valleys, into a deep woods
road, hushed and strange, and at last beckons us aside
from the road itself, with a twinkle of white birch
stems, and the swirl of wild water, white and amber.
    It takes a long time to tie and blanket Peggy while
I sit dreaming in the dappled shade beside the musical
rush of water, haunted by my friend's own song that
once set all this woodland madness to elfin rhythms.
But my mood is interrupted by the thumping down of the
stout picnic basket.  She is smilingly tolerant of my
dryad whimseys, but for herself, nowadays, she wishes
to unpack that basket and get settled.  It is for me
also, perhaps, to be smilingly tolerant of the other
dryad turned domestic; for me, brook water still has
power to turn me dizzy and to make my heart stop
beating.
    It is the same basket we used to carry, but, like
the house, it has a difference.  There is a great
object concealed in ebony leather, and it is called the
"wap-eradicator."  The term is profoundly masculine,
for a "wap" is some<160> evil-eyed foreigner who might
disturb our picnic privacy, and his eradicator is a
pistol.  There is also a marvelous jackknife which I
pause in unpacking to examine.  It again is no lady's
toy, seeing that it has not only all the blades a lady
might require, but in addition a screwdriver and a
corkscrew, a tack-puller and a can-opener.  There is
stout enamel ware in the basket, too, whereas we always
used to carry china, feminine and fragile.  Food, much
of that,--but then we always did take food, for I have
noticed that poets need a deal of victualing.  In fact,
roast beef is about the best thing you can do for
anybody's imagination.  One packet I myself put in for
old sake's sake, despite her laughter, a yellow
envelope packed with her typed poetry.  "We'll never
look at it," she said, and she generally knows.  She
pulls forth now some scribbled tablets, skeleton
stories of my own, "Your little deedles," she
designates them in genial contempt, and plants the
cream jar upon them.
    Presently she is off to gather fagots for the fire,
admonishing my absentmindedness, "Don't let Mac eat the
food before we do."  I note how much handier she has
grown in all wood-lore.  To-day the fire needs no
coaxing, also it's a much smaller fire than we used
to<161> build.  We used to have a scorching splutter
for a wee bit of coffee.  This fire goes briskly and to
the point, showering us now and then with cinders, yet
on the whole well-behaved.  In other days we toasted
our bacon on forked sticks, but there's a fine
frying-pan now, with rings to thrust a rod into,
tightening it with twigs.  Bacon and eggs sizzle
merrily, and the coffee-kettle boils its cover off.  We
sit smut-cheeked and zestful, and exhibit a great
capacity for sandwiches.  There is much complacency in
our manners.  Her coffee, she remarks, "has seven kinds
of sticks in it, but is perfectly potable."  The fire,
that low, leaping ruddiness against a gray boulder, is
the best fire she "ever personally conducted."  As for
me, there is plenty of chuckle in me, too, but I am
thinking, when shall we begin to talk, for was that not
what we always went to the woods for?  Somehow, what
with building fires, and brewing and frying, with
eating and drinking, and giving Mac and Peggy to eat
and drink, there has not been time for talking.  That
will come later, when we have packed away the
sandwiches we could not eat, and given Mac his drink
from our emptied coffee-pail, and Peggy her two lumps
of sugar.  Then surely at last we shall talk, about
poems and stories, and all things writ<162>able, and
all things livable.  Sometimes I think she guesses what
I am waiting for and regards me with a twinkle, while
she moves about light-footed, setting away our clutter.
    But afterwards she is sleepy, lying stretched in
flickering shadow on the brown pine needles; and I, the
picnic place has caught me again into its spell.
Nowhere does spring come stepping so delicately as in
New England.  In other places there is more riot and
revelry in the carnival of bursting blossoms and leaf.
In New England spring has the face of a girl nun.
There are white violets in our woods and white birch
stems.  The very light has a quality soft and rare.
The sky is the Quaker ladies' own color.  Across the
swirling water that leaps down the rock path, the face
of a hill rises high into the sky.  It is all gray
boulder and brown, with a film of pale green over all,
touched here and there by the dreamy white of the
shadbush.  Nearer by, great boulders at the waterside
below us are moss-covered, and across them the dappled
shade of little leaves goes flickering.  The beautiful
tree shapes are unhidden, gray stems twining with
brown.  There is a satin sheen in the rod of light that
lines each trunk-shaft turned to the sun.  Just now,
sailing from nowhere, across the green-veiled gray
of<163> the hill opposite, there fluttered a white
butterfly.
    After a long time I touch the envelope packed with
poetry, and move it tentatively toward my friend's
hand.  She shoves it quietly aside.  Drowsy though she
is, she has an eye open to watch Peggy's glossy brown
head tossing down there in an amber-lit wood space, and
to see that Mac does not wake from his nap, where he
lies only half visible against the russet leaves he has
chosen to match his coat.  Nowadays any soaring talk
may be interrupted by a hearty "Whoa, Peggy!" or a
"Down, Mac!"  It is no poor punctuation, no unworthy
anchorage, for people whose feet have often ached from
treading the tree-tops.
    She has tossed aside her poetry, but will listen to
my stories.  I am eager to tell her about all the new
people in my brain.  She brushes the cobwebs from their
heads and from mine with all her old acumen, knowing,
in all the spacious sanities of the married woman, that
I need to write, while I, I know, too, that she need
not.  If we did not, each of us, understand, could
there be any more picnics?  But the pauses grow longer,
filled with the voices of the water and the wood.  The
air is warm and drowsy, and at last she is<164> fast
asleep, held close to the brown earth, and I, the other
one, sit straight, my back to a stout pine, while my
thoughts go wandering, gazing in at Eden, at all Edens.
Everybody's path skirts so many Edens, of the women
friends married, and the men friends married.  Passing
pilgrim-wise, one garners a walletful of reflections.
Looking at my friend lying there asleep on brown pine
needles, I know, as every woman must know, that she
will never again need me in the old way, and, as every
woman must be, I am far too glad to be sorry.  The
question for each of us, man or woman, outside the
fence, is, Will he, will she, still come out sometimes
into life's great open and picnic with me?  That all
depends, does it not? on the newcomer.  If he, if she,
is a petty person, there are no more picnics.  If a
man, moving in to possess all sky, all sea, every crack
and cranny of the universe, still holds most sacred
there that path of a woman's past which she walked,
alone, to come to him, he will leave untouched all the
little sunny picnic places, for any man big enough to
deserve all a woman's past would be far too big to
desire it; is not just that the secret of how to have
picnics though married?
    And still my thoughts go wandering, passing now
from the "wap-eradicator" to all<165> that lies back of
it, of our need for it.  How fundamentally different
the way in which we must both regard that great black
pistol lying between us!  To her it is a new toy,
something she has recently learned to shoot, and
deeper, truer, it is the symbol of a husband's
protection, while I see beyond it that great fevered
army of the unemployed, those who work and want, whose
presence makes a weapon necessary.  In some way I
cannot analyze, I know that I am vaguely glad that I am
on their side of the fence; in both my work and play
too far away from them, perhaps, and too forgetful,
still on their side of the ramparts of Eden, in that
strange great world where no one ever is satisfied.
    That packet of poetry tossed to earth, to which no
new poem has been added for many a month,--will she
ever write again, and shall I be glad or sorry, I who
know myself how a woman's writing is made?  Yet hers is
vital poetry, earth-warm and limpid as the song of the
meadowlark.  Curious how it is men who have best put
women into words, men who have made the best bedtime
lullabies for children; women have been much too happy
to talk about it.  Yet a happy woman with the gift of
song, if she remembered,--if she could set to music the
purring of her<166> kettle on the hob, the lilt of her
sewing-machine,--how the sunny words might twinkle on
harder, stranger paths!  But if happy people
remembered, could they then be happy?  Oh, dear me, why
must I be always asking questions?  The wind is
blowing, and against that big frowning boulder a
buttercup is bobbing in the sun: how many times a day
one is glad one does not have to be God, but only has
to know Him there, behind this sun-and-shadow curtain
we name Life!
    But my friend is awake, measuring the time of the
master's home-going and ours.  She is up, and running
down to the waterside.  I see her there, slender and
tall, light-poised on a stone.  Beyond her the opposite
hillside looms high, green and gray.  Above her ruddy
head a shadbush bends itself, russet and white like her
own woods-dress.  As I look she tosses the water from
her cup, and it falls in a great arc of sun-spray
against the dusk of the woods.
    The home-going is as glad as the going forth, but
quieter, with long shadows across the grass.  We pass
pools where tall trees stand with their feet in the
water in the gold light of late afternoon, and all the
motionless brown water is bordered bright with
marsh-marigolds.  We stop at a watering-trough, and I
must get out to undo Peggy's<167> check-rein, and to
keep a hand on Mac's collar so that he will not tumble
head foremost over the high rail.  I hand up a cup to
the driver seated, and we drink thirstily, all four of
us.
    One farm has been happy with a spring paint-brush
since our morning passing.  Every flower-pot, box,
tripod, and that curiously frequent flower-receptacle,
the iron boiler, cut in lengthwise section, has been
coated with dashing vermilion.  Spring had got into
their bones on that farm.
    Mac lags from time to time, and we have to stop to
lug and heave him into the wagon, where he lies across
our feet, a panting, restless lap-robe of warm
Airedale.  Now a curious social phenomenon occurs.  The
very dogs, which in the morning had nosed Mac in
friendliest fashion, come forth and bark and howl at
him in his present eminence.  It is the old, old story
of the proletariat protesting against the plutocrat.
    The green spring country is seamed by old stone
walls.  I do not know why an old stone wall has power
to touch my pulses strangely, to set stirring dreams
long prisoned.  It is some forgotten child association,
I suppose, the feeling that an old stone wall gives me,
exactly akin, by the way, to that of an old covered
bridge, with its magic of mystery-shod hoofs at
midnight.<168>
    Peggy's hoofs are swift, going home, and the road,
although the same, seems twice as short as before.  At
one point we vary it, cutting across country through a
wood of pines.  Beneath the pines the earth is all
brown unflecked by any sun, and the light is clear
amber, except that at the far edge of the grove there
are bright gold gleams through the distant tree stems.
Above our heads the color is not brown; it is that
strange deep gray-blue that makes mysterious the heart
of a pine tree where the branches meet the trunk.  We
have not talked very much to-day, she and I, but here
no one could speak any words.  These seem the stillest
woods in all the world.  We draw rein.  Suddenly from
out uttermost silence there rings the chime of a
thrush.
    But Peggy stamps and chafes, and Mac is panting.
Were the animals urgent just like this, I wonder, when
Adam and Eve longed to listen to some archangel's
voice?
    It is Peggy's will that we get home.  The master is
there before us, and at the barn.  That is another
thing I have noticed about husbands, when they are not
at "The Works," they are likely to be at the barn, if
there is one.  Jennie is flying about, singing to her
feet to keep them lively while she makes us a dinner.
Even when that meal comes I find<169> I am still
dreaming, for I was not, ready to come home.  Afterward
in the clear May twilight we move forth to doorstep and
lawn, It is Peggy's hour for evening cropping.  The
master leads her about.  Every turn of her head, every
lift of her foot, is a movement of grace.  In the
gathering twilight, soft and misty, Peggy seems some
beautiful horse stepping delicately out of elfland.
Mac is tugging at the other end of her tether rope, and
the master is somehow strung between them.
    The level meadows flow away before us.  The
deepening blue of the sky softly puts out the sunset.
Suddenly, as at some signal, the frogs begin to pipe
from the meadow pool.  My friend crosses the dusky lawn
to join those others.  She moves at Peggy's head in her
dim white dress.  One star comes out.
    Across their heads I see, hardly discernible, the
spires of the city, and its red earth-lights, and
somehow, although I know all its fever, all its pain, I
hear the far crying of its spirit to my spirit, cry of
innermost comradeship, the call of Home.  I rise now
from my seat on the doorstep, signal of good-night.
She comes flying to my side; of all the words she might
say, she chooses that best one, "It was our very nicest
picnic."



                               XV

                       _The Farm Feminine_

There are in my summer neighborhood three gentlemen
farmers who are women.  There is an implied distinction
in the implied definition.  The three I have under
observation are quite different from those women
farmers who have shouldered their husbands' acres when
forced to do so by widowhood or other marital
disability.  This difference, among others that readily
occur, is primarily the same as that between all actual
and amateur farming, the difference between those who
grow up out of the soil and know its tricks, and those
who come to the soil from another plane, and don't
suspect it of having any tricks.  At any rate, the lady
farmers of our neighborhood farm because they want to,
not because they have to; otherwise, perhaps, they
would not be in our neighborhood at all, although it is
one of the loveliest in all the land.
    Somewhere between the lush luxuriance of the South
and the beautiful austerity of New England lies
Pennsylvania.  This countryside<171> is rich in mellow
old farms, far retired from railways.  There are low,
rolling hills and woodsy back roads.  Houses are set
far up grassy lanes, lined with trees.  Doorways back
and front are deep in shade.  Barns are big and white,
and spread broad wings over plentiful harvesting.
Houses are white, too, of stucco or of stone, old,
kindly, solidly built.  To these shady bricked porches,
where the roses clamber against gray-white walls,
Washington's colonials might have come clattering up.
Small wonder that women desiring farms should desire
just this deep-verdured beauty, and no less wonder that
the farms, many good miles from market, should be so
abundantly for sale that any lady, eager to surround
herself with fields and fowls, may readily choose her
own particular frame and setting.
    The three have chosen, each according to her
heart's requirements.  Lady One is the lady of the
flowers, and she is the youngest.  Her throat is round
and white, nor beneath the droop of her great garden
hat is it too much exposed to the sun.  She wears
gloves, white ones and unique among garden gloves
because they fit.  Her shoes, her kerchief, are always
freshly white, and her muslin dress of soft shade,
lavender or blue, or sprigged and<172> flounced.  She
might have stepped forth from fancy's gallery where we
all keep pictures hanging of gardens and of
grandmothers.  She herself may be dreaming of just such
a portrait-picture.  But don't think that she is a
drone because she is perhaps a dreamer.  There are no
such flowers in thirty miles, and flowers mean tireless
toil; they take more good soil-sweat than a whole field
of potatoes.
    She chose her farm to fit her, it had run sadly
seedy, but she retouched all its fading
picturesqueness.  The house is pillared, frame, low,
and white.  Small grilled windows wink with garret
mysteries above the high porch roof, and all is deep in
shade and set far back beyond low terraces with mossy
flower urns and steps of cracked flags.  There are trim
green globes of box trees before the front door, and to
the left is her garden of flowers set within a
labyrinthine box hedge.  Everywhere are roses, roses,--
starry little yellow blossoms, red, pink, white, roses
whose very names are fragrant:  Flower of Fairfield,
Perle de Jardin, Baltimore Belle, Soleil d'Or, Crimson
Globe, Killarney.
    This lady's eyes are brown and too deep to fathom
because she is still too young to be fearless.  Her
voice, her words, are sweet and friendly, but her eyes
do not see you, they see<173> only roses, and in roses,
perhaps, those deeper mysteries all women see in all
growing things; her gloved hand can touch a rose as if
it were a little live face.
    Quite different, Lady Two and her farm.  Here all
is bustle and clack.  Chickens, pigs, turkeys, kittens,
ducks, puppies, calves occur so frequently that every
day is a birthday.  You could not associate Lady One
with the farmyard; you could not associate Lady Two
with anything else.  True, her house has a front
doorway every whit as picturesque as Lady One's,--a
square porch where the lilies-of-the-valley push up
through ancient bricks, and a great pine bears fruit of
stars every evening,--but Lady Two is not there to see,
for she is putting her chickens to bed.  It is out on
the great back porch with its pump and its grapevine
lattice, on this porch and on the slope to the big
barns below, that things happen.  There is no rose
garden.  Lady Two has flowers, it is true, in hearty
democratic confusion and profusion; she loves them,
too, but without subtlety, watering them and her tomato
plants alike with the same splashing hand.  Her
vegetable garden is the garden of her heart.  She is a
woman radiant with a hoe.
    Lady Two is tall and spare, tanned and<174> cheery.
Somewhere she has a family, comfortable and
conventional, but somehow she has managed to slip off
to a farm, away from them and all social claims, and
thus at forty she remains a hearty, rosy boy, with
quick hands, quick feet, and brown eyes full of zest.
The farm keeps her a little breathless; she is on the
jump all day, from the first imperative call of hungry
chicks to the small-hour barkings of Gyp.  It is
nothing to hurry forth from slumber with lantern and
comforting words to still her dog.  If she should find
that Gyp had been barking at some prowling evil-doer,
she would not think first of her own nerves, but of
Gyp's.
    Lady Two cares not for costume, choosing merely the
nearest and the handiest before she hurries forth to
her farm.  Her hands are marked by sun and
serviceability; could you succor a sick horse in
gloves!  In mud-streaked denim, hatted and booted like
a man, she stalks the boggy pasture to recapture the
black turkey-hen, an errant lady, who, in some
atavistic dream, prefers to brood on an empty nest in
the swamp, exhibiting a truly feminine propensity to
combine a pleasing wildness with a perilous wetness.
    To Lady Two her farm means primarily fowls.  Down
the slope below the kitchen<175> porch they are housed
with all modern improvements, in brooders and colony
house, and all manner of coops.  Ducks waddle, geese
strut, guinea fowl go trip-trip on feet too tiny.  At
feeding-time Lady Two is the center of a feathered
mass, cackling, peeping, gobbling, quacking, creaking
like rusty hinges as guinea fowl do.  She might be a
mother with a great group of happy, boisterous
youngsters.  Sometimes she stoops to pick up and
inspect some tiny hurt chick.  She croons to it with
brooding tenderness.  Babies, she calls the tiny
things, and babies they are to her, all the little
newly-borns of her farm, whether a pinky piglet, a calf
that gambols awkwardly, a little turkey that must not
get its feet wet, a colt unsteady on stilt-legs, a
beady-eyed yellow duckling, a plunging puppy lost among
its own four legs,--babies all.
    Not for roses, not for chicks, that grow, both,
beneath a fostering hand, did Lady Three choose her
farm.  Roses and chicks she has both in plenty, and
tends them with her own hands, adequately and happily,
but without absorption.  She has outlived the need for
absorption, so that the twinkle in her gray eyes is
imperishable.  She has also outlived the need for
varied costume.  Hers has the detachment and
independence of<176> uniform, always straight-cut, gray
serge with a straight-cut linen collar, and small
crimson tie.  Her dress has all a man's superiority to
his exterior, but her choice of a farm reveals nothing
masculine in her spirit.  Her great farmhouse is built
of brown stones set irregularly in clear-seamed white.
There are big twin chimneys at right and left.  There
is a white tablet beneath the eaves bearing a date of
Penn's time, but only the shell of the house is old,
within all is remade to a mistress's liking.  If in all
women the root of all impulse is to be always making
something that shall tangibly shape to the impress of
each woman's separate self, then Lady Three chose
neither flowers nor fowls, she chose to create for
herself a home.  Much-traveled herself, she found her
farm far from beaten paths, lost down a grassy lane
where a brown brook clatters and chuckles from out a
hushed woodland.  A business woman, so-called,
executive, successful, as any man, she chose, ten years
ago, at fifty, her far-off farm.  Her lawns are clear
of litter as was her desk in her counting-room.  Her
house is heated, watered, furnished in neatest and
completest comfort.  Many electrical devices, and her
own ruddy health make her quite independent of kitchen
itinerants not like the mistress<177> inured to
loneliness.  Having read much, seen much, done much,
known much, in her fifty years, she chose to spend the
rest with herself, in her home, a home where every
chair, book, rug, picture speaks individuality, some
quick quaint taste, some humorous little philosophy.
It is a house warm with welcome, but genially
self-sufficient.  Of the three, this lady, wise and
gray, is the only one who really sees you, and listens;
the other two see only farm.  Lady Three is not afraid
to live alone with the stars out-of-doors, or alone
indoors with her hearth fire.  You can't be afraid of
the lonely wind when you have long ago ceased to be
afraid of yourself.
    Thus my three lady farmers; and now that question,
Does their farming pay?  All lady farming depends
entirely on the quality of its male assistance.  You
cannot farm without a man; it has been tried.  Help is
an ever-present trouble, but the Lady of the Roses has
not found this out, because she is still too young and
too pretty.  Whenever she steps far from her roses, it
is to look at her sky rather than her soil.  Unwitting
she has power to turn that brute species, Hired Man,
into a very knight of chivalry, jealous to guard every
blade of wheat that springs for her.  Busily binding,
cutting, watering her roses,<178> she never even sees
her servitors; but they see her, in all those frail
fripperies of hers, while in the summer evening they
linger, blue-overalled and bounden, just beyond her low
hedge, to hear the sound of her voice in its sweet,
absent responses.  Her men know she does not see them,
but perhaps they think some day she will perceive what
tall corn she has, what sleek cattle.  Does her
farming, therefore, pay?  Yes, a little, which is as
much as can be said for most farming.
    Quite different is the case with Lady Two.  She has
her hired men and her hired boys, big and little, and
they all keep very busy, watching her, and they keep
still busier demanding that she watch them.  She is a
cheery, desirable comrade for any toil, their "Miss
Katie," diminutive, both affectionate and superior,
showing small awe for their tall boy mistress, in whose
brisk capability they have, however, pride.  They
constantly call her to see them do it, whatever it is
she desires.  "Miss Katie,"  "Miss Katie," resounds
from garden and furrow and hencoop.  They cannot detach
a setting hen, or churn the butter without her
oversight, loudly bellowed for.  They are children
demanding that their mother shall watch their prowess
at play.  She wonders why her farm does not<179> pay;
it is because of that expensive little name of hers,
because of her "Miss Katie."
    Lady Three,--does her farm give her dollar for
dollar?  Precisely that, and that is all she asks of
it.  Her oversight is brief, adequate.  Men have always
worked well for her, they always will.  She has the
quiet mistress-mastery that every man recognizes;
moreover, she has a bank account that every man
respects.
    No, on the whole, lady farming does not pay, if you
reckon success not by desires, but by dollars.  From
that point of view, only those women farm successfully
who have at least once or twice in their lives
possessed a husband and assimilated his manner of
dealing with crops and with animals.  Farming _qua_
farming, that is essentially man's work, but farming
_qua_ joy, that's a woman's discovery.  A man farmer is
never fused with his farm, because a man is not built
to share earth's parturition.  In some way or other a
woman must be always creating, always bringing forth.
If she is not a house-mother, then she must be
slipping, sliding, something of herself into her roses,
her baby chicks, her home.  To be joyous, she must be
putting forth shoots, blossoms, must be pushing down
her roots.  To be glad, she must feel<180> herself part
of this great springing, growing universe.  That woman
who has chosen herself a farm has done so that she may
feel her head warmed by the life-giving sun and her
feet firm in the fertile earth.
    If success lies in having what you want, then my
three farmer friends have attained it.  But sometimes I
look at them and wonder, Is it what once they wanted?
The Lady of the Roses, I am sure she has a story; I am
not sure she will not some day have another; surely
there are things her hands might touch fairer even than
roses.  Lady Two has no story, and is too hearty and
happy to note the fact, but when I see her lift in a
strong brown grasp a yellow duckling, I remember there
are heads even more golden and downy.  Lady Three,
cozily ensconced in her snug old farmhouse, looks back
into her homeless past, forward into her unhoused
future, fearless in the knowledge that whithersoever
she goes she carries with her a serene personality that
will always be shaping its whereabouts to fit it, but
her eyes are bright with philosophies that might have
sent forth sons and daughters to splendid living.  Like
my three friends who have found quiet in the morning
call of the sun, in the coming of the rain on a
thirsting flower-bed, on all the big little<181>
concerns of a farmyard, I must lean back on the good
green peace of the universe--a universe which must have
some stout principle of growth spiritual beneath its
seeming waste of mortal energies, in order that I may
not question why it is that the farm feminine is not,
as it might have been, the farm masculine, the farm
infantine.



                               XVI

               _A Little girl and Her Grandmother_

I am always sorry for children who have never known
what it is to have a grandmother and a grandfather and
an old mountain farm to visit, far away from
everywhere.  A little girl I once knew had all three.
Her grandmother was the dearest grandmother I have ever
seen.  She was tall and stout, with a broad,
comfortable lap, and her hands, as they stroked the
little girl's head on her shoulder, were smooth and
soft.  The grandmother's eyes were blue and full of
mischief and fun and love.  When she laughed she shook
all over so that nobody looking at her could help
laughing too; even the little girl, who was naturally
serious.  The grandmother's checks were a soft pink,
and her hair was black, faintly silvered.  She wore it
parted plain on week-days, but on Sundays it was
crimped.  On Sundays, too, she wore her black
grenadine, but on other days her dress was blue gingham
with a long white apron.
    The grandmother lived on a farm so steep<183> that
it seemed always to be sliding down the mountain into
the valley below.  At the back of the house were a few
acres of cleared space, and then beyond this the
stretches of mountain woods.  From these woods you
could hear the call of the whip-poor-wills in the
evenings, and there were wildcats and bears there, too,
perhaps, and rattlesnakes surely.  The farm had been a
wild sort of place until the grandmother took hold of
it and tamed it.  She had them build a line of white
fence palings between the house and the grass-grown
mountain road.  She would have the porch trimmed with
clematis, and they had to build her a grape arbor, too,
and swing a hammock under it.  Above the whitewashed
fence a row of sunflowers nodded, and within was a line
of sweet-peas.  In front of the house were two long
flower-beds, bordered with mignonette.  In one was
heliotrope, in the other flowering red geraniums.
There were other flower-beds, too, wherever the
grandmother could find a place for them, and in one was
a tall plant of lemon verbena.  The grandmother was
always plucking a leaf of this and crushing it, and
then clapping her fragrant hand over the little girl's
nose.  Such fun they had with the flowers, snipping and
weeding and watering, their two gossipy<184> sunbonnets
close together!  Whatever the grandmother was doing,
the little girl was always at her heels, except when
she was tagging after her grandfather.
    All through her childhood the little girl used to
make long visits at the farm.  She was a queer little
girl, not at all happy.  Her grandmother said she was
"high-strung," but her mother and the little girl
herself called it just plain "naughty."  At any rate,
she was always losing her temper, and then crying for
hours over the sin of it.  She worried over everything
that happened by day, and she was afraid of everything
that might happen by night, and was always flying from
her bed in terror of the dark.  At last, when the
little girl's cheeks would grow so thin, and her eyes
so big and anxious that her mother was at her wits' end
what to do with her, she would say to the father:  "We
must send Margie down to mother."
    Now the little girl's father, who was a minister,
had very little money, and the grandmother had less,
but somehow they would do without things and do without
things until they got the little girl safely off to the
old farm, where she grew so brown and fat and jolly
that her mother hardly knew her.
    The first of these visits was when Margie<185> was
so little that she would have been a baby if there had
n't been another baby at home.  She remembers only one
happening of that visit--riding high on the hay wagon,
she and her grandmother, while her grandfather drove
the mules.  Margie thinks now that perhaps her
grandmother did not enjoy that ride, for hay is hot and
prickly, but whatever the little girl wanted to do,
that the grandmother did.  Another incident of that
first visit her grandmother used to tell the little
girl afterwards.  The little girl always wanted to help
her grandfather in all his work, and often she was much
in the way.  Sometimes when there was hoeing that must
be done, the grandfather would try to slip away
unnoticed; then that tease of a grandmother would point
out to the little girl how the grandfather's overalls
were just disappearing around the corner of the house,
and the little girl would snatch up her sunbonnet and
her fire shovel, and run after, crying:  "Wait for me,
grandpa!"  Then she would stand in the furrow right in
front of him and pound away with her shovel, so hot and
earnest that the grandfather had nothing to do but
stand and laugh at her, and down in the doorway the
grandmother, watching them, laughed, too, because she
was teasing the grandfather and pleasing the little
girl.<186>
    Another visit came the summer when Margie was
seven.  Her father was going to Convocation, and so
could take her with him and drop her off at the
grandmother's station.  Margie wore a big sailor hat
and a brand-new sailor suit.  She was so excited all
the way that she did not talk at all, and would not
touch her lunch.  At last, peering out of the window,
she saw the old spring wagon and her grandfather
holding the reins and her grandmother waiting on the
platform.  Her grandmother lifted her up in her arms,
doll and satchel and lunch-box and all, and carried her
over to the wagon: at home Margie was much too old to
be lifted and carried.  Seated between her
grandparents, while her grandmother held her hat and
the mountain wind blew through her curls and her trunk
bumped along at the back, all Margie's worries fell
away from her--she forgot she was a sinful child, she
ceased to think that the babies were doomed to drown in
the river, that her mother would be stricken by dread
disease and die, that her father would be run over in
crossing the railroad track; and as for springing from
her bed in fear, that night and all the rest she slept
so soundly that she never woke at all.
    Arrived at the farmhouse, the grandmother<187>
would open Margie's trunk and take out all the little
garments and think them the prettiest ever seen,
because the little girl's mother had made them every
stitch.  From the little dresses the grandmother would
select the very oldest, and then lock all the others
away again.  Down at the village store she would buy
some coarse brown and white stockings, costing ten
cents a pair.  From a corner behind the sewing-machine
she would bring out the sunbonnet she had stitched for
Margie in the winter.  It was blue check and had
pasteboard slats that came out when it was washed.
Thus equipped, the little girl might run free of the
farm.  She helped to feed the calves and the chickens
and the pigs; she wiped the dishes for Minnie, the
little Dutch maid, in order that Minnie might be sooner
ready to play in the haymow with her in the long sultry
afternoons through which the locusts shrilled; she went
huckleberrying with her grandfather, pushing far into
the mountain woods, always treading warily because of
the rattlers, and coming home with a face smirched with
purple under the sunbonnet; she took long drives with
her grandfather along strange, still mountain roads.
With him, too, she tried milking: the cow-bells tinkled
through the dusk of the long shed, and the air was
fragrant with<188> the hay and the steaming milk-pails,
and the little girl tried with all her might, but
usually she only succeeded in sending a fine stream
into her grandfather's eye.  On indoor days Margie
would draw her little red rocker up beside her
grandmother's knee and listen to stories.  The stories
were all about mysterious and unknown relatives, Cousin
Letty This and Uncle Josiah That and Aunt Tirzah
Something Else.  Much of it the little girl did not
understand at all, yet somehow she liked listening to
stories, snuggled against her grandmother's knee,
better than anything else in the long, blithe days, and
the little girl felt sleepy very early here on the
farm--she that was such a sleepless midget at home.
    After supper, while the light was still clear, her
grandmother would undress her and put on her nightgown:
then, when her hair was combed and her teeth brushed
and her prayers said, she would wrap the little girl in
the gray blanket shawl, and carry her out to the big
rocking-chair on the front porch.  There the
grandmother would croon old songs while the little
girl's head drowsed against her shoulder, and the
summer twilight stole upon them.  Sometimes the call of
a whip-poor-will would sound out from the woods, or the
roosting turkeys in the apple trees across the<189>
road would rustle and flap their wings, and sometimes
the white moon would come gliding up the sky, seen
dreamily through the clematis bloom.
    As the little girl grew older she could not go to
the farm so often, partly because she took a full-fare
ticket now, and partly because her mother needed her at
home but always, when she did go, she and her
grandmother had the same old good times together, and
Margie was still happier there on the old mountain farm
than anywhere else in the world.  She seemed to love
her grandmother better now that she was old enough to
think about her more.  The grandmother had some funny
ways.  For one thing she would never sit in a straight
chair at table, but always in a rocker.  She would eat
a little, and then sit back and rock a little, and
sometimes, since meals at the farm were leisurely and
chatty, she would fall asleep while she rocked, but she
would never admit that she had napped a minute, not
she.  Try as you might, you could never get the
grandmother a present that she would keep.  She loved
dainty things, but the prettier the gift, the more she
would fall to thinking how much it would please some
one else, and so presently away it went.  If the giver
chanced to find her out, she would hang her<190> head
and look much ashamed of herself, but all the time her
eyes would be roguish.  All the family teased her and
she teased them.  She would have walked miles for the
sake of a good joke on any one of them, but her fun was
always tender.  One dearly loved joke she played every
year.  In October, when the mountains were wonderful in
the blue autumn weather and the tang of burning leaves
was in the air, a little family of Margie's cousins
used to come out from their town house to the old farm
for chestnuts.  For days before they came the
grandmother and Minnie would gather every chestnut and
put away the treasure in a big bag.  On the morning of
the children's coming, the grandmother was always to be
found scattering the hoarded chestnuts in great
handfuls everywhere.  Later in the day, when the
children were shouting over the windfall, she would
shake a threatening finger at the grandfather and
Minnie if they dared to chuckle.
    After a while the little girl was quite grown up
and had gone to college, where she had acquired a bad
habit of studying herself sick.  Once again her mother
in desperation sent her to her grandmother.  At the
station the grandparents had the spring wagon waiting
with a cot bed; they laid the little girl on it
and<191> walked alongside up the mountain.  That
morning the grandmother and Minnie had been over all
that mile of mountain road and had picked off every
stone, so that the little girl might feel no jarring.
Margie thought that the back of her head would never
stop aching, but her grandmother nursed her and fed her
and rubbed her, and wrapped her up warm and put her out
in the sunshine; she told her that she must forget what
the doctors had said, and that the mountain air would
cure her, and so after a while it did.
    But there came a last visit.  They found that for
two years the grandmother had been ill with a terrible
disease, but she had kept it a secret as long as she
could.  They sent her little girl to her for the last
time.  The grandmother would always stop moaning when
Margie came near, and sometimes she would rouse herself
enough to sit up and tell her stories.  She, liked to
lie in the hammock and have Margie swing her gently,
and she would often send her down to the ferny spring
for a fresh drink of water.  She liked to take it from
the old cocoanut drinking-cup, and almost always as she
handed this back to Margie she would say, "Have you
ever tasted such good water as this?" and always she
was pleased when Margie answered, "No."<192>
    One day Margie had to go away to her teaching.  Her
grandmother got up from her couch and walked to the
front door to bid her good-bye.  They said very little,
and they did not cry at all, only as Margie looked back
from the turn of the road at the little farmhouse and
the valley and the circling mountains, at all the place
she loved best in all the world, she knew that she
should never wish to see it again.
    So the little girl's visits to her grandmother came
to an end, like a beautiful book read through.  But
though it is never the same as the first time, one may
read a book over again.  The little girl has been grown
up for a long time, but sometimes when she is tired and
worried and frightened she turns back the pages of her
memory.  She is sitting on her grandmother's lap on the
porch in the summer twilight.  Her grandmother is
singing to her, and the great moon is rising behind the
clematis.



                              XVII

                      _The Wayfaring Woman_

Just when, for the first time, I was fearing lest some
day the wizard-light might fade from my hilltops,
because I had climbed them so often; lest some day
people's eyelids might cease to be doors flashing upon
mystery, because I had seen so many secrets; and lest,
sadder still, I might wake up some morning and find
that my comrade-soul had forgotten to pipe me on to the
new adventure of the new morning,--just when I was
fearing these things, I bought a pair of rubber boots!
    They are real boots, real as all masculine things
are real.  They have straps, a new thing to me in
footgear.  They are deep and cavernous, so that I sink
to the knee, and in them I am armored like a man, but
yet a woman.  Whimsical symbol, perhaps, my newbought
rubber boots, of adjustment to a man's free-hearted
adventuring.  If I am to tramp alone, let me be
valiantly shod like a man, though a woman at heart, for
is not all the world mine for the walking it?  Who
knows what new fun may be abroad for me now, in<194> my
rubber boots?  I was made for life's out-of-doors.  I
am a woman who wishes to walk this earth in all
weathers, and indeed I have walked it in many, plucking
by my homely hillpaths thoughts that are wayside
flowers along a subtler way.
    I have gazed at my circling hills in many changing
lights.  I have seen them on a moon-flooded summer
evening lie shoulder to shoulder asleep about the broad
valley pastures, while the tree-shadows wavered black
against white farmhouses, asleep, too; and nothing made
any noise except the brook beneath my wayside bridge,
and that, a merry brown human brook by day, went
singing in the moon an elfin chant it had forgotten
that it knew.  I have seen my hills deepest blue at the
skyline, and below all ablaze, beneath the racing white
clouds of October, when more than at any other time the
winding roads bewitch my feet, and every blackberry
thicket and slope and fence-row is flaunting its
banners in my eyes; yet I cannot stop to gaze, for the
air is of so keen a blueness; I must walk, run, fly,
because of the urgency of October in my toes.
    But in the spring one's step slackens, and one
stops to loiter and look at the green willows that
twist with the wavering course of<195> the swift muddy
river; at the rosy mist on the maple-boughs, at sunny
blue wings that flash against bare branches.  In the
spring the most insistent walker must pause by an
arbutus bank.  Last year's leaves upon it are still
rimmed with frost and snow, and one's fingers grow red,
poking beneath for treasure.  But what largess of
arbutus our humblest wayside banks hereabouts can
yield, arbutus great-petaled, deep-pink, setting free
what prisoned fragrance!
    I have tramped my climbing roads in winter-time,
too, on those days of winter when the mercury sinks to
the zero point, when the snow crunches loud beneath my
heels, and the sun hangs high and cold, and the spangle
glistens on crusted fields.  But heretofore there have
been days of winter when I have felt myself held within
doors, days of slush and ooze, when the sky broods low,
and the air is blind with great wet flakes; yet these
were the very days when the gypsy wind came rattling
the window-sash and piping of new wonders of grayness
and of whiteness out there upon the hills.
    I who have packed my wanderer's wallet with the
gentle secrets of summer nights, of springtime
hillsides, and wintry sunshine, I who have always
tramped to the call of a<196> lonely road, should I
turn craven stay-at-home when life's wild weather draws
my feet hillward through grim slush and sleet?  Are
there not new secrets waiting on the stormy hills?  I
am not afraid!  I have put on rubber boots.
    In all this countryside I am the only woman who
walks.  Highroads and by-paths and woodways are mine
alone, for here solitude is safe and cheery for the
woman who goes uncompanioned.  I pass by unmolested,
but not unhailed.  Happily, I have reached the age when
men greet me with level comrade eyes, and pass me
merrily the time of day; at least the genial old
codgers of our region do.  The men of my home hamlet of
Littleville are a bit proud of my pedestrian prowess,
and if they meet me wandering far will draw rein to
twinkle down and rally me:  "Guess you're lost this
time sure, ain't you?"
    The strangers I meet rarely pass me in churlish
silence.  I have had a man, never before seen, bend
down from his high seat, his face all one pucker of
concern, while he shouted to me in a high windy voice,
"Hi, there, you're losing a hat-pin!"  His overspread
relief as I adjusted it was but one instance of the
intimacy ruling within the sweeping circle of hills
that rim Littleville like a<197> cup.  We are no
strangers here, we comrades of the road.
    Yet in my walking I must often pay the penalty of
being unique, of being an anomaly in country
conventions.  They are kind, our rural men-folk, but I
think the kindest, passing me, make a swift comparison
between me and their kitchen-keeping women.  In this
inarticulate comparison there is a boyish flash of
sympathy that I should find the out-of-doors the same
jolly thing men do; but more, there is distrust of one
who obviously enjoys the zest of her own feet as much
as their wives enjoy jogging through life beside a
comfortable husband behind a comfortable horse.
Possibly the thoughts of rural men-folk are not so
different from the thoughts of all other men-folk when
they pass the woman who walks.
    Whatever the mental comment attached to the gaze,
the eyes that meet mine are quite as often astounded as
amused.  If this is evident even when I trudge in
flooding sunshine, astonishment becomes irrepressible
when I am seen abroad in snow and sleet.  "By gosh!
pretty hard walking you got, ain't you?"
    Foot-fast in slush, I pipe back, "But I like it.  I
have on rubber boots!"
    Such the accost from vehicles not facing in<198> my
direction; but when a horse that goes my way is drawn
up, and I decline the proffered seat; knee-deep in
slush, refuse to get in! then the driver's face
expresses such commiseration as I never expected to
feel applied to my inoffensive person.  Plainly I see
that it is not my drabbled skirts he is sorry for, it
is my addled wits.  Walking country roads in ill
weather has taught me exactly how a lunatic must feel.
It is said that the crazy have a certain look in the
eye; of experience I can affirm that so also have those
who gaze upon the crazy.
    For the passing instant, as I meet that profound
pity in mild, masculine orbs, I do doubt my own sanity,
and wonder if perhaps this glorious freedom of the
wild, wet weather is quite the sensible thing it seemed
when I set out; for it is the look in other people's
eyes that gives us our own spiritual orientation.
Lunacy is a purely relative term.  There are places
where women may walk and hardly be glanced at for so
doing, just as, perhaps, within his own cage-walls, the
Bedlamite may seem to himself a normal human being.
Also, perhaps, the lunatics, like me, have their silent
chuckle; knowing, like me, that they have their inward
fun, although the numskull sane can't see it.  I hope
so, for I would fain think<199> some sunny thought of
the poor brainsick folk.
    It is not given to my friends of the highway,
sensible men creatures on wheels, any more than to
their wives, snug at home in dry domestic shoes, to
know the joy of my walk through the swift, wet
snowflakes.  On and up I go, never meaning to go home
by the same way I have come.  What lover of the road
ever does that?
    The clinging snow has enfolded all things.  Every
tree stands with white, shrouded branches.  The berry
thickets are softly furred with white.  The dusky gray
aisles of the roadside woods die to blackness in the
near distance.  The little brooks go tinkling beneath a
thatch of snow bristling with high grass blades.  There
is almost no color.  Even the bronze of oak leaves is
veiled by white mist.  The world is all white and gray,
and in the distance faintly blue.  The fast-falling
snow blurs all familiar outlines strangely, so that I
hardly believe those dreamy roofs down there belong to
humdrum Littleville.
    There is strange, muffled silence.  I am half
afraid of the woods; they have grown unearthly, so that
I start at the eerie thud of the snow that drops from
the branches.  Gray-white, silent mystery,--and I
should never<200> have known or seen it, had I not
laughed at life's wild weather, and trudged forth to it
in rubber boots, all alone.
    Yet, whatever the shy comradeship of wayside
groves, of busy secret streams and homely fields,
always the human aspect of the road engages the woman
who tramps with joy at the heart.  In summer and
winter, as I go, I pass the brown milk-wagons,
plodding, monotonous, starting forth from all the
circling farms and converging to the milk station.  The
drivers have always dull or far-away faces, for it is
always the same road, the same rattling cans at their
backs, the same shaggy, jogging flanks before them.
    Almost always, somewhere on my journey, I meet the
rural mail-man.  The bobbing yellow dome of his narrow
wagon is always easily descried in the distance.  The
mail-man knows my tramp-habits well, and the smile from
his little blinking pane never fails me.  Another
familiar vehicle is the school carryall, which nowadays
picks up all the human contents of one of our district
schools and carries them down to Littleville for
instruction.  The school wagon is driven by a jovial
grandsire, and it is always crowded to overflowing with
small, merry people who hail me.  I rarely meet any
folk on foot,<201> although occasionally a leggined
huntsman slips noiselessly across the road from one
grove to another, while a hound sniffs to right and
left of his path.
    The farm-homes for the walker by the way have each
the spell of some new story.  There beside that
wind-rocked cupola is some curious mechanism.  For what
purpose?  To lift water to a roof-tank?  To catch the
lightning?  To send afloat an airship?  Crude, clumsy,
aspirant, a farm-boy's dream!
    I pass by a porch that abuts close upon the road.
A door flings open and a man and a woman come out, too
temper-tossed to heed me.  The woman's face is set in
impotent hate, the man's mouth is wried with cursing;
and the faces are not young, nor the graven bitterness
a mere passing blight.  Man and wife!  Yet they loved
once, I suppose, and went driving gayly back from the
parson's, his arm about her ribboned waist, and posies
flaunting in her hat and in her checks--once!
    It is given to us who trudge by in the road beyond
the doors to pity often, but to envy rarely.  It is in
the nature of things that we cannot envy, for those
things we might covet are precisely those that come
spilling out of door and window to bless us, so that
presently we are bowing our heads and saying our bit
of<202> a grace for them, as being also ours.  Gentle
old world, so constituted that a home can lock its
door, if it will, upon its sorrow, but can never hide
its joy!  I pass another ragged farmhouse, and here the
children in their homemade little duds are trooping in
from school.  Again an open doorway, and in it a mother
wiping red hands upon her apron.  The closing door
shuts off sharply the shrill voices that tell of the
day's events; but I have seen and heard, and therefore
I, too, possess.
    At still another window-pane there is a bobbing
baby-face.  Such a crowing, chuckling joy as is a
year-old baby!  What home could ever hide him under a
bushel?  Strange mystery, that gives, withholds,
inscrutably, the heart's desire of all of us, and yet
ordains for us who trudge a snow-cold path, that there
shall be, even until we grow gray of soul and
feeble-footed, forever along our way, until the end,
always behind the panes we pass, the bobbing
baby-faces!  Other women's babies?  Does it make so
much difference whose they are, so long as they are
sweet?
    Another happiness it is ordained no woman shall
keep unto herself.  The peace of a woman's mouth when a
good man loves her, that is another of the things
nothing can conceal, for sorrow may be leaden and
secret at the<203> heart, but joy will always out and
abroad.  That is one of the things we know, we
wayfaring women.
    Walks end with the dipping of the day.  The winter
dusk steals very early over all the snowy whiteness.  I
have to peer to see Littleville's clustered roofs down
there in the river-valley.  Before I turn to wade back
down the drifted hill-road to the ruddy little home
that lends me harborage for the night, I stand still to
look about me, through the whirling flakes.  See all
around me hills I have not yet climbed!  Think of the
untried roads that lead to them!  What secret wizardry
of new woods, what elfin tinkle of new brooks, what new
farm-doors, glimpsing upon human mystery!  Hills and
the road for me, on and on!  Just around the turn what
wonders wait, shall ever wait, for my rubber boots and
me!



                              XVIII

                     _The Road That Talked_

I had walked that way a score of times and never seen
that road, yet it must have seen me and singled me out,
or else it would never have peeped about from its
ambush of berry thicket and swamp and said, "Come."  I
was sturdily plodding the broad state road, for there
is a state road everywhere, white and useful, belonging
to everybody,--to the lumbering brown milk-wagons, to
the bouncing muddy buckboards, to the motor-cycles with
their vibrant chugging, to the skimming automobiles.
The state road talks business all the time, incessant
talk to blur the hearing; for all good talk is half
silence, and the only people who have anything to say
are the people who have listened.  I was lonely for
some one to talk to when the little road beckoned.
    The state road always chooses the riverway, always
bustles along on the level; how could one ever be
friends with a road that never climbed a hill?  My feet
were trudging the macadam, though growing more gypsyish
each moment, when the flash of a red leaf on<205> a
dusty bush, the rustle of an unseen bird, and I saw the
little road hailing me, and turned.  It was waiting for
me, half revealed, half hidden, like a shy, would-be
friend, and at first, except for certain gypsy gleams
along its fence-rows, it was commonplace enough, it
might have been anybody's road.
    At first, too, it went along discreetly, it turned
and walked parallel with the state thoroughfare, a
little apart, it is true, but steadily patterning on
the manners of the highway, so that if a traveler had
chanced on it, he would have seen nothing
unconventional.  The little road went along like that,
and waited for its friends, but I had faith to believe
it would soon begin to climb, that climbing was what it
wanted of me.  Imperceptibly at first it swerved from
the parallel, imperceptibly it mounted a little, so
that presently, near as we still were, we could look
down at the village.
    Then the little road began to talk, politely,
pleasantly, but in no wise pregnantly.  Its language
was meaningless at first, but with a lure, as comrade
eyes light to yours above lip-chat that does not need
to mean anything.  We could go slowly, having all the
morning to get acquainted.  Together the road and I
looked down at the town through a screen of late
September leaves.<206>
    The place lay in mist, partly of the late-lingering
fog, partly of the fires that belong to these days when
all the village rakes and burns, and the youngsters
tumble and romp and shriek in piles of leaves.  All
outlines are blurred by a pearly haze, against which
eddies the deeper blue of chimney-smoke.  Beyond the
town the hills are dull gray against the luminous gray
of the sky, and between town and hill the river runs, a
shining silver sheet, with broken, deep-toned
reflections near the bank.  Looking eastward through
the flickering leaves, I watch the sun steadily shining
through, shredding the mist with fires of opal, in
gleams of blue and orange and amethyst.  Down at the
village they see none of this, they know only that the
fog lifts, while stubble-gardens, and lawns, and
house-fronts all turn brown and bare and commonplace
beneath the relentless sun.  It is for me to see the
opal fires lick up the mist; such cheery little wonders
of the road are all for me.
    The road keeps silence, letting me listen to the
village sounds, musically fused at this brief distance;
the shunting of a freight train and its raucous
whistle, the ringing of hammers on new scaffolding, the
shrilling of the saw-mill, the barking of dogs.  All to
herself, like the shy one that she is, the little
road<207> murmurs her replies, in the twittering of
sparrows in fence-thickets, in the rustle of wind in
bared branches, in the scratch and scud of dry leaves
that race, the soft thudding of a chestnut burr.
    The sun is high, and the wind is blowing, and the
comrade road is waiting, genially postponing its sure
self-revelation, but a-tiptoe to be off now to the
woods, where we may share our fun unmolested,
unsuspected.  The little road is climbing now beyond
mistaking.  She is stepping through the woods so
familiarly that you might miss her trail if you did n't
follow close, for she knows there is no fun in the
woods if you can't get lost, can't drop the pack of
personality from your shoulder, and grow one with
brushwood shadow, or arched branch.  When the road said
this to me, I began to listen to her for every word
that she might say.  But stealing ever deeper into the
woodland, my path is not talking now, she is singing
rather, she is dancing.  Suddenly in the deeps of the
wood she opens up a long green alley of fairy turf, and
waits to see if I will share it with her and go
scudding it like a squirrel.  The white state-way never
dreamed that I could fly, but the little friend-road
knew.  The road plays with me.  Near the rut made by a
lumber team, she tosses a handful<208> of wintergreen
berries like flecks of coral for me to garner, and
lifts a sudden torch of scarlet oak against some
wood-recess black and deep as a cave.  Every time she
hears the sound of wood-chopping she whisks away into
still deeper shadow to be alone with me.  Looking to
right and left you cannot see the open; the only open
is above, in the blue.
    In the heart of the woods there is elfland.
Trusting me, the little road dared to turn mad, she who
had been so circumspect down below in the valley.  Of
the trees, some were still summer green and some were
russet gold and some were claret crimson, so that the
sifted light was strange, the light of faery.  "There
is no state road anywhere," said my mad little path to
me, "there is nothing in all the world but wood and
sky.  You are a tree, a cloud, a leaf,--there is no
you!  Dance!"  In and out through the trees she eddied
and whirled, my road, glad as a scudding cloud and mad
as the wind, in and out, in and out.  Free winds that
piped in the tree-tops, white clouds that raced the
blue above us, laced branches that swayed to a dance
eternal, exhaustless,--round and round we eddied,
panting, the road and I, all by ourselves, alone,
unguessed, in the heart of the woods.  They, too, were
drunk with the madness of out-of-doors, Bacchus's
maenads.<209>
    Then, "Whisk!" cried the little road, we can't long
keep up this sort of thing, friend-woman!"  She turned
sober in an instant, wild laughter dying to bubbling
chuckles at itself.  The tall trees broke away abruptly
on stump-pocked fields, flaunting sumach by their stone
walls.  We had come upon a bustling little farm.  My
road, the wild and lonely-hearted, was transformed into
a chatty neighbor, and turned in cheerily to pass the
time of day at the back door.  A brisk and friendly
farm it was.  The orchard jounced us a red apple as we
passed, a white-nosed horse thrust head from the barn
window and whinnied a welcome.  Two shepherd dogs, one
a stiffened grandsire, the other a rollicking puppy,
barked a dutiful protest, then sniffed and licked
genially.  There was a baby carriage on the porch, a
swing beneath the shaggy dooryard pine, there were
geraniums at the window, and gleaming milk-pans on the
back porch.  Beyond the big house was a whole village
of miniature houses, kennels and chicken sheds and
corn-cribs, set down cozily anywhere to be handy.  The
big red barns were chatty with clucking hens.  A sunny,
sociable, commonplace farm that drew us to gossip on
the back steps, to pause and rest there, the road and
I.  As we chatted, lingering and<210> happy, of
buttermilk and buckwheat and the cut of kitchen aprons,
would any one have guessed that this little cozy
domestic road, back there beyond the turn, had reeled
in bacchic dance for very ecstasy of solitude?
    When we were alone again, the road explained,
questioning with searching friend-eyes to see if I
understood, "Many selves belong to every road that must
be always climbing a hill, all alone.  Don't you know,"
laughed the little road, that there was never a dryad
but longed sometimes to bind a big apron over her
flickering leaf-films and slip into some crofter's cot
in Tempe and slap the wheatcakes on the warm
hearth-stones?
    "And I have other moods as I climb, whispered the
little road, as we took hands and trudged along,
shuffling the leaves and playing with them, with no one
to watch, sharing with each other the eternal child
that chuckles inside lonely folk; the undying child
within us is not startled to hear itself laugh out loud
in the friendly solitude of little roads like this.
    Yet, laughing, we were thoughtful, too.  Maples
like great torches of flame studded the wayside, and
beyond them in broad fields marched the corn-shocks, a
ragged brown battalion.  The sky was ever burning
bluer<211> above the hill-crest.  Then we left the farm
fields for a wild stretch of boulder-grown pasture, and
suddenly the little road said:  "Look, a wayside
shrine!  Let us stop."
    Pine trees such as survive now in only a few
scattered groves formed a vaulted chapel.  Beneath the
trees some one had built a rude stone pile, a picnic
fireplace, now for us become an altar, for to a little
wildwood road all things are natural.  We stood silent
on that pavement of brown pine-needles beneath the
arching green, supported on its blue-brown pillars of
high pine trunks.  Through the far tops there went
singing an eternal chant.  No one ever listened long to
that music, all alone, who did not know that it is a
hymn older than any creed, and outliving all doubt.  In
the amber-lit shrine, swept by clean wind and haunted
by eternal music, there was beauty to empty the heart
of all desire, so that, troubled, I asked, "But it was
to pray that we stopped?"
    "Oh," answered the pagan road, "I never pray, for
what is the use of learning how to lisp?--I only
praise!"
    We were a long time silent beneath the pines, but
we were deeper friends when we went on, for there is no
bond in friendship closer than the sharing of a faith.
Our feet<212> were springing along as up we went.
There were no more farms now, only at last above us the
hilltop and the sky, clouds that raced across it, the
sweep of great clean winds, and the call of
high-winging crows.
    The little road, so shy at starting, now dared to
say to me this intimacy, "Do you not know my gospel,--
that gladness is God?  That is why I am always climbing
hills.  That is why I called you this morning, so that
for a little while I and you might step into the sky."



                               XIX

                     _My Mother's Gardeners_

Of gardens "so much has been said and on the whole so
well said," that I might perhaps restrain my pen from
turning up that overworked soil.  But yet the gardens
of which I write have not been like the gardens of the
published page.  They have not brought forth generously
either prose of lusty vegetable or poetry of spicy
blossom.  Although the gardens have been many, they
might almost be described, so alike have they been, as
if they were one, an itinerant garden that has
accompanied us from one little hill village to another;
for I write of the stony, arid, sterile garden-plot of
a country parish.
    Now, however forbidding the garden that has
stretched rearward of each new domicile, my mother has
always fallen upon it with a valiance of hope that
neither years nor disappointment can destroy.  She
always thinks that things are going to grow in her
gardens, and things do grow in them, too; but they are
not always the things my mother has led me to expect.
For her, I hope she will find the<214> garden of her
dreams in Paradise; for me, this earth will do, even
this small, hill-circled scrap of it; for I am no
gardener in my heart, only an observer of gardens.  I
own to an unregenerate enjoyment in watching my
mother's vegetables misbehave, just as,
surreptitiously, I can't help loving the whimsical
goats of my father's rustic flock.
    As I glance back over the unwritten journal of my
childhood, I find the words Choir, Vestry, Garden
always printed in capital letters.  The Gardener was a
figure as momentous in my infant horizon as was the
Senior Warden.  In respect to gardens my mother has
never had any confidence in the assistance of her own
family.  There have been occasions when some son or
daughter, temporarily in favor, has been allowed to hoe
softly, under supervision; but as to her husband,
banishment is the sole decree.  In fact, my father,
genuine old English, imported direct from Trollope,
does not show to best advantage in a garden.  In
general I have observed that our country clericals are
likely to be at quarrel with the soil, that arid
independent old soil which will grow things in its own
way, in utter despite of parsons.  My father's original
sin was due to the usual pastoral reluctance to let the
tares and the wheat grow together unto the
harvest,<215> and it was when he mistook our infant
carrots for Heaven-knows-what seed of the Enemy that
the decree of banishment against him as a marauder
occurred.  Rather than initiate one of her own
home-circle into her garden mysteries, my mother has
chosen the unlikeliest outsider, and solicited advice
from the most unprecedented sources, or by any methods
of cajolery; she has been no stickler in regard to any
man's creed or practice when it has been a question of
so vital a matter as cucumbers.
    My retrospect shows our gardeners stretching back
to the bounds of my memory, a lean, gnarled, hoary
procession.  One of the earliest of them is Father Time
himself, with hoe instead of scythe, and with white
locks rippling down his back.  Father Time's frank
admission when engaged might have daunted some, but did
not daunt my mother, for he confided to her at once
that he could hoe but could not walk.  He proved useful
when carefully hauled from spot to spot, but our garden
was cultivated that season in circles, of which the hoe
was the radius and Father Time the center.
    Another of our ancient hoe-bearers was a veteran.
I do not know whether he had lost his eye on the
battlefield or elsewhere, but certainly he had not
exchanged it for wisdom.<216>  That is why he is the
favorite of my mother's recollections.  She likes her
gardeners a little imbecile.  They are more manageable
that way.  The burden of their intelligence is the more
usual trouble.  A simple faith united to an instant
obedience is the desideratum in gardeners; usually a
gardener is as obstinate as he is conservative, and
this is not at all to my mother's mind.  She loves to
glean gardenlore from every source, but better still
she loves to invent garden-lore of her own.  She likes
to be allowed to set out on an entirely new tack with
some poor erring cabbage, and it is all she can do to
hold on to her ministerial temper when she finds that
her gardener has ruined the work of regeneration by
some old-fashioned disciplinary notions of his own.
Our ancient warrior, however, had no notions of his
own, disciplinary or other, and that is why he
possesses a shrine apart in our memories.  He was as
meek in my mother's hands as his own hoe, and he never
did anything she did not wish him to do except when he
died!
    On a bad eminence of contrast my memory declares
another figure.  I do not remember whether it was an
invincible audacity, or an utter despair of securing
likelier assistance, that led us that year to employ
our own sex<217>ton.  It is an axiom known to every
ministerial household that it is unwise ever to put any
member of your own flock to domestic use.  A brawny
Romanist, if such can be obtained, for laundry
purposes, a Holy Roller for the furnace, and a
Seventh-Day Baptist for the garden--these are samples
of our principle of selection.  I do not know just why
those of our own fold are undesirable,--it is wiser
perhaps that the silly sheep should not see the antic
gamboling of the sober shepherd behind his own locked
door, or guess what internal levities spice the
discreet external conduct of his family.  I do not know
how it was that we fell so utterly from the grace of
common sense as to employ our own sexton that summer.
Apart from sectarian issues, a sexton is the most
mettlesome man that grows, and not at all to be subdued
to the ignoble uses of a hoe.  This sexton was an agony
to my father in the sanctuary, and an anguish to my
mother in the garden.  He went about with a chip in his
mouth, and he always held it in one corner of his lips
and chewed it aggressively and bitterly, and with the
other corner he talked, just as bitterly.  Within his
own house he must have exchanged the chip for a pipe,
for although I never saw him smoke, the fragrant
tobacco fumes of him were spread through the<218> house
after every back-door colloquy.  He talked more
willingly than he worked, and that summer was a lean
and sorrowful season, when the garden languished and my
mother was browbeaten, unable, all because he was the
sexton, to bring the man to order with the sharp nip of
her words across his naughty pate.
    We were more cautious next time and availed
ourselves of one no less meek than a certain village
ancient prominently known to be an Anarchist and a
Methodist.  The combination is unusual, I admit, but
you may look for almost anything in a gardener.  As an
infant, I used to scan his person for a glimpse of the
red shirt, and his lips for a spark of the incendiary
eloquence, but no symptom of either ever showed.  He
was old and underfed and taciturn, and he gardened
exactly as he wished to, without paying the tribute
even of a comment to my mother's suggestions.  He had
such original methods of his own that, for very
amazement, she gave up her own initiative for the
pleasure of watching his.  Once when he was seen
solemnly planting stones in one earthy mound after
another, he did break his icy reserve to answer her
irrepressible inquiry; he believed that potatoes grew
better that way, since<219> the roots did not have to
pierce the earth for themselves but could wriggle
through the friendly interstices of the stones.  That
summer was one of cheerful surprises.  This singular
spirit had, I believe, a genuine sympathy for the poor
toiling vegetables; I remember that he spent one
afternoon in tying up his tomatoes in copies of a
certain sectarian sheet he brought with him for the
purpose.  A sportive wind arose in the night, to die
before the Sabbath morning, on which we beheld not only
our rectory lawn, but the utterly Episcopal precincts
of the church, bestrewn with "Glad Tidings of Zion."
He was a lonely soul and dwelt apart, chiefly in a
wheelbarrow.  The vehicle was one of his
idiosyncracies.  He never appeared without it.  Up and
down our leafy streets would he trundle it; but yet I
never saw anything in the wheelbarrow except the
gardener.  He appeared to push it ever before him for
the sole purpose of having something to sit on when he
wished, from the philosophic heights of his theological
and sociological principles, to ruminate upon the evil
behavior of "cabbages and kings."
    As I look back over a long succession of gardeners,
I see it, punctuated as it may be here and there by
some salient personality,<220> for the most part
stretching a weary line of the aged and infirm of mind
and body, and I wonder by what survival of the
unfittest society devotes to gardening purposes only
those already devoted to decrepitude.  As a matter of
fact, the more one becomes acquainted with the vagaries
of growing things, the more one is convinced that it
requires nimble wits and supple muscles to subjugate
the army of iniquitous vegetables the humblest garden
can produce.  The more you know of the deception and
ingratitude to be experienced in the vegetable world,
the sadder you become.  In addition to sharpened brain
and taut sinews, the worker in gardens needs a heart
packed with optimism.  This last my mother possesses,
and though garden after garden may have gone back on
her, nothing can prevent her running with overtures of
salvation to meet the next little grubby potato-patch
life offers her.  With hope indomitable my parents
survey each new glebe, while I, the incredulous,
secretly meditate upon the kinship in conduct of all
parochial gardens, expecting only that the sheep and
the potatoes will find some new way of going astray;
and may Heaven forgive me that I should be diverted by
their versatility of naughtiness!  For example,
you<221> can never tell what you may expect from a
tomato, for your tomato is a vegetable of temperament.
Poetically sensitive to atmospheric environment, it
fades to earth under the mildest sun, wilts at a frost
imperceptible to its more prosaic neighbors.
Capricious ever, it will sometimes, in mock of its own
cherished nervous system, exhibit a sturdiness out of
pure perversity.  One chill June morning we found our
young tomato plants flat to earth, a black and hopeless
ruin.  We bought new ones and set them out in their
stead, whereupon the old plants popped up and sprouted
to wantonness,--nothing but the elemental energy of
jealousy.  The tomato is like to be as barren of
production as the human sentimentalist, either bringing
forth a green bower of leafage, or drooping to earth
with the weight of crimson globes that, lifted, show a
corroding hole of black rot.
    In homely contrast consider the bean.  The bean is
the kindliest vegetable there is.  From the seed up, it
is well-intentioned, for the bean may be eaten through
and through by worms, and yet, planted, will sprout and
spring, and bring forth fruit out of the very stones.
    The beet is another simple-minded, dependable
member of the congregation, and<222> even more generous
in contribution to the minister's support than is the
bean, for the beet yields top and bottom, root and
branch.  In summer the beet-top furnishes the first
succulent taste of green, and afterwards the round red
root of him is a defense against the lean and hungry
winter months.
    But for the most part vegetables are an
ill-behaving lot.  The cabbage inflates itself with an
appearance of pompous righteousness, the longer to
deceive our hopes and the more largely to conceal its
heart of rot.  The radish sends up generous leaves as
if it meant to fulfill all the mendacious promises of
the seed-catalogue, and when uprooted exhibits the pink
tenuity of an angle-worm.  The cucumber is at first,
for all our ministrations, hesitant and coy of leaf
within its box, and then suddenly bursts into a riot of
leafiness whereby it does its best to conceal from our
inquiring eye its swelling green cylinders.  Corn,
deceptive like the radish, is prone to put forth a
hopeful fountain of springing green, only to ear out
prematurely, and reward us with kernels blackened and
corroded.
    In the parochial garden the pea is one to tease us
always with its might-be and might-have-been.  If peas
are to grow beyond "the kid's lip, the stag's antler,"
they require the<223> moral support of brush, and brush
is something a minister's family, aided only by a
decrepit gardener, cannot always supply.  Unsupported
by brush, our fair peas lie along the ground, an
ever-present disappointment.
    Two vegetables have always haunted my mother's
aspirations, in vain.  I hope they grow in heaven, for
it is in the nature of things that celery and asparagus
should be denied to a nomadic earthly clergy,
requiring, as the one does, richness of soil, and as
the other, permanence.  Illusory asparagus, it takes
three years to grow him!  Of course if some
disinterested predecessor had planted him, we might in
our turn eat him.  But our too itinerant clergy do not
give overmuch thought to their successors.  Barren
parochial gardens hint just a shade of jealousy about
letting Apollos water.
    But it is not the vegetables alone that strain my
mother's sturdy optimism.  All gardens are subject to
invasion by marauding animals, differing in size and
soul and species, all the way from the microscopic
tomato-lice, past woodchuck and rabbit and playful
puppy, up to the cow, ruminating our young corn-shoots
beneath the white summer moon, on to my father himself,
planting aberrant feet where his holden
ministerial<224> eyes behold no springing seedlings in
the blackness of the soil.  But our worst enemies are
hens, and as it happens at present, dissenting hens,
sallying forth from the barnyard fastnesses of the
Baptist parsonage upon our helpless Anglican garden,
plucking our young peas up out of the soil, and then
later and more brazenly prying them out of the very
pod!  Forthwith they fall upon our lettuce-beds,
scratching away with fanatic fervor, as if for all the
world they meant to uproot Infant Baptism from out the
land.  All this is too much for my mother.  On the
vantage-ground of the back doorsill she stands and
hurls coal out of the kitchen scuttle at the sectarian
fowls,--coal and anathema, low-voiced and virulent.
Hers is no mere vulgar many-mouthed abuse.  There is
nothing of so delicate pungency as the vituperation of
a minister's wife, really challenged to try the
subtleties of English and yet offend no convention of
seemliness.  Add to the fact of the challenge, another
fact, that she is of Irish blood, and that her gallery
gods are just inside the door, and it is a pity her
audience should be merely the hens and I.
    Thus do I ever hover at hand, softly applausive of
my mother's defense of her garden, secretly
appreciative of the devious<225> ways of vegetables,
witnessing--to forgive--the wanderings of my father's
flock.  For if all the flock were abstemious and
orthodox instead of being, as some are, frankly given
over to alcoholism and agnosticism and what not; and if
the gardens grew, as gardens should grow, into honest,
God-fearing cabbages and potatoes; if the righteous
corn parted green lips from kernels firm and white as a
dentist's placard, how then should the parish gardens
that dot our hill-strewn countryside bring forth that
fruit of laughter which consoles the dwellers in these
our tiny strongholds of lonely effort?



                               XX

                        _My Little Town_

Vividly at times my memory restores to me the sensation
of the eternal Sabbath.  Beyond the stained-glass
windows, the sunshine is sifted over daisied graves.
Perhaps, for all one knows, the grown-up angels are
letting the little ones sport over those graves at this
very minute, even though it is Sunday, for there are no
parishes in heaven to say no to naughtiness.  My mother
is held home from the sanctuary that morning.  The
three of us sit a-row in the front pew.  Above us our
father thunders forth his sermon, to which we give but
scant attention, that roar in his voice being part of
the programme of this one day in seven.  Against my own
shoulder drowses my little sister's head.  On my other
side, my little brother conceals his yawns by receiving
them into a little brown paw, and then, as it were,
softly sliding them into his pocket, as if his hand had
other business there.  But I, I sit erect and
unwinking, for I am the minister's eldest, and the
Parish is at my back.<227>
    While the younger ones nodded, while the infant
angels played hide-and-seek out in the graveyard
sunshine, of what was I thinking?  This: of the
minister's daughter who had lived in that Parish before
me.  A great girl of five she had been when she used,
having waited until her father was engrossed in his
sermon, to slip from that very front pew in which I
sat, to steal up into the chancel, and there, all
silently but with impish grimace and antics, would she
hold the horrified gaze of the Parish so fascinated
that her father would at length be diverted from his
eloquence, and forthwith, swooping from the pulpit all
in a swirl of wrathful surplice, would bear his small
daughter into the vestry room and lock her there before
resuming his sermon.  She was very naughty, but oh,
what larks, what larks!  So I thought then, and still
to-day I am querying whether that little girl--
inevitably though she must, under steady parochial
pressure, have been subdued to a womanhood of decency
and decorum--does not to-day in middle life rejoice
that once upon a time, at five, she had her little
fling in her father's chancel!
    But we were children of no such independent
pattern; and so on every Sabbath we presented to the
Parish's criticism unwrig<228>gling infant backs,
little ramrods of religion, while our thoughts went
flying off on impish business of their own; and, as the
years flowed by, on and up to man's estate we tramped,
always thrusting forward in sight of the Parish,
fashionable, urban, critical, our shabby best foot,
skittish though that foot might be.  Holding well
together, on we went, running the gantlet of many
parishes, until at last we trudged us into Littleville.
We supposed my little town would be a parish too, but
it is not.
    Cozily remote and forgotten among its blue hills,
Littleville has preserved a primitive hospitality, so
that, battered nomads of much clerical adventuring, we
sank gratefully into its little rectory.  There was
perhaps a reason for our sincerity of welcome, for if
we had had our parishes, so, too, had Littleville had
its parsons.  It belongs to that class of far-away, wee
congregations whither they send old ministers
outwearied, to be alone with old age and memories
beside the empty, echoing churches reminiscent of the
days when farmers attended service.  And if among these
venerable shepherds there have fallen to Littleville's
lot some whose scholarly old wits had gone a bit
doddering, so that they believed and preached whimsical
doc<229>trine, or could no longer trace without
assistance the labyrinth of the liturgy, or others,
younger, who had proved ministerial shipwrecks because
they were burdened by some fatal handicap in child or
wife,--if such have come to Littleville, Littleville
has been very kindly.  My little town has accepted its
hay-crop as the rain has willed, and its ministers as
the bishop has sent them.  Its views on both
visitations are produced in a spirit of comment rather
than criticism; its conduct toward both is that of
adaptation rather than argument.
    For instance, there was that bachelor-rector who
preferred the society of beasts to that of his
parishioners in the rectory, and to that of his fellow
saints in the new Jerusalem.  During his incumbency a
setting-hen occupied the fireplace in the spare room,
and a dog sat on a chair at his celibate table, and
crouched before the pulpit during service.  Littleville
did not protest; rather, of a weekday, the female
members from time to time descended upon the unhappy
man in his retirement, and with broom and mop-pail
cleaned him up most thoroughly; and of a Sunday the
whole body of the congregation listened unwinking while
their rector's brandished fist demanded from their
stolid faces<230> eternal salvation for his Rover,--
listened with those inscrutable eyes I have come to
respect: for I know that while Littleville never argued
with their parson the point of kennels in the skies,
they will turn this theological morsel under their
tongues down at the hardware store unto the third and
fourth generation.
    Then there was the vicar whose poor boy was scarred
in a way that Littleville, sympathetic but always
delightedly circumstantial, has painted upon my
imagination.  When, during this rectorate, rival
sectarians would point to the goodly ruddiness of some
Baptist or Methodist scion, the Littleville Anglicans
would loyally argue that Seth Lawson over at Hyde's
Crossing had a little girl who had four thumbs, and
Seth was just a plain man, and no minister.
    Tradition tells also of a parson who trod the mazes
of the ritual so uncertainly that he was just as likely
to jump backwards as forwards in the psalter.  With
inimitable delicacy Littleville would stand holding its
prayer-books at attention, ready to jump with him,
whichever way he went.  However, certain women have
confided to me how fearful they were, on their
wedding-day, lest this retrograde movement might occur
during the solemnization of matrimony.<231>
    Thus it came about, I fancy, that Littleville
received us with relief as well as warmth, for our
theology was so simple and sound that hardly could the
agnostic barber find fault with it; a family studiously
normal, we showed

        "Never mole, harelip, nor scar,
         Nor mark prodigious;"--

and we proved able to conduct service with sonorous
equilibrium.
    Here we have been accepted and courteously
entreated.  Here we have not had to live up to any
parochial pretensions, for my little town does not play
bridge or give dinner-parties.  Here in my little town
we need not rise betimes to perform miracles of
domestic service on the sly in order to be free to
attend on the lordly city parishioner possessed of
maidservants and manservants.  Rather we may wear our
gingham pinafores on the front porch, and pop our peas
under the very nose of the senior warden, and very
probably with his assistance, if he perchance slouch
down beside us, blue-overalled and genial.
    Littleville, always leisurely, took its time about
getting acquainted with us.  It hurtled us through no
round of teas, it did not put us through the paces of a
parish reception.  Rather it came and hammered together
our<232> broken furniture, decayed by much moving, it
stole in at the back door to help us when we were sick,
it let us know it missed us when we went worldward,
visiting.  Of such as it had, it made us gifts,--a
yellow pumpkin vaulting our back fence, potatoes
rattling into our cellar-bins unannounced while we were
still abed, golden maple syrup flowing for us at the
time when tin pails gleam all up and down the street,
and the sap-vats bubble and steam pungently; or perhaps
the gift is the reward of the gunning season, as when a
vestryman-huntsman, as we stand about the social door
after church, darts aside into the coalbin and thence
presents a newspaper package streaked with pink; peeped
at to please his beaming eye, it exhibits a brace of
skinned squirrels, which we bear cozily homeward from
divine service.
    There is in the mere aspect of Littleville a latent
friendliness perceptible to all eyes that give more
than a touring-car glance.  Over our hilly streets
slumbers eternal leisure.  Whatever it is, Littleville
always has time to talk about it.  When anything
happens we all go running out of our front doors to
discuss it, but otherwise our streets are very still:
rows of farmhouses planted side by side for
sociability, while behind each stretch<233> its acres
of stony pasture and half-shorn woodland.  At night,
silence and darkness settle upon us early.  By nine
even the hotel has gone to bed, so that it would with
difficulty be summoned forth in protesting pajamas if a
late traveler should clamor at the door.  Of a starless
night you may look forth at eight and see no glimmer of
light or life all up and down the street.  When we come
to church of a winter evening, we carry lanterns as we
plod a drifted path in high-girt skirts and generous
goloshes.  One's sleep is sometimes startled by a flare
of light that streams from wall to wall and passes, as
some mysterious late lantern-bearer goes by, leaving
the night again all blackness, pierced sometimes by the
crazy laughter of an owl, or beaten upon by the
insistent clamor of frogs.
    Those who live by Littleville's quiet streets have
had time to have their little ways.  For example, they
still have "comp'ny" in Littleville.  In other places
they no longer have comp'ny, no longer sacrifice for
unprotesting hours and days and weeks all domestic
peace and privacy to the exigencies of an intrusive
guest.  Comp'ny, imminent, instant, or past, is
discussed in bated whispers at back doors.  Assistance
and sympathy are proffered as in a run of fever.  As
for the comp'ny itself, it<234> knows its privileges
and never resigns its prerogatives.  However efficient
at home, when a-visiting, it can sit on the barnyard
bars in its best store suit and without an emotion of
conscience watch its host milk twenty cows, or within
doors it can fold its housewifely hands upon its
waistline, regard without compunction a lap for once
apronless, and rock and chatter hour after hour while
its hostess pants and perspires to feed it.  But
Littleville has one revenge: one day, it, too, can put
on its best and drive off, and itself be somebody's
comp'ny.
    Comp'ny by definition comes from abroad, invading
our peaceful citadel from some hillside farm or
neighboring village; within our own bulwarks we are all
too neighborly for any such alien stiffness.  Our
streets are cheery with greeting.  Among the younger
fry, "Hello " is the universal term of accost.
"Hello!" some youngster yodels to me from across the
street, "hello," supplemented by the frank employment
of my baptismal name, sign and seal of my adoption.  We
are careless of the little formalities of Miss and Mr.
here, just as our gentlemen are careless of their
hat-raising.  Why should Littleville man endanger head
and health from false deference to his hearty, workaday
comrade,<235> woman?  From the older men, surely,
twinkle and grin are greeting enough without any
up-quirking of rheumatic elbows; and as for the younger
men, I have a fondness for their method of raising the
right index finger to the hat-brim, with a smile that
points in the same direction.
    Although we are without formality, certain
conventions always belong to a call.  The popular hours
are two and six, with the tacit exemption of Saturday
evening, for then we might inconsiderately intercept
the gentleman of the house en route from his steaming
wash-tub in the kitchen to his ice-bound bedroom.  We
have our set forms of greeting and departure.  A
hostess must always meet a caller with a hearty, "Well,
you're quite a stranger."  A caller must always remain
a cordial two hours, and rising to leave must
invariably say, "Well, I'm making a visit, not a call";
to which the hostess responds, "Why, what's your
hurry?"  Conversation must hold itself subject to
interruption, must be prepared to arrest itself in the
midst of the most lurid recital in order that all may
fly to the window if man or beast or both pass by.
    As to that conversation itself, we really do not
care for feverish animation.  We allow<236> ourselves
long pauses while we creak our rockers, pleasantly
torpid.  Should our emptiness become too acute, there
is always one subject that can fill it.  We always have
the sick.  We report to each other anxiously that
So-and-So is having "a poor spell," a condition that,
if obstinate, will result in the poor man or woman's
"doctoring," a perilous substitute for home treatment.
We have our hereditary nostrums of combinations
quainter than Shakespeare's cauldron, and home-made
brews of herbs that sound almost Chaucerian.  There is
suggestion still more remote in "hemlock tea."  I am
not certain of its ingredients, but its effect is to
produce a state of affairs known as a "hemlock sweat."
A "hemlock sweat" is the last resort before sending for
the doctor, and it generally brings him.
    If our interest in our diseases should ever flag,
we have, of course, always, our neighbors.  In
Littleville, gossip has become an art, in so far as it
possesses the perfection of pungency without taint of
malice, like the chat of an inquisitive Good Samaritan.
When Littleville talks about its neighbors, I listen in
reverence before a penetration I have never seen
anywhere else.  Littleville has not gone abroad to
study human nature; it has stayed at home, and watched
every flicker of its neighbor's<237> eyelash, has
marked each step taken from toddling infancy to
toddling old age, has listened to every word uttered
from babyhood to senility.  Oh, Littleville knows its
own; and knowing its own, knows other folk too.
Newcomer though I am, I should venture no pretense in
the face of that slumbering twinkle in Littleville's
eyes,--Littleville, sharp of tongue and genial in
deeds.
    This grace of Littleville charity, charity,
keen-eyed yet tender, can be, I suppose, the possession
of stationary people only; of people who have been
babies together, have wedded and worked, been born and
been buried together, whose parents and grandparents
also are unforgotten, whose dead lie on white-dotted
hillsides in every one's knowledge.  The thought of
this bond of permanence, of memories, has its
wistfulness for us others.  You can never be very hard
on the woman, however fallen, who was once the little
Sallie to share her cooky with you at recess; and,
however his poor grizzled head be addled now with drink
and failure, a man is still the little Joey whose bare
feet trod with yours the stubble of forbidden midnight
orchards.
    All the world looks askance at a gypsy, and we are
gypsies, we clericals; yet never gypsies<238> more
involuntary, more home-loving at heart.  We are
pilgrims, never dropping, as we sojourn in parish after
parish, the pilgrim cloak of an affable reserve.  Back
to the edges of my memory, we ourselves have been
always the Ministry.  Sundays in that straight front
pew, week-days in that well-watched rectory, always the
Ministry, never ourselves.  But here at last in my
little town, is that straight cloak of ministerial
decorum slipping from us?  May we set down our scrip
and staff?  At last do we dare to be ourselves,
neighbors with neighbors?  Do we dare to be part of a
place?  Perhaps.
    Already in brief years I have acquired a little of
that admitted intimacy with a community that comes only
through knowing some bit of its history for one's self
and not on hearsay; for I have observed the course of
several of our thrifty Littleville courtships whereby
our youngsters in their later teens set themselves
sturdily beneath the yoke of matrimony, promptly
bringing forth a procession of babes, as promptly led
to baptism.  Also I have stood with the rest in our
little graveyard when some old neighbor has been laid
to rest.  I share with the rest the memory of kind old
hands grown motionless, and chirrupy old voices now
stilled; so that some of<239> these graves, turning
slowly from raw soil to kindlier green, are mine, the
stranger's.
    Because those newer graves are mine, I may linger
in more assured friendliness among the older ones, for
to me these brief white-portaled streets of this other
Littleville are kindly too; so that I like to go
a-calling here also, letting my fancy knock at these
low green mounds beneath the mat of periwinkle, above
which sometimes flash the blue wings of birds or of
sailing butterfly, while just beyond the fence the
bobolinks go singing above the clover-fields.  Country
graveyards are pleasant places; at least ours has no
gloom of tangled undergrowth and dank cypress shadow,
for we are a house-wifely company, and we like all
things well swept and shipshape, even cemeteries.
    Even the tragedies the marbles tell are softened
now.  There are many little gravestones in our
cemetery, recording little lives long ago cut short.
Many of them belong to that winter I have heard about,
a winter long before antitoxin or even disinfectants,
when one Sunday in Littleville twenty children lay
dead.  It was sad then, but to-day to the tune of
soaring bobolinks I must be thinking how gayly the
little ones put on their winglets all together, and, a
white flock, went trooping<240> off, shepherded by
angels.  In a village graveyard where the dead lie so
cozily close to home, in a graveyard so blue above and
green below, one has to remember how many things are
sadder than death.
    I come back from reverie as the 'bus bell goes
tinkling by, beyond the white-arched gate, and I rise
to gaze to see who has come to us from the world, for
the 'bus comes from the train, and the train comes from
far away, where the world runs its whirligig, far from
Littleville.
    The 'bus connects us with life.  When one arrives
at home, usually at nightfall, there always is the old
'bus man at the train step, peering up and stretching
out both welcoming arms to receive our packages and
bags.  When he has stowed all away, in he climbs
rheumatically, and off we trundle, rattling and
wheezing along, for driver and horses and 'bus are all
in the last stages of decrepitude.  The lantern hung
between the shafts plays out its straight jet of light,
but within it is so dark that I cannot guess our
whereabouts until we draw up at the hotel.  The
hotel-keeper comes out in his shirt-sleeves to receive
the fat agents we have brought him, and, peering
hospitably into the dark recesses, gives me welcome
too.  Off and on we rumble, and as<241> we draw rein at
the post-office, the postmaster, shouldering the
mail-bag, spies me and extends his hearty handshake;
from the newspaper office near by, where the editor is
working, comes a hazarded greeting, to which I respond
cheerily from my dark hole, and become forthwith one of
to-morrow's items.
    On and up the hill.  I can just discern the white
belfry against the blue-black sky.  Beyond the church
is the rectory, and there a lantern on the step and a
ruddy door flung wide.  I have drawn up, returning, to
rectory doors before, but somehow in Littleville it is
different; to-morrow, on Sunday, Littleville will be
glad I have come back, and will say so, at church, for
in Littleville Sunday is different, too.
    Here there is never the Sabbath stiffness of my
childhood.  Here the front pew does not straighten my
spine intolerably.  Rather I turn half about, run a
careless arm along the pew-rail, and chat huskily with
my rear neighbor until church begins, and even in
service I may nod encouragement to the choir if they
happen to be brought to confusion in the Te Deum, or in
the very sermon I may peep under some little flowered
straw hat and get a delighted grin in response.  When
service is over<242> I shall be a long time getting to
the door, having so many hands I want to shake, for we
do not call my little town, Parish; we call it home.



                               XXI

                        _Genus Clericum_

I was a ministerial child rather by birth than by
conviction.  To one born on the march there may come to
be in the end a mystic home-sense in the loneliness of
tents, but in the beginning the army child may perhaps
have his own opinion of the rigors of camp life and
prefer his morning snooze to the summons of the
bivouac.  Analogously, the children of the clerical
class may come into existence with a leaning toward the
world, the flesh, and the devil, and may long conceal,
beneath an outward conformity and a due filial
reticence, an infant resentment against the
preoccupation of their parents with the salvation of
souls.
    I think I speak for many ministerial children when
I say that the attitude of my infancy toward its
environment was mainly one of protest, broken by
passionate upheavals of partisanship.  Sometimes I
sympathized with little neighbors who limped
shamelessly through the catechism or went out of church
before the sermon, but as often I longed to<244> shake
them and thrust them, well-prodded, upon their duties.
    The mere external discipline of the church militant
came easily to me because I was so early inured to it.
It is back of my memory, but I have ascertained that it
was at the age of two and under that I learned rigidity
of muscle in the sanctuary, where I sat holding
immobile on the pew cushion legs too short to crook,
while my fingers, in white cotton gloves, were extended
in stiff separation each from each.  The hat upon my
head was in itself an early example of ministerial
adjustment to parochial issues.  Two ladies who were
rivals in missionary zeal had each been moved to
present me with a hat.  That neither hat suited either
my face or my mother's taste was, of course, mere
incident.  The claims both of courtesy and of equity
necessitated my wearing the hats in impartial
regularity, on alternate Sundays.  Thus before the
beginnings of memory, and through the medium of a
baby's hat, did I become acquainted with the potency,
in our domestic concerns, of that great public called
Parish.
    It must have been at about this period that I
experienced one of my intermittent attacks of
partisanship, desiring with my clear infant voice to
rebuke the lukewarm re<245>sponses of the congregation,
and remodeling the unintelligible stretches of the
Litany by the stentorian variation, "Lord have mercy
upon us, miserable scissors!"  The words of liturgy and
hymn did not, however, long confound me.  I had the
concentration of many a sanctuary hour to devote to
their meaning, so that by six years old even the
Trinity had become a term of crystalline comprehension.
By this time, also, other ministerial babykins had come
toddling into the march in my rear, to share with me
the soberness and separation of our calling.  It was,
on the whole, well disciplined, our little army corps,
although we recognized the latent twinkle in the eyes
of the mother who generaled us with a clever balancing
of motive between our well-being and that of the
Parish.  Both she and we were occasionally
flabbergasted, sometimes by our public performance of
private virtues, sometimes by our private performance
of public ones.  For example, at the home table we were
always exhorted to conscientious chewing; it did not,
therefore, occur to us to accelerate the process at a
Sunday-School picnic.  The sylvan board had long been
deserted by others, but we, the Rector's children, a
faithful little line, longing to be on the
merry-go-round, in the swings, on the<246> boats, still
sat and dutifully chewed and chewed and chewed.  I
vividly recall the bewildering onslaught of our mother
leading a bevy of church ladies in search of the
missing.  Ignominiously were we whirled off to join the
sports of less seeming-famished companions.
    On the other hand, in public, in the Sunday School,
were we early made to understand that all the law and
the prophets hung upon the catechism; a pink-paper
catechism, frank in its woodcuts and facile in its
explanation of the mysteries of the sacraments.  Since
this pink catechism was a lamp unto our feet, we
suggested, during a thrilling burglar epidemic, that
copies be left on the thresholds of rectory
bedchambers.  The burglar would pause to read, and
there would ensue his immediate conversion and our
resultant security.  The parental laughter at our
expense shook the foundations of our faith.
    Such a severe consistency of behavior in regard to
the lessons taught in the rectory and those taught in
the sanctuary is a state of mind early outgrown by any
intelligent ministerial child.  Such crudity of conduct
was a stage in the march that we had all passed by the
age of ten.  By that time we had an unerring sense of
what was due to the Parish and what was due to
ourselves, with the result<247> that our outward
conformity was about balanced by our inward misanthropy
at having to conform.  We attended, muttering
imprecations up to the very door, the infant missionary
society that filched our Saturday afternoons, we tore
up futile scraps of calico to jab them together again
with accursed "over-and-over" stitches, we gazed at
pictures in which splendid blanketed braves, or
splendid unclothed Samoans, were seen to exchange
romance for religion in the shape of conversion and
white cottas.  Our souls loathed patchwork and
missions, but, on the other hand, how we thrilled to
the righteousness of reward when the visiting
missionary, male or female, became our own particular
guest!  The ecstasy as one flirted one's Sunday
flounces before the eyes of less favored neighbors
because one was walking to church, holding the hand of
a genuine Arctic archdeacon!  And then the Bishop's
visits, when we were whisked into cubbyhole and closet
out of our crowded nursery that it might be converted
into a prophet's chamber!  Which one of my schoolmates
had ever passed the right reverend plate at supper?
And the honor of the Bishop's petting afterwards!  The
episcopal lap, the high general's knee, is the
prerogative of the captain's children only,<248> the
same that never miss church and know all their
collects.
    Slowly we grew accustomed to the pressure of the
knapsack upon our shoulders, that weight of clerical
example which did not burden our irresponsible
playmates.  We knew that the Minister's children were
different.  We did not want it to be so, but we began
to see why it was so.  True, we protested when our
father would not pause to tell us stories or our mother
stay at home from calls to play with dolls, yet in the
silent thinking-places of our little hearts we began to
divine the beauty of the midnight sick-watches, of the
valiancy of Sunday-School labors, of the brave
weariness of sewing societies, of the heaven-born
patience with Parish bores.  As we watched the sleeker
parents of our schoolmates, there dawned in us
realization of what our parents had given up, and
silent shame for our jealousy of their devotion.  Few
children are hurt by being shoved aside a little
because of an ideal.  The hours when our parents played
with us are still passing precious, but it is because
of the other hours that there was born in us a
shamefaced sense of the meaning of the banner under
which we trudged.
    Isolation is the chief inconvenience of hav<249>ing
an ideal in the family.  We were apart from other
youngsters, partly because we knew it incumbent upon us
to set them an example, since, early enough and sadly
enough, we had acquired self-consciousness from the
frank criticism of all our conduct made by any
parishioner so minded, and partly were we cut off by
the vow of poverty taken by our parents.  Other
families may look forward to easier times; no
ministerial household has any such illusions.  The
tiniest child of the ministry knows that after forty
the father will not receive a call; the veriest baby of
us knows what happens to old ministers, because so many
pitiful, decrepit old soldiers have from time to time
found shelter in our tent.
    Yet the ministry is the best place in the world to
learn that poverty is a nut that yields good meat if
you crack it boldly.  Well I remember an icy rectory
which had but one register in the Arctic regions of the
second story.  At bedtime we would gather about this
register to warm our toes.  Each blanketed to the ears
like a little Indian, we would discourse as serenely
and acutely as any schoolmen, of the nature of angels,
for was not the whole realm of heaven and earth ours
for the mere talking?  Pinched and patched we
might<250> be, but bold to meet penury with a
consciousness of princely possessions.  I did not so
much think well of myself for this superiority to
worldly comforts as I thought scorn of those who did
not have it.  Very early I had a contempt for a child
who could not evolve a game from a clothespin or set a
pageant moving forth from a box of buttons.  I had a
veritable snobbishness of disdain for a youngster who
had to be amused.
    Necessarily one requires respect for inward
resources when the only things one has ever had enough
of are bread and butter and books.  Every ministerial
child breathes book-madness and burns for an education.
When at the age of five you have known your father to
go without boots for a book, and then to caper like a
weanling lamb on the volume's arrival, you have
acquired something more potent than a mere
conscientious respect for literature; rather you have
learned to regard the book-world as a place of
bacchanal liberty and delight forever open to you.  I
do not know whether it tended toward my humanizing or
against it that the dominant beings of my young
imagination were Books, while those of my girl friends
were Boys.
    There is nothing more effective than clerical
penury to teach one the cheapness of<251> dreams.  The
door of fantasy stands always open for the rectory
household to enter, singly or together.  I think every
ministerial family cherishes that one dear dream of all
unwilling gypsies.  They always hope somehow,
somewhere, sometime, to find a house that shall be a
home.  Do what you may, a rectory is always house, not
home.  It may always belong to some one else next
month.  If only it were worth while to plant perennials
in our flower-beds!  If only it were worth while to
plant friendships to bear fruit in after years!  Yet
this last we can never help doing as we pass from
parish to parish, being at heart most human of
wanderers.  It must be very beautiful to belong
somewhere, to have, for instance, cousinships in the
neighborhood.  There are never any family parties in
the ministry.  There are never any gentle grandsires to
come forth from their kindly crypts and give guarantee
of our characters to the community.  On each new
camping-ground we stand, a huddled family group,
completely dependent on our own efforts for
introduction.
    These new-parish sensations tempt to
generalizations, for they are so alike, in town after
town.  The zest of a new call wears away even in one's
infancy.  Perhaps the captain<252> still expects to
find his tents pitched in Arcady, but not so his
family; we meet the Parish's reception acutely on our
good behavior, exquisitely affable to all, but our
inner motto is, "Watch out!"  It is usually those
parishioners who give us most effusive welcome who will
be readiest to desire our godspeed.  It is those who
stand back and look us over who will be our firmest
friends.  We cannot resent their attitude because it is
exactly our own.  We, too, are looking them over.
When we go into a new parish the first person we meet
is some one who is n't there, namely, our predecessor,
that thorn in the flesh of the most righteous saint and
soldier.  There is always a predecessor, and however
dead or distant, he is always there, in the hearts of
the Parish, and quite frequently he is in their homes
as well.  However callous, however courteous one may
endeavor to be, one cannot escape a slight sensation of
stiffening when parishioners want The Other One to
marry or bury them.  Think of the well-bred wrangle
that sometimes occurs in settling the clerical rights
to a corpse!  In all my ministerial experience I never
knew a predecessor and a successor who loved each
other.  Yet I speak without bitterness, for one of the
proudest and pleasantest sensations of our<253>
ministry has been that of being a predecessor ourself.
    To an unwilling nomad there is nothing so
monotonous as change, yet the very constancy of our
march engenders an amazing ease of adjustment to each
new environment.  In our relations to people, we
clericals learn an adaptability almost pathetically
perfect.  We succeed in being all things to all men by
never being all ourselves to any man.  Our affability
is the armor that protects the inner sensitive
personality.  Perhaps we are naturally expansive, but
we early learn the perils of frankness, so that it
comes about that along our pilgrimage we are friendly,
but have few friends, those few, however, the
tenderest, trustiest friends in the world, those few,
rare spirits of a keenness and a kindness to penetrate
the steel-strong armor of ministerial reserve.  Very
young, we clerical sons and daughters learn to pass
from millionaire to laundress with no change of manner.
The reason is not far to seek; we own senior warden and
washerwoman as our parishioners, equally, because
warden and washerwoman, equally, feel that they own us.
With equal freedom the two censure or serve, love or
hate, us.  Recognizing the proprietory rights of each,
we realize that each may be equally<254> our bane or
our blessing.  Yet our democracy goes deeper than all
this.  Half-hearted soldiers we may often be, but we
never doubt the sincerity of our flag.  We had the luck
to be born into the household of the consecrated,
whether we wanted to be or not; we are genuinely
democratic for the same reason that the apostles were.
    Perhaps there is another reason, and a wickeder
one, why all men stand in our sight naked of all
accidental social trappings; and that is that we know
them all so well!  I cannot determine how clearly the
world may see into rectory windows, but certainly one
sees pretty clearly from rectory windows.  It is a
heart-searching and heart-revealing relation, that of a
parish to its parson.  The completely voluntary nature
of all church effort and church organization affords an
exhibition of idiosyncrasies not to be found in any
other association.  When I think of the crimes and the
crankiness sometimes committed in the name of religion,
I thank Heaven that the effect of these in a
ministerial household is more often amusement than
cynicism.  I was grown up before I realized that the
ostensible purpose of a choir is to praise the Lord: in
my youth I always thought of a choir solely as a means
of perfecting a rector in patience.<255>
    But always there exists the other side in the
parochial relation, the side not of badness, but of
beauty.  Personally I perceive no stronger argument
against the charge of present-day irreligion than the
tribute of trust paid to any sincere minister.  From my
childhood on I have seen it everywhere, the respect for
consecration.  Everywhere I have heard it, the belief
in the man who believes, ring confident as the cry of
the roadside beggar upon the Nazarene.
    Few people think it worth while to put on pretense
with a clergyman; they rarely try to make him think
them better than they are; yet he generally does think
so.  It is frequently the alertness to protect the
captain against his own unworldliness that teaches his
family their sanity and sureness of insight.  This very
insight may, however, make them poorer-spirited than
their superior officer, craven and fain to capitulate.
In a parish skirmish they are likely to be divided
between hot loyalty to his cause and a vain hope that
he won't think it necessary to fight.  I can picture
the probable domestic anxiety in the house of Calchas
when in pursuit of his calling he found it necessary to
stand up to the king of men, Agamemnon!
    Long campaigning is likely to make minis<256>terial
offspring lovers of peace, yet I believe I am not
really unwilling to fight the Devil.  The trouble is
that we of the ministry so often fight him when he is
n't there.  I wish our young theologues could be taught
the sound and shape of Satan.  Frankly I arraign the
theological seminary as a very poor military school.
It sends forth a soldier who does not know so much as
how to set up a tent, whose idea of the Enemy is a
mediaeval bugaboo in a book, I would establish two new
chairs in our seminaries, a chair of agriculture,
rudimentary, perhaps, but sufficient to teach the
difference between tares and wheat, which Nature,
uninstructed in any isms, still ordains shall grow
together unto the harvest; and a second chair, in
common sense, to dispense instruction in human nature.
The average theologue is deep-read in Hebrew Scripture,
but ignorant of the A B C of the tongue in which is
written the Bible of man's soul.  Doctors may dispute
the divine inspiration of the former, but who of us is
infidel enough to dispute the divine inspiration of the
latter?  Perhaps the more reprehensible fault of the
seminary is not so much deficiency in the matter of its
teaching as deficiency in its maturity.  No thinking
person wishes to receive his spiritual guidance from an
unthink<257>ing boy.  I am constantly puzzled by the
ill-logic of our ministerial preparation when I reflect
that the foundation of its teaching is the fact that
God Himself thought it necessary to be thirty years a
man with men before He was ready to teach or to preach.
    Considering his inadequate equipment, so inferior
in the relation of means to end to that of the social
worker, the average minister of to-day does better than
his preparation deserves.  If he has devotion, devotion
will, in the long run, counteract his blunders.  People
will put up with almost anything from a man so long as
he's a man.  There never was a time when respect for a
clerical coat, as a coat, was less; there never was a
time when reverence for the man within the coat, as a
man, was greater.  Because of this fact, we of the
ministry who best know the seamy side of an ideal know
also best its beauty.
    I was born beneath a banner I did not choose, but
like many another ministerial child, I have grown from
a mere external allegiance to a real one.  I think the
angels of birth were a little distraught when they
dropped me in the tents of the righteous, but on the
whole I am reconciled.  I have traveled to and fro and
far, but only the rectory tent is home, there alone
exists the nomad's intense<258> family friendship which
is a home's sole enduring furniture.  I have wandered
so far among other men and other manners and morals
that sometimes our little band has seemed but a faint
dot on the spaces of a universe undreamed of within the
limitations of rectory walls.  Wandering thus, I have
questioned many things unquestioned in my childhood.
Only ministerial children themselves can estimate how
open they are to doubt's attacks.  The very intensity
of partisanship and narrowness of creed and practice in
which they have been brought up are sources of danger,
while, having always been nourished on the glory of the
mind, they will always in their traveling gravitate to
the places of intellect, only to find their little
faith regarded there as one more soap-bubble to be
tossed about.  Accustomed at home to the old-fashioned
unquestioning distinctions, the minister's son or
daughter will discover that there no longer exists the
old sharp fight between orthodoxy and heterodoxy,
because each side recognizes far too well a kinship in
weakness and wistfulness.  There was a time when to
take a man's faith from him was a fair game, for it was
his own affair to guard a castle aggressively inviting
attack.  Now even infidels are too pitiful to steal
another man's God.<259>
    It is not so simple an adjustment as perhaps it
externally appears, the return to the tiny clerical
camp whence once we issued forth to our education.
Perhaps I have thrilled to the trumpets of larger
armies, perhaps our little troop of skirmishers seems
to me a sorry one now, and perhaps, darker treachery
still, the hosts of Midian do not loom so big and black
to me as of old, perhaps I have even made some charming
friends among the Hittites and the Jebusites, but it is
astonishing how, when I am back in the old conditions,
the enemy's ranks resume their old color and
proportion.
    When I am abroad I am no stickler for church
attendance, yielding myself sometimes to the call of a
"heaven-kissing hill" or to the spell of woods sacredly
serene; but at home I am accustomed by contagion to
look darkly askance at Sunday picknickers or lazy
stay-at-homes.  They should come and hear my father
preach!  Yet I myself feel God nearer on a hilltop than
at the altar, and I own, as closest comrades and most
inspiring, men and women whose souls never bow in
worship anywhere.  They belong to another army, that
army of social betterment which is so curiously blind
to its own pillar of fire.  My creed is to their minds
a child's<260> lisping, they ask neither a God nor an
immortality, they ask only that they may lift the
burdened man upright.  If we cannot worship, let us
work, people say to-day, and do not dream that never
before in history was there enough religion in the
world to make theirs a plausible deduction.
    These my friends belong to the army of
non-church-goers arraigned in the little village church
where I kneel to say my prayers.  It is very strange,
they say to me,--these soldiers of an army grown far
larger now than our thinning ranks,--very strange to me
that you should need a religion; and I answer it is
very strange to me that you cannot hear above the
blackness of your hosting, your own prophet voices
choiring a midnight mass to Heaven.
    There are divers ways of worship and I acknowledge
that my own way, minister's daughter though I am,
exemplary in externals, is not always that which would
appear best in accord with my bowed head and practiced
knees.  There is much in your full-sized Anglican that
is bigger than his Prayer Book, although I loyally hold
that an inspired document of Christian common sense.
Many a windy, rolling thought comes to me when I am
kneeling in secret rebellion at the abase<261>ment of
the Litany, irreverent, meseemeth, to the souls cast in
God's image, but who am I that I should think scorn of
any words by which people climb to Heaven?  Suppose I
should compose prayers for my father's congregation,
think how bewildered the good people in our pews would
become if they should find, writ out for their
repeating, the calls of birds and the voices of winds,
which I know would sing themselves into any prayer of
my making.
    No, in its prayers and in its practice, I find
myself ever turning quietly back to the faith of my
fathers, that banner of my clan.  Perhaps I may think
its gold tarnished with mediaevalism, its silk worn
very thin, but are not all banners merely the work of
men's hands?  And what matter of the ensign so long as
it holds skyward?  I, within the ministry, may
sometimes question our methods of warfare, thinking
them valiant against obsolete bugaboos and oblivious of
a more subtle Satan, but, doubtful how better to direct
the age-old campaign, uncertain what newer weapons to
endue, I would rather still be on the side of a blind
and passionate ideal, for energies may sometimes be
wasted, but ideals are never wasted.
    Perhaps I have sometimes thought to<262> join that
other army, of man's social progress, a noble army the
thunder of whose modern warfare rolls ever louder and
louder through the land.  But I a deserter from the
thin, faint brigade that belongs to an older fashion?
A deserter now, when, in our little rectory corps, I
see the hands that grasp the sword growing weaker, and
the hands that uphold the sword-bearer's growing
frailer, and when, in eyes keen to pierce the Enemy's
darkness, I read the growing peace prophetic of the
battle over?  Back to my place in the ranks, back
beneath our tattered pennon!  What better service have
I craved?  What braver banner?  For on the ensigns of
many creeds I have searched, after all, only for that
one sure device which shines upon my fathers' faith.
That device is a Face, even the face of the leader of
all the host, and as on and on I follow the march of
our ministry,--

        "That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows,
         Or decomposes, but to recompose,
         Become my universe that feels and knows!"



                              XXII

          _Some Diffculties in Doing without Eternity_

Have any of us noticed what a fairy-land we lost when
we stopped believing in eternity?  There was a glamour
and a glitter about that past playground of religion
which makes our present creed of science barren and
chilly.  If to-day we write the word Eternity in white
chalk on a blackboard, and gazing at it try to recall
what it used to signify, we shall find this exercise of
the spirit most joyous.  The word reminds us how we
used to slip away from hurry to bathe in a sea of
timelessness, refreshing to every taut nerve.  How we
exulted and expanded in the belief that eternity would
give us all that we could not get in the present, for
that was what eternity was for!  We should never again
be sick or sad or bad.  In eternity we should be no
longer the puny spawn of monkeys, but beings good and
great and glorious as angels.  Eternity was full of
shining light and serried ranks of singing<264> hosts.
Majestic figures from the past walked its wondrous
streets and we ourselves walked with them.  There was
the gleaming of a golden and immortal city, our home at
last.  There was even in our vision of eternity the
presence of God.
    Such was the fairyland of faith where once we
walked confidently.  It is banned now even from our
fancy as irrevocably as the elf-kingdom of the nursery.
No one now believes we live after we die; it is even
deemed reprehensible to want to.  Yet for those of us
who formerly possessed eternity it is hard all at once
to get used to doing without it.  We agree with science
that eternity should be abolished in the interests of
an efficient spiritual life, and yet, without eternity,
we sometimes ache with our abrupt adjustment to being
merely mortal.  Creeds and other comforts have a way of
slipping away from us without our seeing.  Time and
again we can be found blindly struggling to adapt
ourselves to some deficiency in our supply of beliefs
without any clear conception of the nature of the hole
or of our resources for either filling it or enduring
it.  The present age suffers all the awkwardness of
being transitional.  In a few decades babies will be
born immune to any faith or fear in regard<265> to the
future, but meanwhile it is well to examine closely our
present difficulties in passing from immortality to
annihilation, and perhaps to discover a little help for
hobbledehoys.  A transitional period should be a little
patient with itself, for it suffers both the
growing-pains of stretching to the demands of the
future and the rheumatic twinges of belonging to a
decaying past.
    The first difficulty of our adjustment has the
nature of a growing-pain, being due to our still
imperfect response to the commands of science, which
bewilder our dullness by apparent contradiction.  When
science is all the time bidding us to batter down
doors, it is confusing to the mind to have science
herself declare that death is the only door that opens
nowhere.  In every other department of research we are
encouraged to the wildest flights of imagination and
hypothesis.  It is, therefore, increasingly difficult,
as we become increasingly inured to scientific
adventure, to stop short before the most provocative of
all phenomena, the human spirit in its eventful cycle.
Eternity seems the only thoroughly scientific
explanation of soul.  At a mere superficial reading
each human life appears like a chapter from a serial
rather than a complete volume or a<266> fugitive page
tossed on the wind.  The chance-blown paragraphs reveal
so much that suggests a vigorously conceived plot,
powerful characterization, dramatic incident, intense
emotion, rich background, that it is almost impossible
not to formulate a synopsis of preceding chapters, and
to conjecture the denouement following the catastrophe
of death.
    It is even at times hard to withstand the
conviction that there must be an author.  One could
almost suspect him of breaking off at a crisis on
purpose to make us eager for the next installment.  The
figure of speech may perhaps make clear to us the
primary trouble of our being transitional, namely, the
difficulty of being both scientific and unscientific at
the same time, for our instinct to understand and
explain tends to destroy our pleasure even in the torn
chapter we hold in hand; it is hard to work up a proper
reading enthusiasm in the face of the positive
assertion by science that there will be no
"continued-in-our-next."
    The most cursory study of our bygone belief reveals
at once other troubles for the present generation in
trying too suddenly to get along without a future.  We
suffer from the working within us of old instincts
and<267> superstitions not to be violently uprooted--
rheumatic heritage of souls in process of
transformation.  While our reason admits that there is
no valid excuse for being immortal and that our
perverse hankering after such a condition argues us
self-centered and self-important, all the same there is
peril in too abruptly removing the props to personal
prestige promised by the mythical joys of our lost
fairyland.  Our anticipated survival gave us a sense of
superiority to the insects, prevented our being
sensitive to the silent scoffings of the roadside
stones that so long outlast us.  Evanescence tends also
to undermine our personal affections.  It hardly seems
worth while to be overfond of relative or friend whom a
breath of wind may snuff out like a flame.  Why should
beings more brittle than beetles go about loving each
other as if they were gods?  Morally, human frailty was
often subconsciously controlled by keeping ourselves
fit for the society we expected ultimately to enter,
that of saints and sages and perhaps of God Himself.
    The first effect of destroying all these
expectations is disastrous for people who were far more
dependent on them than they dreamed, for, to tell the
truth, eternity in the old days had so little apparent
relation<268> to our daily conduct that the complete
rejection of the concept is like that of some bodily
organ whose functioning is deemed negligible until it
ceases.  Our suffering is no less keen because we
recognize it as purely evolutional and temporary.  In a
few generations people will find as much inspiration in
being finite as we used to find in being infinite.
Meanwhile, for us who have the luck to be transitional
there is perhaps a compromise.
    Apart from our personal pangs, the loss of eternity
has had effects, social and political, that intensify
our private discomfort.  Perhaps if our difficulties
are clarified we may recognize how burdened we actually
are, and be more willing to allow ourselves a makeshift
leniency.  Chief among the public phenomena directly
traceable to the absence of eternity is the war.  On a
basis of strict mortality, war for aggrandizement
becomes the only legitimate activity for person or
nation.  Reason shows that, since death ends all,
material things are the only things worth getting, and
even more clearly shows that, since human beings are as
finite as mosquitoes, they are no more worthy of
preservation.  Germany is the most laudably logical
nation in the world, but her logic has been a<269>
little uncomfortable for the nations who are more
sluggish in evolution, and who still cling to their
retrogressive respect for spiritual valuations and to
their obsolete reverence for the human soul.  Of
course, if Germany had not purified herself of all
taint of faith in eternity, she might conceivably have
waited for permeation in peace, instead of being in
such a devil of a hurry to chop a way through for her
culture.  Doubtless, in the course of time other
nations will attain Germany's serene heights of pure
reason, but at present it is necessary frankly to admit
that aggression, while our brains pronounce it a most
rational pastime, is still for our imaginations and
sympathies one of the chief temporary discomforts of
doing without eternity.
    Next to the war in importance of effect stands the
high cost of living.  Of course we all know that there
is enough food for everybody to eat and enough money to
pay for it, provided that nobody wants more food than
he ought to eat, nor more money than he ought to spend.
However, now that we know with absolute certainty that
we die when we die, any man would be a fool if he did
not try to eat as much and to spend as much as he
possibly could.  Food and money are the<270> only fun
the finite can have, and naturally the effort to get as
much as possible of both sends prices soaring.  Without
penetrating too far into economic intricacies, one can
connect the decline in value of the Apocalypse with the
advance in value of eggs.  The high cost of living is
directly due to the high cost of dying; when dying
costs annihilation, people have to work pretty hard to
get a life's worth out of seventy years.
    Of causes of distress taken in order of popular
complaint, next to war and the high cost of living
stands the new poetry.  The relation between imagism
and immortality is so obvious as to be invisible.
Granted that the aim of literature is to mirror life,
the imagist insistence on aspect _versus_
interpretation is inevitable, for plainly literature
should not deal with meanings when life, being mortal,
cannot have a meaning.  Sensation alone is sufficiently
ephemeral to be true to life, whereas a poem that
attempts to express some significance beneath phenomena
has a tendency to outlast its generation, and runs the
risk of endurance, and of becoming, in some notable
instances, even immortal, whereas such a reversion
toward stability either in a poem or in a person shows
each alike false to our faith in flux.<271>
    Those of us, however, who cannot all at once throw
off the thrall of the poor old poets of our infancy
must be content to go a bit slowly, trusting that our
descendants will attain complete responsiveness to the
poetry of the evanescent.  We perceive humbly enough
how reactionary we are, but our obstreperous instinct
for explanation corrupts even our literary tenets so
that with senile obstinacy we sometimes wonder whether,
even from its own purely aesthetic point of view, the
new poetry does not miss something the older poetry
possessed.  Meaning, adroitly introduced into a poem,
sometimes produced a pretty little art of its own, a
blending of outer and inner attributes that had in
itself a kind of grace.  It is even more heterodox to
question, in looking back, whether a poet's effort to
explain was not stimulating to his imagination, making
him actually see things more vividly in their external
aspects by his very concentration on their inner
qualities.  Certainly no imagist poet, for all his
preoccupation with picture, has ever produced as vivid
descriptions as did Browning, a poet above all others
avid for meanings.
    We of to-day may as well acknowledge first as last
that our feet, set in infancy to<272> the pace of
eternity, will never step lively enough for the present
age.  While deprecating the breathlessness of keeping
up with the contemporary, the most old-fashioned of us
must admire its valiancy.  We are not nearly so lazy as
when we used to leave some of our development to be
accomplished after the temporary set-back of death.
Our own muscles are a bit stiff, however, and as we
conscientiously whip them to the requirements of
high-speed pressure, we must comfort ourselves with the
thought that our posterity will be able to fly without
experiencing any of our awkwardness.
    The spiritual leisure and lethargy resulting from a
reliance on eternity to finish up what we could not get
done on earth, obviously clogged the wheels of
progress, which now can be everywhere seen whizzing
along without any brakes.  We open the advertising
pages of any periodical, to find that speed is the
dominant advantage offered with every commodity.
Get-healthy-quick, get-learned-quick, get-rich-quick,
are the headings under which most of our advertisements
might be grouped.  We are all familiar with the
photographed faces of the people who will show us how
to reach a maximum of attainment in a minimum of time.
The gentleman with the<273> arresting index finger
leaps out at our laziness to teach us how to be
successful in ten lessons.  Success is a word that
could not even be defined before the abolishment of
eternity, with the resultant denial of all criteria but
the immediate.
    While haste is necessarily painful for our still
imperfectly adjusted mentality in every department of
life, we must allow for our being peculiarly sensitive
to the changes it necessitates in the training of
youth.  In the old days when death graduated us into
eternity, we had much more time to devote to education.
There was in our early years an agreeable luxury in the
pursuit of learning.  We did not have to practice the
rigid economy of the correspondence school or of
languages by phonograph.  As we look back, it seems as
if minds were richer when they did not have to be so
niggardly in the luggage they took for their journey.
This is but the sentimental vaporing of the senile, for
in our sane moments we perceive as clearly as does the
most modern pedagogue that Greek and Latin are
impedimenta to retard the boy of to-day in the race set
before him, and we agree with the publisher-purveyors
to youth that the compendia of useful knowledge
furnished by them offer the handiest possible<274>
canned nutriment for a period that has time only for
acquisition, not for digestion.
    As regards the study of the classics, we did not at
first perceive that to annul the future involved
annulling the past, and yet, practically, giving up
eternity has undermined our interest in history.
Conviction of mortality enjoins the conscience to
concentrate on the contemporary so intensely that past
events become obscure.  Unless we have eternity before
us we really have no time to look behind.  Yet some of
us have a yearning for history that used to find
satisfaction in fancying that our little age fitted
into a sequence of ages.  It contributed to a false but
agreeable complacency to gaze back into an endless past
as it did to gaze forward into an endless future.  Of
course, abolishing eternity does not necessarily
obliterate the past or explicitly forbid our going back
there to visit; it merely makes to-day so important
that we have no time whatever for yesterday.
    In this matter of educational adjustment, as in
others, a transitional period suffers enough to permit
itself a little humoring of its prejudices; we should
not attach too much guilt to a surreptitious enjoyment
of the ancients so long as we do not corrupt the youth
of our acquaintance by teaching them<275> any of our
respect for antique art.  So long as we are doing our
conscientious best to free our boys and girls from the
cumbersomeness of a classic education, we may feel that
we have done our duty, and may indulge a secret delight
in the dusty shelves that reveal to us the grace that
was Greece and the glory that was Rome.  It is all
right so long as we don't let the children know, for
that bygone beauty is strangely seductive and
glamorous, and contact with it might sap their energy
in pursuing fortune and fame and food, which should be
the sole preoccupation of people appointed to die.
    Indisputably speed must be the desideratum of all
activity, educational or other.  Now the chief distress
we older ones experience from speed is not that it
leads to success, but that so often it leads nowhere.
The old-fashioned custom of having a purpose in a
pursuit makes it difficult for us to enjoy pure
giddiness as heartily as do our younger contemporaries.
Haste, first introduced as a method of extracting from
the temporary what eternity used to supply, has become
an end in itself, so that a great many people ask
nothing else of life but to feel themselves whizzing.
Since nothing is permanent except impermanence, the one
thing to do is to go spinning along,<276> cautious only
to avoid bumping into a destination.  As a consequence
of trying to catch up in one lifetime with all the
activity of eternity, we have acquired such
exhilaration, such momentum of energy, that there is
nothing we are so afraid of as the impact of arriving
somewhere.  The profession of flux as a creed
necessitates the practice of flying as a habit.  Yet
with this very profession of faith I find I have
arrived at a heresy.
    Now this heresy consists of the argument plainly
approved by pure logic that if the purpose of speed is
to get the most out of this life because there is no
other, then no movement at all is exactly as rational
as too much, and we have a perfect right to select any
spot of our mental landscape that suits us and sit down
on it, convinced that it is just as sensible to get our
money's worth out of life's little day by being
stationary as by being giddy.  On the principle that
ephemeral beings have a right to any fun they can find
is founded the advice to our age toward which this
entire discussion has been directed.  Baldly stated,
the proposal is this: the best way of doing without
eternity is to pretend we don't have to!  The
suggestion is frankly so absurd that any reader is
permitted to smile at it as freely as does the writer.
We have lost eternity and we<277> can't bring it back
by pretending it is still there.  The point is that we
don't want to bring it back, but we do want to discover
some way of being comfortable without it.  Believing
that there is no eternity, but living as if there were,
is not a process possible to all persons, and is
therefore urged only upon those capable of so
separating their reason and their imagination that the
two can function independently of each other.  Many
people are happily thus constituted, and still more can
become so if they try.  There is, moreover, no real sin
in the course, because we are rather true to our
imaginations than false to our convictions, and,
besides, we do no proselyting; we merely allow our own
fancy the refreshment of revisiting our lost fairyland.
    The chief obstacle to the compromise is that its
absurdity is exactly balanced by its efficacy; in other
words, you can't tell how good it will feel until you
try it, and if you are an over-rational and
over-conscientious person you will think it beneath
your dignity to try it.  Yet actually there is nothing
that contributes so much toward a sense of well-being
as pretending, for a few minutes every day,--say just
before getting up in the morning and just before going
to sleep at night,--that you are going to live after
you die.<278>
    After a few weeks of this exercise, that
embarrassment we experience in the presence of nature
becomes less painful, whereas, when we are too acutely
conscious of mortality, we are shamed by an insensate
oak, by a rock we could pound to powder for its silent
sneer at our evanescence.  If we make believe we are as
good as they are, we can hold up our heads to the sky
and the stars, and even venture to penetrate the social
exclusiveness of the sky and the mountains.  A man who
pretends he is immortal is not so deafened by the
cannon of the contemporary that he cannot hear the
still, sweet voices of the little flowers.  An
association with the ancient aristocracy of sea and
forest is good for a person, but it is almost
impossible to feel at ease in this society unless we
temporarily assume an equality with it in permanence.
    This secret leniency toward our abandoned faith
tends to enhance our joy in human comradeship as well
as in that of nature.  In actuality human affection is
so menaced by fate as to resemble the surreptitious
whispering in the schoolroom while the teacher's back
is turned.  When the loftiest spiritual converse may at
any time be broken off by the malevolence of a molecule
called a germ, some of us would rather never love
anybody as the<279> only means of getting even with
being ephemeral.  On the other hand, if we can manage
to simulate a sense of survival, and can picture death
as a mere voyage, we can enjoy comradeship up to the
very last minute, and shout confident au revoirs even
while the boat is pulling out to sea.
    A faith in a future secretly indulged is
stimulating to mentality.  If we assume for a few
minutes even in jest that perhaps our life's chapter
has a meaning, instantly our ingenuity is off to invent
other chapters past and future.  Before we know it our
minds are glowing as we discover some passage of grand
and sustained style, or are tingling with the glorious
guesswork of an entire synopsis.  If we are gifted with
any dramatic instinct, we are as likely as not, while
we turn the pages, to find ourselves appropriating the
hero's part, and bearing ourselves a bit more nobly,
with a dim notion of being destined to still greater
actions in the next installment.  Pretending that
perhaps after all our life has a meaning makes us
acquit ourselves rather better than we otherwise should
in the tragic episodes, and makes us enjoy the comic
scenes with a twinkle kindled at imperishable fires.
Even hazarded surmises about the creatorship of our
life's romance sometimes give a sense of<280> rest and
relief not as yet afforded by the prevalent doctrine of
pure flux.
    A little self-indulgence in eternity will not only
enfranchise our conversation with our contemporaries
and quicken our brains to decipher the book of
humanity, but will tend to keep our minds, manners, and
morals in trim for association with the great and good
of all ages.  We used to believe the halls of the dead
were thronged with noble spirits toward whose wisdom
and beauty our pilgrim feet would surely sometime find
the way.  This hope helped us to keep ourselves in
order, much as the exiled Englishman restrains himself
from slumping by donning his dress-suit in the jungle
solitude.  Of course, when evolution from the eternal
to the ephemeral is fully accomplished, nobody will
need any fillip to personal prestige, but for us poor
intermediates, painfully hobbledehoy, it is a secret
education in noble manners to pretend to ourselves that
some day we shall be called upon to meet Socrates or
Buddha or Christ.
    Why not have a little patience with ourselves, we
poor devils who have to bear all the brunt of the
transition from eternity to evanescence?  If we promise
not to corrupt advancing youth, if we promise not even
to corrupt our own reason by any genuine faith,<281>
can't we safely play that our life's chapter is going
to be continued?
    For, after all, what if there should be an Author?


                             THE END