By and by would come vacation, and in the following spring, at farthest, she would leave school, and then—she would see. She would write a book, maybe. Why not? And secretly dispose of it, for a large sum, to some self-regardless publisher. Should there never be another Fanny Burney? Not a novel, though, or any grown-up book, at first; but a juvenile, at least, she could surely venture on. Look at all the Cousin Maries, and Aunt Fannies, and Sister Alices, whose productions piled the booksellers' counters during the holiday sales, and found their way, sooner or later, into all the nurseries, and children's bookcases! And think of all the stories she had invented to amuse Hendie with! Better than some of these printed ones, she was quite sure, if only she could set them down just as she had spoken them under the inspiration of Hendie's eager eyes and ready glee.
She made two or three beginnings, during the summer holidays, but always came to some sort of a "sticking place," which couldn't be hobbled over in print as in verbal relation. All the links must be apparent, and everything be made to hold well together. She wouldn't have known what they were, if you had asked her—but the "unities" troubled her. And then the labor loomed up so large before her! She counted the lines in a page of a book of the ordinary juvenile size, and the number of letters in a line, and found out the wonderful compression of which manuscript is capable. And there must be two hundred pages, at least, to make a book of tolerable size.
There seemed to be nothing in the world that she could do. She could not give her time to charity, and go about among the poor. She had nothing to help them with. Her father gave, already, to ceaseless applications, more than he could positively spare. So every now and then she relinquished in discouragement her aspirations, and lived on, from day to day, as other girls did, getting what pleasure she could; hampered continually, however, with the old, inevitable tether, of "can't afford."
"If something only would happen!" If some new circumstance would creep into her life, and open the way for a more real living!
Do you think girls of seventeen don't have thoughts and longings like these? I tell you they do; and it isn't that they want to have anybody else meet with misfortune, or die, that romantic combinations may thereby result to them; or that they are in haste to enact the everyday romance—to secure a lover—get married—and set up a life of their own; it is that the ordinary marked-out bound of civilized young-lady existence is so utterly inadequate to the fresh, vigorous, expanding nature, with its noble hopes, and its apprehension of limitless possibilities.
Something did happen.
Winter came on again. After a twelvemonth of struggle and pain such as none but a harassed man of business can ever know or imagine, Mr. Gartney found himself "out of the wood."
He had survived the shock—his last mote was taken up—he had labored through—and that was all. He was like a man from off a wreck, who has brought away nothing but his life.
He came home one morning from New York, whither he had been to attend a meeting of creditors of a failed firm, and went straight to his chamber with a raging headache.
The next day, the physician's chaise was at the door, and on the landing, where Mrs. Gartney stood, pale and anxious, gazing into his face for a word, after the visit to the sick room was over, Dr. Gracie drew on his gloves, and said to her, with one foot on the stair: "Symptoms of typhoid. Keep him absolutely quiet."