Madam Fulton regarded her for a moment with a softened glance. It seemed wistfully to include other dreams, other hopes than the girl's own, a little dancing circle of shadowy memories outside the actual, as might well happen when one has lived many years and seen the growth and passing of such ties.
"Well, Electra," she said then, "I suppose you'll marry him. You'll be famous by brevet. That's what you'll like."
Electra laughed a little, in a tolerant way.
"You are always thinking I want to become a celebrity, grandmother," she said. "That's very funny of you."
"Think!" emphasized the old lady. "I know it. I know your kind. They're thick as spatter now. Everybody wants to do something, or say he's done it. You want to 'express' yourselves. That's what you say—'express' yourselves. I never saw such a race."
She went grumbling into the library to answer her letters, or at least look them through, and paused there for a moment, her hand on the table. She knew approximately what was in the letters. They were all undoubtedly about her book, the "Recollections" of her life, some of them questioning her view of the public events therein narrated, but others palpitating with an eager interest. She had written that history as a woman of letters in a small way, and a woman who had known the local celebrities, and she had done it so vividly, with such incredible originality, that the book was not only having a rapid sale, but it piqued the curiosity of gossip-lovers and even local historians. No names were mentioned; but when she wrote, "A poet said to me in Cambridge one day," everybody knew what poet was meant. When she obscurely alluded to the letters preceding some smooth running of the underground railway, historians of the war itched to see the letters, and invited her to produce them. The book was three months old now, and the wonder no less. The letters had been coming, and the old lady had not been answering them. At first she read them with glee, as a later chapter of her life story; but now they tired her a little, because she anticipated their appeal.
A bird was singing outside. She cocked her head a little and listened, not wholly in pleasure, but with a critical curiosity as well. She was always watching for the diminution of sound, the veiling of sight because she was old, and now she wondered whether the round golden notes were what they had been fifty years ago. She stood a moment thoughtfully, her hand now on the letters,—those tedious intruders upon her leisure. Then, with an air of guilty escape, though there was no one to see and judge, she left them lying there and stole softly out on the veranda, where she sank into her friendly wicker chair, and looking upon the world, smilingly felt it to be good. The sky was very bright, yet not too bright for pleasure; clouds not meant for rain were blotting it in feathery spaces. There was a sweet air stirring, and the birds, though they were busy, said something about it from time to time in a satisfactory way. Madam Fulton felt the rhythm and surge of it all, and acquiesced in her own inactive part in it. Sometimes of late she hardly knew how much of life was memory and how much the present brilliant call of things. It was life, the thing she did not understand. Presently she closed her eyes and sank, she thought, into a deeper reverie. These excursions of hers were less like sleep, she always told herself, than a kind of musing dream. At last she was learning what other old people had meant when they explained, with a shamefaced air of knowing youth could never understand, "I just lost myself." To lose one's battered and yet still insistent self was now to be at peace.
When the forenoon was an hour or more along, she opened her eyes, aware of some one looking at her. There he was, an old gentleman of a pleasant aspect, heavy, with a thickness of curling white hair, blue eyes, and that rosiness which is as the bloom upon the flower of good living. His clothes were of the right cut, and he wore them with the ease of a man who has always had the best to eat, to wear, to look at; for whom life has been a well-organized scheme to turn out comfort. The old lady stared at him with unwinking eyes, and the old gentleman smiled at her.
"Billy!" she cried at last, and gave him both her hands. "Billy Stark!"
They shook hands warmly and still looked each other in the eye. They had not met for years, and neither liked to think what was in the other's mind. But Madam Fulton, after they had sat down, challenged it.