She stopped, out of breath, and her husband, rather subdued yet trying to make light of it, hugged her and said: "Seems to me, Sophy oughtn't to claim all the laurels. Seems to me you're a right elegant little poetess yourself!"
Charlotte extricated herself from this frankly marital embrace, and pushing the curls out of her eyes went on, too excited and in earnest to heed this funny little compliment.
"That's what I see for Sophy!" she said. "The tragedy of the hand-glass—the tragedy of love in her case. For that boy can't love her soul and mind as he ought to—and what soul he's got she's given him—for the time being. He's just a walking mirror—a reflection of her. Sophy doesn't dream it—nor he—of course. But I can see it. Love does that sometimes. Oh, you needn't grin, Joe!—I watch life though I do live in the country the year round. Sophy's just a woman Narcissus. She's in love with her own reflection in Morris Loring. And some day she'll want to draw him from that dream-pool. Then she'll find empty wetness in her hands ... just tears...."
She broke off almost in tears herself. Suddenly she caught her husband's head to her breast:
"Oh," she cried, "I do thank God that you are bald, Joe, and sixteen years older than I am!"
"Lord love us!" exclaimed the Judge, bursting into inextinguishable mirth this time, "I reckon that's the funniest prayer of thanksgiving that ever went up to the Throne of Grace!"
XII
In the verandah of her cottage at Nahant, where she always passed the months of May and June, Mrs. Loring, Morris's mother, sat re-reading the letter in which he told her of his engagement to Mrs. Chesney.
There had been a storm the night before, and the sea made a marvellous, heroic music among the rocks. Mrs. Loring laid the open letter on her knee, and her light, bright blue, short-sighted eyes gazed wistfully towards the sound. Storms both in Nature and in human passions, when distant enough, had always possessed a strange charm for her, the charm of printed perils to minds congenitally timorous. She knew Sophy's history and had read her poems when they first came out, with that same sense of one enjoying a tempest in mid-ocean from the staunch deck of a liner. In her case temperament was the liner—though she had always felt in some inmost recess of her being, known only to herself and her Creator, that, given the circumstances, she, too, might have been a centre of tumult. And sometimes, gazing from the safe, close-curtained windows of her present personality—the result of many careful, cautiously repressed years—she wondered if the mistake makers, the convention breakers, had not the best of it after all? Repentance must be a wonderful emotion—that upheaving, ecstatic repentance that follows big sins. So unconsciously and typically New England was Grace Loring, that she could not think of splendid crime without following it up in her mind by repentance even more gorgeous.