But their friendship, thus auspiciously begun, did not prosper. Gallatin almost pointedly avoided her. He helped her only when Richard, disturbed from time to time by his unrelaxed reserve, urged him to take a day or an afternoon off "and amuse yourself with the flowers, since you like that sort of thing." If it had not been that occasionally in talking or working at the gardening he seemed to forget his solemn and formal pose and showed unmistakable enthusiasm, she would have thought his profession of interest a pretense. She had a peculiar horror of gloom—doubtless born of the austerity of her bringing up. There was in her circumstances only too much to discourage her natural brightness, and she had within herself a struggle as incessant as that against weeds and destructive insects in her gardens. She had no desire to make this struggle harder; so she saw as little of him as she in courtesy could—the only course open to her, since she did not know him well enough to try to help him.
"What's the matter with Gallatin?" Richard asked her one day. "He says he likes it here and is going to stay, yet he acts as if he were revolving something different. He used to be full of fun and life. Now he's enough to give anyone the blues."
"He is rather heavy," admitted Courtney.
"I wonder if it's the booze," said Richard reflectively.
"The booze?"
"He always drank a lot more than was good for him. And there in Pittsburg he got to lapping it up like the get-rich-quick crowd he traveled in. That was why he wanted to come here—to break off and take a fresh start. I suppose he's gloomy because he's fighting his taste for rum."
"Probably," said Courtney.
Drink was a vice she could not comprehend—and we always are unsympathetic toward the vices we do not comprehend. She associated drinking and stupidity; the Wenona men who drank to excess were the dull ones, like Shirley Drummond. When Richard thus disclosed to her what Gallatin had meant by his mysterious hint as to his reason for coming to Wenona, she lost the interest in him started by his fine frank way of meeting her advances and his appreciation of her work. She recalled his other mysterious hint—about there being a hidden reason for his wishing to go. "No doubt," thought she, "he meant he's finding it hard to keep straight here, where it's so quiet. I wish now that he'd gone—though, when a man can give way to such a dull, dirty habit as drunkenness, he'd find excuse anywhere."
As the mail came in the middle of the morning and the middle of the afternoon, she saw it first. Thus, she noted that about once a week there was for him a foreign letter so heavy that it carried several stamps. These letters were from the same person, the same woman. And as the writing was large, rapid, and affectedly angular, she more than suspected that the woman was young. Somewhat tardily these facts, obvious though their leading was, wove together in her mind, incurious about other people's affairs; she knew that there was traveling abroad a young woman who taking the trouble to write their guest regularly and at great length. But when she happened to recall that he had a young married sister, she assumed the letters were from her.
One day he casually said that his sister had taken a house at Bar Harbor for the summer. The moment he said this, she for some unknown reason, or for no reason at all, jumped to the conclusion that his depressed state was due to the lady of the letters—to her being so far away—perhaps to some difficulty in their love—the objection of her parents to his drinking habit.