Sometimes, however, this lurking shadow refused to be ignored and crept out, clouding her clear blue eyes, troubling her nice, sensible thoughts, and making her, all in an instant, pale and downcast and dismayed. The shadow was a fear—fear of poverty, fear of defeat and failure, fear, above all, of romance.
Miss Smith’s charming mother and father had been a romantic couple, and she remembered what had happened to them. They had both been too poor and too young and too charming. They had had no business to get married, but they had got married, and their daughter remembered—
She remembered her mother putting a piece of cardboard inside her slipper, because of a great hole in the sole, and her father going down on one knee to kiss the slender little foot. It was very romantic, but Miss Smith had seen tears in her father’s eyes and in her mother’s.
She remembered a terrible quarrel over a boiled egg. There had been only two eggs. She, a little girl, had got one of them for her breakfast, and the other had been set before her father; but he wouldn’t have it. He said that Nora positively needed it; and Nora—her mother—said that she didn’t need it, didn’t want it, and wouldn’t have it.
In the end Mr. Smith had thrown the egg out of the window, where it lay in the mud, with the summer rain beating down on it. He had shouted bitterly that he was no good, because he couldn’t make enough money to buy enough eggs for his family; and the little girl had cried, and her mother had cried, and their poor devoted little servant—their servants were always devoted—had cried, too. It had ended with her father sitting on the arm of her mother’s chair, tenderly stroking that wonderful black hair, and herself sitting on her mother’s lap, while the little servant stood in the doorway, drying her eyes on her apron. Everybody begged everybody else’s pardon, and, after a while, they all laughed; and that very morning a devoted neighbor—for their neighbors were generally devoted, too—sent them a dozen new-laid eggs.
That was the sort of thing which was always happening to them; but Miss Smith remembered, not the gay ending, but the storm itself. Her mother had said, often and often, that her life had been a beautiful one, that she had been blessed above any woman she knew in the love and comradeship of her husband; but Miss Smith remembered too many tears, too many anxieties. She sometimes added, at the end of her prayers:
“And please, dear Lord, don’t let me do anything like that!”
She would not have made that particular prayer with such particular earnestness if she had not known how easy it would be for[Pg 236] her to do something like that; but she did know. She knew that the germs of that fatal disease called romance were in her blood, and she had to take frequent doses of a bitter sort of moral quinine to keep them inactive.
One of the best of these cures was in repeating to herself her full name—her poor, pathetic, dreadful name, which she never let any one know. Mr. and Mrs. Patterson were middle-aged and very serious, and Gladys Patterson, though only ten in years, was quite a settled and responsible character; and the life in that sedate West Side house was so calm, so orderly, that there was much time for idle, foolish thoughts. When any such came drifting through her mind, Miss Smith would repeat her name to herself with a stern smile, and would be deeply thankful for the “Smith” part of it, which was so thoroughly unromantic and sensible.
She tried to be thankful all the time. Before going to sleep she would tell herself how thankful she was for this nice, dignified, safe position, where she could probably remain five years longer, if she continued to do her duty. The very thought of having to leave the Pattersons and go out to look for a new position dismayed her; but she comforted herself by the thought that in five years’ time she would be twenty-nine—which is almost thirty—and that she would probably be much more sensible then than she was now.