'No,' answered Eunice, 'probably not. It's very beautiful.' She laid down the garment she was folding and looked up, troubled, into her mother's face. 'Oh, it seems so selfish for me to have it all. You've always wanted nice fine linen, mother.'
'I've given up wanting, I guess. I don't care as long as you have them. You had better lay tissue paper in that sleeve, Eunice, the way I showed you. I'll start supper so that you can put these things away. They won't look like anything if you leave them about.'
When her mother was gone, Eunice took up the pink kimono and spread it out on the bed. She could fold it more carefully that way. She touched it with caressing fingers. 'Dawn and apple-blossoms,' she repeated softly. Then she smiled, remembering Mabel's remark: 'Stephen has a funny way of saying things.'
Stephen was different somehow from Harry, from any of the men whom her friends had married. They were nice young men, of course, all of them. One was superintendent of the Sunday School, besides getting a good salary in the Cash Register Company; another had gone to college, had been in Stephen's class at the Ohio State University in fact, and was now doing well as part owner of the garage on Main Street; still another was paying-teller in the bank next to the garage; he wore very 'good-looking' suits, usually with a tiny line of white at the edge of the waistcoat. Still Stephen was different.
When he had got his B.A. degree at Ohio, he decided that he wanted to be a lawyer, and that he would go to one of the best schools in the country. He chose Columbia. He had worked his way through college, but he considered that it would not pay to work his way through Law School. He wanted the time to get something out of New York. His father was unable to advance the money, so Stephen went to a friend of his father's, a prosperous coal-dealer in the town, and asked that he lend him enough to put him through economically, but not, he plainly said, too economically. He would give the coal-dealer notes, payable with interest four years after he was admitted to the bar.
The coal-dealer, taking into consideration the fact that the young man had broken every record at the university in scholarship, and two other facts, the young man's forehead and mouth, lent him the money. He said that the interest need not begin until he was admitted.
Stephen thanked him and went to Columbia. One of the professors there took a great fancy to him. He introduced him to his sister, a maiden lady living in Washington Square, who, finding him very likable, introduced him to other people living in the Square.
Stephen was very happy. He wrote to Eunice,—he had been engaged to her since the end of his second year at the Law School,—'Washington Square is rather terrifying from the outside, but once inside you feel beautifully at home. I think it's the perfect breeding you find there. I've met women more intellectual, greater perhaps, than Professor Lansing's sister, but never one who gives such an impression of completion. There are no loose ends. You will like her, Eunice.'
In another letter he said, 'We won't have much money to start with, of course, but if we put a little dignity into our kitchenette apartment, it will be a home that people will love to come to. It's partly the dignity of their living that makes these Washington Square people so worth while to be with.'
And last week he had written, 'You won't find New York lonely. They will love you, dear. You belong. You have not only charm but the dignity that belongs. I wonder if I'm foolish to care so much for that word dignity. Perhaps it's because I associate it with you, or perhaps—I love you because you have it.'