Mrs. Day came up to the bed. 'I'll take it out to-morrow while you are at school. I meant to do that.' Her face worked as she left the room.
When the door closed, Eunice sat up and pushed her tumbled hair back from her face. She wanted to look at the Glory-Box. To-morrow her mother was going to take it away. She clasped her hands tightly about her drawn-up knees and stared at the box with hot, miserable eyes. Of course it would have to be taken away, but she wanted to look at it now because it was her Glory-Box and because it was Stephen's. Stephen had made it.
'That's a decent job for just a lawyer,' he had said, when the last nail was driven in and they were taking a critical survey of it.
Stephen had laughed when she regretted that the roses in the cretonne were yellow, because the things to go into the box very likely would be pink. He had laughed and kissed her and told her she had better get a pair of pink specs, then the roses would be pink enough.
And Stephen had taken such an interest in what she had written about the things she was embroidering for household use. When she had reported a whole dozen napkins hemmed and initialed, he had thought it would be jolly to have nice linen. They would probably be short on silver at first, but good linen made you feel respectable. He remembered his mother taking so much pride in what had been left of hers. For a moment the words of that letter were so vividly recalled that she forgot that Stephen was dead. For quite a moment she was happy. Then she remembered, but the realization brought no tears, only a swelling wave of misery.
'I can't bear it, oh, I can't!'
But even as she moaned she knew that she would bear it, that she would go on living for years and years and years. Other girls she had known or heard about—in her own town—had gone on living: little Sadie Smith whose lover had been killed three days before her wedding, and even Milly Petersen, who had been engaged for five years when the man asked to be released because he wanted to marry the girl who had recently moved to Milly's street. These girls had lived; they had grown pale and faded, or hard. People felt very sorry for them: they were spoken of as 'poor Milly,' or 'Sadie Smith, poor child'; but they had lived. Eunice saw herself moving among her little circle, brave and sad-eyed like these girls.
Suddenly—she never remembered just how it came about—suddenly her humor flashed a white light over the vision. This sad-eyed Self seemed something not to pity but to scorn. It was grotesque standing in your friend's parlor with clenched hands, as it were, and compressed lips, saying, 'Don't mind me, please. I'm bearing it.' If one were going to live one must live happily. Stephen was such a happy person. He was happy when he was working or playing or just loving. Even hurdy-gurdys made him happy.
'When I hear one grinding away in the morning,' he had written, 'I have to kick a few Law Journals about just to keep in tune with the darn thing.'
It had been a delightful surprise to her, his overflowing happiness, for Stephen's face in repose was very grave. She herself only occasionally had his joy in mere living, but she had always thought that Stephen's joyfulness would prove infectious. Suppose, now, without Stephen she should make the experiment of being happy. It would be a wonderful experiment to see,—she spoke the words aloud, deliberately,—to see if she could kill this terrible thing, Sorrow, and keep Stephen to love and to remember.