No more passed between him and me. But I felt I had taken this man and that he had taken this woman "for better or worse."
CHAPTER XXI
AUNT JOSEPHINE'S LETTER
Bettina came into the room and handed me a letter.
"Mrs. Harborough!"—my mother drew herself up on the pillow with an animation I had not thought to see again.
I opened and read: "My dear niece——"
"Ah!" my mother brought out the ejaculation with an effect of having doubted if the relationship would be owned.
That introductory phrase turned out to be the most comprehensible part of the first half of Aunt Josephine's letter. As for me, I was completely floored by "the Dynamism of Mind," after I had stumbled over a cryptic reference to my mother's state—"which you must not expect me to call sickness. There is no such thing. There is only harmony or unharmony, whether of the so-called body or the soul."
On the third page, the writer descended from these Alpine heights, to say that it had been "inspirationally borne in upon" her that the time was come for her brother's daughters to widen their horizon, and incidentally, to see something of their father's world.
The implied slur upon our mother's world was, to my surprise, not resented.
"Go on. Go on."