"I had quite a struggle after that. I was all hemmed in—" she stopped again—"by the city I found when I first arrived. But I huffed and I puffed and I hunted about—and at last I discovered our New York—the town we girls used to dream about at home in all those talks we had! Oh, I don't mean I have found it yet—but I've felt it, though, and had one good look. I dined with some people. How silly that sounds. But never mind—the point is not me, but the fact that this city is really and truly crammed full of the things we girls used to get so excited about—Art, you know, and Music of course, and people who make these things their God. The town opens up if you look at it right—and you find Movements—Politics—you hear people talk—you see suffrage parades—I marched in one not long ago feeling like Joan of Arc! And you find men, too, who are doing things. Big schemes for skyscrapers and homes! I mean that our New York is here!"
Again there came a pause in the writing. Her eyes looked excited. She smiled and frowned. Now to finish it off!
"What I want of it all I am not yet sure—for me personally, I mean. But there is my husband, to begin with, and his work that I can help grow—and his old friends. And they are not all. I keep hearing of new ones I must meet—and they are mixed in with all those things I have discovered in the town. A few of these people were born here—but most have come from all over the country. Sometimes I shut my eyes and ask—'Where are you now, all over the land, you others who are to come to New York and be friends of mine and of my children?'
"I want children—more than one. How many I am not quite sure. That's another point—you decide these things." She frowned and scratched this sentence out. "And children grow—and the idea of bringing them up makes me feel very young and humble, too. But in that we are all in the same boat—for the whole country, I suppose, is a good deal the same. What a queer and puzzling, gorgeous age we are just beginning—all of us! I wonder what I shall make of it? What shall I be like ten years from now? How much shall I mean to my husband—and to other men and women? But most of all to women—for we are coming together so! I wonder what we shall make of it all? I wonder how much we women who march—march on and on to everything—are really going to mean in the world!
"Oh, how solemn! Good-night, my dears! A kiss to every one of you!"
She folded her letter with the rest, and then she quickly squeezed them all into a large envelope, which she addressed to Miss Barbara Wells, Bismarck, North Dakota. Ethel's eyes were very bright. She sniffed a little and smiled at herself. "Oh, don't be a baby! It's all over now, you know—I mean it's just beginning!"
She stopped for a moment by the table, with the letter in her hand, and looked down at Amy's picture. "That is all any one needs to know."
Her look was pitying, tender, but a little curious, too.
"I wonder what you were like at my age! I wonder what you went through, poor dear? . . . But it's over now—all over. All we don't like will fade away, and you'll grow so beautiful again. Susette will love her mother. . . . But she won't be just like you, my dear."
Ethel went slowly out of the room. At the doorway she switched off the light, and the bare, empty room was left in the dark. The photograph was invisible now. On the street below, a motor stopped; and there was a murmur of voices, a laugh. Tomorrow somebody else would be here.