“I’m sorry I made you all that trouble,” Eleanor said, “but I thought it would be the best thing to do.”
“Tell me why,” Peter said, “tell me why, I’ve suffered so much—wondering—wondering.”
“You’ve suffered?” Eleanor cried. “I thought it was only I who did the suffering.”
She moved a step nearer to him, and Peter gripped her hard by the shoulders.
“It wasn’t that you cared?” he said. Then his lips met hers dumbly, beseechingly.
“It was all a mistake,—my going away,” she wrote some days after. “I ought to have stayed at the school, and graduated, and then come down to New York, and faced things. I have my lesson now about facing things. If any other crisis comes into my life, I hope I shall be as strong as Dante was, when he ‘showed himself more furnished with breath than he was,’ and said, ‘Go on, for I am strong and resolute.’ I think we always have more strength than we understand ourselves to have.
“I am so wonderfully happy about Uncle David and Aunt Margaret, and I know Uncle Jimmie 306 needs Aunt Gertrude and has always needed her. Did my going away help those things to their fruition? I hope so.
“I can not bear to think of Aunt Beulah, but I know that I must bear to think of her, and face the pain of having hurt her as I must face every other thing that comes into my life from this hour. I would give her back Peter, if I could,—but I can not. He is mine, and I am his, and we have been that way from the beginning. I have thought of him always as stronger and wiser than any one in the world, but I don’t think he is. He has suffered and stumbled along, trying blindly to do right, hurting Aunt Beulah and mixing up his life like any man, just the way Uncle Jimmie and Uncle David did.
“Don’t men know who it is they love? They seem so often to be struggling hungrily after the wrong thing, trying to get, or to make themselves take, some woman that they do not really want. When women love it is not like that with them.