“Uncle Peter, I wrote to my grandfather. It seems funny to think of Albertina’s aunt taking care of him now that Grandma is gone. I suppose Albertina is there a lot. She sent me a post card for Christmas. I didn’t send her any.
“Uncle Peter, I miss my grandmother out of the world. I remember how I used to take care of her, and put a soapstone in the small of her back 185 when she was cold. I wish sometimes that I could hold your hand, Uncle Peter, when I get thinking about it.
“Well, school is the same old school. Bertha Stephens has a felon on her finger, and that lets her out of hard work for a while. I will enclose a poem suggested by a lecture I heard recently on Emerson. It isn’t very good, but it will help to fill up the envelope. I love you, and love you. Eleanor.
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“Life
“Life is a great, a noble task, When we fulfill our duty. To work, that should be all we ask, And seek the living beauty. We know not whence we come, or where Our dim pathway is leading, Whether we tread on lilies fair, Or trample love-lies-bleeding. But we must onward go and up, Nor stop to question whither. E’en if we drink the bitter cup, And fall at last, to wither. |
“P. S. I haven’t got the last verse very good 186 yet, but I think the second one is pretty. You know ‘love-lies-bleeding’ is a flower, but it sounds allegorical the way I have put it in. Don’t you think so? You know what all the crosses stand for.”
Eleanor’s fifteenth year was on the whole the least eventful year of her life, though not by any means the least happy. She throve exceedingly, and gained the freedom and poise of movement and spontaneity that result from properly balanced periods of work and play and healthful exercise. From being rather small of her age she developed into a tall slender creature, inherently graceful and erect, with a small, delicate head set flower-wise on a slim white neck. Gertrude never tired of modeling that lovely contour, but Eleanor herself was quite unconscious of her natural advantages. She preferred the snappy-eyed, stocky, ringleted type of beauty, and spent many unhappy quarters of an hour wishing she were pretty according to the inexorable ideals of Harmon.
She spent her vacation at David’s apartment in charge of Mademoiselle, though the latter part of the summer she went to Colhassett, quite by herself 187 according to her own desire, and spent a month with her grandfather, now in charge of Albertina’s aunt. She found Albertina grown into a huge girl, sunk in depths of sloth and snobbishness, who plied her with endless questions concerning life in the gilded circles of New York society. Eleanor found her disgusting and yet possessed of that vague fascination that the assumption of prerogative often carries with it.
She found her grandfather very old and shrunken, yet perfectly taken care of and with every material want supplied. She realized as she had never done before how the faithful six had assumed the responsibility of this household from the beginning, and how the old people had been warmed and comforted by their bounty. She laughed to remember her simplicity in believing that an actual salary was a perquisite of her adoption, and understood for the first time how small a part of the expense of their living this faithful stipend had defrayed. She looked back incredulously on that period when she had lived with them in a state of semi-starvation on the corn meal and cereals and very little else that her dollar and a half a week had purchased, and the 188 “garden sass,” that her grandfather had faithfully hoed and tended in the straggling patch of plowed field that he would hoe and tend no more. She spent a month practically at his feet, listening to his stories, helping him to find his pipe and tobacco and glasses, and reading the newspaper to him, and felt amply rewarded by his final acknowledgment that she was a good girl and he would as soon have her come again whenever she felt like it.
On her way back to school she spent a week with her friend, Margaret Louise, in the Connecticut town where she lived with her comfortable, commonplace family. It was while she was on this visit that the most significant event of the entire year took place, though it was a happening that she put out of her mind as soon as possible and never thought of it again when she could possibly avoid it.