It was just a little more than two years from the summer day he had first met her, with her cornflower eyes as blue as the ribbons on the muslin dress she wore, and her dainty tininess, until that summer day when he had turned away from a low mound in the country cemetery, with hot rebellion in his heart that the one had been taken and the other left.
He had not wanted to go to that country party. With all a city boy's superiority he had yawned at the suggestion; then decided to go just to watch "the rubes"; and there he had found her, and his visit to the distant cousin had assumed a new significance. After they were married, he had wanted to take her away with him, but she had clung to her own home; and so he had stayed with her on the Redfield Farm, making lazy efforts to learn a trade that had no sort of attraction for him, just because she wished it.
But after she was gone, the farming had lost its excuse for being, and the tiny baby daughter, who cried when he picked her up, and who only wanted to eat and sleep, had no real power to hold him where she was. He wandered restlessly about the country-side, trying to find some place where the mother's personality had never been; and then one day he had announced to Miss Eliza that he was going abroad, to work at something congenial where no memories made it hard for him to stay. He had not intended to remain very long, a year or two perhaps. But Ross followed the line of least resistance nearly always, and the friends he had made and the life he had lived had proved attractive; little by little the ties that had bound him to the Farm had slackened, until he hardly felt them at all.
Time had done what his first hot, youthful grief would never have admitted that it could do, and had faded the glowing colors in the pictures of that chapter in his life; and it was now, as he had said, almost like something dreamed.
"Then she died just after Arethusa was born?"
Ross nodded.
"That was an odd name to give her, dear; 'Arethusa'! Was she named for anyone?"
"No, just because her mother liked it. I was a great goose in those days, with large ideas of the necessity for the revival of Grecian 'pure beauty,' as I called it. Heaven knows where I got the phrase! I had just graduated from college that June before I met her and I had a lot of stuff I had taken to the country with me. Then I sent for more. I used to devour volumes about vase paintings, and classical ideals, and I read worlds of it aloud to her. Miss Eliza used to think it was atheistic, I'm quite sure. She didn't say so, but she wouldn't let me read my mythology in the house at least, aloud. Matilda and I had to go down to the Branch, so we wouldn't be heard. It was from Bulfinch, I believe, she got the story of the fountain nymph that seemed to appeal to her so strangely. And I was quite willing to saddle my daughter with it; it was like taking a firm stand for my ideas. They were hardly ideals." He sighed.
"You poor babies!" said Elinor softly, to herself.
"What did you do with the little girl, Ross?"