I remember, to-night, a time when my love contained but one element—trust. I remember a particular day when love was young with me,—I went into the Enterprise office with Aunt's chronic "want,"—"A girl to do general housework—references required." It was immediately after Edgar had offered himself for a target to Jack Summers. There is something glorious in a man's inviting another man to attack him—if he dares. I was thinking about it as I went up the Enterprise steps. When I entered the office Edgar sat at a funny desk with peculiar pigeon holes—he has said since that he had used it before he took the Enterprise, and though he could have had one that would have been an improvement on it, in point of beauty, he had a sort of sentimental feeling in regard to the old one. He says in times of prosperity it will be quite wholesome to look at those collar boxes, and remember the time when he was very thankful to get paper collars.
We laugh a great deal over this, and I am going to have the desk put in our—well, yes, in our room.
He sat that day by the desk, and Mose Harbell had his feet on the white-washed part of the stove,—Edgar says he always does it after his dinner, while he is preparing his most "genial" paragraphs.
A sunbeam glanced across the room, and made the frayed edge of Edgar's coat stand out beautifully, but he looked terribly clean. He didn't see me at first, and I watched him a minute as he wrote. I loved him first, for the way in which he grasped his pen. He was finishing an editorial on the lack of energy in his esteemed fellow citizens in putting down immoral enterprises that were wrecking the universe in general, and Thebes in particular. I knew what kind of an article it was, by the expression of his elbows on the desk, and the way he held his chin.
There, in the office of the Thebes Daily Enterprise, with fifty cents in one hand, and Aunt's want in the other, with Mose Harbell's feet on the stove, and the frayed edge of Ed's coat looming up in the sunlight, I, Helen Thayer, loved Edgar Braine, in the year of our Lord, 18—. Amen.
I always feel like pronouncing the benediction when I think of that minute. It was the close of an eventless, careless, tiresome period. I sang the doxology in my heart—I said, "and thus endeth the first lesson," and a number of other appropriate, religious things like that. Well, after that, things drifted.
That evening there was a good deal about love for your neighbor—or sentiment after that pattern, in the end of that editorial. Edgar said he was three-fourths done with it when he looked up and saw me.
As the days went by, the Enterprise seemed more and more filled with the milk of human kindness. I take a great deal of credit to myself for the present exalted tone of the Thebes Daily E——. Edgar says that I have always inspired him with one great desire—to be good and honorable. He says that no good woman ever lived who did not make the best man in the world feel ashamed of himself. I am glad of this. There is something delicious in making one feel ashamed of himself.
All that time I felt a peculiar reverence for him. It was a feeling almost enervating. I felt as though walking on a tight-rope—mentally. I used to look with awe upon the dignity of those frayed coat bindings, and the bits of white where the button holes were worn—Ed called it "the towel" showing, I believe.
Then that period passed, and there came a day when he stopped in on his way from the office to see if Aunt wanted to put in her chronic want again the next evening. That day we sat in front of the fire talking for a little minute about Ed's schemes for advancing the universe generally, and Thebes, again, in particular.