The old soldier was almost as completely subordinated as I. Several times each day he came into the house to say, "Well, how is my granddaughter getting on?" and upon seeing her, invariably remarked, "She's the very image of Belle,"—and indeed she did resemble my mother. He expressed the wish which was alive in my own heart, when he said, "If only Belle could have lived to see her granddaughter."
My new daughter was all important, but the new book could not be neglected. Hesper was scheduled for publication in October and copy must go to the printer in August, therefore I was forced to leave my wife and babe and go East to attend to the proof-reading and other matters incidental to the birth of another novel. Some lectures in Chicago and Chautauqua took up nearly two weeks of my time and when I arrived in New York, huge bundles of galley-proof were awaiting me.
My publishers were confident that the new book would equal The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop in popularity, but I was less sanguine. For several weeks I toiled on this job, and at last on the eleventh of September, a day of sweltering heat, I got away on the evening train for the West. In spite of my poverty and notwithstanding the tender age of my daughter, I had decided to fetch my family to New York.
On November tenth, we found ourselves settled in a small apartment overlooking Morningside Park, which seemed a very desirable playground for Mary Isabel.
Relying on my books (which were selling with gratifying persistency) we permitted ourselves a seven-room apartment with a full-sized kitchen and a maid—whom we had brought on from West Salem. We even went so far as to give dinner parties to such of our friends as could be trusted to overlook our lack of plate, and to remain kindly unobservant of the fact that Dora, the baby's nurse, doubled as waitress after cooking the steak.
In this unassuming fashion we fed the Hernes, the Severances, and other of our most valued friends who devoured the puddings which Zulime "tossed up," with a gusto highly flattering to her skill, while the sight of me as baby-tender proved singularly amusing—to some of our guests. It will be seen that we were not cutting entirely loose from the principles of economy in which we had been so carefully schooled—our hospitalities had very distinct (enforced) limits.
Our wedding anniversary came while we were getting settled and my present to Zulime that year was a set of silver which I had purchased with the check for an article called "A Pioneer Wife"—the paper which I had written as a memorial to my mother. In explanation of the fact that all these silver pieces bore the initials I. G., I said, "You are to think of them as a gift from my mother. Imagine that I gave them to her long ago, and that they now come to you, from her, as heirlooms. Let us call them 'The family silver' and hand them down to Mary Isabel in her turn."
Zulime, who always rose to a sentiment of this kind, gratefully accepted this vicarious inheritance and thereafter I was pleased to observe that whenever Mary Isabel wished to break a plate she invariably reached for one of her grandmother's solid silver spoons—they were so much more effective than the plated ones!
Christmas came to us this year with new and tender significance, for "Santy Claus" (who found us at home in New York, rejoicing in our first baby) brought to us our first tree, and the conjunction of these happy events produced in my wife almost perfect happiness. Furthermore, Mary Isabel achieved her first laugh. I am sure of this fact, for I put it down in my notebook, with these words, "She has a lovely smile and a chuckle like her grandmother's. She robs us of solitude, and system, and order, but our world would now be desolate without her." Only when I thought of what her grandfather was missing did I have a sense of regret.
At our feast our daughter sat in the high chair which Katherine Herne had given her, and looked upon the tiny, decorated tree with eyes of rapture, deep, dark-blue eyes in which a seraphic light shone. Her life was beginning far, very far, from the bleak prairie lands in which her Daddy's winter holidays had been spent, and while the silver spoon in her mouth was not of my giving, the one with which she bruised her chair-arm, was veritably one of my rewards.