All my publishing interests and most of my literary friends were in New York (my support came from there), hence my frequent coming and going. Whether this constant change, these sudden and violent contrasts in my way of life strengthened my fictional faculty or weakened it, I can not say, but I do know that as the head of a family I found concentrated effort increasingly difficult and at times very nearly impossible. Constance was ailing for a year, and was a source of care, of pain to me, as to her mother. At times, many times, her sufferings filled me with a passionate pity, a sense of rage, of helplessness. Indeed both children were subject to throat and lung disorders, especially when in the city.
Oh, those cruel coughing spells, those nights of burning fever, those alarming hours of stupor or of terrifying delirium! "Can science find no check upon these recurrent forms of disease?" I demanded of our doctor. "Must humanity forever suffer the agonies of diphtheria and pneumonia? If so why bring children into the world?"
We always knew when these disorders had set in, we knew all the signs but no medicine availed to stop their progress. Each attack ran its course in spite of nurse and drug whilst I raged helplessly and Zulime grew hollow-eyed with anxious midnight vigil. Death was a never-absent hovering shadow when those bitter winter winds were blowing, and realizing this I came to hate the great desolate city in which we lived, and to long with the most passionate ardor for the coming of April's sun.
One of the first signs of spring (so far as Mary Isabel was concerned) was the opening of the "White City," a pleasure park near us, and the second event quite as conclusive and much more exciting was the coming of the circus. These were the red letter days in her vernal calendar, and were inescapable outings, for her memory was tenacious. Each May she demanded to be taken to the "Fite City" and later "the Kings and Queens" and "the fairies" of the circus claimed her worship. Together we saw these glorious sights, which filled her little soul with rapture.
For two years my estrangement from the old Homestead was complete, but when one April day I found myself passing it on my way to St. Paul, I was constrained to stop off just to see how my father and the garden were coming on.
This was late April, and the day warm, windless and musical with sounds of spring. The maples and the elms had adorned themselves with most bewitching greens, the dandelions beckoned from sunny banks, and through the radiant mist, the nesting birds were calling. In a flood, all the ancient witchery of the valley, all of the Homestead's loveliest associations came back to soften my mood, to regain my love. Wrought upon by the ever-returning youth of the world—a world to which my daughters were akin, I relented, "We will come back. Cruel as some of its memories are, this is home, I belong here, and so does Mary Isabel."
The sunlight streaming into my mother's chamber lay like a fairy carpet on the floor, waiting for the dancing feet of her grandchildren. Her spirit filled the room, calling to me, consoling me, convincing me.
All day I worked at trimming vines, and planting flowers while the robins chuckled from the lawn, and the maples expanded overhead. How spacious and wide and safe the yard appeared, a natural playground for the use of children.
And so it came about that on June seventeenth, just before Constance's second birthday, Mary Isabel and I took the night train for West Salem, leaving Zulime and the nurse to follow next morning. Greatly excited at the prospect of going to sleep on the cars my daughter went to her bed. "I kick for joy," she said, her eyes shining with elfin delight.
She loved the "little house" as she called her berth, and for an hour she lay peering out at the moon. "It follows us!" she cried out in pleased surprise.