Yet my story has been ill told if it has seemed to be more the story of Ernest than of Miss Theodora. For very few of us does life hold any marked surprises, any startling events. A whole life is often merely the summary of many very commonplace happenings. Its real events are more likely to be those moral crises when the soul must put itself in harmony with all those external happenings which it has no power to control. Nor is it one of the least of life's lessons that it would be indeed a fatal gift, if it were ours—this longed for power to turn the tide of events.
Take, for example, the case of Miss Theodora; what a feeble figure she had been in her efforts to turn the current of affairs that made up her life. How helpless her will to accomplish her desires!
If John had not married Dorothy—if Ernest had been willing to take his grandfather's profession—if he had never met Eugenie—if he and Kate had never cared for each other,—with all these "ifs" turned into verities, how different, Miss Theodora thought, had been her outlook on life. But we, who regard these things from the point of view of the impartial onlooker, know that the fulfilling of her desires would not have made her happiness, nor for the happiness of her nephew.
If in trying to show you this I have seemed to dwell too long on the ordinary happenings in a simple life, remember that these, after all, were not the things which I count of chief importance.
To me the great events in Miss Theodora's life were those three occasions when she had to summon her strength to great decisions. These soul crises counted for more than any other happenings in her life. First, there was that struggle when she had to choose between her lover and her nephew; then, almost as severe, though different in kind, the battle in which at last she had given in to Ernest in his choice of a profession; and last, although it had had no outward result, her merging of her own prejudice against Eugenie in a readiness to do what would probably make Ernest happier.
Hardly less bitter than these three struggles was the one which Miss Theodora waged to decide whether or not it was her duty to join Ernest in the West. At last she yielded in this more quickly though with greater pain than in the two cases when she had given in to Ernest about Harvard and about Eugenie.
She left Boston with the less reluctance, perhaps, because of certain changes—some persons called them "improvements"—that had begun to appear in her well-loved West End. The tall apartment houses which had begun to creep in even before she left the city, the electric cars now dashing through Charles street, were innovations that cut her to the heart.
The breaking up of her modest little home soon followed.
"You will spend half of every year with us," said Kate, now pleasantly situated in a house whose western windows overlooked the river. She had already begun to make life pleasant for Ben's sisters, one of whom was always staying with her.
"That will depend upon Ernest," Miss Theodora had answered, smiling. As a matter of fact, she did not return to Boston, even for a visit, until after Ernest's marriage; and so with her removal to Colorado, her story—as a West End story—may be said to end.