Her Husband's Purse

by Helen Reimensnyder Martin

"I promised nothing. I never make promises."

"Your acceptance of my condition is a promise."

"Acceptance of your condition!" He choked and spluttered over it.

"And it's a mighty small condition considering all I'm going to do for you with cheerfulness, amiability, a pleasant smile——"

"Hold your tongue and speak when you are spoken to!" he growled, apparently furious, but secretly exulting at the child's refreshing fearlessness with him.

It had been an instinct of self-preservation that had led Margaret to demonstrate to her uncle, in that very first hour with him, that the line would have to be drawn somewhere in his browbeating. And the word "wench" had served her purpose. Thereafter, in the eight years that she lived with him, docile and patient as she always was, he never forgot, and she never had to remind him, that there was a limit past which he could not safely venture in the indulgence of his tendency to tyrannize.

But her life was hard; most girls would have found its monotony and self-sacrifice unbearable; its gloomy environment in the great empty barn of a house too depressing; its close confinement within the narrow limits of the unkept grounds, overgrown with weeds and bushes, and dark with big trees and a high hedge of hemlocks, as bad as any jail. There were sometimes weeks at a stretch during which she saw no human being save her uncle and the old negro couple who had lived on the place for a quarter of a century; for though Harriet and her husband lived in Charleston, her uncle would spare her so seldom to visit them, and was so exacting as to her speedy return to him that she soon fell into the way of confining her intercourse with her sister almost entirely to a weekly exchange of letters.

In spite, however, of her isolation Margaret felt that there were compensations in her lot. She had resources within herself in her love of books, and she found in her uncle's rich intellectual equipment, of which he freely gave her the benefit in their daily association, a stimulus, a variety, and even an excitement that meant much more to her than the usual girl's diversions of frocks, parties, and beaus would have meant. It is true she often longed for a congenial companion of her own age, she hungered for affection, she suffered keenly in her occasional feverish paroxysms of restlessness, and there were times when the surging fountains of her youth threatened to break down the barriers that imprisoned a nature that was both large and impassioned.

"She's temperamental enough!" was her uncle's early conclusion as, from day to day, the girl's mind and heart were unfolded to his keen observation.

Her rare periods of passionate discontent, however, though leaving her spent and listless for a time after they had passed over her, did not embitter her. There was a fund of native sweetness in Margaret's soul that even her life with cynical old Osmond Berkeley could not blight. That philosopher marvelled often at his inability to spoil her, remarkably open as he found her young mind to the ideas and theories which he delighted in impressing upon her. It was indeed amazing how readily she would select from the intellectual feast daily spread before her what was wholesome and pure and reject what was morbid.