Her Husband's Purse

by Helen Reimensnyder Martin

V

Margaret's suddenly conceived passion for the young minister went through all the usual phases. It was not, of course, the individual himself, but her impossible inhuman ideal of him, of which she was enamoured, the man himself was as unknown to her as though she had never seen him; his image merely served as a dummy to be clothed with her rich imaginings. The thought of him dwelt with her every moment of the day, making her absent-minded and listless, or feverishly talkative. She made excuses to go frequently to town, to a dentist, to a doctor, to see Harriet, just for a chance to drive past the minister's parsonage, for even if she did not catch a glimpse of him, it was manna to her soul to look upon the place of his abode. She would have delighted to have lain her cheek upon the doorsill his foot had pressed. The actual sight, once or twice, of his ungainly figure on the street, set her heart to thumping so that she could not breathe. Her discovery, through a paragraph in the religious news of a daily paper, that he was married, did not affect her, for she was not conscious of any desire to marry him; she only wanted to see him, to hear him, to feel herself alive in all her being, in his presence.

Even the sermon she managed to hear him preach one Sunday morning, when a visit from one of the scholarly gentlemen whom her uncle considered dangerous, gave her a free half day, even her recognition, through that sermon, of the man's mental barrenness, did not quench her passion.

What did finally kill it, after three months of mingled misery and ecstasy, was an occasion as trivial as that which had given birth to it. One day, in front of a grocery shop, where some provisions were being piled into her phaeton, and where, to her quivering delight, the Object of her adoration just chanced at that moment to come to make some purchases, she heard him say to a negro employee of the grocer, "Yes, sir, two pecks of potatoes and a head of cabbage; no, sir, no strawberries."

To say "sir" to a negro! The scales fell from Margaret's eyes. Her heart settled down comfortably in her bosom. Her nerves became quiet. The young minister stood before her as he was. His Adam's apple was no longer a peculiar distinction, but an Adam's apple. For this was South Carolina.

Thereafter, her uncle found her a much more comfortable companion. But keenly observant though he was, he had never suspected for a moment, during those three months of Margaret's obsession, that she was actually experiencing the thing he was so persistently trying to avert; for it would not have been conceivable to him that any woman, least of all his niece, Margaret Berkeley, could fall in love with "a milksop" like "Rev. Hoops," as the poor man's printed visiting card proclaimed him.

Never in all the rest of her life could Margaret laugh at that youthful ordeal. That she could have been so insanely deluded was a mystery to wonder over, to speculate about; but the passion itself, the depth, the height, the glory of it, its revelation of human nature's capacity for ecstasy—all this was a reality that would always be sacred to her.

At the same time, her discovery that an emotional experience so intense and vital, so fundamental, could grow out of an absolute illusion and be so ephemeral, made her almost as cynical about love as was her uncle himself; so that always after that the seed of skepticism, which he so earnestly endeavoured to plant in her mind, fell on prepared soil.

Had Margaret adopted indiscriminately her uncle's philosophical, ethical, social, political, or even literary ideas, it would certainly have unfitted her for living in a society so complacent, optimistic, and conventional as that of most American communities. As it was, the opinions she did come to hold, from her intercourse with this fearless, if pessimistic, thinker, and from her wide and varied reading with him, and also the ideals of life she formed in the solitude which gave her so much time for thought, were unusual enough to make her unique among women. One aspect of this difference from her kind was that she was entirely free from the false sentimentality of the average young woman, and this in spite of the fact that she was fervently imaginative and, in a high degree, sensitive to the beauty and poetry of life. Another and more radical point of difference was that she had what so very few women do have—spiritual and intellectual fearlessness. And both of these mental attitudes she owed not only to her own natural largeness of heart and mind, but to the strong bias given her by her uncle toward absolute honesty.