Her Husband's Purse

by Helen Reimensnyder Martin

So, for nearly a year after her uncle's death, Margaret continued to live at Berkeley Hill.

Harriet always referred to their home as "My house," "My place," and never dreamed of consulting her younger sister as to any changes she saw fit to make in the rooms or about the grounds.

It was during these first weeks of Margaret's life with Harriet that she suffered the keen grief of finding her own warm affection for her sister thrown back upon itself in Harriet's want of enthusiasm over their being together; her always cool response to Margaret's almost passionate devotion; her abstinence from any least approach to sisterly intimacy and confidence. It was not that Harriet disliked Margaret or meant to be cold to her. It was only that she was constitutionally selfish and indifferent.

So, in the course of time, Margaret came to lavish all the thwarted tenderness of her heart upon her sister's three very engaging children.

But before that first year of her new life had passed over her head she came to feel certain conditions of it to be so unbearable that, in spite of Walter's protests (only Walter's this time), she made a determined effort to get some self-supporting employment. And it was then that she became aware of a certain fact of modern life of which her isolation had left her in ignorance: she discovered that in these days of highly specialized work there was no employment of any sort to be obtained by the untrained. School teachers, librarians, newspaper women, even shopgirls, seamstresses, cooks, and housemaids must have their special equipment. And Margaret had no money with which to procure this equipment. There is, perhaps, no more tragic figure in our strenuous modern life than the penniless woman of gentle breeding, unqualified for self-support.

The worst phase of Margaret's predicament was that it had become absolutely impossible for her to continue to live longer under the same roof with Walter and Harriet. The simple truth was, Harriet was jealous of Walter's quite brotherly affection for her—for so Margaret interpreted his kindly attitude toward her. Having no least realization of her own unusual maidenly charm, the fact that her brother-in-law was actually fighting a grande passion for her would have seemed to her grotesque, incredible; for Walter, being a Southern gentleman, controlled his feelings sufficiently to treat her always with scrupulous consideration and courtesy. Therefore, she considered Harriet's jealousy wholly unreasonable. Why, her sister seemed actually afraid to trust the two of them alone in the house together! (Margaret did not dream that Walter was afraid to trust himself alone in the house with her.) And if by chance Harriet ever found them in a tête-à-tête, she would not speak to Margaret for days, and as Walter, too, was made to take his punishment, Margaret was sure he must wish her away. Of course, since she had become a cause for discord and unhappiness between Harriet and Walter, she must go. A way must be found for her to live away from Berkeley Hill.

It was this condition of things which she faced the night she lay on the couch in her sister's room keeping guard over her sleeping children while Harriet and Walter were seeing Nazimova in "Hedda Gabler."

VI

Walter Eastman, on his way to town next morning, to his law office, considered earnestly his young sister-in-law's admonition given him just after breakfast, that he must that day borrow for her a sufficient sum of money to enable her to take the course of instruction in a school for librarians, giving as security a mortgage on her share in Berkeley Hill. And the conclusion to which his weighty consideration of the proposition brought him was that instead of mortgaging their home, he would bring Daniel Leitzel, Esquire, out to Berkeley Hill to dinner.