I've written it out on a piece of paper, about their being engaged, and looked at it by night and by day since they told me about it. I've said it low, and I've said it loud, but I can't realize it, and the little sense the Lord gave me He has taken away.
They say I did it. Say I'm responsible for every bit of it, and that I will have to look after them all the rest of their lives to see that I didn't make a mistake in writing that letter. And that I'm to go to Europe with them on their wedding tour and live with them always and always. And—oh!—I believe my heart is going to burst with miserable happiness and happy miserableness, and my head feels like it's in a bag.
Dr. Parke Alden and Miss Katherine Trent are the two nicest people on earth, and the two I love best. But I don't think they know all the time what they are doing and saying. They are that in love they don't see but one side—the happy side—and they think I am going to leave this place with a skip and a jump and run along by them, third person, single number, and not know I'm in the way.
They won't even listen when I tell them I don't know what I'm going to do. I know what I want to do! Everything in me gets into shivering trembleness when I think I could go to Europe with them on their wedding trip. Think of it! Mary Cary could go to E-U-R-O-P-E!
They've invited me and say I'm to go, because I'm never to leave them any more, and they want me. But it isn't so. Mary tries to believe it's so, but Martha knows it isn't. They think they think they want me, but they don't; nobody wants an outsider on a wedding tour, and I'm not going. I can't help it. Come on, tears! Even angels sometimes cry aloud; and, not being a step-relation to one, I'm going to let Mary cry if she wants to. Sometimes Martha is real hard on Mary.
There is no use studying Human Nature. You can't study a thing that changes by day and by night, and is so uncertain you never know what it is going to do. Now, here is Mary Cary, mostly Martha, who would rather get on a train or a boat and go somewhere— she don't care where—than to do any other thing on earth. Who has never seen anything and wants to see everything, and who, if anyone had told her a year ago she could go to New York, and then to Europe, would have slid down every flight of stairs head foremost from pure joy. And now she has the chance, she is not going. She is Not.
She hasn't much sense, Mary Cary hasn't, but enough to know wedding trips are personal, and, besides, the girls have turned into regular weepers. Every time anything is said about going away their eyes water up, and Martha feels like a yellow dog with no tail. I know they hate Miss Katherine's going; but why do they cry about my going? Lord, this is a strange place to live in, this world is! I wonder what heaven will be like?
Miss Bray is much better. She says Uncle Parke has cured her. I don't believe it. I believe it was Relief of the Mind.
I wasn't meant to be a sad person. I was silly sad the other day; but I've found out when anything bothers you very much, it helps to take it out and look at it. Walk all around it, poke it and see if it's sure enough, and, if it isn't, tell it you'll see it dead before you'll let it do you that way.