Cousin Eunice came out of her cataleptic state on Sunday morning, for she is ashamed to write on the type-writer that day for fear Waterloo will tell it at Sunday-school—and she showed me how to dispose of the week-old egg-shells and concentrated soup cans which had accumulated amazingly around the fenders of the range.
"Oh, I think a literary ambition is an evil thing sometimes," she said with a deep sigh, looking around at the house, which she declared was enough to give us all bubonic plague.
"It is—er, disheartening to have you shut up all the week in the little back room up-stairs," Rufe admitted, fishing one of his best gloves out from behind the coal-box. "When you're locked away up there the house looks as empty as a hotel bureau-drawer—and that's the emptiest thing on earth."
"I know it," she answered, looking at him sympathetically. "—Besides, it's wearing to have a book for ever in your mind. Inspiration is so uncertain—and so urgent. I've had it strike me while I was washing my hair; and it's far from pleasant to have to dash the soap out of your eyes while you search all over the house for your note-book and pencil—and the water drips down all over the furniture."
"It must be," Rufe agreed.
"And here lately I've grown so absent-minded that when I go down-town for a little shopping I have to dress with my memorandum in my mouth to keep from going off and forgetting it."
But on Monday morning genius was burning again, and I stayed through that week, but only in the capacity of a protection against interruptions. We got another cook, for Pearl's brother, like Charles II., was "an unconscionable time a-dying." Richard came every day and every night and was so attentive to the whole family that Rufe rather sarcastically asked one day: "Ann, is Chalmers courting you or me?"
Rufe's words meant little to me then, but later they kept recurring to my mind with a persistency that would make Banquo's ghost appear like a tame and laggard thing. Was Richard hoping to gain, through his friendship with me, the support of the Times? He knew that if Rufe's personal influence could not bring about an actual support of him in the coming campaign it would be a factor in having the paper judge his manipulations with a lenient eye.
And now this finally brings me up to that miserable day the following spring, the Ides of March, it was, when the skies fell; and they never fell upon a more wretched, more humiliated, more bitterly disciplined young woman.
As I have said, Richard had made an ideal fiancé throughout the time which followed that miserable parting with Alfred, and I had occasion many times to wonder if, after all, I might not have been mistaken about the incompatibility of our natures. Besides, the fascination of the handsome, physical Richard Chalmers was still there; perhaps it was never so strongly and bitterly there as on the fifteenth of March that I have just mentioned.