And the letter went on, in a composed and courageous tone that David found astonishing in any girl so young:
While she lives, which will not be long, for she seems more like eighty than fifty now, and is so frail we hardly know whether she will ever get up again—while she lives I must stay here, since Sylvia and Aunt Flora will let me, whether my pride likes it or not, of course. Afterward, I look to work—[she had underscored it twice]—any sort of work, to help me get my balance back, to help me feel that life is just in the long run, and that there is good somewhere under all this.
David read the thin sheets more than once, and mused far more steadily than he realized upon the situation of the lovely and loving young creature to whom life had been so strangely harsh. There was not, truly, as she had said, one thing of which she might be proud. Her father was nothing to her, her mother was poor little weak-minded Aunt Lily, the bread she ate, the roof that covered her, were Sylvia’s. Nameless, penniless, at eighteen she faced the world with bare hands.
One day he stopped at a fancier’s, in the East Thirties, and sent up to Wastewater a coffee-coloured airedale, seven weeks old. The creature had somewhat the shape and feeling of a little muff, but was stocky, warm, and wriggling, with a little eager red tongue coming and going, and an entreating whine for whosoever stopped to finger his soft little head. If Aunt Flora objected, David scribbled on his card, Gay was to ask John please to keep Benbay, who was alas somewhat lacking in points, but whose father was Champion Benbay Westclox II, until David could take him away.
David, however, hoped that Aunt Flora would not object to Benbay. His lack of “points” would not prevent the woolly little affectionate creature from being a real companion and comfort to the lonely girl at Wastewater. Studying, practising, brooding, walking alone in the snow, eating meals alone with Aunt Flora in the dreary dining room, singing her little songs to her forlorn and dying mother in the winter evenings—David would shut his eyes and shake his head at the mere thought of such a life for such a girl!
His exhibition was early in April, and was followed by another in Chicago, where he would show pictures, and must be, if possible. David planned to go to Wastewater immediately afterward and establish himself there for the summer. Sylvia would be coming home in June, and there would be all sorts of questions to settle. Sylvia would have plans—she brimmed with plans. And of late David, musing over the problem of Gay and her youth and her beauty and her future, had been entertaining a new plan of his own.
It had come to him suddenly, this thought of a new solution for Gay, and it had a strangely thrilling and heart-warming quality about it, for all its undoubted whimsicality and unexpectedness. David had first found himself thinking of it on the day when he and Jim Rucker were bound for Chicago. David had been thinking idly, in his comfortable big Pullman chair, and staring through the wide window at a landscape that, although still bleak and bare, was already so different from what it had been even a few weeks before.
Clouds so heavily packed then were flying wildly now across a sky that seemed nearer, more accessible. Trees, leafless, yet had a faintly moist and expectant air, as they whipped madly about. There were thawing, and the taste of rain, and a great softening in the air; there was ploughing under way, and children’s coats and winter hats were already shabby and ready to be shed. Shadows lay longer, and daylight lingered in the car almost until the dinner hour. David watched school children stamping and running by the big roadside pools that were ruffled by the wind; he saw mired cars in the muddy roads that were hard as steel a few weeks before, and except on the northeastern sides of fences and barns there was no more snow.
He was thinking of Gay, in a desultory fashion that had been customary of late, just of Gay at Wastewater, coming and going in her plain frocks, with her beautiful hand set off by the thin lawn cuff, and her beautiful creamy throat rising from the broad, transparent organdy collar, with that husky sweetness in her voice, and the fashion of raising her up-curled lashes to look at him. Gay, opening doors, walking by the sea——
And suddenly, full-grown in his mind, was the idea of marrying Gay. He did not know whence it had come; it seemed complete, it was finished to the last detail.