I mean to take all your good advice about being calm, and trying not to feel that it devolves upon me to settle all our social problems this month. I know even better than you the complexity of the difficulties in our congested city life. I have little hope of doing much for this generation of pauperism and vice, but I am determined to do whatever my money and good will can do for laying the foundation of better things in the generation to come.
I am going to begin with tenement houses, for there, I believe, lies the root of half of the trouble. I suppose my friends will think that I am getting to be a dreadful doctrinaire. Well, it can’t be helped. I was predestined for that, I believe. My consolation is that you at least will not be bored by all my plans and theories, and will warn me if I get too rabid....
CHAPTER VI.
The night after I had first seen Mildred Brewster at aunt Madison’s I lay awake for hours, feverishly tossing upon my pillow, and revolving many thoughts. I then made one resolve. I would try to win the friendship of this woman who had touched me, who had moved me in a way that no one had ever done before.
It was not so much by what she had said, for I had heard the same or kindred thoughts expressed by other lips; but I had never before met a woman so strong, well poised and thoughtful, a woman who united girlish grace and charm with all the persistent ardor of one who, I was sure, could not only die for an idea, but, what is far rarer, live for it day by day and year by year, although forced to meet indifference and coldness or the quiet contempt which cuts to the quick in every sensitive nature.
As I had sat by the firelight that night, watching the color come and go in her face,—that changeful, eager face,—for the first time in a dreary twelve-month I had felt my heart leap up with warmth and sympathy. From a thoughtless, happy girlhood, from the life of a gay, pleasure-loving young lady, I had been rudely summoned to face some of the bitterest realities of life. No matter what they were. I am not writing about myself. But though my life was still rich and full of opportunities, if I had but known it, yet in my blindness and selfishness it had seemed utterly wrecked to me. I had sunk into a dull, prosaic routine, and under a proud mask of gay indifference was trying to hide a heart dead to hope, ambition, and love. Yet, no! not dead to love, though I had thought it so; but in the heart-hunger which was not satisfied, I was fast becoming self-centred, cold, and cynical.
Like a dreary desert the long years which must be lived stretched desolately before me, and my only aim was to fill the minutes of each day so full as to leave me no leisure for memory or thought.
As I closed my eyes to sleep that night my last thought was, “Yes, I will know her. I must know her. Oh, if I could only be like her, a creature of thought and purpose, absorbed in some idea, caring for something beside my wretched, silly self! Perhaps she can help me. I will ask her. I can trust her.”
I had been deceived in others; I had given my utmost trust to those who had proved utterly unworthy, and in bitterness of spirit I had resolved never to trust again, never to leave the gateway to my heart unguarded; but now, before I knew it, the locks had yielded, and I stood with lonely, outstretched arms, begging for love to enter in. After all, I was still young, and very, very human.
And love came. It came before my fallen pride had found words to ask for it. I had something to live for now. I had found a friend. What romance has ever been written that tells of woman’s love for woman? And yet the world is full of it, despite the skeptics, and the Davids and Jonathans find their counterparts in thousands of the unwritten lives of women. Yes, I had found not a new acquaintance, but a warm heart-friend. Thank God that she knew it and I knew it before the wealth which came so fast upon the beginning of our friendship could create a gulf between us, which, once established, my pride would never have allowed me to cross. Mildred knew, she always knew, that I had loved her first, and wanted her for herself alone.