Little Miss By-The-Day

by Lucille Van Slyke

Now that you are old enough to understand and Grandy is himself old enough to be more patient I think perhaps you will be the one who will be able to make him forgive Louisa for going to France. He would never let me tell him; I tried to but he wouldn't listen because he thought it was going to be painful; he would only say that the past was over and done with and then he would walk away from me.

We've had such an unfortunate habit, Felice! We women of this family!
We would run away with the men we loved! The first of us to run away
was Prudence Langhorne who ran away with an old Frenchman who came to
America to try to forget the miserable troubles of his country.

There were many reasons, some of them political, why she couldn't explain who this Frenchman was—and besides I think she was so happy and so busy that she never minded what people thought. She was a little careless about explaining things until it was too late—for she died and left a daughter, Josepha, who never knew that her mother had been really and truly married to her father and who was bitter and unhappy because there was a deal of gossip about her. This Josepha was not asked about whom she wanted to marry. She was just taken to France and married to a man whom she never learned to love and sometimes people taunted her so that after he died she took just one of his names and came back to America with her daughter Louisa and built this house in Montrose Place. She did not think it was time for Louisa to marry. She meant to arrange things carefully when it was—but Louisa was like the rest of us—she fell in love when she was still very young and she ran away with her man—(that was Grandy) and she promised him that she'd always like to be poor with him. She would have, of course, only after her mother died she learned there was a great deal of money that belonged to us and when she knew that I was coming she wanted things for me. So she made a silly mistake. She kept everything a secret from Grandy; she used to go to the lawyer's when he didn't know about it and then some one told Grandy about her going and Grandy misunderstood—he thought she loved her lawyer. So they quarreled and quarreled, for Louisa was furious because he mistrusted her and in the end she was so angry that she sailed away for France with her lawyer. She couldn't make Grandy believe that it was true that she really had business in Paris; he thought it was only an excuse of the lawyer's to take her away. So Grandy went away to war and Louisa stayed in France and that's where I was born and that's where I lived until Louisa died and the Major came for me.

Sometime I hope that Grandy will take you to France and let you live a little while at least in that house. I loved it so—sometimes I think I loved it even more than I loved the House in the Woods or this house.

It was in this house that your father learned to love me—it was in this house here that I waited a long time hoping that the Major would let us marry. You see Louisa, my mother, did leave me these houses and a great deal of money, some of it in France, and Grandy thought your father wanted to get it, so in the end, after we had all been unhappy and wasted many precious years I did like the rest of them—I ran away.

You must not blame Grandy too much. I know that Louisa and her mother
Josepha were as much to blame as he.

Felix and I were not patient. We all of us made many, many mistakes. They look so silly now that we are older but they seemed so necessary when they happened.

When we knew you were coming, your father and I, we used to laugh because you see, I had so many names and a title too—and I'd run away from everything just to be with Felix and I'd no way to get at what I owned without going back to Grandy. Besides it seemed to me that what I owned had made all of us unhappy. So we used to say all we'd give you would be the names and the titles but we'd keep you away from the rest of it—and that we were glad the days of princesses were gone for both our countries, America and France.

But I think that when the time comes, for you to marry you will like to have all these papers that tell you who you are and I think too, that if you are wise, having the houses and the money that belongs to you cannot make you unhappy—I like to think you will find some way to be happier than the rest of us have been, for you have something that none of us had, something that was your legacy from your father. He was very poor, Felice, but everyone loved him because he never let himself be morose or unhappy. He taught me that you can't be happy yourself if you are making anyone else unhappy. He said the delightful thing about not possessing much was that one could be prodigal and extravagant about being happy. He said he had no obligation in this world except to be happy.

He made a game of everything he did whether it was something he liked to do or something he hated to do. Toward the end he had to do many things he hated, that he wasn't strong enough to do. But he did them gaily. He made everyone around him laugh as he did.