Poppea of the Post-Office

by Mabel Osgood Wright

Then again did John Angus shut himself up for a day and night, to emerge as before and accept the inevitable with a denial of any need of sympathy. In a week he announced that Philip was to study modelling, therefore an outdoor studio was to be built in the garden, and he was to be under the guidance of Clay Howell, a famous sculptor, who not only had studios in Rome and New York, but also a summer home at Westboro. The latest tutor was retained as a companion, and Angus, more ill than he would confess even to himself, set sail at Christmas nominally for a six months' absence.

Philip had as a child a beautiful soprano voice which, by the time he was seventeen, had developed a tenor quality without losing any of its impersonal boyish sweetness. Stephen Latimer had taken great pains in its training, and in his friendship the boy had found the one soul who seemed to understand without spoken words. It was through this companionship that he found that other that seemed to him in his dark hours of self abasement and disappointment, the one light that kept hope alive,—this was Poppea.

As a child he had longed to play with her, and used to watch her by the hour through the port-holes of the parapet, while she was working in the garden that extended from the treasure-trove bank little by little until it finally reached the apple trees. That they might not be playmates Mrs. Shandy made plain to him, though never the reason why. Later on they had met at children's parties at the Feltons' and at the choir practice at St. Luke's, and Poppea had always so sweet and gentle a way with him, that when he used to dream of angels or try to think what his mother must have looked like, Poppea's face was always blended in his visions, for he never felt the stately portrait by Huntington in the library to be his mother.

When at last it was decided that he was not to go to college and life held out an olive branch to Philip, Poppea seemed to be the dove that brought it; Poppea, for whom Stephen Latimer asked Philip to play accompaniments when she went of an afternoon to the Rectory for a singing lesson "between mails," and Jeanne Latimer could not be of the party.

To Latimer, Philip seemed a mere child; it never occurred to him that he might be reckoned with emotionally and sentimentally as a man, and it rejoiced his gentle heart to see the boy so happy.

Any boy is spiritualized and made better by the sympathetic companionship of an older woman if she be of the right mettle, and Latimer believed that this companionship would give Philip the very thing, the conception of the essence of woman's sympathy, that he had lacked all his sad life and that must be realized if he was to grapple successfully with his art. Consequently, he was quite unprepared and almost angry, when after coming into the room one day while they were practising, Jeanne had said:—

"Have a care, Stephen dear, that you do not develop a tragedy in, as you say, cultivating Philip's artistic perceptions. Will it be well, think you, that he falls entirely in love with Poppea?"

Even then Latimer would not understand. "There are many kinds of love that are far removed from tragedy," he answered.

"Yes, but to a sensitive dreamer for a woman like Poppea there is but one love," she had replied almost vehemently.

"You are mistaken, Jeanne, in this. I am with them, and I stand between their thoughts as they pass, and my soul reads them. The safety lies in that Poppea is what she is."