'How fine!'
'Yes,' said Miss Brackett, looking at the dunes and the surging lake. 'It was, as you might say, a great experience. You hardly would believe me, but before that time, why, I hardly knew there was such a place as outdoors; not till I was forty-six years old; and that’s a fact.'
Elsie glanced up at her inquiringly. She had heard of persons who acquired Spanish at ninety, or who experienced a passionate personal infatuation for the first time at sixty, but never of an adult creature, devoted to an indoor existence, who suddenly felt in middle age a real response to the great inarticulate voices of the earth.
'Up to then, I lived on the West Side, in Chicago, with my married sister. My father left the place to her and to me. Most of the rest of the property went to my young half-brother Kip. But when Nettie’s children were nearly grown, it seemed as though there wasn’t any room left in the house for me; and yet they needed me, you see, to sew for them, right straight along. I used to sew, sew, sew till midnight and past, often, tucking on the girls' summer dresses, especially that last spring when I was at home; and I began to cough then and get so dreadful tired. That winter Nettie thought each of the girls ought to have their own room. It was no more than right, either. Nettie and me, we each had our own room when we was young girls. So I used to sleep just on two chairs with quilts in the back parlor, and couldn’t seem to rest very good, and, besides, had to get up and get dressed and the room fixed, real early, so Will could come there and read his morning paper. Well, I used to keep all my things in shoe-boxes, up in the attic, so they’d be out of the way. They used to laugh, and laugh, about those boxes; and one night we was all sitting on the steps, and they were laughing, and my youngest niece, Baby, she got real mad. She 's so warm-hearted and she never wanted to take my room, and only did because it provoked Nettie so, for her not to. Babe turned real white, and she said all of a sudden, "The reason why Aunt Min hasn’t anything but shoe-boxes to keep her things in is just because we’ve turned her out of everything," she said. "You ought to be ashamed of yourselves." And she jumped up and ran into the house.
'That night my brother Kip happened to be there. He’d been West ever since he was fifteen. He’s a lot younger than Nettie and me—only twenty-five, then. We thought Kip was an awful wild, queer sort of fellow, then; we didn’t know him at all. I felt just like the rest. He’d run through all that was left him long ago; and he’d married an actress and was separated from her. He was a sort of a Socialist too, and even had tramped some. But he seemed to be real kind in some ways. When Babe said that, he looked at me quite hard. When he went home he says to me, "You look sick, Min," he says, and he took hold of my hand. "You’ve got fever. Why don’t you see a doctor?"
'Well, I don’t know what got into me. After they was all gone that night, I just broke down, and cried and cried. I did feel dreadful sick and feverish, and I hadn’t no money of my own to see a doctor, and felt just all gone really. I managed to get up and fix the room before any of them come down. But then I had to lie on the sofa, and couldn’t get to breakfast. And after breakfast—would you believe it?—a doctor come. Kip sent him, himself. But he frightened Nettie to death. I felt dreadfully sorry for her.'
'He told your sister how ill you were,' said Elsie gravely.
'Oh, yes. But it wasn’t so much that, as she was so afraid some of the children might catch my trouble. She was all right though as soon as they got me to the hospital, though she was provoked too, because it took so much of her time to come there to see me. She come twice before I went away. The doctor said that going away was my only chance. For all that I was up and around, he thought I couldn’t live a year.'
Neither of them spoke for a moment, looking away at the dunes.
'Then—what do you think—Kip had an intimate friend, quite a rich young man, Will Bronson, who was sick the same way I was. That’s how Kip come to notice my sickness so. The doctors wanted him kept out of doors, and he and Kip was going on this wagon-trip. But his mother was nearly crazy worrying over it, and worrying the young man and crying all day and night. She thought Kip never could take care of him. Well, those boys wanted me to go off with them on the wagon-trip. They said I could cook for them, and it would relieve the mother. And it did. They took me to see her. And she thought if a person like me could go on a wagon-trip it couldn’t be so awful after all. Well, the short and the long of it was, we went to Fort Leavenworth, and the boys got a wagon and provisions and blankets and thick shoes and things for me, and they got two good mules from the government post, and we started off.'