“Nonsense!”
“Yes, it is so. He said so. Oh, Maria! you will think I am dreadful, and I do love you and Aunt Maria and Uncle Henry and Aunt Eunice, but I can't help minding his going away where I can never see him, more than anything else in the world. I can't help loving him most. I do feel so very badly, sister, that I think I shall die.”
“Nonsense, darling.”
“Yes, I shall. And I am not ashamed now. I was ashamed because I thought so much about a man who did not care anything about me, but now I am not ashamed. I am just killed. A person is not to blame for being killed. I am not ashamed. I am killed. He is going away, and I shall never see him again. The sight of him was something; I shall not even have that. You don't know, sister. I don't love him for my own self, but for himself. Just the knowing he is near is something, and I shall not even have that.” Evelyn was too weak to cry tumultuously, but she made little, futile moans, and clung to Maria's hand. Maria tried to soothe her, and finally the child, worn out, seemed to be either asleep or in the coma of exhaustion.
Then Maria went into her own room. She undressed, and sat down beside the window with a wrapper over her night-gown. Now she had to solve her problem. She began as she might have done with a problem in higher algebra, this problem of the human heart and its emotions. She said to herself that there were three people. Evelyn, Wollaston and herself, three known quantities, and an unknown quantity of happiness, and perhaps life itself, which must be evolved from them. She eliminated herself and her own happiness not with any particular realization of self-sacrifice. She came of a race of women to whom self-sacrifice was more natural than self-gratification. She was unhappy, but there was no struggle for happiness to render the unhappiness keener. She thought first of Evelyn. She loved Wollaston. Maria reasoned, of course, that she was very young. This first love might not be her only one, but the girl's health might break under the strain, and she took into consideration, as she had often done, the fairly abnormal strength of Evelyn's emotional nature in a slight and frail young body. Evelyn was easily one who might die because of a thwarted love. Then Maria thought of Wollaston, and, loving him as she did, she acknowledged to herself coolly that he was the first to be considered, his happiness and well being. Even if Evelyn did break her heart, the man must have the first consideration. She tried to judge fairly as to whether she or Evelyn would on the whole be the best for him. She estimated herself, and she estimated Evelyn, and she estimated the man. Wollaston Lee was a man of a strong nature, she told herself. He was capable of self-restraint, of holding his head up from his own weaknesses forever. Maria reasoned that if he had been a weaker man she would have loved him just the same, and in that case Evelyn would have been the one to be sacrificed. She thought that a girl like Evelyn would not have been such a good wife for a weak man as she herself, who was stronger. But Wollaston did not need any extraneous strength. On the contrary, some one who was weaker than he might easily strengthen his strength. It seemed to her that Evelyn was distinctly better for the man than she. Then she remembered the look which she had seen on his face when Evelyn began her essay that day.
“If he does not love her now it is because he is bound to me,” she thought. “He would most certainly love her if it were not for me.”
Again it seemed to Maria distinctly better that she should die, better—that is, for Evelyn and the man. But she had the thought, with no morbid desire for suicide or any bitterness. It simply seemed to her as if her elimination would produce that desirable unknown quantity of happiness.
Elimination and not suicide seemed to her the only course for her to pursue. She sat far into the night thinking it over. She had great imagination and great daring. Things were possible to her which would not have been possible to many—that is, she considered things as possibilities which would have seemed to many simply vagaries. She thought of them seriously, with a belief in their fulfilment. It was almost morning, the birds had just begun to sing in scattering flute-like notes, when she crept into bed.
She hardly slept at all. She heard the gathering chorus of the birds, in a half doze, until seven o'clock. Then she got up and dressed herself. She peeped cautiously into Evelyn's room. The girl was sleeping, her long, dark lashes curled upon her wan cheeks. She looked ghastly, yet still lovely. Maria looked at her, and her mouth compressed. Then she turned away. She crept noiselessly down the stairs and into the kitchen where Aunt Maria was preparing breakfast. The stove smoked a little and the air was blue.
“How is she?” asked Aunt Maria, in a hushed voice.