I have named my friend the “anemone lady,” a name beautifully appropriate.
The anemone lady used to teach me literature in the Butte High School. She used to read poetry in the class-room in a clear, sweet voice that made one wish one might sit there forever and listen to it.
But now I have left the high school, and the dear anemone lady has gone from Butte. Before she went she told me she would be my friend.
Think of it—to live and have a friend!
My friend does not fully understand me; she thinks much too well of me. She has not a correct idea of my soul’s depths and shallows. But if she did know them she would still be my friend. She knows the heavy weight of my unrest and unhappiness. She is tenderly sympathetic. She is the one in all the world who is dear to me.
Often I think, if only I could have my anemone lady and go and live with her in some little out-of-the-world place high up on the side of a mountain for the rest of my life—what more would I desire? My friendship would constitute my life. The unrest, the dreariness, the Nothingness of my existence now is so dull and gray by contrast that there would be Happiness for me in that life, Happiness softly radiant, if quiet—redolent of the fresh, thin fragrance of the dear blue anemone that grows in the winds and rains of spring.
But Miss Corbin would doubtless look somewhat askance at the idea of spending the rest of her life with me on a mountain. She is very fond of me, but her feeling for me is not like mine for her, which indeed is natural. And her life is made up mostly of sacrifices—doing for her fellow-creatures, giving of herself. She never would leave this.
And so, then, the mountainside and the solitude and the friend with me are, like every good thing, but a vision.
“Thy friend is always thy friend; not to have, nor to hold, nor to love, nor to rejoice in: but to remember.”