... “My thoughts in these past weeks have not been happy ones; but I must turn now to the future. In my dark hours I have groped toward you, felt the need of your leading hand. I love you. That is the one great fact in the world. Whatever I have left to me of life is yours; and it is now my right to give it.... It was my fate, not my fault, that I learned to love you. Nothing can change that. Let me begin over again and prove my love for you—win you as it is a woman’s right to be won, in the world’s eyes. I want you to bear my name; belong to me truly, help me to find and keep the path of happiness.”
She did not understand herself as the days passed and she felt no impulse to reply. She loved him still—there was no question of that—but she tortured herself with the idea that he had written only from a chivalrous sense of obligation. Trenton was free; but she too was free; and marriage was an uncertain quantity. She encouraged in herself the belief that to marry him would be only to invite unhappiness. While she was still debating with herself, she learned from Irene that Trenton was again in town and working hard.
The new club for business girls, which Miss Reynolds decided to name Friendship House, was in process of furnishing and was to be opened on Thanksgiving Day.
Nothing in the preparations had proved so embarrassing as the choice of the first occupants. It might have seemed that all the young women in town were clamoring for admission and only fifty could be accommodated. Miss Reynolds and Grace spent many hours interviewing applicants. Then, too, there was the matter of working out a plan for the general management of Friendship House until the club members took hold of it for themselves.
“The girls can make their own rules,” said Miss Reynolds. “But I’m going to have one little rule printed and put in every room and worked into all the doormats and stamped into the linen—just two words—Be Kind! If we’d all live up to that this would be a lot more comfortable world to live in!”
Being so constantly at Miss Reynolds’s Grace had heard the Bob Cummingses mentioned frequently. The merger had obliterated the name from the industrial life of the city; the senior Cummings had gone West to live with his eldest son and Miss Reynolds had spoken frequently of the plight in which the collapse of the family fortunes had left Bob. Evelyn came in one morning when Grace was alone in the improvised office.
“We’ve sold our house,” she announced, after they had talked awhile. “It was mine, you know; a wedding present from my uncle. And I’ve got about a thousand a year. So I’m going to turn Bob loose at his music. He’s already got a job as organist in Dr. Ridgley’s church and he’s going to teach and do some lecturing on music. He can do that wonderfully.”
“That’s perfectly splendid!” said Grace warmly. “But it’s too bad—the business troubles. I’ve wanted to tell you how sorry I am.”
“Well, I’m not so sure any one ought to be sorry for us. Our difficulties have brought Bob and me closer together, and our chances of happiness are brighter than on our wedding day; really they are! I’m saying this to you because you know Bob so well, and I think you’ll understand.”
Grace was not sure that she did understand and when Evelyn left she meditated for a long time upon the year’s changes. She had so jauntily gone out to meet the world, risking her happiness in her confidence that she was capable of directing her own destiny; but life was not so easy! Life was an inexorable schoolmaster who set very hard problems indeed!