"You are a man," she said. "Men do, I believe. But I, I get so tired sometimes"—she bit her lip—"of being master." She laughed nervously. "That's why I ran away."
Presently she went on speaking.
"If we could only be surrounded by such things as these, always, how serene our lives might be. Don't smile. It's my old sermon of environment, I know; but why are you here?—and why am I? I try my best to keep the beautiful before my children's eyes, to tempt them into lovely thinking. Bertram, I believe, heart and soul, in the power of beauty. I am so sure of it, I know I should be a stronger teacher if I were young and beautiful myself—or even pretty, like Helen White."
"She is a mere wax doll," I said.
"But children like pretty faces," she replied. "Look! You have a fish!"
It was a snag, but while I was busy with it she rose. "Wait," I said, "I'll drive you home."
"No, thank you, Bertram. I'd rather walk. My head is better now. Good-bye."
I did not urge her. When she had gone I picked up a slip of paper from the path where she had passed. It was a crumpled half of a blue-ruled leaf torn from some pupil's tablet, and, scrawled upon it in a school-girl's hand, I read:
"Dear Edna,—Don't mind the homely old thing. Everybody says she's fifty if she's a day. No one would marry her, so she had to teach school."
It was written, Dove told me afterwards, by one of the rose-girls in Letitia's garden.