Contrary Mary

by Temple Bailey

There seemed open to me the Church and the law. Had I lived in a different environment, there would have been also the stage. But I saw only two outlets for my talents, the Church, toward which my tastes inclined, and the law, which had been my father's profession.

At last I chose the Church. I liked the thought of my scholarly future—of the power which my voice might have to sway audiences and to move them.

I am putting it all down, all of my boyish optimism, conceit—whatever you may choose to call it.

Yet I am convinced of this, and my success of a few years proved it, that had nothing interfered with my future, I should have made an impression on ever-widening circles.

But something came to interfere.

In my last years at the Seminary, I boarded at a house where I met daily the daughter of the landlady. She was a little thing, with yellow hair and a childish manner. As I look back, I can't say that I was ever greatly attracted to her. But she was a part of my life for so long that gradually there grew up between us a sort of good fellowship. Not friendship in the sense that I have understood it with you; there was about it nothing of spiritual or of mental congeniality. But I played the big brother. I took her to little dances; and to other college affairs. I gave both to herself and to her widowed mother such little pleasures as it is possible for a man to give to two rather lonely women. There were other students in the house, and I was not conscious that I was doing anything more than the rest of them.

Then there came a day when the yellow-haired child—-shall I call her Kathy?—wanted to go to a pageant in a neighboring town. It was to last two days, and there was to be a night parade, and floats and a carnival. Many of the students were going, and it was planned that Kathy and I should take a morning train on the first day, so that we might miss nothing. Kathy's mother would come on an afternoon train, and they would spend the night at a certain quiet hotel, while I was to go with a lot of fellows to another.

Well, when that afternoon train arrived, the mother was not on it. Nor did she come. Without one thought of unconventionality, I procured a room for Kathy at the place where she and her mother would have stopped. Then I left her and went to the other hotel to join my classmates. But carnival-mad; they did not come in at all, and went back on an express which passed through the town in the early morning.

When Kathy and I reached home at noon, we found her mother white and hysterical. She would listen to no explanations. She told me that I should have brought Kathy back the night before—that she had missed her train and thus her appointment with us. And she told me that I was in honor bound to marry Kathy.

As I write it, it seems such melodrama. But it was very serious then. I have never dared analyze the mother's motives. But to my boyish eyes her anxiety for her daughter's reputation was sincere, and I accepted the responsibility she laid upon me.