Contrary Mary

by Temple Bailey

Here everything is the same. Constance will be with me until spring, and we are to have a quiet Thanksgiving and a quiet Christmas with just the family, and Leila and the General. Porter Bigelow goes to Palm Beach to be with his mother. I don't know why we always count him in as one of the family except that he never waits for an invitation, and of course we're glad to have him. Mother and father used to feel sorry for him; he was always a sort of "Poor-little-rich-boy" whose money cut him out from lots of good times that families have who don't live in such formal fashion as Mr. and Mrs. Bigelow seem to enjoy.

As soon as Constance leaves, I am going to work. I haven't told any one, for when I hinted at it, Constance was terribly upset, and asked me to live with her and Gordon. Grace wants me to go to Paris with her; Barry and Leila have stated that I can have a home with them.

But I don't want a home with anybody. I want to live my own life, as I have told you. I want to try my wings. I don't believe you quite like the idea of my working. Nobody does, not even Grace Clendenning, although Grace seems to understand me better than any one else.

Grace and I have been talking to-day about life as a great adventure. And it seems to me that we have the right idea. So many people go through life as just something to be endured, but I want to make things happen, or rather, if big things don't happen, I want to see in the little things something that is interesting. I don't believe that any life need be common-place. It is just the way we look at it. I'm copying these words which I read in one of your books; perhaps you've seen them, but anyhow it will tell you better than I what I mean.

"But life is a great adventure, and the worst of all fears is the fear of living. There are many forms of success, many forms of triumph. But there is no other success that in any way approaches that which is open to most of the many men and women who have the right idea. These are the men and the women who see that it is the intimate and homely things that count most. They are the men and women who have the courage to strive for the happiness which comes only with labor and effort and self-sacrifice, and only to those whose joy in life springs in part from power of work and sense of duty."

Aren't those words like a strong wind blowing from the sea? I just love them. And I know you will. I am so glad that I can talk to you of such things. Everybody has to have a friend who can understand—and that's the fine thing about our friendship—that we both have things to overcome, and that our letters can be reports of progress.

Of course the things which I have to overcome are just little fussy woman things—but they are big to me because I am breaking away from family traditions. All the women our household have followed the straight and narrow path of conventional living. Even Grace does it, although she rebels inwardly—but Aunt Frances keeps her to it. Once Grace tried to be an artist, and she worked hard in Paris, until Aunt Frances swooped down and carried her off—Grace still speaks of that time in Paris as her year out of prison. You see she worked hard and met people who worked, too, and it interested her. She had a studio apartment, and was properly chaperoned by a little widow who went with her and shared her rooms.

But Aunt Frances popped in on them suddenly one day and found a Bohemian party. There wasn't anything wrong about it, Grace says, but you know Aunt Frances! She has never ceased to talk about the frumpy crowd she met there. She hated the students in their velvet coats and the women with their poor queer clothes. And Grace loved them. But she's given up the idea of ever living there again. She says you can't do a thing twice and have it the same. I don't know. I only know that Grace may seem frivolous on the outside, but that underneath she is different. She has taken up advanced ideas about women, and she says that I have them naturally, and that she didn't expect such a thing in Washington where everybody stops to think what somebody else is going to say. But I haven't arrived at the point where I am really interested in Suffrage and things like that. Grace says that I must begin to look beyond my own life, and perhaps when I get some of my own problems settled, I will. And then I shall be taking up the problems of the girls in factories and the girls in laundries and the girls in the big shops, as Grace is. She says that she may live like a bond-slave herself, but she'd like to help other women to be free.

And now I must tell you about Delilah Jeliffe. She had a house-warming last week. The old house in Georgetown is a dream. Delilah hasn't a superfluous or gorgeous thing in it. Everything is keyed to the old-family note. Some of the things are even shabby. She has done away with flamingo colors, and her monkeys with the crystal ball and the peacock screen. She has little stools in her drawing-room with faded covers of canvas work, and she has samplers and cracked portraits, and the china doesn't all match. There isn't a sign of "new richness" in the place. She keeps colored servants, and doesn't wear rings, and her gowns are frilly flowing white things which make her look like one of those demure grandmotherly young persons of the early sixties.

Her little artist is a charming blond who doesn't come up to her shoulders, and Delilah hangs on every word he says. For the moment he obscures all the other men on her horizon. He made sketches of the way every room in her house ought to look. And what seems to be the result of years of formal pleasant living really is the result of the months of hunting and hard work which he and Delilah have put in. He even indicates the flowers she shall wear, and those which are to bloom next summer in her garden. She affects heliotrope, and on the night of her house-warming she carried a tight bunch of it with a few pink rosebuds.