Once upon a time you and I read together "The Arabian Nights," and when we had finished the first book you laid your little hand on my knee and looked up at me. "Is it true, Uncle Rod?" you asked. "Oh, Uncle Rod, is it true?" And I said, "What it tells about the Roc's egg and the Old Man of the Sea and the Serpent is not true, but what it says about the actions and motives of people is true, because people have acted in that way and have thought like that through all the ages, and the tales have lived because of it, and have been written in all languages." I was sure, when I said it, that you did not quite understand; but you were to grow to it, which was all that was required.
Blessed child, what your Geoffrey Fox has done, though I hate him for it and blame him, is what other hotheads have done. The protective is not the primitive masculine instinct. Men have thought of themselves first and of women afterward since the beginning of time. Only with Christianity was chivalry born in them. And since many of our youths have elected to be pagan, what can you expect?
So your Geoffrey Fox being pagan, primitive—primordial, whatever it is now the fashion to call it, reverted to type, and you were the victim.
I have read his letter and might find it in my heart to forgive him were it not that he has made you suffer; but that I cannot forgive; although, indeed, his coming blindness is something that pleads for him, and his fear of it—and his fear of losing you.
I am glad that you are coming home to me. Margaret and her family are going away, and we can have their big house to ourselves during the summer. We shall like that, I am sure, and we shall have many talks, and try to straighten out this matter of dreams—and of sunsets, which is really very important, and not in the least to be ignored.
But let me leave this with you to ponder on. You remember how you have told me that when you were a tiny child you walked once between me and my good old friend, General Ross, and you heard it said by one of us that life was what we made it. Before that you had always cried when it rained; now you were anxious that the rain might come so that you could see if you could really keep from crying. And when the rain arrived you were so immensely entertained that you didn't shed a tear, and you went to bed that night feeling like a conqueror, and never again cried out against the elements.
It would have been dreadful if all your life you had gone on crying about rain, wouldn't it? And isn't this adventure your rainy day? You rose above it, dearest child. I am proud of the way you handled your mad lover.
Life is what we make it. Never doubt that. "He knows the water best who has waded through it," and I have lived long and have learned my lesson. When I knew that I could paint no more real pictures I knew that I must have dream pictures to hang on the walls of memory. Shall I make you a little catalogue of them, dear heart—thus:
No. 1.—Your precious mother sewing by the west window in our shadowed sitting-room, her head haloed by the sunset.
No. 2.—Anne in a blue pinafore, with the wind blowing her hair back on a gray March morning.