“Once I asked him how it was that he who had appreciated women personally so little as never to have married one, was yet so loyal a supporter of them in the aggregate that he cheerfully put his shoulder to the wheel of every cart which carried their burdens.
“‘Now that,’ said he, with a boyish laugh and sunny smile, ‘has its root in a bit of sentiment; but I don’t deny that it has grown into a principle. The only woman I found indispensable to me found me very dispensable to her. Through that experience I learned that love, if it be genuine, can rise higher than possession. She was of your emancipated; that is, she made a place for herself in the world, and leaned on no one. Her life showed me that woman could grow to heroic mental stature, if she would think, work and act for herself. The one of whom I speak requested me to do what I could all my life to make it easier for women to get out of their dependent condition. I have done so and have found pleasure in it. She is in the world somewhere, still, and I feel that everything I do for women helps her. That’s my story. Take it and use it, if you wish, as an example of how the monster man can be humanized and regenerated by a woman who neither loved him nor married him.’
“‘Whatever good I may have done, whatever I have achieved in any praiseworthy direction, I owe to that woman. But for her wholesome encouragement, if living at all, I should be still a clerk at some more prosperous man’s desk, withered in spirit and wasted in body, and with no brains at all. It used to be quite the correct thing, in stories, for good women to marry rakish fellows, and ‘make men of them,’ as the phrase had it. I am now convinced they achieve that result far quicker, when they don’t marry them, whether rakish or otherwise, but make them stand on their own feet entirely.’”
Mrs. Doring listened to this story, feeling very much as might a ghost who comes wandering back to its old haunts and hears some one talking of its life when on earth, for this Kendall was her old lover whom she loved not and she was the woman of whom he spoke. Turning to the writing desk of her hostess, she wrote:
“Cartice Hill Doring sends regards to the Honorable Charles Kendall. It is with grateful pleasure she learns that he has been faithful to the promise made to her long ago, to do what he could to make life broader and freer for womankind.”
The response was prompt and full. He told the story of his life from the day of their parting to the day of writing. Then came these paragraphs:
“I am more than glad to have found you again. Not that I ever really lost you, for you have an eternal abiding-place in my mind and heart. Though I have forgotten much and wish I could forget still more of the rubbish of memory, neither you nor aught pertaining to you can be forgotten. You are not forgettable. But I am glad to be able to talk with you once more, although it be only on paper and across a continent. For me the end of the drama is near. I am in the last act, which has but few scenes. Life and death! what are they? We know as much of one as of the other, for we understand neither. We drop the question of whence because the imminent whither faces us and must be met, and dark enough it looms before us as we confront it at short range. Who can answer this cry of perplexed humanity?
“I turn to you as I did in the past, and bade you decide whether I should go or stay. Now I have no choice but to go; yet tell me, shall I go with peace and trust into light, or must I lie down to be wrapped in darkness and silence forever? It is a time when my own strength is insufficient, and I reach out for the clasp of an assuring hand.
“Is it strange that I turn to you for the help I need on this journey, which, though lonesome, is brief? It seems a natural thing to do. In all the years since I saw you, and have known nothing of you, when the way was uncertain, I always turned to you for guidance. I said to myself: ‘Would Cartice Hill wish me to do this?’ And I did that which I thought you would sanction. So you see you have been with me all the time. We have never been separated.
“To me you are always young—young and full of courage and hope. I see you as I saw you last, a precious picture in my memory. The years that have passed since then are blown like a breath away. I am sitting beside you in the park again. I can almost touch your blue dress, and I hear the scratching of your parasol as you wrote with its tip on the ground.