“A favor from Letty Bland I will not endure!” mother proclaimed. “I will not endure her patronage.” Then she broke down entirely and sobbed: “Oh, I can’t stand in your way, my poor little girl, and I can’t bear to let you go so far from me.”
The end of the whole matter was that the close of September found me on the way to New York, warmly clad in the clothes over which mother had reddened her pretty eyes and pricked her pretty fingers, an emergency fund of a hundred and twenty-five dollars—those blessed broilers!—in a chamois bag between my excellent woolens and my stout muslins, a room in the Margaret Louisa Home engaged for me for any period up to a month. Our clergyman’s wife had recommended that refuge, and mother’s premonitions of battle, murder and sudden death for me grew a little less insistent when she had been finally convinced that I could go almost without change of cars from the safety of Agonquitt to that most evangelical of shelters.
Oh, the tremors, the breathlessness, the excitement, of that journey! Oh, the fairly dizzy rapture and pain of it! I had a vision of streets brilliant with lights, of a press of carriages, of shops, flowers, buildings; of unknown faces, each one the possibility of interest, the invitation to adventure, and I exulted. Then I saw the big, square house where I had been born, shabbily in need of paint; the lonely fields sloping away from it, the woods of yellow birch and pine, the lonely blue reaches of our Northern bays, and my mother sitting in her poor black frock alone by the fire in the early evening. Then I strangled sobs behind my clinched teeth.
My journey from Agonquitt had been broken by one night’s stay in Portland with our second cousins. Mother regarded a sleeping car as an unpermissible atrocity—and wider experience compels me to share her views—and I made the trip by daylight stages. No one had paid any particular attention to me; no adventure had paused by my chair in the car. Nothing happened until I emerged from the train into the murky, glittering evening at the Grand Central Station. Then for a few minutes I was really dazed.
I had spurned the assistance of porters, being forewarned of tips, and I carried my bag through the yard toward the street. There I gasped and nearly reeled. Never had I heard such a clamor, or seen such a whirl and tangle of lights, such recklessness of darting figures, such insistent greed of beckoning fingers and whips.
“Keb, keb, keb, keb!” The maddening din rang in my ears. “Keb, keb, keb, keb!” The arms, the eyes, all echoed the cry. “Keb, keb, keb, keb——” Beyond the barricade of that shout there was tempest, turmoil, clatter; I turned and fled backward toward the train yard, which seemed to me calm and sane now, though a few minutes before it had been a smoking, roaring understudy for Purgatory. Never could I breast that tumultuous tide of madness without.
Another train was unloading. I was jostled by a great many persons who had evidently determined to reach the bedlam on the sidewalk in less than half a second. I dodged. I looked for a uniform which might remain stationary long enough for me to reach it. I saw one—baggage man, carriage starter, train announcer, I didn’t know or care what—I made a sidewise dash for him and collided violently with a dress-suit case, whose owner towered several feet above. He muttered an apology, I muttered an excuse, and then we both stopped, to the damming of the torrential haste behind us.
“Ellen Berwick!”
“Bob Mathews!”
Never had human face seemed to me so friendly as this one. Never had words sounded so honey-sweet as my name ejaculated by a voice which, if not lately familiar, was at least friendly and recognizable. The Agonquitt stamp was already the hall mark of worth, of excellence, in my mind. And Robert Mathews was Dr. Mathews’ son; no amount of Beaux-Arts-ing it, no amount of rising-young-architect-ing it, could alter that blessed fact.