The following short confession, signed "Mrs. M.F.E.," was awarded the first prize by the American Magazine in a contest for articles on "The Best Thing Experience Has Taught Me":
Forty Years Bartered for What?
A tiny bit of wisdom, but as vital as protoplasm. I know, for I bartered forty precious years of wifehood and motherhood to learn it.
During the years of my childhood and girlhood, our family passed from wealth to poverty. My father and only brother were killed in battle during the Civil War; our slaves were freed; our plantations melted from my mother's white hands during the Reconstruction days; our big town house was sold for taxes.
When I married, my only dowry was a fierce pride and an overwhelming ambition to get back our material prosperity. My husband was making a "good living." He was kind, easy-going, with a rare capacity for enjoying life and he loved his wife with that chivalrous, unquestioning, "the queen-can-do-no-wrong" type of love.
But even in our days of courting I answered his ardent love-making with, "And we will work and save and buy back the big house; then we will—" etc., etc.
And he? Ah, alone at sixty, I can still hear echoing down the years his big tender laugh, as he'd say, "Oh, what a de-ah, ambitious little sweetheart I have!"
He owned a home, a little cottage with a rose garden at one side of it—surely, with love, enough for any bride. But I—I saw only the ancestral mansion up the street, the big old house that had passed out of the hands of our family.
I would have no honeymoon trip; I wanted the money instead. John kissed each of my palms before he put the money into them. My fingers closed greedily over the bills; it was the nest egg, the beginning.
Next I had him dismiss his bookkeeper and give me the place. I didn't go to his store—Southern ladies didn't do that in those days—but I kept the books at home, and I wrote all the business letters. So it happened when John came home at night, tired from his day's work at the store, I had no time for diversions, for love-making, no hours to walk in the rose garden by his side—no, we must talk business.