“But, Tom,” answered the girl, “that wasn’t pride, that was self-respect.”
“Well, my dear,” he squeezed her gloved hand and in the darkness put his arm about her, “let’s not worry about him. All I know is that I wanted to square it with him for taking care of the horse and five dollars won’t hurt his self-respect. And,” said the bridegroom as he pressed the bride very close to his heart, “what is it to us? We have each other, so what do we care─what is all the world to us?”
As the midnight train whistled out of South Harvey Grant Adams sitting on a bedside was fondly unbuttoning a small body from its clothes, ready to hear a sleepy child’s voice say its evening prayers. In his heart there flamed the love for the child that was beckoning him into love for every sentient thing. And as Laura Van Dorn, bride of Thomas of that name, heard the whistle, her being was flooded with a love high and marvelous, washing in from the infinite love that moves the universe and carrying her soul in aspiring 124thrills of joy out to ride upon the mysterious currents that we know are not of ourselves, and so have called divine.
In the morning, in the early gray of morning, when Grant Adams rose to make the fire for breakfast, he found his father, sitting by the kitchen table, half clad as he had risen from a restless bed. Scrawled sheets of white paper lay around him on the floor and the table. He said sadly:
“She can’t come, Grant–she can’t come. I dreamed of her last night; it was all so real–just as she was when we were young, and I thought–I was sure she was near.” He sighed as he leaned back in his chair. “But they’ve looked for her–all of them have looked for her. She knows I’m calling–but she can’t come.” The father fumbled the papers, rubbed his gray beard, and shut his fine eyes as he shook his head, and whispered: “What holds her–what keeps her? They all come but her.”
“What’s this, father?” asked Grant, as a page closely written in a fine hand fluttered to the floor.
“Oh, nothing–much–just Mr. Left bringing me some message from Victor Hugo. It isn’t much.”
But the Eminent Authority who put it into the Proceedings of the Psychological Society laid more store by it than he did by the scraps and incoherent bits of jargon which pictured the old man’s lonely grief. They are not preserved for us, but in the Proceedings, on page 1125, we have this from Mr. Left:
“The vice of the poor is crass and palpable. It carries a quick and deadly corrective poison. But the vices of the well-to-do are none the less deadly. To dine in comfort and know your brother is starving; to sleep in peace and know that he is wronged and oppressed by laws that we sanction, to gather one’s family in contentment around a hearth, while the poor dwell in a habitat of vice that kills their souls, to live without bleeding hearts for the wrong on this earth–that is the vice of the well-to-do. And so it shall come to pass that when the day of reckoning appears it shall be a day of wrath. For when God gives the poor the strength to rise (and they are waxing stronger every hour), they will meet not a brother’s hand but a glutton’s–the hard, dead hand of a hard, dead soul. Then will the vicious poor and the 125vicious well-to-do, each crippled by his own vices, the blind leading the blind, fall to in a merciless conflict, mad and meaningless, born of a sad, unnecessary hate that shall terrorize the earth, unless God sends us another miracle of love like Christ or some vast chastening scourge of war, to turn aside the fateful blow.”