The Midst of Life. I

June first
‘I MUST write letters,’ I said, in excusing myself from the company after lunch. But now that I am at my desk, looking through the pack addressed ‘Mrs. John T. Sherburn,’— one from South Africa, two from London, two from New York, one from California, — I think: ‘The only letter I can answer is n’t here, and never will be — never as long as Jack stays dead.’
Dead! Not all the times I’ve spoken that syllable in the last four years have helped to clarify its meaning. Why, after all, should it be a barrier between us? Why should n’t I write to you, dead as well as alive? Why, indeed? Now that I have thought of it, it seems so easy. Of course I shall write to you — every day. I shall tell you everything, everything you would want to know.
But, have no fear that I shall intrude upon your deadness, burden you down with the trivialities of this world. Whatever I may not know about death, this much I do know — that it is a state in which the immediate and timely are as insignificant as the invisible substance carried along in the current of a stream. Never shall I try to interest you in accounts of last night’s dinner conversation, in the politics or economics of the hour, nor in my finances or those of our friends. Of the eternal verities I shall write you, as they persist in their day-to-day accent, to remind you in your other world of the simple happiness of this one, its casualness and its excitement.
Already it seems natural to be writing to you, curious only that I should have delayed so long. The reason is clear. I never really believed you were dead until a few moments ago when the mere fact of there being no letter from you, who wrote me every day we were apart, forced through into my heart, for the first time, the knowledge with which my mind has so long been struggling. Always I believed you would come back in one way or another.
At first, I fancied you were in the next room, that accidentally you had left just before I entered. Then I used to expect to meet you on the street. Once, had there been a knife at hand, I should have stabbed a man through the heart — a man I did n’t know, who did n’t even look like you. It was the first time I walked in the street after you were dead. In the crowd of passing people my eye somehow lighted on this man’s face. Its very insignificance attracted me. He became the symbol of the whole living human race, as indifferent to your death as to their own lives; else why would n’t they have saved you? A spark of insanity lit up my mind. ‘An eye for an eye,’ I thought. ‘If I could kill that man, that particular unknown man with the package under his arm, Jack would n’t be the only person dead, and I could die, too.’
Another time, Alice and I were in a candy shop, when a man, with your walk, your build, your coloring, your kind of clothes, even the pattern of your overcoat, came in to order a box of chocolates. I should have spoken to him at once had not his face worn a tired, disappointed look, so different from your eagerness and animation.
‘That’s Jack come back,’ I said. ‘Death’s made him tired. He does n’t know me, but I must speak to him right away.’
‘It looks a little like Jack,’ Alice said, ‘but he would always know you. Don’t stare so hard at that man, my dear.’
Had I found even a trace of you in any of all the men’s faces into which I have stared, there would be very few men but you in the world. For a year or so I fancied myself in love with a man because something in the timbre of his voice, the gesture of his hand, reminded me of you. But timbre and gesture are no touchstone to mind and heart. It was you I loved, not him, and now that, suddenly, I know you are dead, my freedom to love you, yourself, and not some image, is restored.

June second
To-day I must write you about Josephine. She is undoubtedly the first creature you would encounter if you came back, walking across the lawn toward the terrace, as I always think of you returning, sometime in that clear and silent hour between tea and dinner. Before I should have a chance to greet you, much less to explain her presence, you would find a small, white, mongrel-looking terrier rushing out to meet you, leaping up and down with glee at the sight of you, tearing your socks in the eagerness of her embrace, and then, rebuffed, rolling abjectly over on her back at your feet, as if to say, ‘Master, you may tread on me.’
‘Jinny,’ you would say, ‘what is this ridiculous animal? Where did she come from, and why is she here? You know it’s bad business to have dogs that are n’t pure-bred. What’s her name? How does Hedda like her ? ’
By the time I should have told you that she was given to me as a Sealyham, you would have discovered her charm. She would be sitting on your lap, adoring you in wide-eyed admiration. ‘Here is a bitch who immediately recognizes her master,’ you would think, but it would n’t be true. Her technique with every man who comes here is as unvarying as it is successful. When no lap is available, she curls up on the four-legged Victorian stool with the red fringe around it, looking expectant every time the door opens, as though Sir Edwin Landseer were late for an appointment with his favorite model. Were she a woman, she would cuddle and talk baby talk, but she is a self-respecting little bitch. Rebuffed by one, she approaches the next person; rebuffed by all, she goes to sleep, silent and in no one’s way. And finally she smiles — a broad, ridiculous grin. Each time I have decided to give her away, as the crucial moment approached she has come rushing up to me wherever I might be, and bared her teeth in so amusing and gay a threat that I have become accustomed to regard as an admission of defeat the words, ‘Smi-i-ile, Josephine.’
What Hedda would say is another matter. I don’t know, you see, for she’s dead, too — a year ago last April. She was only twelve, but worn out, I’m afraid, by the vicissitudes and excitements of life. I could n’t admit to anyone else that at first I missed her more than any human being except you. But she never seemed to me like a dog at all; rather like the only other person in whose life you were the centrifugal force. And she possessed the added advantage of having been raised by you from infancy. At first she missed you quite intolerably enough for both of us. For months she never stopped searching for you — from the moment she rushed out to the motor when I came home; she escorted me into the house, only to return to look inside the car for you. From cellar to attic, from room to room, her tail between her legs, she would go, never finding you, but always willing to give me her paw, to let me cry into her soft ruff. After a few months she learned what it has taken me years to believe, that no amount of searching or loving could bring you back. She accepted me as your substitute, and only once with reproach. One wet day I came into the house wearing your raincoat. As usual, she rushed to meet me, but at the first sniff of your coat she let out a howl of grief and ran and hid in the cellar.
Soon after that I found country winters too solitary, so Hedda and I moved to New York. The change in her nature would have astonished you. From Hedda Gabler, the fierce old shepherd bitch, rude to strangers, a sly tyrant over other dogs, she developed into a distinguished dowager, a tactful duenna, somehow or other dubbed Mrs. Higginbotham. She shared the seat with me in taxicabs; she walked with me on Exterior Street, where the traffic did n’t jar her nerves; she became a familiar in the pleasantest restaurants, and occasionally even attended an evening party, where she would honor one or two of the more attractive gentlemen by offering her elegant and slender paw. The reaction from one of these parties may have caused her too early death, and I can’t but feel it was a good one.
The day after a party a very charming but shy young woman came to tea.
‘Do you know a Mrs. Higginbotham?’ she asked me in the course of the conversation.
‘Why?’ I said.
‘Well, I wondered what she looked like. Last night at the party, I heard a man’s voice saying in the most impassioned tone,— you know the way you always dream about being spoken to,— “Oh, Mrs. Higginbotham, I think you are so beautiful.” They were behind me, and I could n’t see her. Do you know her? ’
‘There,’ I pointed, ‘is Mrs. Higginbotham.’ She lay in an ecstasy of vanity, her beautiful legs crossed, her cream-colored ruff as upstanding as Queen Elizabeth’s.
How indulgent is eternity! Time, in this life, would deny a wife the luxury of spending an afternoon writing to her husband about dogs. But without time there is no ban on either sense or nonsense. I dare say, only without time are the two distinguishable.

June twelfth
My head is full of things to tell you, but I have a curious reluctance to put them on paper, as though, by the mere process of transforming thoughts into written words, I should be forever deprived of the poignant happiness I have felt since I realized I could again write to you. So if my words are sometimes stilted, you must be patient with me until I become accustomed to this luxury.
This afternoon, coming back from town weary, I wandered down to the woods to be revived by the beauty of the lady’s-slippers, marching in procession through the brown pine needles. A little footbridge has been built over the brook, to the bank where they flower thickest, and a wild clematis vine trails over it with an aptitude no deliberate planting could ever have achieved. Nor could any setting-out of bulbs have formed as graceful a pattern as the lady’s-slippers, with their orchid pouches, have created of their own accord. Restraint in picking them all these years is responsible for their affluent bloom. Not so their cultivated neighbors in the garden. So riddled with a variety of pests are they, I hate to look at them.
First, there is the columbine borer, whose identity I established with great difficulty. He is a thick-skinned worm, who, starting at the root, climbs up the stem, devouring as he goes and arriving at the flower just as the bud is about to break into bloom. I have not yet discovered his proper poison, and I have other equally weighty problems.
The poppies can’t push out of their buds without assistance, and with the help of my fingers, untempered to the fragility of poppy petals, they emerge torn and shriveled, like premature babies delivered by an inept midwife. But worst of all is the Delphinium blight, which I have fought for three years with every known remedy. Last year I bought all new and healthy plants, and now they too have caught it. I am very much disheartened.
To the lay eye, of course, the garden looks really very charming. My visitors are enchanted by the thick blue forgetme-not border, the wealth of iris, the sweetness of the pinks and the sweet Williams; and they don’t even seem to notice the curiously worn-out look their death pangs have given the columbines.
Then there is, of course, always and eternally the lousy little aphis. It is a relief, for once, to be both redundant and accurate. We have sprayed the rosebushes three times this week, and the sticky green creatures still cling to the buds. I never see them without thinking of an enchanting letter you once wrote me. Do you remember?
You sent me Adele’s reply to your letter telling her that since you were going to marry me you thought it best to abandon your custom of going to the boat races together. She thought not, pointing out that her marriage had not interfered with the annual ritual. You wanted me to tell you what to say. For you wrote, ‘She may not be an emotional pioneer, nor gifted with great intelligence, but she has a gentleness, a softness, a coziness, which have at certain very difficult times been to me a great boon.’
I, perhaps a little jealous and skeptical of my own gentleness, replied that I much preferred your continuing your boat race week-ends to your sitting at home of a June evening, looking wistful over the charms of a past love.
You wrote me: ‘Remember this, Jinny, once and for all. There is no wistfulness over the past. For me, the present and the future are enough. And if, on a June evening, you see me sitting with a far-away look on my face, my thoughts will be, not of Adele and the boat races, but of the aphis attacking the tomato plants.’
If I were a poet, I should write a poem about our being joined in eternity by the aphis, as John Donne and his love were by the Flea. But poem or not, there was a humor you would have liked, when, the other night in the course of one of those little courting dinners so frequently tendered solitary ladies, the present aspirant said, ‘My dear, you look so far away. What are you dreaming about?’
My words don’t matter, for you would have known that my thoughts were on the aphis, the borer, and the blight.

June thirteenth
At last it is raining. Had the drought been prolonged, half the flowers would have died, and the vegetables would never have grown at all. Nellie came in with my tray this morning, wanting to know whether she could have the afternoon to go somewhere with her husband, as he has only rainy days off. He is a gravedigger, for which he earns four dollars a day, and extra for graves dug on Sunday. I remember once, when I was driving Nellie down to the bus, she said: ‘They have to measure them carefully, you know. They must all be just six feet long and three feet wide.’
Just the size of a bed, I thought — a single bed.
The Grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace. For the first few months after you were dead, I could n’t bear rainy days (what days could I bear?), and there was almost no snow that winter. I used to think how cold and lonely you must be, there in the damp ground. Illogically enough, the very cliché, ‘a blanket of snow,’ would have been more comforting. A long time passed before I could persuade myself to go there. My whole association with graves was literary. My only gravedigger acquaintances were Hamlet’s, his grief at Ophelia’s grave my only measuring rod.
When the violets started blooming here that spring, I felt impelled to plant some on your grave. And that was a literary idea, too, partly, for the spring down there is much earlier than here. But I was walking in the woods that May, where I had last walked with you in December. And I had found violets in bloom there, do you remember? It frightened me terribly. Violets in December. I started to pick them and changed my mind. A catastrophic premonition overcame me. I cried as though my heart would break — and it did, such a short time later. ‘Violets in December — violets in December,’ I kept saying. ‘They’re so rare. They’re like us.’
By then you had your arms around me, and when I said, ‘ It’s too beautiful; it can’t last,’ you said I was a silly child, and I believed you, and we were both right.

June fifteenth
Is n’t it odd? The last time I went away, although it was to my own house in New York, I could n’t write you at all. It’s because New York is so brittle; it has nothing at all of eternity about it. Buildings are torn down and replaced; streets change their character, and one’s acquaintances vary according to where one lives and with whom one is flirting. Everything in a state of hurried motion, only the river with its recurrent, rhythmic flux — the tugs going up and down, the Boston boat leaving every night — to remind one of eternity and reality and timelessness.
I spent four days in New York, and, curiously enough, the most completely artificial experience I had was the only one that moved me — Greta Garbo in the poorest picture imaginable. Her gift for giving life glamour, for kindling the fire of excitement in one’s breast, and satisfying it, too, is indescribable. It has nothing to do with characterization, for she is always the same; it bears no relation to the picture as a whole, for she never seems to participate in it. But I think I know what gives her that power.
Do you remember years ago, before I was willing to go to the movies, you went to see her in the picture version of Anna Karenina? When you came home you said she was marvelous and beautiful and moved just the way I did. A long time later we saw her together in Charlottesville in The Green Hat, — I can still hear the howls of the university students when the ring slipped off her finger, — and I was forced painfully to point out to you that I resembled her in no way.
‘You may not think so,’ you said, ‘but when you’re not there, watching her makes me feel just as I do when I ’m watching you.’
To all men, she’s the woman they love, or would if they could find her; and for women she embodies their most beautiful, their most loved and desired selves. That kind of immediate and personal appeal of the artist, over and above the story, cutting through the action, is really the highest expression of the art of acting, I think. It is the embodiment of high romance, projecting, both as one perceives it and as one recalls it, the universal and abstract pattern of romantic love.
But I did n’t start out to write you about Greta Garbo, though I am convinced she too has her place in eternity. No, what I started to tell you was that although I am writing from a strange bed, before breakfast, there emanates from this sixty-year-old Vermont house a durability and peace entirely communicable; and in New York I could find nothing so, though the house I lodged in there was sixty years old too. But its security had been rendered only too vulnerable by the high apartment houses on either side, and in the heat of summer the public and private life of a whole community thrust itself in through the open window. Here it is quite different.
The house is large and square, with a cupola. It sits back from the road on a little hill, privacy ensured by a high hedge of late lilacs, still in full bloom. Many light, high-ceilinged rooms are furnished with the kind of things people had when we were children — wicker rocking-chairs and big mahogany sofas, bright-colored curtains in the windows, framed with Victorian cornices. In the drawing-room are six humorous and beautiful eighteenth and early nineteenth century portraits of the kind you love best, painted by itinerant painters.

June eighteenth
A long time it seems since I have written you. I came back from Vermont with an atrocious sore throat and cold in my head. No other physical immediacies are so efficacious an insulation from eternity as a red nose, a raucous voice, and a stuffy head.
This morning I feel better. The first wild strawberries of the year were on my breakfast tray, with cream as smooth and thick as velvet. The cold prevented my savoring their bouquet, for it is, of course, precious enough to be inhaled like Napoleon brandy. Each year I say I shall cultivate a bed of them in the garden, but it seems to be one of those ideas so easy to conceive, so difficult of execution. I did, however, put in a large and elegant cultivated strawberry bed last year, behind the farmer’s house, and I must say the daily baskets brought for my inspection are of a beauty, but it is the beauty of still life rather than of temptation.
Is it just my perverseness that makes me value the fraises des bois a thousand times above their voluptuous cultivated brothers? Is it because, even with sun and rain just right, they last at most, a week, and are infinitely laborious to cull, while the cultivated ones are brought down each morning in obedient plenty? Probably it’s because the wild ones have a more delicate flavor, but I enjoy these elaborations. I suppose that’s what people really mean by sophistication — elaborating the simple to such a degree that it is projected and heightened to a magnification of its own essence. Wild strawberries are in themselves no more delicious because I used to eat muscat grapes and hothouse peaches and nectarines in long-ago London Junes, but the simple sensation of taste is enlarged into a whole multiplication table of emotion through consciousness of the contrast.
What sophistry to send into eternity! I shall arise at once, pick my onions, radishes, and lettuce, and then ride Sandy over the hills.

June twentieth
Have I told you about my visiting dog? He’s really very charming — a large, black German shepherd with a beautiful head and an ungainly walk, his two hind legs having been broken by an automobile. His owners must stay in New York this summer, so I invited him to visit me. He is very much a city dog, unaccustomed to the society of his kind. In spite of the passionate infatuation for him developed immediately upon his arrival by Hedda’s successor, he treats her with condescending politeness, and accompanies me, in the most approved one-man-dog manner, wherever I go. But never for a moment does he permit me the illusion that his devotion is personal. I’m always conscious of being a logical substitute for his mistress, since we are of the same genus and sex. His manners are perfect. He accords me the same courtesy which the down-at-the-heel Charleston gentility are always hoping to be shown by their paying guests.
He does n’t really like the country at all, and would prefer remaining continually indoors, except for the horseback rides. Unlike my fantastic cavalcade of Sealyham, Scottie, dachshund, and shepherd, who rush ahead, following every scent, rolling each other over, perpetually risking Sandy’s wrath in bites or kicks, he follows like the ideal groom, always to heel and never in the way. He has much the attitude of a kindly bachelor uncle visiting a large family of nieces and nephews.
He reminds me, in fact, of a friend I used to have whom I called ’mon oncle ’ though he was little older than I am. I used it in the sense, I suppose, that the Russians use the phrase ‘ little uncle’ or ‘little father.’ He was essentially a city person, too. But he loved to come up here, although he always sat indoors, avoided the sunshine, never swam in the pool, and thought all flowers were called flags. I first met him about six months after you were dead, when he offered me the hospitality of his mind, as generously and discerningly furnished as a luxurious and wellchosen library. His fine Gallic logic and sharpness in no way tapped the inherent warmth and sympathy of his nature.
For a long time he was the only man whose company I could bear, and we used to talk for hours on end of whatever came into our minds. Proust he was rereading, as I was finishing the last volumes, and he would read parts of it aloud to me in French in his so finely pitched and sensible voice. Sometimes, too, he would read me Racine, or sing me ‘Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre.’ He knew all the stanzas, and once when I was ill up here, alone, in late October, he came and kept me company for ten days until I was quite well again, as a kind uncle would.
Shortly after that, when I was in New York, I went to look at a collection of pictures, and found myself overwhelmed by the beauty of a tiny Vermeer. The picture was of a woman in blue against a yellow background. I wanted to weep for the clarity and perfection of it. Not since Swann’s way had become mine had I looked at a Vermeer. You remember, I suppose, that he was the subject of Swann’s unfinished book, but. you never read the beautiful part about the Vermeer that Bergotte saw as he was dying. I ’ll copy it out for you: —
The circumstances of his death were as follows. An attack of uræmia, by no means serious, had led to his being ordered to rest. But one of the critics having written somewhere that in Vermeer’s Street in Delft (lent by the Gallery at The Hague for an exhibition of Dutch painting), a picture which he adored and imagined that he knew by heart, a little patch of yellow wall (which he could not remember) was so well painted that it was, if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself, Bergotte ate a few potatoes, left the house, and went to the exhibition. At the first few steps that he had to climb he was overcome by giddiness. . . . At last he came to the Vermeer which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else that he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic’s article, he remarked for the first time some small figures in blue, that the ground was pink, and finally the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall. His giddiness increased; he fixed his eyes, like a child upon a yellow butterfly which it is trying to catch, upon the precious little patch of wall. ‘That is how I ought to have written,’ he said. ‘My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with several coats of paint, made my language exquisite in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.’ Meanwhile he was not unconscious of the gravity of his condition. On a celestial balance there appeared to him, upon one of its scales, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly surrendered the former for the latter. ‘All the same,’ he said to himself, ’I have no wish to provide the “feature” of this exhibition for the evening papers.’
He repeated to himself: ‘Little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof, little patch of yellow wall.’ While doing so he sank down upon a circular divan; and then at once he ceased to think his life was in jeopardy and, reverting to his natural optimism, told himself: ‘It is just an ordinary indigestion from those potatoes; they were n’t properly cooked; it is nothing.’ A fresh attack beat him down; he rolled from the divan to the floor, as visitors and attendants came hurrying to his assistance. He was dead. Permanently dead? Who shall say? Certainly our experiments in spiritualism prove no more than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death. All we can say is that everything is arranged as though we entered it carrying the burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be fastidious, to be polite even, nor enable the talented artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his body devoured by worms, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much knowledge and skill by an artist who must forever remain unknown and is barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations which have not their sanction in our present life seem to belong to a different world, founded upon kindness, scrupulosity, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this, which we leave in order to be born into this world, before perhaps returning to the other to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we have obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, knowing not whose hand had traced them there — those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only — and still! — to fools. So that the idea that Bergotte was not wholly and permanently dead is by no means improbable. They buried him, but all through the night of mourning, in the lighted windows, his books arranged three by three kept watch like angels with outspreading wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbols of his resurrection.
‘Mon oncle’ had just read me that portion the night before, and I no longer perceived Vermeer’s yellow through my own eyes but through Bergotte’s eyes, and Proust’s as well. Such poignancy I could n’t bear alone.
‘Well, who’d you like to see it with?’ I thought.
‘Swann,’ was the answer. ‘Swann, of course.’
‘ But Swann is dead,’ I thought.
‘Yes, Swann is dead. Who else, though? Why, Jack, of course. If not Swann, Jack.’
And then suddenly it flashed over me — for in those days I had not become accustomed to the fact — that you, too, were dead. My distress was multiple and complex; for although by now the difference between your deadness and Swann’s is no doubt quite clear to you, I have never formulated a satisfactory distinction between the state of death of Swann, whom I loved, but who never had physical existence, and of you, whom I love as much now that you have left your body as I did when you inhabited it. At the time, I felt as if a new and special death would take me, too, if some living eye did n’t share with me, for at least a moment , that picture. So, although I had a train to catch in twenty minutes, I telephoned my ‘uncle’ to ask him to be sure to go, as soon as possible, to look at it —faute de Swann. Whether or not he did, I never knew.
Soon after, he fell in love — into a Proustian obsessive passion for as beautiful and bad a woman as I ever met. What one means by a ‘ bad woman ’ is difficult to explain, yet I knew intuitively, the moment I met her, the measure of her coldness, her greed, and her sensuality. It was her habit to attach to herself — although she was married and had a child — a series of talented men whose brains and spirits she picked of their choicest possessions, only to transfer them to the bordello of her mind, as bait for the next lover. In return, she propounded a series of secondhand tinsel bons mots which shone as gems of purest rays serene, lighted as they were by the feeling she gave every man that, if he were not her first lover, it was mere chance, for he had cast his predecessors into the limbo of oblivion.
My friend’s entanglement in this glamorous cobweb persisted for over a year; and you know how sticky and treacherous cobwebs are, to cut through or push aside. His talk was all of her, quoting her counters; and his pain when he could no longer see her was unendurable. He emerged from the affair, not enriched as one is by a happy love, however brief, but embittered and cynical — the logic of his mind as useful as ever, but the clarity muddied. He became speciously frivolous in order to hide the emotional beggary in which she left him. His associates were people who understood him not at all, but, though we seldom met, we remained friends.
Late in the summer last year, he telephoned me from New York to propose himself for a brief holiday to begin the next day. The heat in town, he said, was sickening. A houseful of visitors, a sick cook, both cars out of commission, did not make an additional guest a pleasure, but I had n’t the heart to say ‘no.’ A series of minor accidents to the car I’d rented caused me to be an hour late in meeting him. When I reached the station he was nowhere to be found. On telephoning home, a telegram was read me that might well have sprung from the brains of Saki’s Clovis and the mad Duchess in Alice in Wonderland. Ennui, impatience, annoyance, irritability — who knows what — had sent him back to New York on the next train. I reached home after my useless sixty-mile drive to find the other guests in a state of elaborate vindictiveness. But my interest had gone. I remembered the day when his being alive had sustained me through the pain of Swann’s and your deadness, different though they were. Now he, too, was dead; and in a third way. A sort of suicide, I suppose.
It’s a curious story, is n’t it? Why I should be reminded of it by a visiting dog I can’t tell. Oh, yes. I remember! It was because the dog has beautiful manners as well as a kind heart.

June twenty-first
Nellie, when I was driving her back from the bus to-day, told me about her three-year-old daughter, Lorna, who was taken to Sunday School yesterday for the first time. When the other children sang hymns, she joined in loud and strong with ‘It’s Springtime in the Rockies,’ to the consternation of her ten-year-old Scotch Calvinist cousin.
‘But she loves to sing,’ said Nellie, ‘and those are the only words she knows.’ I suppose in the old country they would have been ‘Stand up, stand up for Jesus’ — or is n’t that a Calvinist hymn?
I wonder if you remember Nellie. She’s pretty and trim, with bright red hair, and she worked for you long before we knew each other. Then she married, but after a year or two her husband could find no work, so she came to me when her baby was a year old. It was autumn, and I discovered only too quickly how little she knew about laying wood fires. I led her carefully from one fireplace to another, remembering how painstakingly you had taught me their various idiosyncrasies.
‘Is n’t it funny ? ’ she said. ‘It’s just a few years ago Mr. Sherburn took me all around the house just the same way and showed me the same thing. But I did n’t remember how to do it.’
Nellie’s whole approach to life is based on memory. I’ve no idea what happens in her mind at the occurrence of a new or unique experience. I do remember, though, one morning very early in the days when sleep was as precious to me as the black pearl I have always coveted and shall never own, the telephone next my bed rang and a voice asked for Nellie’s husband, who, unknown to me, had been spending the night there. Almost immediately Nellie appeared, terror-stricken.
‘Oh, Mrs. Sherburn,’ she said. ‘I can’t tell you how disappointed I am. I don’t see how anybody knew Ed was here. I’m so disappointed.’
I’m sure it was a clue to the memory school of thought, but I have never been quite able to analyze it.

Later
My ride to-day was n’t the best possible, but that was my own fault. I’m almost ashamed to tell you about it. You see, for two years after you died I could n’t bear to ride at all. I don’t know whether it was just fear, or because you had given me Sandy and to ride him alone would have made me miss you too much. At any rate, various friends rode him, and one or another of them strained his shoulder badly. Not even six months at pasture did any good. As a desperate remedy, I had him blistered last year, and he seemed to recover. But now I allow no one else to ride him, and even I am very careful. Fortunately, my fear has left me, and his high spirits no longer bother me. Five days ago, when I last rode, he was full of little bucks and tricks, and I probably let him run more than he should have. But to-day he was stiff in his shoulder, and I had to walk him the whole time. I did n’t mind, though, for it was hot, and I took the chance to notice all the circular maidenhair ferns and each wild iris, fugitive and sweet. I fancy he will be better to-morrow.
To-night is Midsummer Night’s Eve, the shortest night in the year. I envy you your timelessness. But even in this minor world you were no slave to time, and I become daily less so.

(To be continued in the next issue)