in my own girlhood, but could not command. I may or may not some day show her Dr. South’s letter. That shall be as my judgment dictates. I shall not consent now or hereafter, while my authority or influence lasts, to Dorothy’s marriage to anybody except some man of her own choosing, who shall seem to me fit to make her happy. If you want Jefferson to marry her, I notify you now that he must fairly win her. And my advice to you is very earnest that he set to work at once to render himself worthy of her; to repair his character; to cultivate himself, if he can, up to her moral and intellectual level; to make of himself a man to whom she can look up, as you say, and not down. There, that is all I have to say.”

Madison Peyton saw this to be good advice, and he decided to act upon it. But, as so often happens with good advice, he “took it wrong end first,” in the phrase of that time and country. He decided that his son should also go north and to Europe, following the party to which Dorothy belonged as closely as possible, seeing as much as he could of her, and paying court to her upon every opportunity.

XXVII
DIANA’S EXALTATION

It is not easy for us now to picture to ourselves what travel in this country was in that year which seems to the older ones among us so recent. In 1860 there was not such a thing as a sleeping car in all the world. The nearest approach to that necessity of modern life which then existed, was a car with high backed seats, which was used on a few of the longer lines of railroad. For another thing there were no such things in existence as through trains. Every railroad in the country was an independent line, whose trains ran only between its own termini. The traveller must “change cars” at every terminus, and usually the process involved a delay of several hours and a long omnibus ride—perhaps at midnight—through the streets of some city which had thriftily provided that its several railroads should place their stations as far apart as possible in order that their passengers might “leave money in the town.” The passenger from a south side county of Virginia intending to go to New York, for example, must take a train to Richmond; thence after crossing the town in an omnibus and waiting for an hour or two, take another train to Acquia Creek, near Fredericksburg; there transfer to a steamboat for Washington; there cross town in an omnibus, and, after another long wait, take a train for the Relay House; there wait four hours and then change cars for Baltimore, nine miles away; then take another omnibus ride to another station; thence a train to Havre de Grace, where he must cross a river on a ferry boat; thence by another train to Philadelphia, where, after still another omnibus transfer and another delay, one had a choice of routes to New York, the preferred one being by way of Camden and Amboy, and thence up the bay twenty miles or so, to the battery in New York. There was no such thing as a dining car, a buffet car or a drawing room car in all the land. There were none but hand brakes on the trains, and the cars were held together by loose coupling links. The rails were not fastened together at their badly laminated ends, and it was the fashion to call trains that reached a maximum speed of twenty miles an hour, “lightning expresses,” and to stop them at every little wayside station. The engines were fed upon wood, and it was a common thing for trains to stop their intolerable jolting for full twenty minutes to take fresh supplies of wood and water.

There was immeasurably more of weariness then, in a journey from Richmond or Cincinnati or Buffalo to New York, than would be tolerated now in a trip across the continent. As a consequence few people travelled except for short distances and a journey which we now think nothing of making comfortably in a single night, was then a matter of grave consequence, to be undertaken only after much deliberation and with much of preparation. New York seemed more distant to the dweller in the West or South than Hong Kong and Yokohama do in our time, and the number of people who had journeyed beyond the borders of our own country was so small that those who had done so were regarded as persons of interestingly adventurous experience.

Quite necessarily all parts of the country were markedly provincial in speech, manner, habits and even in dress. New England had a nasal dialect of its own, so firmly rooted in use that it has required two or three generations of exacting Yankee school marms to eradicate it from the speech even of the educated class. New York state had another, and the Southerner was known everywhere by a speech which “bewrayed” him.

And as it was with speech, so also was it with manners, customs, ideas. Prejudice was everywhere rampant, opinion intolerant, and usage merciless in its narrow illiberality. Only in what was then the West—the region between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi—was there anything of cosmopolitan liberality and tolerance. They were found in that region because the population of the West had been drawn from all parts of the country. Attrition of mind with mind, and the mingling of men of various origin had there in a large degree worn off the angles of provincial prejudice and bred a liberality of mind elsewhere uncommon in our country.

Edmonia and Dorothy were to make their formidable journey to New York in easy stages. They remained for several days with friends in Richmond, while completing those preliminary preparations which were necessary before setting out for the national capital. They were to stay in Washington for a fortnight, in Baltimore for three weeks, in Philadelphia for a week or two, and in New York for nearly two months before sailing for Europe in May.

The time was a very troubled one, on the subject of slavery. Not only was it true that if the owner of a slave took the negro with him into any one of the free states he by that act legally set him free, but it was also true that the most devoted and loyal servant thus taken from the South into a Northern state was subjected to every form of persuasive solicitation to claim and assert his freedom. It was nevertheless the custom of Southern men, and still more of Southern women, to take with them on their travels one or more of their personal servants, trusting to their loyalty alone for continued allegiance. For the attitude of such personal servants in Virginia at that time was rather that of proud and voluntary allegiance to loved masters and mistresses who belonged to them as a cherished possession, than that of men and women held in unwilling bondage.

Accordingly it was arranged that Edmonia’s maid, Dinah—or Diana as she had come to call herself since hearing her mistress read a “history pome” aloud—should accompany the two young women as their joint servitor.

As soon as this arrangement was announced at Branton, Diana began what Polydore called “a puttin’ on of airs.” In plainer phrase she began to snub Polydore mercilessly, whereas she had recently been so gracious in her demeanor towards him as to give him what he called “extinct discouragement.”

After it was settled that she was to accompany “Miss Mony an’ Miss Dorothy” to “de Norf” and to “Yurrop”—as she wrote to all her friends who were fortunate enough to know how to “read writin’,” there was, as Polydore declared, “no livin’ in de house wid her.” She sailed about the place like a frigate, delivering her shots to the right and left—most of them aimed at Polydore, with casual and contemptuous attention, now and then, to the other house servants.

“I ’clar’ to gracious,” said Elsie, one of the housemaids, “ef Diana ain’t a puttin’ on of jes’ as many airs as ef she’d been all over a’ready, an’ she ain’t never been out of dis county yit.”

“Wonder ef she’ll look at folks when she gits back,” said Fred, the cadet of the dining room, who was being trained under Polydore’s tutelage to keep his nails clean and to offer dishes to guests at their left hands.

“Don’ you be in too big a hurry to fin’ out dat, you nigga,” rejoined Polydore, the loyalty of whose love for Diana would brook no criticism of her on the part of an underling. “You’se got enough to attend to in gittin’ yer manners into shape. Diana’s a superior pusson, an’ you ain’t got no ’casion to criticise her. You jes’ take what yer gits an’ be thankful like Lazarus wuz when de rich man dropped water outer his hand on his tongue.”

Polydore’s biblical erudition seems to have been a trifle at fault at this point. But at any rate his simile had its intended effect upon the young darkey, who, slipping a surreptitious beaten biscuit into his pocket, retreated to the distant kitchen to devour it.

At that moment Diana entered the dining room with the air of a Duchess, and, with unwonted sweetness, said:

“Please, Polydore, bring me de tea things. De ladies is faint.”

Polydore, anxious that Diana’s gentle mood should endure, made all haste to bring what she desired. He made too much haste, unluckily, for in his hurry he managed to spill a little hot water from a pitcher he was carrying on a tray, and some drops of it fell upon the sleeve of Diana’s daintily laundered cambric gown.

The stately bronze colored namesake of the ancient goddess rose in offended dignity, and looked long at the offender before addressing him. Then she witheringly put the question:

“Whar’s your manners dis mawnin’, Polydore? Jes’ spose I was Miss Mony now; would you go sloppin’ things over her dat way?”

Even a worm will turn, we are told, and Polydore was prouder than a worm. For once he lost his self-control so far as to say in reply:

“But you ain’t Miss Mony, dough you seems to think you is. I’se tired o’ yer highty tighty airs. Git de tea things for yerse’f!” With that Polydore left the dining room, and Diana, curiously enough, made no reference to the incident when next she encountered him, but was all smiles and sweetness instead.

XXVIII
THE ADVANCING SHADOW

There was now a strong political party at the North the one important article of whose creed was hostility to the further extension of slavery into the territories. It was a strictly sectional party in its composition, having no existence anywhere at the South. It was influential in Congress, and in 1856 it had strongly supported a candidate of its own for president. By the beginning of 1860 its strength had been greatly increased and circumstances rendered probable its success in electing a president that year, for the hopeless division of the Democratic party, which occurred later in the year, was already clearly foreshadowed, an event which in fact resulted in the nomination of three rival candidates against Mr. Lincoln and made his election certain in spite of a heavy popular majority against him.

Had this been all, Virginia would not have been greatly disturbed by the political situation and prospect. But during the preceding autumn the Virginians had been filled with apprehension for the safety of their homes and families by John Brown’s attempt, at Harper’s Ferry, to create a negro insurrection, the one catastrophe always most dreaded by them. That raid, quickly suppressed as it was, wrought a revolution in Virginian feeling and sentiment. The Virginians argued from it, and from the approval given to it in some parts of the North, that Northern sentiment was rapidly ripening into readiness for any measures, however violent they might be, for the extinction of slavery and the destruction of the autonomy of the Southern States.

They found it difficult under the circumstances to believe the Republican party’s disclaimer of all purpose or power to interfere with the institution in the states. They were convinced that only opportunity was now wanting to make the Southern States the victims of an aggressive war, with a servile insurrection as a horrible feature of it. They cherished a warm loyalty to that Union which Virginia had done so much to create, but they began seriously to fear the time when there would be no peace or safety for their state or even for their wives and children within the Union. They were filled with resentment, too, of what they regarded as a wanton and unlawful purpose to interfere with their private concerns, and to force the country into disunion and civil war.

There were hot heads among them, of course, who were ready to welcome such results; but these were very few. The great body of Virginia’s people loved the Union, and even to the end—a year later—their strongest efforts were put forth to persuade both sides to policies of peace.

But in the meantime a marked change came over the Virginian mind with respect to slavery. Many who had always regarded the institution as an inherited evil to be got rid of as soon as that might be safely accomplished, modified or reversed their view when called upon to stand always upon the defensive against what they deemed an unjust judgment of themselves.

Arthur Brent did not share this change of view, but he shared in the feelings of resentment which had given it birth. In common with other Virginians he felt that this was a matter belonging exclusively to the individual states, and still more strongly he felt that the existing political situation and the methods of it gravely menaced the Union in ways which were exceedingly difficult for Southern men who loved the Union to meet. He saw with regret the great change that was coming over public and private sentiment in Virginia—sentiment which had been so strongly favorable to the peaceable extinction of slavery, that John Letcher—a lifelong advocate of emancipation as Virginia’s true policy—had been elected Governor the year before upon that as the only issue of a state campaign.

But Arthur was still bent upon carrying out his purpose of emancipating himself and, incidentally his slaves. And the threatening aspect of political affairs strengthened his determination at any rate to rid both his own estate and Dorothy’s of debt.

“When that is done, we shall be safe, no matter what happens,” he told himself.

To that end he had already done much. In spite of his preöccupation with the fever epidemic he had found time during the autumn to institute many economies in the management of both plantations. He had shipped and sold the large surplus crops of apples and sweet potatoes—a thing wholly unprecedented in that part of Virginia, where no products of the soil except tobacco and wheat were ever turned to money account. He was laughed at for what his neighbors characterized as “Yankee farming,” but both his conscience and his bank account were comforted by the results. In the same way, having a large surplus of corn that year, he had fattened nearly double the usual number of hogs, and was now preparing to sell so much of the bacon as he did not need for plantation uses. In these and other ways he managed to diminish the Wyanoke debt by more than a third and that of Pocahontas by nearly one-half, during his first year as a planter.

“If they don’t quit laughing at me,” he said to Archer Bannister one day, “I’ll sell milk and butter and even eggs next summer. I may conclude to do that anyhow. Those are undignified crops, perhaps, but I’m not sure that they could not be made more profitable than wheat and tobacco.”

“Be careful, Arthur,” answered his friend. “It isn’t safe to make planting too profitable. It is apt to lead to unkindly remark.”

“How so? Isn’t planting a business, like any other?”

“A business, yes, but not like any other. It has a certain dignity to maintain. But I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking of Robert Copeland.”

“I wish you’d tell me about him, Archer. What has he done? I observe that everybody seems to shun him—or at least nobody seems quite willing to recognize him as a man in our class, though they tell me his family is fairly good, and personally he seems agreeable. Nobody says anything to his discredit, and yet I observe a general shoulder shrugging whenever his name is mentioned.”

“He makes too many hogsheads of tobacco to the hand,” answered Archer smiling but speaking with emphasis and slowly.

“Is he cruel to his negroes?”

“Yes, and no. He is always good natured with them and kindly in his fashion, but he works them much too hard. He doesn’t drive them particularly. Indeed I never heard of his striking one of them. But he has invented a system of money rewards and the like, by which he keeps them perpetually racing with each other in their work. They badly overtax themselves, and the community regards the matter with marked disfavor. In the matter of family he isn’t in our class at all, but his father was much respected. He was even a magistrate for some years before his death. But the son has shut himself out of all social position by over working his negroes, and the fact that he does it in ways that are ingenious and not brutal doesn’t alter the fact, at least not greatly. Of course, if he did it in brutal ways he would be driven out of the county. As it is he is only shut out of society. I was jesting when I warned you of danger of that sort. But if you are not careful in your application of ‘practical’ methods down here, you’ll get a reputation for money loving, and that wouldn’t be pleasant.”

Arthur stoutly maintained his right and his duty to market all that the two plantations produced beyond their own needs, especially so long as there were debts upon them. Till these should be discharged, he contended, he had no moral right to let products go to waste which could be turned into money. Archer admitted the justice of his view, but laughingly added:

“It isn’t our way, down here, and we are so conservative that it is never quite prudent to transgress our traditions. At the same time I wish we could all rid our estates from debt before the great trouble comes. For it is surely coming and God only knows what the upshot of it all will be. Don’t quote me as saying that, please. It isn’t fashionable with us to be pessimistic, or to doubt either the righteousness or the ultimate triumph of our cause. But nobody can really foresee the outcome of our present troubles, and whatever it may be, the men who are out of debt when it comes—if there are any—will be better equipped to meet fate with a calm mind than the rest of us.”

XXIX
THE CORRESPONDENCE OF DOROTHY

From Richmond she wrote half rejoicings, half lamentations over the long separation she must endure from him and from all else that had hitherto constituted her life. Arthur observed that while she mentioned as a troublesome thing the necessity of having still another gown made before leaving for the North, she told him nothing whatever about the gown itself.

“Gowns,” he reflected, “are merely necessary adjuncts of life to Dorothy—as yet. She’ll think of them differently after a while.”

From Washington she wrote delightedly of things seen, for although the glory of the national capital had not come upon it in 1860, there was even then abundant interest there for a country damsel.

From Baltimore she wrote:

“I’ve been wicked, and I like it. Edmonia took me to Kunkel and Moxley’s Front Street Theatre last night to hear an opera, and I haven’t yet wakened from the delicious dream. I think I never shall. I think I never want to. Yet I am very sorry that I went, for I shall want to go again and again and again, and you know that I mustn’t listen to such music as that. It will make me bad, and really and truly I’d rather die than be bad. I don’t understand it at all. Why is it wrong for me to hear great music when it isn’t wrong for Edmonia? And Edmonia has heard the greatest music there is, in New York and Paris and Vienna and Naples, and it hasn’t hurt her in the least. I wish you would tell me why I am so different, won’t you, Cousin Arthur?”

From New York she wrote of music again and many times, for she had accepted Arthur’s assurance that there was no harm but only good for her in listening to music; and in obedience to his injunction she went twice each week to the opera, where Edmonia’s friends, whose guest she was, had a box of their own. Presently came from her a pleading letter, asking if she might not herself learn to play a little upon the violin, and availing herself of Arthur’s more than ready permission, she toiled ceaselessly at the instrument until after a month or so Edmonia reported that the girl’s music master was raving about the extraordinary gifts she was manifesting.

“I am a trifle worried about it, Arthur,” Edmonia added. “Perhaps her father was right to forbid all this. Music is not merely a delight to her—it is a passion, an intoxication, almost a madness. She is very fond of dancing too, but I think dancing is to her little more than a physical participation in the music.

“And she mightily enjoys society. Still more does society enjoy her. Her simplicity, her directness and her perfect truthfulness, are qualities not very common, you know, in society, in New York or anywhere else. People are delighted with her, and, without knowing it, she is the reigning attraction in every drawing room. Ah me! She will have to know it presently, for I foresee that ‘the young Virginia belle’ as they all call her, will have many suitors for her hand before we sail—two weeks hence.

“She astonishes society in many ways. She is so perfectly well always, for one thing. She is never tired and never has a headache. Most astonishing of all, to the weary butterflies of fashion, she gets up early in the morning and takes long rides on horseback before breakfast.

“In certain companies—the sedater sort—she is reckoned a brilliant conversationalist. That is because she reads and thinks, as not many girls of her age ever do. In more frivolous society she talks very little and is perhaps a rather difficult person for the average young man to talk to. That also is because she reads and thinks.

“On the whole, Arthur, Dorothy is developing altogether to my satisfaction, but I am troubled about the music. Dr. South had a reason, of which you know nothing, for fearing music in her case, as a dangerous intoxication. Perhaps we ought not to disobey his instructions on the subject. Won’t you think the matter over, Arthur, and advise me?”

To this request Arthur’s reply came promptly. It was an oracular deliverance, such as he was accustomed to give only when absolutely sure of his judgment.

“Have no fear as to the music,” he wrote. “It is not an intoxication to Dorothy, as your report shows that indulgence in it is not followed by reaction and lassitude. That is the sure test of intoxication. For the rest Dorothy has a right to cultivate and make the most of the divine gifts she possesses. Every human being has that right, and it is a cruel wrong to forbid its exercise in any case. I am delighted to see from your letters and hers that she has not permitted her interest in music to impair her interest in other things. She tells me she has been reading a book on ‘The Origin of Species’ by Charles Darwin. I have heard of it but haven’t seen it yet, as it was published in England only a few months ago and had not been reprinted here when I last wrote to New York for some books. So please ask Dorothy to send me her copy as soon as she has finished it, and tell her please not to rub out the marginal notes she tells me she has been making in it. They will be helpfully suggestive to me in my reading, and, as expressions of her uninfluenced opinion, I shall value them even more than the text of the book itself. She tells me she thinks the book will work a revolution in science, giving us a new foundation to build upon. I sincerely hope so. We have long been in need of new foundations. But, pardon me, you are not interested in scientific studies and I will write to Dorothy herself about all that.”

At this point in her reading Edmonia laid the letter in her lap and left it there for a considerable time before taking it up again. She was thinking, a trifle sadly, perhaps, but not gloomily or with pain.

“He is right,” she reflected. “I sympathize with him in his high purposes and I share the general admiration of his character and genius. But I do not share his real enthusiasms as Dorothy does. I have none of that love for scientific truth for its own sake, which is an essential part of his being. I have none of his self-sacrificing earnestness, none of that divine discontent which is the mainspring of all his acts and all his thinking. It is greatly better as Fate has ordered it. I am no fit life partner for him. Had he married me I should have made him happy in a way, perhaps, but it would have been at cost of his deterioration. It is better as it is—immeasurably better,—and I must school myself to think of it in that way. If I am worthy even of the friendship that he so generously gives me, I shall learn to rejoice that he gives the love to Dorothy instead, and not to me. I must learn to think of his good and the fit working out of his life as the worthiest thing I can strive for. And I am learning this lesson. It is a little hard at first, but I shall master it.”

A few days later Dorothy, in one of her unconsciously self-revealing letters, wrote:

“I am sending you the Darwin book, with all my crude little notes in the margins. I have sealed it up quite securely and paid full letter postage on it, because it would be unjust to the government to send a book with writing in it, at book postage rates. Besides, I don’t want anybody but you to read the notes. Edmonia asked me to let her see the book before sending it, but I told her I couldn’t because I should die of shame if anybody should read my presumptuous comments on so great a book. For it is great, really and truly great. It is the greatest explanation of nature that anybody ever yet offered. At least that is the way it impresses me. Edmonia asked me why I was so chary of letting her see notes that I was entirely willing for you to see, and at first I couldn’t explain it even to myself, for, of course, I love Edmonia better than anybody else in the world, and I have no secrets from her. I told her I would have to think the matter over before I could explain it, and she said: ‘Think it out, child, and when you find out the explanation you may tell me about it or not, just as you please.’ She kindly laughed it off, but it troubled me a good deal. I couldn’t understand why it was that I couldn’t bear to let her see the notes, while I rather wanted you to read them. I found it all out at last, and explained it to her, and she seemed satisfied. It’s because you know so much. You are my Master, and you always know how to allow for your pupil’s wrong thinking even while you set me right. Besides, somehow I am never ashamed of my ignorance when only you know of it. Edmonia said that was quite natural, and that I was entirely right not to show the scribbled book to her. So I don’t think I hurt her feelings, do you?

“Now, I want to tell you about another thought of mine which may puzzle you—or it may make you laugh as it does other people. There’s a woman here—a very bright woman but not, to my taste, a lovely one—who is very learned in a superficial way. She knows everything that is current in science, art, literature, and fashion, though she seems to me deficient in thoroughness. She ‘has the patter of it all at her tongue’s end,’ as they say here, but I don’t think she knows much behind the patter. A wise editor whom I met at dinner a few days ago, described her as ‘a person who holds herself qualified to discuss and decide anything in heaven or earth from the standpoint of the cyclopædia and her own inner consciousness.’ She writes for one of the newspapers, though I didn’t know it when she talked with me about Darwin. I told her I thought of Darwin’s book as a great poem. You would have understood me, if I had said that to you, wouldn’t you? You know I always think of the grass, and the trees and the flowers, and the birds and the butterflies, and all the rest, as nature’s poems, and this book seems to me a great epic which dominates and includes, and interprets them all, just as Homer and Milton and Virgil and Tasso and especially Shakespeare, dominate all the little twitterings of all the other poets. Anyhow it seems to me that a book which tells us how all things came about, is a poem and a very great one. I said so to this woman, and next day I saw it all printed in the newspaper for which she writes. I shouldn’t have minded that as she didn’t tell my name, but I thought she seemed to laugh and jeer at my thought. She said something witty about trying to turn Darwin into dactyls and substitute dithyrambics for dogmatics in the writings of Sir Isaac Newton. Somehow it all sounded bright and witty as one read it in the newspaper. But is that the way in which a serious thought ought to be treated? Do the newspapers, when they thus flippantly deal with serious things, really minister to human advancement? Do they not rather retard it by making jests of things that are not jests? I have come to know a good many newspaper writers since I have been here, and I am convinced that they have no real seriousness in their work, no controlling conscience. ‘The newspaper’ said one of the greatest of them to me not long ago, ‘is a mirror of today. It doesn’t bother itself much with tomorrow or yesterday.’ I asked him why it should not reflect today accurately, instead of distorting if with smartness. ‘Oh,’ he answered, ‘we can’t stop to consider such things. We must do that which will please and attract the reader, regardless of everything else. Dulness is the only thing we must avoid as we shun the pestilence, and erudition and profundity are always dull.’

“ ‘But doesn’t the newspaper assume to teach men and women?’ I asked. ‘And is it not in conscience bound to teach them the truth and not falsehood?’

“ ‘Oh, yes, that’s the theory,’ he answered. ‘But how can we live up to it? Take this matter of Darwinism, for example. We can’t afford to employ great scientific men to discuss it seriously in our columns. And if we did, only a few would read what they wrote about it. We have bright fellows on our editorial staffs who know how to make it interesting by playing with it, and for our purpose that is much better than any amount of learning.’

“I have been thinking this thing over and I have stopped the reading of newspapers. For I find that they deal in the same way with everything else—except politics, perhaps, and, of course, I know nothing of politics. I read a criticism of a concert the other day in which a singer was—well, never mind the details. The man that wrote that criticism didn’t hear the concert at all, as he confessed to me. He was attending another theatre at the time. Yet he assumed to criticise a singer to her detriment, utterly ignoring the fact that she has her living to make by singing and that his criticism might seriously affect her prospects. He laughed the matter off, and when I seemed disturbed about it he said: ‘For your sake, Miss South, I’ll make amends. She sings again tomorrow, and while I shall not be able to hear her, I’ll give her such a laudation as shall warm the cockles of her heart and make her manager mightily glad. You’ll forgive me, then, for censuring her yesterday, I’m sure.’ I’m afraid I misbehaved myself then. I told him I shouldn’t read his article, that I hated lies and shams and false pretences, and that I didn’t consider his articles worth reading because they had no truth or honesty behind them. It was dreadfully rude, I know, and yet I’m not sorry for it. For it seemed to make an impression on him. He told me that he only needed some such influence as mine to give him a conscience in his work, and he actually asked me to marry him! Think of the absurdity of it! I told him I wasn’t thinking of marrying anybody—that I was barely seventeen, that—oh, well, I dismissed the poor fellow as gently as I could.”

But while the proposal of marriage by the newspaper man, and several other such solicitations which followed it, struck Dorothy at first as absurdities, they wrought a marked change in her mental attitude. Two at least of these proposals were inspired by higher considerations than those of the plantation which Dorothy represented, and were pressed with fervor and tenderness by men quite worthy to aspire to Dorothy’s hand. These were men of substance and character, in whose minds the fascination which the Virginia girl unwittingly exercised over everybody with whom she came into contact—men and women alike—had quickly ripened into a strong and enduring passion. Dorothy suffered much in rejecting such suits as theirs, but she learned something of herself in the process. She for the first time realized that she was a woman and that she had actually entered upon that career of womanhood which had before seemed so far away in the future that thoughts of it had never before caused her to blush and tremble as they did now.

These things set her thinking, and in her thinking she half realized her own state of mind. She began dimly to understand the change that had come over her attitude and feeling towards Arthur Brent. She would not let herself believe that she loved him as a woman loves but one man while she lives; but she admitted to herself that she might come to love him in that way if he should ever ask her to do so with the tenderness and manifest sincerity which these others had shown. But of that she permitted herself to entertain no hope and even no thought. His letters to her, indeed, seemed to put that possibility out of the question. For at this time Arthur held himself under severe restraint. He was determined that he should not in any remotest way take advantage of his position with respect to Dorothy, or use his influence over her as a means of winning her. He knew now his own condition of mind and soul in all its fulness. He was conscious now that the light of his life lay in the hope of some day winning Dorothy’s love and making her all and altogether his own. But he was more than ever determined, as he formulated the thought in his own mind, to give Dorothy a chance, to take no advantage of her, to leave her free to make choice for herself. It was his fixed determination, should she come back heart whole from this journey, to woo her with all the fervor of his soul; but the more determined he became in this resolution, the more resolutely did he guard his written words against the possibility that they might reveal aught of this to her. “If she ever comes to love me as my wife,” he resolved, “it shall be only after she has had full opportunity to make another choice.”

Accordingly his letters to her continued to concern themselves with intellectual and other external things. He wrote her half a ream of comment upon Darwin’s book, taking up for discussion every marginal note she had made concerning it. But that part of his letter was as coldly intellectual as any of their horseback conversations had been. In all the intimate parts of that and his other letters, he wrote only as one might to a sympathetic friend, as he might have written to Edmonia, for example. He even took half unconscious pains to emphasize the fatherly character of his relations with her, lest they assume some other aspect to her apprehension.

On her side Dorothy began now to write outside of herself, as it were. She described to him all her new gowns and bonnets, laughing at the confusion of mind in which a study of such details must involve him. In her childlike loyalty she told him of the wooings that so distressed her, but she did so quite as she might have written to him of the loves of Juliet and Ophelia and the Lady of Lyons. For the rest she wrote objectively now, in the main, and speculatively concerning certain of those social problems in which she knew him to be profoundly interested, and which she was somewhat studying now, because of the interest they had for him.

The word “slumming” had not been invented at that time by the insolence that does the thing it means. But Dorothy, chiefly under the guidance of her friends among the newspaper men, went to see how the abjectly poor of a great city lived, and she wrote long letters of comment to Arthur in which she told him how great and distressing the revelation was, and how she honored his desire to do something for the amelioration of these people’s lives. “Your aspiration is indeed a noble one,” she wrote in one of her letters; “the life you proposed to yourself, and from which you were diverted by your inheritance of a plantation, is the very greatest, the very noblest that any man could lead. I once thought you were doing even better in the care you are taking of the negroes at Wyanoke and Pocahontas, and in your efforts ultimately to set them free. But that was when I did not know. I know now, in part at least, and I understand your feeling in the matter as I never could have done had I not seen for myself.

“People here sometimes say things to me that hurt. But I am ready with my answer now. One woman—very intellectual, but a cat—asked me yesterday how I could bear to hold negroes in slavery, and to buy fine gowns with the proceeds of their toil. I told her frankly that I didn’t like it, but that I couldn’t help it, and in reply to her singularly ignorant inquiries as to why I didn’t end the wrong or at least my participation in it, I explained some difficulties to her that she had never taken the trouble to ask about. I told her how hard you were working to discharge the debts of your estate in order that you might send your negroes to the west to be free, and that you might yourself return to New York to do what you could for the immeasurably worse slaves here. She caught at my phrase and challenged it. I told her what I meant, and as it happened to be in a company of highly intellectual people, I suppose I ought not to have talked so much, but somehow they seemed to want to hear. I said:

“ ‘In Virginia I always visit every sick person on the plantation every day. We send for a doctor in every case, and we women sit up night after night to nurse every one that needs it. We provide proper food for the sick and the convalescent from our own tables. We take care of the old and decrepit, and of all the children. From birth to death they know that they will be abundantly provided for. What poor family around the Five Points has any such assurance? Who provides doctors and medicine and dainties for them when they are ill? Who cares for their children? Who assures them, in childhood and in old age, of as abundant a supply of food and clothing, and as good a roof, as we give to the negroes? I go every morning, as I just now said, to see every sick or afflicted negro on my own plantation and on that of my guardian. How often have you gone to the region of the Five Points to minister to those who are ill and suffering and perhaps starving there?’

“ ‘Oh, that is all cared for by the charitable organizations’ she said, ‘and by the city missionaries.’

“ ‘Is it?’ I answered. ‘I do not find it so. I have emptied my purse a dozen times in an effort to get a doctor for a very ill person here, and to buy the medicines he prescribed, and to provide food for starving ones. And then, next day I have found that the sick have died because the well did not know how to cook the food I had provided, or how to follow the doctor’s directions in the giving of medicine. I tell you these poor people are immeasurably worse off than any negro slave at the South is, or ever was. So far as I can learn there is no working population in the world that gets half so much of comfort and care and reward of every sort for its labor, as the negroes of Virginia get.’

“Then the woman broke out. She said: ‘You are dressed in a superb satin’—it was at a social function—‘and every dollar of its cost was earned by a negro slave on your plantation.’ I answered, ‘You are equally well dressed. Will you tell me who earned the money that paid for your satin gown?’ Then, Cousin Arthur, I lost my temper and my manners. I told her that while we in Virginia profited by the labor of our negroes, we gave them, as the reward of their labor, every desire of their hearts and, besides that, an assurance of support in absolute comfort for their old age, and for their children; while the laboring class in New York, from whose labor she profited, and whose toil purchased her gown, had nobody to care for them in infancy or old age, in poverty and illness and suffering. ‘It is all wrong on both sides,’ I said. ‘The toilers ought to have the full fruits of their toil in both cases. The luxury of the rich is a robbery of the poor always and everywhere. There ought not to be any such thing anywhere. The woman who made your underclothing was robbed when you bought it at the price you did. You wronged and defrauded the silk spinners and weavers and the sewing women when you bought your gown. Worse than that; you have among you men who have accumulated great fortunes in manufactures and commerce. How did they do it? Was it not in commerce by paying the producers for their products less than they were worth? Was it not in manufactures by paying men and women and children less than they have earned? Was not the great Astor estate based upon a shrewd robbery of the Indian trappers and hunters? And has it not been swelled to its present proportions by the growth of a city to whose growth the Astors have never contributed a single dollar? Isn’t the whole thing a wrong and a robbery? Isn’t the “Song of the Shirt” a reflection of truth? Isn’t there slavery in New York as actually as in Virginia, and isn’t it infinitely more cruel?’

“Then the woman shifted her ground. ‘But at least our laborers are free,’ she said. ‘Are they?’ I answered. ‘Are they free to determine for whom they will work or at what wages? Cannot their masters, who are their employers, discharge them at will, when they get old or feeble or otherwise incompetent, and leave them to starve? No master of a Virginia plantation can do that. His neighbors would actually lynch him should he turn a decrepit old negro out to die or even should he deny to him the abundant food and clothing and housing that he gives to the able-bodied negroes who make crops. And,’ I added, for I was excited, ‘this cruelty is not confined to what are ordinarily called the laboring classes. I know a man of unusual intellectual capacity, who has worked for years to build up the fortunes of his employers. He has had what is regarded as a very high salary. But being a man of generous mind he has spent his money freely in educating the ten or a dozen sons and daughters of his less fortunate brother. He is growing old now. He has earned for his master, a thousand dollars for every dollar of salary that he ever received just as all his fellow workers in the business have done. But he is growing old now, and under the strain of night and day work, he has acquired the habit of drinking too much. He hasn’t a thousand dollars in the world as his reward for helping to make this other man, his master, absurdly, iniquitously rich. Yet in his age and infirmity, the other man, luxuriating in his palatial summer home which is only one of the many palaces that other men’s toil late into the night has provided for him, decides that the old servitor is no longer worth his salary, and decrees his discharge. Is there anything so cruel as that in negro slavery? Is that man half so well off as my negro mammy, who has a house of her own and all the food and clothes she wants at the age of eighty, and who could have the service of a dozen negro attendants for the mere asking?’

“Now, Cousin Arthur, please don’t misunderstand me. Even what I have seen at the Five Points doesn’t tempt me to believe in slavery. I want of all things to see that exterminated. But, really and truly, I find an immeasurably worse slavery here in New York than I ever saw in Virginia, and I want to see it all abolished together, not merely the best and kindliest and most humane part of it. I want to see the time when every human being who works shall enjoy the full results of his work; when no man shall be any other man’s master; when no man shall grow rich by pocketing the proceeds of any other man’s genius or industry. I said all this to that woman, and she replied: ‘You are obviously a pestilent socialist. You are as bad as Fourier and Albert Brisbane and Horace Greeley.’ That was very rude of her, seeing that Mr. Greeley was present, but I’ve noticed that the people who most highly pride themselves on good manners are often rude and inconsiderate of others to a degree that would not be tolerated in Virginia society—except perhaps from Mr. Madison Peyton. By the way, Mr. Jefferson Peyton was present, and to my regret he said some things in defence of slavery which I could not at all approve. Mr. Greeley interrupted him to say something like this:

“ ‘The dear young lady is quite right. We have a horrible slavery right here in New York, and we ought to make war on that as earnestly as we do on African slavery at the South. I’m trying to do it in the Try-bune’—that’s the way he pronounces the name of his paper—‘and I’m going to keep on trying.’

“That encouraged me, for I find myself more and more disposed to respect Mr. Greeley as I come to know him better. I don’t always agree with him. I sometimes think he is onesided in his views, and of course he is enormously self-conceited. But he is, at any rate, an honest man, and a brave and sincere one. He isn’t afraid to say what he thinks, any more than you are, and I like him for that. Another great editor whom I have met frequently, seems to me equally courageous, but far less conscientious. He is inclined to take what he calls ‘the newspaper view’ of things,—by which he means the view that appeals to the multitude for the moment, without much regard for any fixed principle. Socially he is a much more agreeable man than Mr. Greeley, but I don’t think him so trustworthy. Mr. Greeley impresses me as a man who may be enormously wrong-headed, under the influence of his prejudiced misconceptions, but who, wrong-headed or right-headed, will never consciously wrong others. If he had been born the master of a Virginia plantation he would have dealt with his negroes in the same spirit in which he has insisted upon giving to his fellow workers on the Tribune a share in the profits of their joint work. Mr. Greeley is odd, but I like him better than any editor I have met.”

So the girl went on, writing objectively and instinctively avoiding the subjective. But she did not always write so seriously. She had “caught the patter” of society and she often filled pages with a sparkling, piquant flippancy, which had for Arthur a meaning all its own.

XXX
AT SEA

THE voyage to Europe in 1860 was a much more serious undertaking than the like voyage is in our later time. It occupied a fortnight or three weeks, for one thing, where now a week is ample time for the passage. The steamers were small and uncomfortable—the very largest of them being only half the size of the very smallest now regarded as fit for passenger service. There was no promenade deck or hurricane deck then, above the main deck, which was open to the sky throughout its length and breadth, except for the interruption of one small deck house, covering the companion way, a ventilator pipe here and there, and perhaps a chicken coop to furnish emaciated and sea sick fowls for the table d’hôte. There was no ice machine on board, and no distilling apparatus for the production of fresh water. As a consequence, after two days out, the warm water which passengers must drink began to taste of the ancient wood of the water tanks; at the end of a week it became sickeningly foul; and before the end of the voyage it became so utterly undrinkable that the most aggressive teetotaler among the passengers was compelled to order wine for his dinner and to abstain from coffee at breakfast.

The passenger who did not grow seasick in those days was a rare exception to an otherwise universal rule, while, in our time, when the promenade deck is forty or fifty feet above the waves, and the passengers are abundantly supplied both with palatable food and with wholesome water, only those suffer with mal de mer who are bilious when they go on board, or who are beset by a senseless apprehension of the sea.

The passenger lists were small, too, even allowing for the diminutive size of the ships. One person crossed the ocean then where perhaps a hundred cross in our time.

There were perhaps twenty passengers in the cabin of the ship in which Dorothy sailed. By the second day out only two of the ship’s company appeared at meals or at all regularly took the air on deck. Dorothy was one of these two. The other she herself introduced, as it were, to Arthur, in a long, diary-like letter which she wrote on shipboard and mailed at Liverpool.

“I’m sitting on a great coil of rope, just behind the deck house,” she wrote, “where I am sheltered from the wind and where I can breathe my whole body full of the delicious sea air. The air is flavored with great quantities of the finest sunshine imaginable. Every now and then I lay my paper down, and a very nice old sailor comes and puts two big iron belaying pins on it, to keep it from blowing overboard while I go skipping like a ten-year-old girl up and down the broad, clean deck, and enjoying the mere being alive, just as I do on horseback in Virginia when the sun is rising on a perfect morning.

“I ought to be down stairs—no, I mustn’t say ‘down stairs,’ when I’m at sea, I must say ‘below.’ Well, I ought to be below ministering to Edmonia and her friend Mrs. Livingston,—or Mildred, as she insists on my calling her—both of whom are frightfully sick; but really and truly, Edmonia won’t let me. She fairly drove me out, half an hour ago. When I didn’t want to go she threatened to throw her shoes at my head, saying ‘You dear little idiot, go on deck and keep your sea-well on, if you can.’ And when I protested that she seemed very ill and that I hadn’t the heart to go on the beautiful deck and be happy in the delicious air and sunshine while she was suffering so, she said: ‘Oh, I’m always so for the first three or four days, and I’m best let alone. My temper is frightful when I’m seasick. That’s why I took separate staterooms for you and me. I don’t want you to find out what a horribly ill-tempered, ill-mannered woman I am when I’m seasick. How can I help it? I’ve got a mustard plaster on my back and two on my chest, and I’ve drunk half a bottle of that detestable stuff, champagne, and I’m really fighting mad. Go away, child, and let me fight it out with myself and the stewardesses. They don’t mind it, the dear good creatures. They’re used to it. I threw a coffee cup full of coffee all over one of them this morning because she presumed to insist upon my swallowing the horrible stuff, and she actually laughed, Dorothy. I couldn’t get up a quarrel with her no matter what I did, and so I tried my hand on the ship’s doctor. I don’t like him anyhow. He’s just the kind that would make love to me if he dared, and I don’t like men that do that.’ Then Edmonia added: ‘He wouldn’t quarrel at all. When I told him he was trying to poison me with bicarbonate of soda in my drinking water, he seriously assured me that bicarbonate of soda isn’t poisonous in the least degree, that it corrects acidity, and all that sort of thing. I gave him up as hopeless,—but remind me, Dorothy, that when we go ashore I must put half a dozen sovereigns into his hand—carefully wrapped up in paper, so that he shan’t even guess what they are—as his well earned fee for enduring my bad temper. But now, Dorothy, you see clearly that this ship doesn’t provide any proper person for me to quarrel with, and so I must fall back upon you, if you persist in staying here and arrogantly insulting me with your sublime superiority to seasickness. So get out of my room and stay out till I come on deck with my mind restored to a normal condition.’ I really think she meant it, and so I’m obeying her. And I should be very happy with the air and the sunshine and my dear old sailorman who tells me sailor stories and sings to me the very quaintest old sailor songs imaginable, if I could be sure that I’m doing right in being happy while Edmonia is so very miserable.

“As for Mildred—Mrs. Livingston—she lies white-faced and helpless in her bunk—there, I got the sailor term right that time at the first effort—while her husband simply sleeps and moans on the sofa. The doctor says they are ‘progressing very satisfactorily’ and so I am taking his advice and letting them alone. But why anybody should be seasick, how anybody can be sick at sea, I simply cannot understand. The ship’s doctor tried to explain it to me this morning, but he forgot his explanation. He—well, never mind. He ought to have a wife with a plantation or something of that sort, so that his abilities might have an opportunity. I don’t think much of his abilities, and I don’t like him half as well as I do my old sailor. He is going to tell me—the old sailor, I mean and not the doctor—all about his life history tonight. We are to have a moon, you know, and, as he’s on the ‘port watch,’ whatever that may mean, he’s going to come on deck and tell me all about himself. I’ll tell you about it in tomorrow’s instalment of this rambling letter.”

On the following day, or perhaps a day later even than that, Dorothy wrote:

“This is another day. I don’t just know what day. You know they keep changing the clock at sea, and I’ve got mixed up. Edmonia still throws shoes and medicine bottles and coffee cups at me whenever I thrust my head inside the portière of her stateroom, and Mildred, though she has sufficiently recovered to come on deck, lies helpless in a deck chair which my sailor has ‘made fast’—you see I’m getting to be an expert in nautical terms—to a mast or a spar or something, and when I speak to her, says, ‘Go away, child, and be happy in the midst of human misery, if you can. Let me alone.’ When I ask her concerning her husband she answers: ‘I suppose he’s comfortable in his misery. At any rate, he has two bottles of champagne by his side, and he is swearing most hopefully. I always know he is getting over it when he begins to swear in real earnest, and with a certain discretion in the choice of his oaths. Now, run away, you ridiculously well girl or I’ll begin to borrow from Rex’s vituperative vocabulary.’ Rex is her husband you know.

“The sailor’s story didn’t amount to anything, so I’ll not bother you with a repetition of it.”

[As a strictly confidential communication, not to be mentioned to anybody, the author so far intrudes upon attention at this point, as to report that the sailorman, at the end of his picturesque and imaginative narrative, professed a self-sacrificing willingness to abandon the delights of a sea-faring existence, and to content himself thereafter with the homelier and less romantic duties of master of Pocahontas plantation. Dorothy, in continuing her letter, was quite naturally reticent upon this point. But she went on liking that old sailorman, in whose devotion to her comfort on deck nothing seemed to make the slightest difference. Perhaps this chronic mariner already had ‘a wife in every port’ and was only ‘keeping his hand in’ at courtship. At any rate after duly disciplining him, Dorothy went on liking him and accepting his manifold, sailorly attentions. Ah, these women! How very human they are in face of all their airs and pretensions!]

It was a day later that Dorothy wrote:

“There is a very extraordinary lady on board, and I have become acquainted with her, in a way. I didn’t see her at all during the first day out. As she tells me she is never seasick, I suppose she kept her cabin for some other reason. At any rate the first time I met her was on the morning of that second day out, when I was skipping about the deck and making believe that I was little Dorothy again—little ten-year-old Dorothy, who didn’t care if people were seeing her when she skipped. The captain saw me first. He’s a dear old fellow with a big beard and nine children and a nice little baby at home. And, think of it, the people that hire him to run their ship won’t let him bring his wife on board or any of his children on any account! That isn’t quite correct either, for two voyages ago it was the twenty-first anniversary of his marriage, and when he asked permission to bring his wife and baby with him on his trip to New York and back, just to celebrate, you see, the company gave permission without any hesitation. But when he came on board, he found another captain in command for that one trip, and himself only a passenger. That’s because the company don’t want a captain’s attention distracted, and I suppose a new baby whom he had never seen before would have distracted him a great deal. Anyhow that’s the way it was and the only reason the captain told me about it was that I asked him why he didn’t have his wife and children on board with him always. But I set out to tell you about the lady. After the captain had ‘captured’ me, as he put it, and had taken me up on the bridge, and had shown me how to take an observation and how to steer—he let me steer all by myself for more than a mile and I didn’t run the ship into anything, perhaps because there wasn’t anything within five hundred miles to run into—I went down on deck again, hoping that maybe Diana had got well enough to come out, but she hadn’t. She isn’t violently ill, but she’s the most entirely, hopelessly, seasick person I’ve seen yet. She—well, never mind. She’ll get well again, and in the meanwhile I must tell you about the lady. She spoke to me kindly and said:

“ ‘As you and I seem to be the only well passengers on board, I think I’m entitled to a sea acquaintance with you, Miss Dorothy. You know sea acquaintances carry no obligations with them beyond the voyage, and so no matter how chummy we may become out here on the ocean you needn’t even bow to me if we meet again on shore.’ She seemed so altogether nice that I told her I wouldn’t have a mere sea acquaintance with her, but would get acquainted with her ‘for truly,’ as the children say. She seemed glad when I said that, and we talked for two hours or more, after which we went to luncheon and sat side by side—as everybody else is seasick we had the table all to ourselves and didn’t need to mind whose chairs we sat in.

“Well, she is a strangely fascinating person, and the more I know of her the more she fascinates me. Sometimes she seems as young as I myself am; sometimes she seems very old. She is tall and what I call willowy. That is to say she bends as easily in any direction as a willow wand could, and with as much of grace. Indeed grace is her dominant characteristic, as I discovered when she danced a Spanish fandango to my playing—just all to ourselves you know, behind the deck house. She knows everybody worth knowing, too—all the editors and artists and actors and singers and pianists and people in society that I have met, and a great many others that I haven’t met at all. And she really does know them, too, for one day in her cabin I saw a great album of hers, and when she saw I was interested in it she bade me take it on deck, saying that perhaps it might amuse me during the hour she must give to sleep. And when I read it, I found it full of charming things in prose and verse, all addressed to her, and all signed by great people, or nearly all. She told me afterwards that she valued the other things most—the things signed by people whose names meant nothing to me. ‘For those,’ she said, ‘are my real friends. The rest—well, no matter. They are professionals, and they do such things well.’ I don’t just know what she meant by that, but I have a suspicion that she loves truth better than anything else, and that she doesn’t think distinguished people always tell the truth when they write in albums. At any rate when I asked her if I might write and sign a little sentiment in her album, she said, with more of emotion than the occasion seemed to call for: ‘Not in that book, my child! Not as a tag to all those people. If you will write me three or four lines of your own on a simple sheet of paper and sign it, I’ll have it sumptuously bound when I get to Paris, in a book all to itself, and nobody else shall ever write a line to go with it while I live.’

“Wasn’t it curious? And especially when you reflect how many distinguished people she knows! But she brought me a sheet of very fine paper that afternoon, and said: ‘I don’t want you to write now. I don’t want you to write till our voyage is nearly over. Then I want you to write the truth as to your feeling for me. No matter what it is, I want it to be the truth, so that I may keep it always.’ I took the sheet and wrote on it, ‘I wish you were my mother.’ That was the truth. I do wish every hour that this woman were my mother. But she refused to read what I had written, saying: ‘I will keep it, child, unread until the end of the voyage. Then I’ll give it back to you if you wish, and you shall write again whatever you are prompted to write, be it this or something quite different.’

“Curiously enough, her name is in effect the same as my own, translated into French. She is Madame Le Sud. That means Mrs. South, of course, and when I called her attention to the fact, she said: ‘perhaps that may suggest an additional bond of affection between us.’ ”

Several days passed before Dorothy resumed her writing.

“I haven’t added a line to my letter for two or three days past. That’s because I have been so busy learning to know and love Madame Le Sud. She is the very sweetest and most charming woman I ever saw in my life. She is a trifle less than forty—just old enough I tell her, to be my mother if it had happened in that way. Then she asked me about my real mother and I couldn’t tell her anything. I couldn’t even tell when she died, or what her name had been or anything about her. Isn’t it a strange thing, Cousin Arthur, that nobody has ever told me anything about my mother? It makes me ashamed when I think of it, and still more ashamed when I remember that I never asked anything about her, except once. That time I asked my father some question and he answered only by quickly rising and going out to mount his horse and ride away all alone. That is the way he always did when things distressed him, and as I didn’t want to distress him I never asked him anything more about my mother. But why haven’t I been told about her? Was she bad? And is that why everybody has been so anxious about me, fearing that I might be bad? Even if that were so they ought to have told me about my mother, especially after I began to grow up and know how to stand things bravely. May be when I was too little to understand it was better to keep silent. But when I grew older there was no excuse for not telling me the truth. I don’t think there ever is any excuse for that. The truth is the only thing in the world that a sane person ought to love. I’m only seventeen years old, but I’m old enough to have found out that much, and I don’t think I shall ever quite forgive those who have shut out from me the truth about my mother. You, Cousin Arthur, haven’t had any hand in that. I never asked you, but I know. If you had known about my mother you’d have told me. You could not have helped it. The only limitation to your ability that I ever discovered is your utter inability to tell lies. If you tried to do that you’d make such a wretched failure of the attempt that the truth would come out in spite of you. So, of course, you are as ignorant as I am about my mother.

“But I wanted to tell you about Madame Le Sud. To me she is the most beautiful woman in the world, and yet most people would call her hideously ugly. Indeed, I’ve heard people on the ship call her that way, for they’re beginning at last to come out on deck and try to get well. She has a terribly disfiguring scar. It begins in her hair and extends down over her left eye which it has put out, and down her cheek by the side of her nose, almost, but not quite to her upper lip. The scar is very ugly, of course, but the woman is altogether beautiful. She impresses me as wonderfully fine and fragile—delicate in the same way that a piece of old Sèvres china is. She plays the violin divinely. She wouldn’t play for me at first, and she has since confessed that she feared to make me afraid to play for her. ‘For I am a professional musician,’ she said, ‘or rather I was, till I got this disfiguring scar. After that how could I present myself to an audience?’ Then she told me how she got the scar. She was celebrating something or other with a company of friends. They drank champagne too freely, and one of them, taking from Madame Le Sud’s mantelpiece a perfume bottle, playfully emptied its contents on her head. It was a perfume bottle, but it held nitric acid which somebody had been using medicinally. In an instant the mischief was done and Madame Le Sud’s career as a famous musician was ended forever.

“When she got well she was very poor, having spent all her money during her illness. A manager came to her and wanted her to go on as ‘the veiled violinist,’ he pretending that she was some woman of distinguished family and high social position whose love of music tempted her to exercise her skill upon the stage, but whose social position forbade her to show her face or reveal her name. He offered her large sums if she would do this, but she refused to make herself a party to such a deception. She secured employment, as she puts it, in a much humbler capacity which enables her to turn her artistic taste to account in earning a living, and it is in connection with this employment that she is now on her way to Paris. She did not tell me what her employment is, and of course I did not ask her. But now that I have learned something of her misfortunes, and have seen how bravely she bears them, I love her better than ever.

“Diana has come upon deck at last, ‘dressed and in her right mind.’ She is very proud of having been ‘seasick jes’ like white folks.’ She so far asserts her authority as to order Edmonia—who is quite herself again—and me to array ourselves in some special gowns of her personal selection for the captain’s dinner today. It is to be a notable affair and Madame Le Sud is to play a violin solo. They asked me to play also, but I refused, till Madame Le Sud asked me to give ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ with her to play second violin. Think of it! This wonderful musical artist volunteering to ‘play second fiddle’ to a novice like me! But she insists upon liking my rendering of the dear old melody and she has taken the trouble to compose a special second part, which, she generously says, ‘will bring out the beauty’ of my performance.

“We expect to make land during tonight, and by day after tomorrow, I’ll mail this letter at Liverpool.”