The next few weeks there were very few entries.
Ellen was very bad at mathematics, and her uncle, who rarely left his
seclusion to interest himself in her affairs and who merely enjoyed
her personality, thought it would be a fine plan if this responsible
young man should give his Ellen lessons. Mr. Grant was advanced in his
theories concerning the female brain, which, he said, lost its
vagueness and inexactnesses through a mathematical training. Ellen
merely makes a note of this.
There are very few entries in her journal at this time, for she was
playing with the great forces of life. God help us all! We didn't know
passion when it came to us, nor how should we? It was the warp on
which were woven all our generous impulses, all our high idealisms,
making in all the shimmering garments in which we clothed our fragile,
newborn spirits.
Ellen walked in a magic circle of her own ignorance, never dreaming
of love or of being in love. So absorbed was she that it seemed like
some one walking down a road that leads directly into a swift-flowing
river, and not knowing that the river was there until one had walked
directly into it. So close is the so-called silly moment of girlhood
to the moment of full development, that when the change comes it
sometimes takes only overnight. It was only a few pages, after all,
that separated Ellen, who managed to do the minister's dishes by
pretending that she was his second wife, from the Ellen who wrote:--
"I don't know how to begin what I am going to say. I thought
everybody in the world must know what had happened to me. I
thought my face must shine with it. I thought I must look like
some one very different from myself,--like a woman, perhaps. I
came home through Lincoln Field and squeezed myself through a
hole in the fence so no one could see me. I came up the back way
to my room and locked the door. My heart beat both ways at once
when I looked in the glass, but I looked just the same as before
I went out--as before he kissed me. I went downstairs and my
hand seemed too heavy to open the door and go in where I heard
their voices. I was afraid to go because I felt: 'They will
know, they will know!' Mr. Sylvester and mamma and Aunt Sarah
were there. 'Where have you been?' said mamma. And I could not
answer. I felt I had been gone so long and so far. I could hear
the blood beating in my ears, and when my aunt said: 'I wish,
Ellen, you would stand up straighter,' I could hardly lift my
head."
Next day there is an entry: "I didn't know we were engaged until
he told me, 'Why, of course, we are.'"
Thus simply does youth plight its troth. They had been together and he
had kissed her, and so, of course, they were engaged. Of course, they
were ready to fight the long battle of life side by side, and she who
had given so much in her kiss had walked out past the doors of
girlhood; through that one light touch she felt that her whole life
must be then surrendered to the boy who had had the magic word for
her. They decided to tell no one on account of their youth.
No sooner did this honest lad have my rainbow Ellen in his hands than
he started in trying to make some one else of her. I read her journal
that follows with a certain heartache because I was not blameless in
this matter. I, too, wanted to take this gay and shimmering child and
turn her into something else; trim her generosities and check her
impulses.
Another thing that makes me rage is the fact that my knowledge of the
lives of men teaches me that, had Ellen had one little affectation in
which to clothe herself, her young lover would have been on his knees
before her instead of being the pedantic young master. Ellen's journal
at this time varies from a thing glittering with life, from being
drunk with the heady wine of being beloved for the first time, to a
book of copy-book maxims, beginning with: "Edward says I must read--or
do--or act--or mustn't."
Poor young man! He wrote her decalogues by the dozen, and yet the
tragedy of him is that he tasted her special quality and loved her
while trying to kill it. The youth of Ellen and her high joy of living
carried him along in spite of himself, though he always made Ellen pay
for his happiness by lectures on the seriousness of life.
It was here that Alec began to perceive the place he had in her life.
They had a game they played that they called "Two Years Ago," in which
they outdid their own childish pranks. Ellen remarks ingenuously:--
"I suppose that I ought to tell Edward how Alec and I rest
ourselves from growing up, but there is no place in him to tell
this to. I tried it with Roberta, and she just understood what
it was about, but doesn't see why I want to do it; and I don't
know myself exactly, except that I just have to."
Then from one day to another Alec was sent West to an uncle and two
weeks later, as had been planned, Edward left. He was to go away for
a year and a half, and then come back and formally ask for Ellen's
hand. It shocked Ellen terribly that she missed Alec most.
Through all the year and a half that followed, Ellen never told me
anything of what was in her mind, nor did she tell her mother, and
here is the characteristic of their young girlhood that people seem to
forget--this nameless reticence. So, alone, she went through the
crucial thing that falling out of love always is. Another girl in her
situation might have deceived herself, the idea of a grown-up lover
was such a pleasant one to a girl of Ellen's age. Ellen was unaware of
the disillusion she was preparing for herself. She writes, appalled:--
"I don't know what has happened to me, I can only describe it by
saying I have waked up. I know now that I am not in love with
Edward and I just understood this from one day to another. He
has not done anything at all. He writes me just the way he
always has. He hasn't changed, so I suppose I am fickle and bad,
and that I can't trust myself, for if this wasn't real, I don't
know what can be real, and yet I feel as though I had never
loved him at all. I sometimes wonder if I should have become
engaged to some other person if it had happened that some other
person had kissed me."
Write him of her change of heart she could not, for as time went on
apparently the memory of her became dearer to the boy. Good and slow
and pedantic, he yet realized what a lovely thing life had put into
his hands, and he longed to keep it, and he communicated this
ever-growing longing to Ellen. She so wanted to keep faith with
herself and to live up to all the things about "one love and only one
love" that books from all time have taught young girls they ought to
feel. She felt a great need of talking about it with some one and
could not bring herself to do it.
"If I could only tell some one and ask what to do, but it seems
disloyal. Roberta wouldn't understand and some way I don't want
to worry my little mother. Sometimes I feel as if I did tell
her without saying any words, when I sit beside her and hold her
hand and feel afraid. The other night we sat alone in the dark.
The smell of honeysuckle vines was so sweet that I shall never
smell it again without thinking how soft her hand felt in the
dark. She said: 'When I was your age, I used often to want to
tell my mother things and didn't dare. My mother was more like
your Aunt Sarah.' My heart beat so when she said this that it
seemed as if she could hear it, but I only pressed her hand and
kissed it. Then she said to me: 'You have seemed a little
absent-minded lately, my darling child; have you anything on
your mind, Ellen?' And I said in a low voice, and blushing,--and
I took my face off her hand for fear she would feel me blush
against it,--'What should I have?'"
As I read her cramped little handwriting a sudden wave of shame creeps
over me as though I had gone back; I remember her so well; I was so on
the outside; I loved her so truly. Meantime, as every day shortened
the distance that separated them, a certain dread encompassed Ellen;
she visualized their approach one to another in this way:--
"It was as if I was standing still and he was standing still,
and that the space between us was being shortened by little
jerks, and each jerk was as a day that makes us come nearer and
nearer. I don't want to see him--oh, I don't want to see him. I
don't know what I'm going to say to him--perhaps nothing. He
will look at me kindly--oh, kindly and critically,--and then I
shall be afraid; afraid of hurting him--afraid of him."
A little later she writes again:--
"If I go on feeling undecided as to what I shall do, something
will snap inside my head. I can't feel so uncertain. He wrote to
me lately, 'Ellen, my life would be utterly worthless without
you.' I cannot ruin any one's life, and my life is pretty
worthless, anyway, so I am going to stand by my first promise,
which is the only brave thing to do. Now that I have decided
that, I feel at peace. I loved him once and my love will come
back."
She adds touchingly, "I have two weeks before he comes"; but these two
weeks of respite were denied her. I was going down to Ellen's when I
met Edward Graham on his way there also.
"I've come to surprise Ellen," he said. So it happened that it was I
who went to her with the words, "Edward Graham's waiting for you
downstairs," and wondered at the sudden ebb of color from her face.