Many times after the preparations began, and many times after they were
ended, Miss Kilburn faltered in doubt of her decision; and if there had
been any will stronger than her own to oppose it, she might have reversed
it, and stayed in Rome. All the way home there was a strain of misgiving
in her satisfaction at doing what she believed to be for the best, and the
first sight of her native land gave her a shock of emotion which was not
unmixed joy. She felt forlorn among people who were coming home with all
sorts of high expectations, while she only had high intentions.
These dated back a good many years; in fact, they dated back to the time
when the first flush of her unthinking girlhood was over, and she began
to question herself as to the life she was living. It was a very pleasant
life, ostensibly. Her father had been elected from the bench to Congress,
and had kept his title and his repute as a lawyer through several terms
in the House before he settled down to the practice of his profession
in the courts at Washington, where he made a good deal of money. They
passed from boarding to house-keeping, in the easy Washington way, after
their impermanent Congressional years, and divided their time between
a comfortable little place in Nevada Circle and the old homestead in
Hatboro'. He was fond of Washington, and robustly content with the world
as he found it there and elsewhere. If his daughter's compunctions came to
her through him, it must have been from some remoter ancestry; he was not
apparently characterised by their transmission, and probably she derived
them from her mother, who died when she was a little girl, and of whom she
had no recollection. Till he began to break, after they went abroad, he
had his own way in everything; but as men grow old or infirm they fall
into subjection to their womenkind; their rude wills yield in the suppler
insistence of the feminine purpose; they take the colour of the feminine
moods and emotions; the cycle of life completes itself where it began, in
helpless dependence upon the sex; and Rufus Kilburn did not escape the
common lot. He was often complaining and unlovely, as aged and ailing men
must be; perhaps he was usually so; but he had moments when he recognised
the beauty of his daughter's aspiration with a spiritual sympathy, which
showed that he must always have had an intellectual perception of it.
He expressed with rhetorical largeness and looseness the longing which
was not very definite in her own heart, and mingled with it a strain of
homesickness poignantly simple and direct for the places, the scenes, the
persons, the things, of his early days. As he failed more and more, his
homesickness was for natural aspects which had wholly ceased to exist
through modern changes and improvements, and for people long since dead,
whom he could find only in an illusion of that environment in some other
world. In the pathos of this situation it was easy for his daughter to keep
him ignorant of the passionate rebellion against her own ideals in which
she sometimes surprised herself. When he died, all counter-currents were
lost in the tidal revulsion of feeling which swept her to the fulfilment
of what she hoped was deepest and strongest in her nature, with shame for
what she hoped was shallowest, till that moment of repulsion in which she
saw the thickly roofed and many towered hills of Boston grow up out of the
western waves.
She had always regarded her soul as the battlefield of two opposite
principles, the good and the bad, the high and the low. God made her, she
thought, and He alone; He made everything that she was; but she would not
have said that He made the evil in her. Yet her belief did not admit the
existence of Creative Evil; and so she said to herself that she herself
was that evil, and she must struggle against herself; she must question
whatever she strongly wished because she strongly wished it. It was not
logical; she did not push her postulates to their obvious conclusions; and
there was apt to be the same kind of break between her conclusions and her
actions as between her reasons and her conclusions. She acted impulsively,
and from a force which she could not analyse. She indulged reveries so
vivid that they seemed to weaken and exhaust her for the grapple with
realities; the recollection of them abashed her in the presence of facts.
With all this, it must not be supposed that she was morbidly introspective.
Her life had been apparently a life of cheerful acquiescence in worldly
conditions; it had been, in some measure, a life of fashion, or at least
of society. It had not been without the interests of other girls' lives,
by any means; she had sometimes had fancies, flirtations, but she did not
think she had been really in love, and she had refused some offers of
marriage for that reason.