The other looked at her musingly. "No, I suppose not, you are so queer
that way. Seems to me I can't find time enough to make new things. One
just _must_ keep up, you know."
"It is settled then?" asked the woman, at the corner where they
parted.
"It will be so good of you," murmured the other.
The woman had many invitations to spend her brief vacation with
friends, but, that night, she wrote a letter to the people who lived
in her old home and asked if they would take her for two weeks,
requesting that they telegraph their answer. When the message came,
she wired them to meet her and went by the first train.
At the old home station, her train took a siding at the upper end of
the yards to let the outgoing express pass. From the window where she
sat the woman saw a tall man, dressed in a business suit of quiet
gray, standing on the rear platform of the slowly moving outbound
train and waving his hand to someone on the depot platform. Just a
glimpse she had of him before he passed from sight as her own train
moved ahead to stop at the depot where she was greeted by her host.
Not until they were driving toward her old home did the woman know who
it was that she had seen.
The woman was interested in all that the people had to tell about her
old playmate and asked not a few questions but she was glad that he
had not known of her coming. She was glad that he was gone. The man
and the woman were strangers and the woman did not wish to meet a
stranger. The boy lived, for her, only in her Yesterdays and the woman
told herself that she was glad because she feared that the man, if she
met him, would rob her of the boy. She feared that he would be like so
many that she had been forced to know in the world that denied her
womanhood. She had determined to be for two weeks, as far as it is
possible for a woman to be, just a girl again and she wanted no
company other than the little boy who lived only in the long ago.
As soon as supper was over she retired to her room--to the little room
that had been hers in her childhood--where, before lighting the lamp,
she sat for awhile at the open window looking out into the night,
breathing long and deep of the pure air that was sweetly perfumed with
the odor of the meadows and fields. In the brooding quiet; in the soft
night sounds; in the fragrant breeze that gently touched her hair; she
felt the old, old, forces of life calling to her womanhood and felt
her womanhood stir in answer. For a long time she sat there giving
free rein to the thoughts and longings that, in her city life, she was
forced to suppress.
Rising at last, as though with quick resolution, she lighted her lamp
and prepared for bed; loosening her hair and deftly arranging the
beautiful, shining, mass that fell over her shoulders in a long braid.
Then, smiling as she would have smiled at the play of a child, she
knelt before her trunk and, taking something from its depth, quickly
put out the light again and once more seated herself in a low rocking
chair by the open window.
Had there been any one to see, they would not have understood. Who is
there, indeed, to understand the heart of womanhood? The woman,
sitting in the dark before the window in that room so full of the
memories of her childhood, held close in her arms an ancient doll
whose face had been washed so many times by its little mother that it
was but a smudge of paint.
That night the woman slept as a child sleeps after a long, busy,
happy, childhood day--slept to open her eyes in the morning while the
birds in the trees outside her window were heralding the coming of the
sun. Rising she looked and saw the sky glorious with the light of
dawning day. Flaming streamers of purple and scarlet and silver
floated high over the buildings and trees next door. The last of the
pale stars sank into the ocean of blue and, from behind the old
orchard above the house where the boy lived, long shafts of golden
light shot up as if aimed by some heavenly archer hiding behind the
hill.
When the day was fully come, the woman quickly dressed and went out
into the yard. The grass was dew drenched and fragrant under her feet.
The flowers were fresh and inviting. But she did not pause until, out
in the garden, at the farther corner, close by the hedge, she stood
under the cherry tree--sacred cathedral of her Yesterdays.
When she turned again to go back to the house, the woman's face was
shining with the light that glows only in the faces of those women who
know that they are women and who dream the dreams of womanhood.
So the woman spent her days. Down in the little valley by the brook,
that, as it ran over the pebbly bars, drifted in the flickering light
and shade of the willows, slipped between the green banks, or crept
softly beneath the grassy arch, sang its song of the Yesterdays: up in
the orchard beyond the neighboring house where so many, many, times
she had helped the boy play out his dreams; on the porch, in the soft
twilight, watching the stars as they blossomed above while up from the
dusky shadows in the valley below came the call of the whip-poor-will
and the bats on silent wings flitted to and fro; out in the garden
under the cherry tree in the corner near the hedge--in all the loved
haunts of the boy and girl--she spent her days.
And the tired look went out of her eyes. Strength returned to her
weary body, courage to her heart, and calmness to her over-wrought
nerves. Amid those scenes of her Yesterdays she was made ready to go
back to the world that values so highly things that are new, and, in
the strength of the old, old, things to keep the dreams of her
womanhood. And, as she went, there was that in her face that all men
love to see in the face of womankind.
Poor old world! Someday, perhaps, it will awake from its feverish
dream to find that God made some things in the heart of the race too
big to be outgrown.