Eunice Mavering acknowledged Alice's first letter. She said that her
mother read it aloud to them all, and had been delighted with the good
account she gave of Dan, and fascinated with all the story of their
daily doings and sayings. She wished Eunice to tell Alice how fully she
appreciated her thoughtfulness of a sick old woman, and that she was
going to write herself and thank her. But Eunice added that Alice must
not be surprised if her mother was not very prompt in this, and she sent
messages from all the family, affectionate for Alice, and polite for her
father and mother.
Alice showed Dan the letter, and he seemed to find nothing noticeable in
it. “She says your mother will write later,” Alice suggested.
“Yes. You ought to feel very much complimented by that. Mother's
autographs are pretty uncommon,” he said, smiling.
“Why, doesn't she write? Can't she? Does it tire her?” asked Alice.
“Oh yes, she can write, but she hates to. She gets Eunice or Minnie to
write usually.”
“Dan,” cried Alice intensely, “why didn't you tell me?”
“Why, I thought you knew it,” he explained easily. “She likes to read,
and likes to talk, but it bores her to write. I don't suppose I get more
than two or three pencil scratches from her in the course of a year. She
makes the girls write. But you needn't mind her not writing. You may be
sure she's glad of your letters.”
“It makes me seem very presumptuous to be writing to her when there's no
chance of her answering,” Alice grieved. “It's as if I had passed over
your sisters' heads. I ought to have written to them.”
“Oh, well, you can do that now,” said Dan soothingly.
“No. No, I can't do it now. It would be ridiculous.” She was silent, and
presently she asked, “Is there anything else about your mother that I
ought to know?” She looked at him with a sort of impending discipline in
her eyes which he had learned to dread; it meant such a long course of
things, such a very great variety of atonement and expiation for him,
that he could not bring himself to confront it steadily.
His heart gave a feeble leap; he would have gladly told her all that was
in it, and he meant to do so at the right time, but this did not seem
the moment. “I can't say that there is,” he answered coldly.
In that need of consecrating her happiness which Alice felt, she went a
great deal to church in those days. Sometimes she felt the need almost
of defence against her happiness, and a vague apprehension mixed with
it. Could it be right to let it claim her whole being, as it seemed
to do? Than was the question which she once asked Dan, and it made him
laugh, and catch her to him in a rapture that served for the time, and
then left her to more morbid doubts. Evidently he could not follow her
in them; he could not even imagine them; and while he was with her
they seemed to have no verity or value. But she talked them over very
hypothetically and impersonally with Miss Cotton, in whose sympathy they
resumed all their import, and gained something more. In the idealisation
which the girl underwent in this atmosphere all her thoughts and
purposes had a significance which she would not of herself, perhaps,
have attached to them. They discussed them and analysed them with a
satisfaction in the result which could not be represented without
an effect of caricature. They measured Alice's romance together, and
evolved from it a sublimation of responsibility, of duty, of devotion,
which Alice found it impossible to submit to Dan when he came with his
simple-hearted, single-minded purpose of getting Mrs. Pasmer out of the
room, and sitting down with his arm around Alice's waist. When he had
accomplished this it seemed sufficient in itself, and she had to think,
to struggle to recall things beyond it, above it. He could not be made
to see at such times how their lives could be more in unison than
they were. When she proposed doing something for him which he knew
was disagreeable to her, he would not let her; and when she hinted
at anything she wished him to do for her because she knew it was
disagreeable to him, he consented so promptly, so joyously, that she
perceived he could not have given the least thought to it.
She felt every day that they were alien in their tastes and aims; their
pleasures were not the same, and though it was sweet, though it was
charming, to have him give up so willingly all his preferences, she
felt, without knowing that the time must come when this could not be so,
that it was all wrong.
“But these very differences, these antagonisms, if you wish to call them
so,” suggested Miss Cotton, in talking Alice's misgivings over with her,
“aren't they just what will draw you together more and more? Isn't
it what attracted you to each other? The very fact that you are such
perfect counterparts--”
“Yes,” the girl assented, “that's what we're taught to believe.” She
meant by the novels, to which we all trust our instruction in such
matters, and her doubt doubly rankled after she had put it to silence.
She kept on writing to Dan's mother, though more and more perfunctorily;
and now Eunice and now Minnie Mavering acknowledged her letters. She
knew that they must think she was silly, but having entered by Dan's
connivance upon her folly, she was too proud to abandon it.
At last, after she had ceased to expect it, came a letter from his
mother, not a brief note, but a letter which the invalid had evidently
tasked herself to make long and full, in recognition of Alice's kindness
in writing to her so much. The girl opened it, and, after a verifying
glance at the signature, began to read it with a thrill of tender
triumph, and the fond prevision of the greater pleasure of reading it
again with Dan.
But after reading it once through, she did not wait for him before
reading it again and again. She did this with bewilderment, intershot
with flashes of conviction, and then doubts of this conviction. When she
could misunderstand no longer, she rose quietly and folded the letter,
and put it carefully back into its envelope and into her writing desk,
where she sat down and wrote, in her clearest and firmest hand, this
note to Mavering--
“I wish to see you immediately.
“ALICE PASMER.”