novel! She must think I’m a critic—to want me to read it.” Smiling at the idea, he closed the ledger. “I’ll take it upstairs to my hang-out after dinner, and see if Laura’s literary manner has my august approval. Who in the world would ever have thought she’d decide to set up for a writer?”
“I imagine she might have something to write worth reading,” said his mother. “I’ve always thought she was an interesting-looking girl.”
“Yes, she is. She dances well, too.”
“Of course,” continued Mrs. Lindley, thoughtfully, “she seldom SAYS anything interesting, but that may be because she so seldom has a chance to say anything at all.”
Richard refused to perceive this allusion. “Curious that Laura should have sent it to me,” he said. “She’s never seemed interested in my opinion about anything. I don’t recall her ever speaking to me on any subject whatever— except one.”
He returned his attention to his plate, but his mother did not appear to agree with him that the topic was exhausted.
“`Except one’?” she repeated, after waiting for some time.
“Yes,” he replied, in his habitual preoccupied and casual tone. “Or perhaps two. Not more than two, I should say—and in a way you’d call that only one, of course. Bread, Joe.”
“What two, Richard?”
“Cora,” he said, with gentle simplicity, “and me.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Mrs. Lindley had arranged for her son a small apartment on the second floor, and it was in his own library and smoking-room that Richard, comfortable in a leather-chair by a reading-lamp, after dinner, opened Laura’s ledger.
The first page displayed no more than a date now eighteen months past, and the line:
“Love came to me to-day.”
The next page was dated the next day, and, beneath, he read:
“That was all I COULD write, yesterday. I think I was too excited to write. Something seemed to be singing in my breast. I couldn’t think in sentences—not even in words. How queer it is that I had decided to keep a diary, and bound this book for it, and now the first thing I have written in it was THAT! It will not be a diary. It shall be YOUR book. I shall keep it sacred to You and write to You in it. How strange it will be if the day ever comes when I shall show it to You! If it should, you would not laugh at it, for of course the day couldn’t come unless you understood. I cannot think it will ever come—that day! But maybe–- No, I mustn’t let myself hope too much that it will, because if I got to hoping too much, and you didn’t like me, it would hurt too much. People who expect nothing are never disappointed—I must keep that in mind. Yet EVERY girl has a RIGHT to hope for her own man to come for her some time, hasn’t she? It’s not easy to discipline the wanting to hope—since YESTERDAY!
“I think I must always have thought a great deal about you without knowing it. We really know so little what we think: our minds are going on all the time and we hardly notice them. It is like a queer sort of factory—the owner only looks in once in a while and most of the time hasn’t any idea what sort of goods his spindles are turning out.
“I saw You yesterday! It seems to me the strangest thing in the world. I’ve seen you by chance, probably two or three times a month nearly all my life, though you so seldom come here to call. And this time wasn’t different from dozens of other times—you were just standing on the corner by the Richfield, waiting for a car. The only possible difference is that you had been out of town for several months—Cora said so this morning—and how ridiculous it seems now, didn’t even know it! I hadn’t noticed it—not with the top part of my mind, but perhaps the deep part that does the real thinking had noticed it and had mourned your absence and was so glad to see you again that it made the top part suddenly see the wonderful truth!”
Lindley set down the ledger to relight his cigar. It struck him that Laura had been writing “very odd Stuff,” but interesting; and certainly it was not a story. Vaguely he recalled Marie Bashkirtseff: hadn’t she done something like this? He resumed the reading:
“You turned and spoke to me in that lovely, cordial, absent-minded way of yours —though I’d never thought (with the top part) what a lovely way it was; and for a moment I only noticed how nice you looked in a light gray suit, because I’d only seen you in black for so long, while you’d been in mourning for your brother.”
Richard, disturbed by an incredible idea, read these last words over and then dismissed the notion as nonsense.
“… While you’d been in mourning for your brother—and it struck me that light gray was becoming to you. Then such a queer thing happened: I felt the great kindness of your eyes. I thought they were full of—the only word that seems to express it at all is CHARITY—and they had a sweet, faraway look, too, and I’ve ALWAYS thought that a look of wistful kindness was the loveliest look in the world—and you had it, and I saw it and then suddenly, as you held your hat in your hand, the sunshine on your hair seemed brighter than any sunshine I had ever seen—and I began to tremble all over. I didn’t understand what was the matter with me or what had made me afraid with you not of you—all at once, but I was so hopelessly rattled that instead of waiting for the car, as I’d just told you I meant to, I said I’d decided to walk, and got away—without any breath left to breathe with! I COULDN’T have gotten on the car with you– and I couldn’t have spoken another word.
“And as I walked home, trembling all the way, I saw that strange, dazzling sunshine on your hair, and the wistful, kind look in your eyes—you seemed not to have taken the car but to have come with me—and I was uplifted and exalted oh, so strangely—oh, how the world was changing for me! And when I got near home, I began to walk faster, and on the front path I broke into a run and rushed in the house to the piano—and it was as if my fingers were thirsty for the keys! Then I saw that I was playing to you and knew that I loved you.
“I love you!
“How different everything is now from everything before. Music means what it never did: Life has leaped into blossom for me. Everywhere there is colour and radiance that I had never seen—the air is full of perfume. Dear, the sunshine that fell upon your head has spread over the world!
“I understand, as I never understood, that the world—so dazzling to me now—was made for love and is meaningless without it. The years until yesterday are gray—no, not gray, because that was the colour You were wearing—not gray, because that is a beautiful colour. The empty years until yesterday had no colour at all. Yes, the world has meaning only through loving, and without meaning there is no real life. We live only by loving, and now that this gift of life has come to me I love ALL the world. I feel that I must be so kind, kind, KIND to EVERYBODY! Such an odd thing struck me as my greatest wish. When I was little, I remember grandmother telling me how, when she was a child in pioneer days, the women made the men’s clothes—homespun—and how a handsome young Circuit Rider, who was a bachelor, seemed to her the most beautifully dressed man she had ever seen. The women of the different churches made his clothes, as they did their husbands’ and brothers.’ you see—only better! It came into my head that that would be the divinest happiness that I could know—to sew for you! If you and I lived in those old, old times—you LOOK as if you belonged to them, you know, dear—and You were the young minister riding into
