Not Pretty, but Precious | Page 3

was a stranger to them, until her husband had won a name
and handsome fortune for himself: then she was taken into favor again,
her husband's distinction in the scientific world being supposed to add
lustre to the family name. Alas for us! it was a favor that has cost us
dear. I was their only child. When my sweet, pretty mother lay dying
she left to me, her sixteen-year-old child, my dreamy, unworldly father
as a legacy. "Take care of him: he knows no guile, and your uncles will
wrong him if they can," she said. And they did, or one of them. Ere the
bitter agony of my mother's death had enabled him to return to his
duties, it was discovered that one of her brothers had forged his name
and literally stripped him of everything.
Of course, then he went to work again to earn our daily bread--not with
his old love or ability, but in an inert, feeble way that was pitiful to see.
I think from the day my mother was buried he was dying. Some people,
you know, die hard--some part with life lightly, as if it was a faded robe
they shook off to don a brighter one. Others--my father was one, and I
am like him--see one by one their trusts, their hopes, their loves die:
then with a deathly throe sunder themselves from life. But pardon my
digression.
When I was twenty my father died. Since then, spite of expressions of
disapproval and offers of support from my mother's family, I have
maintained myself by teaching in the schools where my father had been
known, preferring to do without assistance so long as I had health. One
of my uncles desired to take me into his family, and thus wipe out the
wrong done my father by his brother, and my aunts proffered me an
income out of their private means. I mention this to do them every
justice, but I think even a man of fashion like yourself will
acknowledge the impossibility of my accepting, while I could avoid it,
a life of dependence. I could not accept favors from those who had
treated my dear parents unkindly; so I have e'en gone my own way for

these last ten years, and led a not unhappy life, if a busy and rather
wearing one.
My gay cousins, all of whom you know well--the Wilber girls, Leta and
Jennie, pretty little Lou Barton, and another set of Wilbers whom I
think you do not know so well, who are married now--my gay cousins,
then, most of them beauties, all of them rich and fashionable, are
somewhat ashamed of me, and have let me feel it in every petty way
that we women know so well how to find. I am ugly and poor, my
earning my own living is a spot upon their gentility, and I have
unfortunately, and quite against my will, more than once given them
cause for serious annoyance and apprehension. Then, one of our uncles,
who is a bachelor and very rich, has insisted that I am never to be
slighted--always to be invited to everything in the shape of a party
given by the family. If it lay with me, of course I would never accept
these invitations, but I have had it explained to me over and over again
that my not doing so is visited upon the party-givers in one way or
another by our masterful uncle Rufus. So, occasionally, very much
against my inclination, I leave my little third-story room, with its cozy
fire and humble adornments, and sit in the corner of their great rooms, a
"looker-on in Vienna" in every sense.
I have many kind friends: it would be strange if in all these years I had
not found some who did not care for outward advantages. I have
dreamed my sweet love-dream, and it is over, and the roses have grown
above my buried hopes.
Since then I have let one idea fill my life to the exclusion of everything
else, putting away from me all desires and thoughts of other needs; and
that too has left me. I call it an "idea" for lack of a better name. I had
put away all thought of marriage with my bright youth, but took into
my heart instead what I deemed would serve as well--a friendship for
another woman. For ten years we knew no separate life--I thought no
separate hopes. She had loved, been on the eve of marriage, her lover
had died: that was her heart's history, and henceforth the idea of love
had fallen out of both our lives--not the idea only, but the possibility of
love. I thought so--she said so.

I trusted her and loved her with a