The Island of Faith | Page 3

busy. Giovanni
Celleni is out of jail again, and he's thrown his wife down a flight of
stairs. She'll probably not live. And while Minnie Cohen was at the
vaudeville show last night--developing her soul, perhaps--her youngest
baby fell against the stove. Well, it'll be better for the baby if it does die!
And there are others--" The door slammed upon his angry back.
Rose-Marie's face was white as she leaned against the dark
wainscoting.
"Minnie Cohen brought the baby in last week," she shuddered, "such a
dear baby! And Mrs. Celleni--she tried so hard! Oh, it's not right--" She
was crying, rather wildly, as she went out of the room.
The Superintendent, left alone at the table, rang for the stolid maid. Her
voice was carefully calm as she gave orders for the evening meal. If she
was thinking of Giovanni Celleni, his brute face filled with
semi-madness; if she was thinking of a burned baby, sobbing alone in a
darkened tenement while its mother breathlessly watched the gay
colours and shifting scenes of a make-believe life, her expression did
not mirror her thought. Only once she spoke, as she was folding her
napkin, and then--
"They're both very young," she murmured, a shade regretfully. Perhaps
she was remembering the enthusiasm--and the intolerance--of her own
youth.

III
CONCERNING IDEALS
"Sunshine and apple blossoms!" Rose-Marie, hurrying along the hall to
her own room, repeated the Young Doctor's words and sobbed afresh as
she repeated them. She tried to tell herself that nothing he could think
mattered much to her, but there was a certain element of truth in
everything that he had said. It was a fact that her life had been an
unclouded, peaceful one--her days had followed each other as regularly,
as innocuously, as blue china beads, strung upon a white cord, follow
each other.

Of course, she told herself, she had never known a mother; and her
father had died when she was a tiny girl. But she was forced to
admit--as she had been forced to admit many times--that she did not
particularly feel the lack of parents. Her two aunts, that she had always
lived with, had been everything to her--they had indulged her, had
made her pretty frocks, had never tried, in any way, to block the
reachings of her personality. When she had decided suddenly, fired by
the convincing address of a visiting city missionary, to leave the small
town of her birth, they had put no obstacle in her path.
"If you feel that you must go," they had told her, "you must. Maybe it is
the work that the Lord has chosen for you. We have all faith in you,
Rose-Marie!"
And Rose-Marie, splendid in her youth and assurance, had never
known that their pillows were damp that night--and for many another
night--with the tears that they were too brave to let her see.
They had packed her trunk, folding the white dress and the blue
sash--Rose-Marie wondered how the Young Doctor had known about
the dress and sash--in tissue paper. They had created a blue serge frock
for work, and a staunch little blue coat, and a blue tam-o'-shanter.
Rose-Marie would have been aghast to know how childish she looked
in that tam-o'-shanter! Her every-day shoes had been resoled; her white
ruffled petticoats had been lengthened. And then she had been launched,
like a slim little boat, upon the turbulent sea of the city!
Looking back, through a mist of angry tears, Rose-Marie felt her first
moment of homesickness for the friendly little town with its wide,
tree-shaded streets, its lawn parties, and its neighbours; cities, she had
discovered, discourage the art of neighbouring! She felt a pang of
emptiness--she wanted her aunts with their soft, interested eyes, and
their tender hands.
At first the city had thrilled her. But now that she had been in the
Settlement House a month, the thrill was beginning to die away. The
great buildings were still unbelievably high, the crowds of people were
still a strange and mysterious throng, the streets were as colourful as
ever--but life, nevertheless, was beginning to settle into ordinary
channels.
She had thought, at the beginning of her stay there, that the Settlement
House was a hotbed of romance. Every ring of the doorbell had tingled

through her; every step in the hall had made her heart leap, with a
strange quickening movement, into her throat--every shabby man had
been to her a possible tragedy, every threadbare woman had been a case
for charity. She had fluttered from reception-hall to reading-room, and
back again--she had been alert, breathless, eager.
But, with the assignment of regular duties, some of the adventure had
been drained from life. For her these consisted of teaching a club of
girls to sew, of instructing