The Log-Cabin Lady | Page 4

in farmers' families.
The next two years were spent teaching and attending school in Madison. When I was twenty, a gift from father added to my savings and made possible the realization of one of my dreams. I went East for a special summer course.
No tubes shuttled under the Hudson in those days. From the ferry-boat I was suddenly dazzled with the vision of a towering gold dome rising above the four and five-story structures. The New York World building was then the tallest in the world. To me it was also the most stupendous.
Impulsively I turned to a man leaning on the ferry-boat railing beside me. "Is n't that the most wonderful thing in the world?" I gasped.
"Not quite," he answered, and looked at me. His look made me uncomfortable. I could have spoken to any stranger in Madison without embarrassment. It took me about twenty years to understand why a plain, middle-aged woman may chat with a strange man anywhere on earth, while the same conversation cheapens a good-looking young girl.
That summer I met my future husband. He was doing research work at Columbia, and we ran across each other constantly in the library. I fairly lived there, for I found myself, for the first time, among a wealth of books, and I read everything--autobiographies, histories, and novels good and bad.
Tom's family and most of his friends were out of town for July and August. I had never met any one like him, and he had never dreamed of any one like me. We were friends in a week and sweethearts in a month.
Instead of joining his family, Tom stayed in New York and showed me the town. He took me to my first plays. Even now I know that "If I Were King" and "The Idol's Eye", with Frank Daniels, were good.
One day we went driving in an open carriage--his. It was upholstered in soft fawn color, the coachman wore fawn-colored livery, and the horses were beautiful. I was very happy. When we reached my boarding house again, I jumped out. I was used to hopping from spring wagons.
"Please don't do that again, Mary," reproved Tom, very gently. "You might hurt yourself." That amused me, until a look from the coachman suddenly conveyed to me that I had made a /faux pas/. Not long after I hurried off a street car ahead of Tom. This time he said nothing, but I have not forgotten the look on his face.
Over our marvelous meals in marvelous restaurants Tom delighted to get me started about home. Great-Aunt Martha's "personal belongings" amused him hugely. He never tired of the visiting shoemaker, nor of the carpenter who declared indignantly that if we wore decent clothes we wouldn't need our bench seats planed smooth. But some things I never told--about the table napkins, for instance.
We were married in September. Our honeymoon we spent fishing and "roughing it" in the Canadian wilds. I felt at home and blissful. I could cook and fish and make a bed in the open as well as any man. It was heaven; but it left me entirely unprepared for the world I was about to enter.
Not once did Tom say: "Mary, we do this [or that] in our family." He was too happy, and I suppose he never thought of it. As for me, I wasted no worry on his family. They would be kind and sympathetic and simple, like Tom. They would love me and I would love them.
The day after we returned from Canada to New York I spent looking over Tom's "personal belongings"--as great a revelation as Aunt Martha's. His richly bound books, his beautiful furniture, his pictures-- everything was perfect. That night Tom made an announcement: "The family gets home to-night, and they will come to call to-morrow."
"Why don't we go to the station to meet them?" I suggested.
To-day I appreciate better than I could then the gentle tact with which Tom told me his family was strong on "good form", and that the husband's family calls on the bride first. My husband's family came, and I realized that I was a mere baby in a new world--a complicated and not very friendly world, at that. Though they never put it into words, they made me understand, in their cruel, polite way, that Tom was the hope of the family, and his sudden marriage to a stranger had been a great shock, if not more.
The beautiful ease of my husband's women-folk filled me with admiration and despair. I felt guilty of something. I was queer. Their voices, the intonation, even the tilt of their chins, seemed to stamp these new "in-laws" as aristocrats of another race. Yet the same old New England stock that sired their ancestors produced my father's fathers.
Theirs had stayed in Boston,