Young Peoples Pride | Page 8

cautiously into the dining room, sat down at the small sharp-cornered
desk where all the family correspondence was carried on and from
which at least one of the family a day received a grievous blow in the
side while attempting to get around it; lit the shaded light above it and
sat down to read his letter.
It was all Nancy, that letter, from the address, firm and straight as any
promise she ever gave, but graceful as the curl of a vine-stem, gracile
as her hands, with little unsuspected curlicues of humor and fancy
making the stiff "t's" bend and twisting the tails of the "e's," to the little
scrunched-up "Love, Nancy" at the end, as if she had squeezed it there
to make it look unimportant, knowing perfectly that it was the one
really important thing in the letter to him. Both would take it so and be
thankful without greediness or a longing for sentimental "x's," with a
sense that the thing so given must be very rich in little like a jewel, and
always newly rediscovered with a shiver of pure wonder and thanking,
or neither could have borne to have it written so small.
It was Nancy just as some of her clothes were Nancy, soft clear blues
and first appleblossom pinks, the colors of a hardy garden that has no
need for the phoenix-colors of the poppy, because it has passed the
boy's necessity for talking at the top of its voice in scarlet and can hold
in one shaped fastidious petal, faint-flushed with a single trembling of
one serene living dye, all the colors the wise mind knows and the soul
released into its ecstasy has taken for its body invisible, its body of
delight most spotless, as lightning takes bright body of rapture and
agony from the light clear pallor that softens a sky to night.
Oliver read the letter over twice--it was with a satisfaction like that
when body and brain are fed at once, invisibly, by the same lustre of
force, that he put it away. One part of it, though, left him humanly
troubled enough.

"Miss Winters, the old incubus, came around and was soppy to mother
as usual yesterday--the same old business--I might be studying in Paris,
now, instead of teaching drawing to stupid little girls, if I hadn't
'formed' what she will call 'that unfortunate attachment.' Not that I
minded, really, though I was angry enough to bite her when she gave a
long undertaker's list of Penniless Authors' Brides. But it worries
mother--and that worries me--and I wish she wouldn't. Forgive me,
Ollie--and then that Richardson complex of mother's came up again--"
"Waiting hurts, naturally,--and I'm the person who used to wonder
about girls making such a fuss about how soon they got married--but,
then, Ollie, of course, I never really wanted to get married before
myself and somehow that seems to make a difference. But that's the
way things go--and the only thing I wish is that I was the only person to
be hurt. We will, sooner or later, and it will be all the better for our not
having grabbed at once--at least that's what all the old people with no
emotions left are always so anxious to tell you. But they talk about it as
if anybody under thirty-five who wanted to get married was acting like
a three-year-old stealing jam--and that's annoying. And anyhow, it
wouldn't be bad, if I weren't so silly, I suppose--"
"Waiting hurts, naturally," and that casual sentence made him chilly
afraid. For to be in love, though it may force the lover to actions of
impossible courage does not make him in the least courageous of
himself, but only drives him by the one large fear of losing this love
like a soldier pricked from behind by a bayonet over the bodies of
smaller fears, or like a thief who has stolen treasure, and, hearing the
cry at his heels, scales a twenty foot wall with the agile gestures of a
madman. All the old-wives' and young men's club stories of everything
from broken engagements to the Generic and Proven Unfaithfulness of
the Female Sex brushed like dirty cobwebs for an instant across his
mind. They tightened about it like silk threads--a snaky web--and for
one scared instant he had a sense of being smothered in dusty feathers,
whispering together and saying, "When you're a little older and a great
deal wiser. When you've come to my age and know that all girls are the
same. When you realize that long engagements seldom mean marriage.
When--"
He put the cobwebs aside with a strain of will, for he was very tired in
body, and settled himself to write to Nancy. It was not the cobwebs that

hurt. The