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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79250 ***
+
+
+
+
+                                Waiting
+
+
+                             Helen R. Hull
+
+        The Touchstone, vol. 8, Feb. 1921, pp. 346-354, 394-397.
+
+
+
+
+When Anne Stephens, in her early forties, reached the plain to which her
+life had climbed, and looked back along the path she had come, some half
+a dozen incidents stood out clearly defined. In their place along the
+path they had seemed no more prominent than many others. But from her
+final elevation much of the rest was lost, too vague, too hidden in
+underbrush to be visible.
+
+She remembered one still, white winter day. She must have been very
+young, for she was small enough to sit unobserved beneath the window
+bench in her father’s work shop. Content, still and white as the day,
+filled her. She watched the colorless vibrations above the small rusty
+stove in the corner and sniffed the comforting air, thick with fresh
+paint and sawdust. Her father worked above her, humming under his
+breath. That feeling of content must have been his, too. Perhaps hers
+came from him. He was making something, a case for the works of an old
+clock, she thought. Then the door flew open, and crisp, sharp as the
+winter air, her mother stood on the threshold, her blue eyes hard and
+snapping.
+
+“So you’re out here, wasting your day, John Stephens, when you might be
+finding something useful to do!”
+
+Her father stepped away from the bench so that his curly fair hair no
+longer caught the pale sun. He smiled apologetically.
+
+“Put away your rubbish and go help Johnnie in the store. If you can’t
+get work for every day for yourself, the least you could do as a man is
+to be of use to your son! Is that Anne, now, under the bench! Come into
+the house.”
+
+Her mother slammed the door and was gone, but the still content had
+fled. Anne crawled out, shaking the shaving curls from her hair. Her
+father fingered the polished boards on his bench, and then picked up the
+tools.
+
+“It’s the fun there is in making things. The only joy that is good.
+Women don’t know it—the joy of making.”
+
+Then there was a night, how much later Anne did not know, when she woke
+with her heart cold at the sound of her mother sobbing. She crept out to
+the head of the stairs to listen.
+
+“It’s only that she isn’t good enough for you, my Johnnie, my
+first-born! Johnnie, I’ve worked my fingers to the bone for you—slaved
+for you—to give you what you desired—and you have no more love for me,
+your mother!”
+
+And then a voice cajoling, caressing, John, her oldest brother.
+
+“Now, mother, can’t a man take a wife? A man has a mother and he wants a
+wife, too, doesn’t he? Now, mother—”
+
+Anne knew that her mother had thrown her arms about John’s neck. She had
+always known that her mother loved John more than the rest of them.
+
+“Go your way!” her mother’s voice shrilled out. “You’re cruel, stubborn
+and set. Keep her away from me, I tell you. I’ll hate her!”
+
+“Now, mother, you wouldn’t. I’m bringing her home for dinner this
+Sunday, and I’ll show her what a mother I’ve got. You’ll be used to the
+feeling by then.”
+
+“Leave me alone! I’ll have no more to do with you!”
+
+Anne had crawled hastily back to bed, and had listened in the dark to
+the choking, sobbing breath of her mother as she climbed the stairs.
+Sunday John’s sweetheart had come to dinner, and Anne had waited,
+tortured, for something to break. Her mother’s cheeks were bright
+between the smooth bands of her heavy hair, but John had thrown his arm
+over her shoulders and joked at his Marie—“See how you’ll have to work
+to make up to me for leaving such a mother!” And nothing had happened.
+
+Then there was the dreadful time after Pearce, the second brother, had
+come home from the west, where he had gone in search of gold and found
+only the seed of death, so that he lived but three days after he had
+come back. Anne felt the chill darkness of the house; it was as though
+the grave sod had been piled over them all. Her mother, coming into the
+house after the funeral, had stared for a moment at her father. Anne
+remembered her face distinctly. The skin had drawn tightly over the high
+cheekbones and temples, and a gray, dusty pallor lay upon it. She had
+gone into her room and locked the door. How many days had she stayed
+there? Anne heard her father begging outside the door, begging against
+that awful silence within. Finally he had cried, crouching on the floor,
+cried like a little child; then he had called out, “Unless you come out,
+Kate, I will bring my axe and chop down this damned door!”
+
+Anne remembered the slow opening of the door, the dreadful pause while
+her mother stood above her father, staring down at him. She had said,
+“If part of my body was torn off, you would give it time to heal. And
+you can not let me be—” Suddenly her father had taken her mother in his
+arms, and she was crying, too. Anne had run away, out of the house.
+
+Another thing she remembered. She had been sitting in a crotch of the
+old apple tree at the side of the house, sewing for a doll. She had a
+family of dolls whom she tended carefully, without enthusiasm. As she
+sewed, a wonderful idea had seized her, gripping her heart with its
+splendor until she was dizzy. She had climbed down from the tree and
+gone in quest of her mother. She had found her in her low rocker,
+sewing, her eyes shining. One of her rare, light moods was upon her.
+Anne stood in front of her, trembling, eager.
+
+“Mother, will you—that is, I want—”
+
+“Well? Don’t stammer.” How fast that little pricking sound of the needle
+ran!
+
+“Will you tell me, please, where I can get a baby? Of my own? I must
+have a baby.”
+
+“What are you talking about?” Her mother dropped her sewing, wary
+suspicion in her eyes.
+
+“I want a baby—” Anne found it difficult to say more.
+
+“Who has been telling you things you shouldn’t know? Come here!” Anne
+had shrunk away. “What are you talking about?”
+
+“Nothing—I just thought it—please, mother!” She winced under her
+mother’s sharp grasp.
+
+“Have the children—” Her mother sighed. “Oh, you are so stubborn! Don’t
+shut your mouth that way! What has been said to you about babies?”
+
+“Nothing! Nothing!” Anne was hot with shame now, an inexplicable,
+harrowing shame.
+
+“Well, think nothing of them, then. You’re a baby yourself. Don’t let me
+hear you talking of such things.”
+
+Anne had played no more with dolls.
+
+One day at school the teacher had said, “Now, children, let’s all think
+what we want to be when we are grown up.” She had gone round the class
+until she came to Anne. “Anne, do you want to be a milliner or a
+teacher, too?” Anne shook her head. “No, I want to be a mother.” The
+sound of the laughter, sudden like thunder, rattled against her still.
+She had never spoken her desire again.
+
+After that came a stretch of years in which she made two discoveries.
+One was the magic of color and form; she could capture it with brush and
+paint, and the other was the extraordinary wonder of her own body.
+During the Christmas week of her last year in school her class had a
+sleigh ride. She had gone reluctantly. The drive was a blur of
+sensations: chill air tingling in her nostrils, the smell and crackle of
+hay in the huge bobs, sharp bells on the horses, the crunch under the
+runners, the yellow glow from the swinging lanterns. Songs and shouts
+and giggles, and then, on the way home, silence, with low whispers,
+until the boy next Anne had slipped his arm about her and pulled her
+close against him. Strange, maddening thrill, all ecstasy and sweet
+shame. She had never seen the boy again; he was a cousin of someone,
+visiting. But the thrill became part of her dreams.
+
+There was one dream. Sometimes she could cling to it when she had
+wakened. Sometimes she knew only from the still, white peace with which
+she woke that she had dreamed it. She lay in a great meadow which curved
+against a blue sky under the sun. No wind stirred. She lay there, not as
+herself, but as the meadow, part of the quiet, waiting soil.
+
+In March of her year at the normal school, Anne met Robert Duffy. He had
+come over from the university for a short series of lectures. Anne had
+been unruffled by the comments upon him; he was the youngest man on the
+staff of the university, with a reputation of brilliance and the
+forecast of a great future. When he walked out on the platform, Anne, in
+her corner, leaned forward, the pupils of her eyes dilating. He was thin
+and dark, with hasty gestures, and a hostile eagerness sprang from his
+voice and eyes.
+
+At the end of his second lecture, Anne waited at the edge of the crowd
+about the platform. She proffered some question, simple, almost
+irrelevant, and as he answered her, stood near him, her brow, her
+beautiful throat, her relaxed fingers, touched with subtle humility.
+After that he watched for her, and Anne’s days leaped up like a ship at
+the flick of the wind. Robert Duffy may have thought he drove her down
+the seas before him. Anne knew.
+
+He had not wished to marry so immediately. He was working for a degree,
+was developing a new chemical theory. But Anne, lifting his hands to
+clasp the pillar of her throat, had said, calmly,
+
+“Why wait? You are tired and nervous now for someone to take care of
+you.”
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+In April Anne was summoned home. Her mother had died suddenly. Her
+father wept for her as the young girl he had loved, and Anne, looking at
+the pale oval face between the sleek, dark wings of her hair, saw her
+for the first time as a woman of passion and force caught in too narrow
+an orbit.
+
+The father went to live with John and his wife, and in June Anne was
+married. She remembered only one thing her father had said.
+
+“I thought it might be, now, Annie, you would make an artist.”
+
+She had smiled and gone swiftly on with her preparations. Her mother’s
+death had foreshortened life for her, until she felt at times a fear
+that she too might die with her desire unreached.
+
+One of the next years there were two moments with sharp outlines; the
+rest blurred into full tide of passionate tenderness, fear, absorption.
+One moment was at night in that first summer. She and Robert walked
+along the river just outside the little college town, silent, until
+Robert turned on her.
+
+“Where are you! I can’t reach you,” he had cried out. “I am afraid of
+you! You drown me, and I never touch you. What are you doing with me?”
+
+She was glad of the darkness which hid the sudden fierce contraction of
+her body, hid the terror and hatred that leaped within her. But she had
+laughed softly and said, “You are tired. You work too hard,” until he
+lay with his head against her breast, her fingers in his hair, while she
+stared with sombre, heavy eyes at the pale glow on the water at her
+feet. She had been shamed at the coil of emotion his cry had struck, so
+that she had thrust the moment out of memory.
+
+The other sharp moment was shortly before the birth of her second child.
+She lay on the couch in the sitting room, staring dully at the dingy
+carpet, the litter of papers on the desk. Margaret, who slept in her
+arms, had stirred, and the touch of that silky head in the curve under
+Anne’s chin drew her up from her apathy. Robert came to the door, and
+she knew the conflict she had waited for was upon her.
+
+“I understand you have talked with Samuels,” Robert began. “You might
+have said so—all this time!”
+
+“I thought you would wish to make your decision yourself.”
+
+Robert slumped into a chair near the desk. She thought for the first
+time that she knew how he would look as an old man, the eagerness
+drained out of his dark face.
+
+“Samuels told you his offer, of course? I harness my brains to his
+chemical plant for life.”
+
+“He said there would be opportunity for you to carry on any experiments
+you wished.” Her voice trailed off wearily, as though she had no spirit
+for a fight.
+
+“You’d like me to take it?”
+
+“Only if you wish.” She pressed that small, silky head against her
+throat.
+
+“You know what I want! To go on my own path—” He stopped.
+
+“Have you thought of the children?”
+
+“You give me small chance to think of anything else!”
+
+She turned her face away from him, her eyes closed. Presently he rose
+heavily.
+
+“Very well. Have it your way.”
+
+“No, Robert. You must decide. Are you so sure your own path leads
+anywhere?” She saw in his eyes the great weight of her own passive,
+inert body, of her gray immobility.
+
+“I was, once. Anne, I don’t mean to be selfish—” He flung out his hands,
+with their slender, nervous fingers, in a limp, impotent gesture.
+“Samuels’ offer is profitable. I am taking it.”
+
+“Why so tragic, Robert?” Her words hurried slightly. “Even if you leave
+your university for someone who appreciates your value, you’ll still
+have time for your own work, evenings and all.”
+
+“Turn off an idea after dinner!” He broke off into an ugly little laugh.
+“Have you no comprehension of the way creative work must be done? How
+you wait and wait while it grows within you? You can’t just do it
+forcibly overnight. But I said I was taking Samuels’ offer. I’ll become
+his well-paid consulting chemist.”
+
+When he had gone, Anne laid her lips gently against the fragrant warm
+crease of Margaret’s neck, her eyes closed to hide their triumph.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+After that, ten years in which Anne had been as God walking in his
+garden. Her children were the miracle, herself extended beyond her own
+narrow limits, the work of her flesh and her spirit. In them she was
+fulfilled, and in their growth she saw her own work. Her passion was not
+that of the mother so much as that of the artist. She could have created
+pictures; instead she chose to create human beings. Robert begged her to
+spend less time with the children, to leave them, and she brushed his
+words carelessly aside.
+
+Almost overnight, it seemed, Jamie, the youngest, was four,
+sandy-haired, chunky, jolly, and Margaret, fourteen, was a tall, slim
+thing with dark eyes and hasty gestures like her father. She developed
+stubborn, reticent moments, against which Anne thrust herself vainly.
+
+Anne’s first jealousy licked through her veins when she saw Margaret,
+after a long afternoon curled up with a book, silent, almost sullen at
+Anne’s approach, fling aside book and mood at her father’s homecoming.
+Anne heard them in the library, Margaret’s light voice chording with
+Robert’s tone. She went to the door, shaken with a forlorn desire to beg
+them to admit her, but pride held her outside.
+
+The sound of those voices, however, stood out as the first, faint rumble
+in Anne’s clear sky. “It was ridiculous of Robert to take the child so
+seriously, to talk with her as though she were a grown person,” she
+thought; she added hastily, a surface thought, “Of course, I want the
+children to be real friends with their father. It’s only that he’s
+spoiling her!”
+
+Margaret came in from school one day, her eyes alight.
+
+“Mother, the girls are going to Miss Truesdale’s camp this summer. Could
+I go?”
+
+Anne asked which girls were going, and added, gently, “Mother would
+rather have her girl with her.”
+
+“Oh, mother!” cried Margaret, and then was silent, her whole slight
+figure stiffening into protest.
+
+“Wouldn’t you rather stay with mother?”
+
+Margaret lifted her dark eyes, and Anne had a sudden impulse to seize
+her, to shake out of her the hostility that lay within her glance. But
+she said, with her persistent gentleness, “At any rate, I should have to
+know more of the camp before I could decide.”
+
+At the sight of Margaret rushing down to meet her father that evening,
+Anne’s decision clicked into shape. She would send the child to the
+camp. It would, after all, be excellent training, with the regularity of
+the life, and all. Margaret had been growing too fast and perhaps
+studying too hard. She was over-emotional.
+
+Margaret came back after two months in the mountains, brown, slim,
+apparently docile. Anne had moved her household to the shore, near
+enough town so that Robert could spend week-ends with them. The second
+week of Margaret’s return Anne discovered that her casual manner of
+wandering down the road in the early afternoon had a definite motive;
+she went to intercept the postman.
+
+Anne’s first thought was one of horror. Had a silly flirtation started.
+Surely Margaret was too young for that! She was only a little girl.
+
+The next afternoon Anne followed with swift, silent feet, when she saw
+Margaret start down the lane. She found her on a bench near the tennis
+court, her dark head and slim brown throat bent over a letter.
+
+“Oh, she is beautiful,” thought Anne, “this young girl-child of mine! I
+won’t have her touched—not yet—”
+
+At her feet on the gravel, Margaret crumpled the letter into her pocket
+and flung back her head, scarlet running into the tan of her cheeks.
+
+“A letter?” said Anne, as she sat down beside Margaret. “How nice!”
+
+Margaret slipped to the end of the bench; in her bright eyes something
+fluttered desperately, seeking escape.
+
+“Who is writing to you?” Anne kept her voice gentle, in spite of the
+inflexible impulse behind her words. As Margaret rose, poised at the
+edge of flight, she added, “If I weren’t sure of you, Margie, I should
+think you were hiding something you were ashamed of!” She saw the girl
+flinch.
+
+“It’s nothing,” she protested. “Just from a friend, from Miss Innsmere
+at the camp.”
+
+“Won’t you show me her letter?” Anne sat very quiet. She stretched out
+one firm white hand toward Margaret, and her face showed nothing of the
+sharp fear that circled within her. Was Margaret lying to her? “You see,
+mother doesn’t know her.”
+
+“It’s just a letter to me.” The girl’s hands clenched over her pocket
+and she retreated a step.
+
+Anne rose deliberately and laid her fingers on the girl’s wrist. She was
+taller than Margaret; the child was a reed she could bend in her
+fingers. But the quiver of the wrist under her fingers disturbed her,
+and unexpectedly, she was aghast at the flame of defiance that leapt in
+the dark pupils of the girl’s eyes.
+
+In that moment Margaret wrenched her wrist free, and with a fierce
+“Oh-h—” was running across the tennis court toward the shore.
+
+At luncheon Anne felt Margaret’s eyes touch her warily; she paid no
+heed. Once when Margaret was a mere baby she had been stubborn, and Anne
+by quiet ignoring of her had brought her swiftly to her arms in hot
+tears.
+
+Then she knew that she must see that letter. Quickly she went along the
+hall to Margaret’s room. She must protect the child. There lay the
+child’s dress, but her fingers found no letter in the pocket. She stood
+in front of the little white desk, with a faint smile at the tiny yellow
+shells laid in a row along the top, and the flat, bleached sand-dollars,
+one at each corner of the blue blotter. Just a child, after all! Like a
+distant echo Anne felt the slow rhythm of the days before Margaret’s
+birth, when all her life had turned inward, dream-woven, to the making
+of this child.
+
+There in one of the pigeonholes were the letters. Anne hesitated.
+Margaret need never know; there seemed no other way. She brushed aside
+the strange qualm and drew out the letters, several of them, addressed
+to Miss Margaret Duffy, in a bold, square hand. Freda Innsmere,
+Truesdale Camp, on the flap. At least the child hadn’t lied. She had the
+folded sheet in her fingers when behind her she heard a little strangled
+cry, and turning, she faced Margaret. She made an instinctive motion of
+concealment, but the envelope slipped to the floor. For an instant, as
+the wide, incredulous horror of Margaret’s gaze travelled from that
+white square up to her mother’s face, Anne shared that horror, as though
+she saw her guilty reflection in the girl’s dark stormy eyes. Only for
+an instant. Then she spoke, crisply.
+
+“I am sorry, Margaret. But if you insist upon concealment, it is
+necessary for me to do this.”
+
+Margaret stood motionless, a little figure of bronze, save for her quick
+breathing.
+
+“Perhaps you came back to hide these letters?” Anne added cruelly. She
+saw the adorable young curves of shoulder and knee melt from bronze to
+trembling flesh. “Unless you are ashamed, Margie, why do you hide them
+from mother?” Her voice filled again with its soft, rich tones. “Come,
+sit here beside me, and tell me about this new friend.”
+
+Margaret shrank away from her outstretched hands, retreated along the
+end of the bed, clinging to the footrail, her knuckles showing white
+through the tan.
+
+“Oh, you shouldn’t touch them!” she cried out. “They are mine—and you
+shouldn’t touch them!”
+
+“Margaret, dear, mother wants only what is best for you. You know that.
+This woman has made you secretive, ashamed.”
+
+“I’m not ashamed!” Margaret’s lips struggled with tears.
+
+Anne lifted the sheet and unfolded it. With a swift movement, Margaret
+was in front of her.
+
+“If you read that—I—I’ll hate you!” she cried.
+
+Anne dropped the letter and pulled the girl into her warm embrace.
+
+“Margie, little Margie! You are my daughter! Flesh of my flesh, spirit
+of my spirit! I won’t have a stranger standing between us!” She felt the
+child’s tears on her throat, felt her body stiffen within her arms. “I
+shall not read those letters against your will. But you will bring them
+to me.”
+
+She went slowly from the room. She turned at the door; Margaret stood
+motionless, her head averted. Something in her posture tore at Anne,
+like a rending of flesh from flesh. A strange fear hurried at her heels
+down the hall. Later she knew what that pain and fear had been; worse
+than birth-anguish, they were the labor pains of her new knowledge.
+
+Anne took her sewing down to the screened porch. She had discovered
+years earlier that whenever life snarled itself up, she had only to sit
+down with something in her hands, something requiring attention, and
+gradually, without effort on her part, things would smooth themselves
+out. So she sat now, her fingers busy with bright orange wool with which
+she embroidered a blouse for Margaret. Finally she heard Jamie wake, and
+scramble off in search of his brother.
+
+Then she heard within the house Margaret’s voice, clear with delight;
+
+“Father! I didn’t know you were coming today!”
+
+Anne laid aside her sewing with a secret faint dismay, which she
+banished instantly. She found Robert in the hall; Margaret, hanging over
+the banister, drew back at Anne’s approach.
+
+“Hello, Anne.” Robert kissed the cool cheek Anne offered. “The city was
+so beastly I came out a day early. Had your swim, Margie? Fine, I want
+to see that new dive you wrote about.”
+
+“I’ll wait for you down by the boathouse,” said Margaret, and she
+whisked down the stairs and out of the door.
+
+“Don’t let her stay in the water too long, Robert,” said Anne. “She
+seems tired. And bring the boys back when you come.”
+
+Anne went slowly back to her sewing. A faint disturbance lingered under
+her ignoring concentration on the orange stitches.
+
+Dinner was rather silent, in spite of Anne’s gentle and insistent talk.
+Margaret and her father had come in just in time to dress. Margaret had
+twisted her damp hair on the crown of her head and bound it with a green
+ribbon. That, with her green linen dress, gave her small pointed face
+with its winged brows the look of a startled dryad. Anne glanced at her
+often; there hung about her a cloud of excitement, like light over
+water. Once she found Robert, too, eyeing her speculatively.
+
+When Anne came down from Jamie’s goodnight she found the porch deserted.
+Little Robert came back presently, somewhat disconsolate because Dad and
+Margie were taking a long walk and didn’t want him. He sat beside Anne,
+telling her in his shrill young voice of all he had done since morning.
+She sent him to bed finally, and at his summons, climbed the stairs to
+bid him goodnight. As she descended she heard Margaret and her father at
+the door.
+
+“Goodnight, Bobs,” Margaret was saying. “And you’ll tell her? Oh, Bobs!”
+
+“If you’ll promise to go straight to sleep and get unstrung a little.
+Goodnight, Margie.”
+
+Margaret’s flight up the stairs carried her past her mother before she
+saw her.
+
+“Goodnight, dear,” called Anne.
+
+Margaret hesitated, whirled, came back the few steps, lifting her face
+mutely toward Anne.
+
+“Goodnight, mother’s little girl.” Anne kissed her wistfully. “Sleep
+well.” Again at Margaret’s hasty withdrawal, she felt that strange fear.
+But she went calmly down to the porch, where Robert waited.
+
+“Have you time to talk awhile?” he asked abruptly, and she heard in his
+voice an excitement like Margaret’s. He waited until she had settled
+herself in a low chair, and then dropped opposite her against a pillar.
+He lighted a cigar, the light glowing within his fingers.
+
+“Are you very tired this week?” she asked.
+
+“Nothing unusual,” he dismissed her inquiry bruskly. “I want to talk
+about Margaret.”
+
+Had the child gone to her father, tale-bearing! That would be
+unendurable.
+
+“She’s been telling me things—” Robert paused.
+
+“She didn’t tell you about her letters?” Anne spoke with frigid scorn.
+
+“Letters? No.”
+
+“Well?” Anne waited, the autumn dusk wrapping her in outward
+tranquillity.
+
+“The beginning, I suppose, is a call I had last week. I thought I
+wouldn’t write about it. A Miss Innsmere came into the office one day.
+She was at this camp where you sent Margaret, a dancing teacher. Quite a
+person, too, I judge, young, vigorous—a Danish girl. She came in about
+Margaret. Thinks the child has a talent for dancing.”
+
+“Why did she go to you?” Anne found it difficult to keep her voice from
+bristling.
+
+“Because you weren’t in town, I suppose. She seemed to think we wouldn’t
+take to the idea, and so she came to talk it over.”
+
+“What idea?” Anne’s antagonism rippled in her tone.
+
+“Why, of Margaret’s dancing. She thinks she ought to study—Margie, I
+mean. On the side, for a few years. Then she’ll know whether it’s the
+thing. And Margie wants to.”
+
+“You mean study dancing professionally?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Ridiculous! I hope you told her we had our own plans for Margaret.”
+
+“Now, wait a minute, Anne. You see, Margaret has been talking to me,
+too. She wants to do it.”
+
+“You haven’t encouraged her!”
+
+“I have listened to her, Anne.”
+
+“Why hasn’t she come to me about this?” Anne shut her hands together in
+her lap. The letters! They were about this scheme!
+
+“Can’t you see? She is afraid you will disapprove. Afraid she can’t make
+you see how much she wishes to try it.”
+
+“She knows it is absurd, then, if she is so sure of my disapproval.”
+
+“Is it, Anne? Why?”
+
+“A public dancer! That child? Are you mad, Robert?”
+
+“Margaret said to me tonight, and she didn’t sound childlike, that she
+thought she had to dance. She studied last year, you know, at school.
+She says—and you know how shy she is with words—that it is the only
+thing she loves. That she can say things she feels and thinks that way.
+That she feels as though she has just been waiting until she found this
+out. We walked down through the Black Firs tonight, and she danced for
+me, a dance she had made for the trees, she said. Anne, it was the
+loveliest dream I ever saw!”
+
+Anne was silent. Her hands moved together up to her heart, as if to hold
+close the edges of a gaping wound. After the grief of the afternoon
+Margaret had taken her father away to dance for him. Margaret was afraid
+to come to her.
+
+“You know, Anne,” went on Robert eagerly, “I have a strong belief that a
+desire like that is—well, sort of sacred. That we haven’t any business
+to stand in the way. Don’t you think so?”
+
+“She’s only a child,” said Anne coldly. “She doesn’t really know what
+she wants.”
+
+“I’m not so sure. I knew what I wanted earlier than that. Didn’t you? I
+didn’t get it.” His voice dropped wrily. “That’s no reason why Margaret
+shouldn’t.”
+
+“Surely, Robert, you don’t believe what you are saying—that a child
+knows better what it needs than its mother—its parents can know?”
+
+“Ah, Anne, we don’t know much! If this isn’t the right thing, she has
+plenty of time to find it out.” Robert pulled himself to his feet, drew
+a chair near Anne’s, and seated himself. “You think, probably, that I
+don’t appreciate how this makes you feel. Shall I tell you? You are
+feeling as though a picture you had started to paint suddenly walked off
+your canvas!”
+
+He puffed strongly at his cigar, and the momentary glow touched into
+relief his cheekbones and temples, lighted his eyes with a glimmer of
+their old eagerness. They were Margaret’s eyes! The same pointed fold of
+eyelids, the same dark fire. What had he said? A picture, walking off
+the canvas—
+
+“I wonder why I said picture,” he went on slowly, out of the darkness.
+“I must have been thinking of that career you might have taken. You
+chose children instead, and human beings aren’t so docile as paint and
+canvas, are they?”
+
+“Why discuss that?” Anne moved impatiently. “You must admit that I have
+no interests, no concern, except the good of the children. That’s why I
+won’t consent to this plan. You’ve been wheedled into it by a strange
+woman and a child! I—I think it rather unjust of you to encourage
+Margaret without consulting me.”
+
+“Don’t be hasty, Anne. There are so many things I’d like to say
+tonight.” He flicked his cigar end over the railing. “You’ve no idea how
+much thinking I have done this week. It began after Miss Innsmere’s
+call. Then young Carsdale came in. Remember him? That boy at the
+university? He has carried through several of the things we started—and
+more of his own. He was telling me about them. When he left, he grinned
+at me and said, ‘They’ve got you properly domesticated and successful,
+haven’t they, Duffy?’ He was a little shabby in that gilt-edged office
+where I sit all day.”
+
+Anne caught her breath sharply.
+
+“You are suggesting, I suppose, that I am to blame for
+your—commercialization?” she asked, incredulity in her cool tone.
+
+“I want to show you how I feel about Margie. I know why she is afraid to
+come to you with her desires. You are indomitable, Anne. You are like
+the earth itself. No one sees its motion, but no one can stop it and
+everyone is whirled along with it. Sometimes I have known that you chose
+me—shall we say to father your children for you? Sometimes I have
+pretended I was a free agent. Sometimes I have been sorry you didn’t
+devour me utterly—the female spider has a neat way with her spouse, you
+know! I shouldn’t say these things now, when it is all too late, except
+for Margaret. She doesn’t want to be eaten. The boys are still too young
+to mind.”
+
+“How can you sit there and say those things!” Anne’s voice was thick
+with whirling rage. “As though I were a monster—”
+
+“Anne, dear, you insist upon misunderstanding me. You have been a very
+beautiful mother. That I know. I am not blaming you that I am prosperous
+and respectable instead of lean and hollow-eyed from wrestling with
+ideas and schemes. There was at least a motive there. The children did
+need food and shelter. But Margaret is no longer a baby. She must have
+what she wants.”
+
+Something snapped in Anne, and a terrible grinding pain, a physical
+anguish seized her. She huddled back in her chair, her hands pressing
+against her breasts.
+
+“Oh, you can’t know!” she cried. “You think I am selfish, devouring! You
+can’t know! Before she was born I dreamed of her—beauty and health and
+loveliness. And since she was a baby I have watched her, worked to make
+her what she is. A dancer—in public—You have tried to get her away from
+me! You have tried—”
+
+“Anne! You know that is a lie! I have been humble enough that she has
+cared for me. When I saw her dancing tonight I was jealous to frenzy
+that others might watch that. But if she wishes it, who are we to stand
+in her way?”
+
+“She doesn’t know. She doesn’t need to dance—to do anything! I had
+planned so many things for years to come. Surely if I have made her what
+she is, I have a right to decide what she shall be!”
+
+“Made her?” Robert sat forward; Anne could see his shoulders hunched
+against the dim light through the window behind him. “We like to think
+that, don’t we? Instead—I was a tool for you, and you, even you, Anne,
+were a tool for—what? An obscure drive of peoples behind us, craving
+embodiment. What have you made about her? When she was born you felt you
+had created her. What had you done, but wait, wait, while she grew?” He
+was silent. On the shore below them Anne heard the steady rhythm of the
+surf, like a great crowd shouting in the distance.
+
+What had she done but wait? But wait? The words slipped into the rhythm
+of the surf.
+
+“You know—” Robert’s voice dropped into a puzzled wonder. “That’s what
+all creative work seems to amount to. You wait. You think you are making
+something, but you only wait while it grows.” Another silence. “I have
+filled my days so full I had no time for that slow waiting. Do you see,
+Anne? We are nothing but the soil—lying fallow under the sun.”
+
+Anne sat very still. The dreadful rending within her had ceased, and a
+heavy, lethargic cessation of pain, like that after childbirth, brooded
+over her. Incredibly there hung about her a moment of white peace, like
+that of her old dream, in which she lay in the great windless meadow
+curving against the sky, part of the waiting soil.
+
+Robert had spoken the truth. Margaret’s struggles had been only an
+inarticulate expression of the same truth. It had been as though the
+soil tried to drag under its warm darkness a flower, opening above.
+
+Robert rose and stood near her.
+
+“That’s all, Anne.” She felt his fingers brush her shoulder. “After all,
+you are an artist. Perhaps you should have chosen otherwise than
+children for your work.”
+
+Anne could not speak. Humility, a strange garment for her, enclosed her.
+
+“It is late. Perhaps tomorrow—after you have slept on it.” He pulled his
+tone back to an ordinary level. “You are cold?” She had shivered under
+his fingers.
+
+“No. Only stripped.” Her laugh trembled into a sob.
+
+“Won’t you come in, now?”
+
+“Not yet, please.” A moment of hesitating silence, and Robert moved
+toward the door. “Robert—” Anne found words with cumbersome difficulty.
+“It may be—that tomorrow I can thank you.” She saw him draw his body
+erect, as though a weight had dropped from him. “Goodnight.”
+
+She sat for a long time, like one who accustoms himself to the thin,
+clear air of a mountain top. She had reached the plateau from which she
+could see the winding of the path she had followed. When, at last, she
+climbed silently to her room, she slept with the exhaustion which
+follows bodily suffering.
+
+She woke early, lying for a time with her eyes closed. Then she rose,
+and with a curious feeling of exaltation, as though she prepared herself
+for a sacrament, she wound her long braids of dark hair about her head
+and bathed. She could hear Jamie and little Rob, their tongues
+clattering in small boy early morning style, but no one else seemed
+awake. She dressed carefully, choosing a dull blue crepe morning gown
+that Margaret had always liked. Then she went to Margaret’s door, and
+knocked. After a silent moment she pushed it ajar.
+
+Margaret stirred sleepily, her face flushed and young in a cloud of
+dusky hair. At the sight of Anne she woke instantly, and the wistful
+alertness in her eyes wrenched at Anne’s poise.
+
+She sat down on the edge of the bed, her hands clasped, her eyes
+caressing the sweet curve of the child’s body beneath the cover.
+
+“Margie, dear,” she said, “Father talked over with me your plans—” She
+saw terror leap in the girl’s eyes, but she kept her voice serene. “I
+shall be glad to have you study dancing. Will you, some day, show me
+some of your own dances?”
+
+Margaret’s eyes widened, and a flame ran into her cheeks.
+
+“Oh!” she cried. “Oh! I thought you wouldn’t like it—” She sat up
+against her pillow. “I must tell you—” a bewildered shame in her
+face—“that I burned up those letters yesterday. They—they were just
+about the dancing.”
+
+“I am sorry about the letters.” Anne’s serenity had a tinge of
+piteousness. “Margaret, can you understand how hard it is to find your
+baby has grown up? I am sorry.”
+
+Margaret brushed away the episode impetuously.
+
+“You really mean that you are glad about the dancing?” Her slim hand
+moved shyly along the blanket toward her mother. “You are glad?”
+
+The reticent caress winged into Anne’s heart.
+
+“Yes,” she said steadily. “I wanted to tell you, to begin your day!”
+
+She stood for an instant beside the bed, before she turned to leave. In
+that instant she had her vision of further waiting; a waiting into which
+Margaret might, some day, return.
+
+
+
+
+                          Transcriber’s Notes
+
+
+Transcribed from the first publication in: The Touchstone, vol. 8, Feb.
+1921, pp. 346-354, 394-397.
+
+New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public
+domain.
+
+The original spelling and punctuation were preserved. Minor typesetting
+mistakes were silently corrected.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79250 ***
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+   <!-- TITLE="Waiting" -->
+   <!-- AUTHOR="Helen R. Hull" -->
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+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79250 ***</div>
+
+
+<div class="frontmatter chapter">
+<a id="page-346" class="pagenum" title="346"></a>
+<h1 class="title">
+Waiting
+</h1>
+
+<p class="aut">
+Helen R. Hull
+</p>
+
+<p class="src">
+The Touchstone, vol. 8, Feb. 1921, pp. 346-354, 394-397.
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+When Anne Stephens, in her early forties, reached the
+plain to which her life had climbed, and looked back
+along the path she had come, some half a dozen incidents
+stood out clearly defined. In their place along
+the path they had seemed no more prominent than
+many others. But from her final elevation much of
+the rest was lost, too vague, too hidden in underbrush to be visible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She remembered one still, white winter day. She must have been
+very young, for she was small enough to sit unobserved beneath the
+window bench in her father’s work shop. Content, still and white as
+the day, filled her. She watched the colorless vibrations above the
+small rusty stove in the corner and sniffed the comforting air, thick
+with fresh paint and sawdust. Her father worked above her, humming
+under his breath. That feeling of content must have been his,
+too. Perhaps hers came from him. He was making something, a case
+for the works of an old clock, she thought. Then the door flew open,
+and crisp, sharp as the winter air, her mother stood on the threshold,
+her blue eyes hard and snapping.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So you’re out here, wasting your day, John Stephens, when you
+might be finding something useful to do!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her father stepped away from the bench so that his curly fair hair
+no longer caught the pale sun. He smiled apologetically.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Put away your rubbish and go help Johnnie in the store. If you
+can’t get work for every day for yourself, the least you could do as a
+man is to be of use to your son! Is that Anne, now, under the bench!
+Come into the house.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her mother slammed the door and was gone, but the still content
+had fled. Anne crawled out, shaking the shaving curls from her hair.
+Her father fingered the polished boards on his bench, and then
+picked up the tools.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s the fun there is in making things. The only joy that is good.
+Women don’t know it—the joy of making.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then there was a night, how much later Anne did not know, when
+she woke with her heart cold at the sound of her mother sobbing. She
+crept out to the head of the stairs to listen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s only that she isn’t good enough for you, my Johnnie, my
+first-born! Johnnie, I’ve worked my fingers to the bone for you—slaved
+for you—to give you what you desired—and you have no more
+love for me, your mother!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then a voice cajoling, caressing, John, her oldest brother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now, mother, can’t a man take a wife? A man has a mother
+and he wants a wife, too, doesn’t he? Now, mother—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-347" class="pagenum" title="347"></a>
+Anne knew that her mother had thrown her arms about John’s
+neck. She had always known that her mother loved John more than
+the rest of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Go your way!” her mother’s voice shrilled out. “You’re cruel,
+stubborn and set. Keep her away from me, I tell you. I’ll hate her!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now, mother, you wouldn’t. I’m bringing her home for dinner
+this Sunday, and I’ll show her what a mother I’ve got. You’ll be
+used to the feeling by then.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Leave me alone! I’ll have no more to do with you!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Anne had crawled hastily back to bed, and had listened in the
+dark to the choking, sobbing breath of her mother as she climbed the
+stairs. Sunday John’s sweetheart had come to dinner, and Anne had
+waited, tortured, for something to break. Her mother’s cheeks were
+bright between the smooth bands of her heavy hair, but John had
+thrown his arm over her shoulders and joked at his Marie—“See how
+you’ll have to work to make up to me for leaving such a mother!”
+And nothing had happened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then there was the dreadful time after Pearce, the second brother,
+had come home from the west, where he had gone in search of gold
+and found only the seed of death, so that he lived but three days after
+he had come back. Anne felt the chill darkness of the house; it was
+as though the grave sod had been piled over them all. Her mother,
+coming into the house after the funeral, had stared for a moment at
+her father. Anne remembered her face distinctly. The skin had
+drawn tightly over the high cheekbones and temples, and a gray, dusty
+pallor lay upon it. She had gone into her room and locked the door.
+How many days had she stayed there? Anne heard her father begging
+outside the door, begging against that awful silence within. Finally
+he had cried, crouching on the floor, cried like a little child; then
+he had called out, “Unless you come out, Kate, I will bring my axe and
+chop down this damned door!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Anne remembered the slow opening of the door, the dreadful
+pause while her mother stood above her father, staring down at him.
+She had said, “If part of my body was torn off, you would give it time
+to heal. And you can not let me be—” Suddenly her father had
+taken her mother in his arms, and she was crying, too. Anne had
+run away, out of the house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another thing she remembered. She had been sitting in a crotch
+of the old apple tree at the side of the house, sewing for a doll. She
+had a family of dolls whom she tended carefully, without enthusiasm.
+As she sewed, a wonderful idea had seized her, gripping her heart with
+<a id="page-348" class="pagenum" title="348"></a>
+its splendor until she was dizzy. She had climbed down from the tree
+and gone in quest of her mother. She had found her in her low
+rocker, sewing, her eyes shining. One of her rare, light moods was
+upon her. Anne stood in front of her, trembling, eager.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mother, will you—that is, I want—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well? Don’t stammer.” How fast that little pricking sound
+of the needle ran!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Will you tell me, please, where I can get a baby? Of my own?
+I must have a baby.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What are you talking about?” Her mother dropped her sewing,
+wary suspicion in her eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I want a baby—” Anne found it difficult to say more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Who has been telling you things you shouldn’t know? Come
+here!” Anne had shrunk away. “What are you talking about?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nothing—I just thought it—please, mother!” She winced
+under her mother’s sharp grasp.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Have the children—” Her mother sighed. “Oh, you are so
+stubborn! Don’t shut your mouth that way! What has been said to
+you about babies?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nothing! Nothing!” Anne was hot with shame now, an inexplicable,
+harrowing shame.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, think nothing of them, then. You’re a baby yourself.
+Don’t let me hear you talking of such things.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Anne had played no more with dolls.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One day at school the teacher had said, “Now, children, let’s all
+think what we want to be when we are grown up.” She had gone
+round the class until she came to Anne. “Anne, do you want to be a
+milliner or a teacher, too?” Anne shook her head. “No, I want to
+be a mother.” The sound of the laughter, sudden like thunder, rattled
+against her still. She had never spoken her desire again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After that came a stretch of years in which she made two discoveries.
+One was the magic of color and form; she could capture it with
+brush and paint, and the other was the extraordinary wonder of her
+own body. During the Christmas week of her last year in school her
+class had a sleigh ride. She had gone reluctantly. The drive was a
+blur of sensations: chill air tingling in her nostrils, the smell and
+crackle of hay in the huge bobs, sharp bells on the horses, the crunch
+under the runners, the yellow glow from the swinging lanterns. Songs
+and shouts and giggles, and then, on the way home, silence, with low
+whispers, until the boy next Anne had slipped his arm about her and
+pulled her close against him. Strange, maddening thrill, all ecstasy
+<a id="page-349" class="pagenum" title="349"></a>
+and sweet shame. She had never seen the boy again; he was a cousin
+of someone, visiting. But the thrill became part of her dreams.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was one dream. Sometimes she could cling to it when she
+had wakened. Sometimes she knew only from the still, white peace
+with which she woke that she had dreamed it. She lay in a great
+meadow which curved against a blue sky under the sun. No wind
+stirred. She lay there, not as herself, but as the meadow, part of the
+quiet, waiting soil.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In March of her year at the normal school, Anne met Robert
+Duffy. He had come over from the university for a short series of
+lectures. Anne had been unruffled by the comments upon him; he was
+the youngest man on the staff of the university, with a reputation of
+brilliance and the forecast of a great future. When he walked out on
+the platform, Anne, in her corner, leaned forward, the pupils of her
+eyes dilating. He was thin and dark, with hasty gestures, and a hostile
+eagerness sprang from his voice and eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the end of his second lecture, Anne waited at the edge of the
+crowd about the platform. She proffered some question, simple,
+almost irrelevant, and as he answered her, stood near him, her brow,
+her beautiful throat, her relaxed fingers, touched with subtle humility.
+After that he watched for her, and Anne’s days leaped up like a ship
+at the flick of the wind. Robert Duffy may have thought he drove her
+down the seas before him. Anne knew.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had not wished to marry so immediately. He was working
+for a degree, was developing a new chemical theory. But Anne, lifting
+his hands to clasp the pillar of her throat, had said, calmly,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why wait? You are tired and nervous now for someone to take
+care of you.”
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+* * *
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+In April Anne was summoned home. Her mother had died suddenly.
+Her father wept for her as the young girl he had loved,
+and Anne, looking at the pale oval face between the sleek, dark
+wings of her hair, saw her for the first time as a woman of passion and
+force caught in too narrow an orbit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The father went to live with John and his wife, and in June Anne
+was married. She remembered only one thing her father had said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I thought it might be, now, Annie, you would make an artist.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had smiled and gone swiftly on with her preparations. Her
+mother’s death had foreshortened life for her, until she felt at times a
+fear that she too might die with her desire unreached.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One of the next years there were two moments with sharp outlines;
+the rest blurred into full tide of passionate tenderness, fear,
+absorption. One moment was at night in that first summer. She and
+<a id="page-350" class="pagenum" title="350"></a>
+Robert walked along the river just outside the little college town,
+silent, until Robert turned on her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where are you! I can’t reach you,” he had cried out. “I am
+afraid of you! You drown me, and I never touch you. What are you
+doing with me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was glad of the darkness which hid the sudden fierce contraction
+of her body, hid the terror and hatred that leaped within her.
+But she had laughed softly and said, “You are tired. You work too
+hard,” until he lay with his head against her breast, her fingers in his
+hair, while she stared with sombre, heavy eyes at the pale glow on the
+water at her feet. She had been shamed at the coil of emotion his cry
+had struck, so that she had thrust the moment out of memory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The other sharp moment was shortly before the birth of her second
+child. She lay on the couch in the sitting room, staring dully at
+the dingy carpet, the litter of papers on the desk. Margaret, who slept
+in her arms, had stirred, and the touch of that silky head in the curve
+under Anne’s chin drew her up from her apathy. Robert came to the
+door, and she knew the conflict she had waited for was upon her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I understand you have talked with Samuels,” Robert began.
+“You might have said so—all this time!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I thought you would wish to make your decision yourself.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Robert slumped into a chair near the desk. She thought for the
+first time that she knew how he would look as an old man, the eagerness
+drained out of his dark face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Samuels told you his offer, of course? I harness my brains to
+his chemical plant for life.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He said there would be opportunity for you to carry on any
+experiments you wished.” Her voice trailed off wearily, as though
+she had no spirit for a fight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’d like me to take it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Only if you wish.” She pressed that small, silky head against
+her throat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You know what I want! To go on my own path—” He
+stopped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Have you thought of the children?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You give me small chance to think of anything else!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She turned her face away from him, her eyes closed. Presently
+he rose heavily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very well. Have it your way.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, Robert. You must decide. Are you so sure your own
+path leads anywhere?” She saw in his eyes the great weight of her
+own passive, inert body, of her gray immobility.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-351" class="pagenum" title="351"></a>
+“I was, once. Anne, I don’t mean to be selfish—” He flung out
+his hands, with their slender, nervous fingers, in a limp, impotent gesture.
+“Samuels’ offer is profitable. I am taking it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why so tragic, Robert?” Her words hurried slightly. “Even
+if you leave your university for someone who appreciates your value,
+you’ll still have time for your own work, evenings and all.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Turn off an idea after dinner!” He broke off into an ugly little
+laugh. “Have you no comprehension of the way creative work must
+be done? How you wait and wait while it grows within you? You
+can’t just do it forcibly overnight. But I said I was taking Samuels’
+offer. I’ll become his well-paid consulting chemist.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When he had gone, Anne laid her lips gently against the fragrant
+warm crease of Margaret’s neck, her eyes closed to hide their triumph.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+* * *
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+After that, ten years in which Anne had been as God walking
+in his garden. Her children were the miracle, herself extended
+beyond her own narrow limits, the work of her flesh and her spirit.
+In them she was fulfilled, and in their growth she saw her own work.
+Her passion was not that of the mother so much as that of the artist.
+She could have created pictures; instead she chose to create human
+beings. Robert begged her to spend less time with the children, to
+leave them, and she brushed his words carelessly aside.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Almost overnight, it seemed, Jamie, the youngest, was four,
+sandy-haired, chunky, jolly, and Margaret, fourteen, was a tall, slim
+thing with dark eyes and hasty gestures like her father. She developed
+stubborn, reticent moments, against which Anne thrust herself vainly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Anne’s first jealousy licked through her veins when she saw Margaret,
+after a long afternoon curled up with a book, silent, almost
+sullen at Anne’s approach, fling aside book and mood at her father’s
+homecoming. Anne heard them in the library, Margaret’s light voice
+chording with Robert’s tone. She went to the door, shaken with a
+forlorn desire to beg them to admit her, but pride held her outside.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sound of those voices, however, stood out as the first, faint
+rumble in Anne’s clear sky. “It was ridiculous of Robert to take the
+child so seriously, to talk with her as though she were a grown person,”
+she thought; she added hastily, a surface thought, “Of course, I want
+the children to be real friends with their father. It’s only that he’s
+spoiling her!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret came in from school one day, her eyes alight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mother, the girls are going to Miss Truesdale’s camp this summer.
+Could I go?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Anne asked which girls were going, and added, gently, “Mother
+would rather have her girl with her.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-352" class="pagenum" title="352"></a>
+“Oh, mother!” cried Margaret, and then was silent, her whole
+slight figure stiffening into protest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Wouldn’t you rather stay with mother?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret lifted her dark eyes, and Anne had a sudden impulse
+to seize her, to shake out of her the hostility that lay within her glance.
+But she said, with her persistent gentleness, “At any rate, I should
+have to know more of the camp before I could decide.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the sight of Margaret rushing down to meet her father that
+evening, Anne’s decision clicked into shape. She would send the child
+to the camp. It would, after all, be excellent training, with the regularity
+of the life, and all. Margaret had been growing too fast and
+perhaps studying too hard. She was over-emotional.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret came back after two months in the mountains, brown,
+slim, apparently docile. Anne had moved her household to the shore,
+near enough town so that Robert could spend week-ends with them.
+The second week of Margaret’s return Anne discovered that her casual
+manner of wandering down the road in the early afternoon had a
+definite motive; she went to intercept the postman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Anne’s first thought was one of horror. Had a silly flirtation
+started. Surely Margaret was too young for that! She was only a
+little girl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next afternoon Anne followed with swift, silent feet, when
+she saw Margaret start down the lane. She found her on a bench
+near the tennis court, her dark head and slim brown throat bent over
+a letter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, she is beautiful,” thought Anne, “this young girl-child of
+mine! I won’t have her touched—not yet—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At her feet on the gravel, Margaret crumpled the letter into her
+pocket and flung back her head, scarlet running into the tan of her
+cheeks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A letter?” said Anne, as she sat down beside Margaret. “How
+nice!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret slipped to the end of the bench; in her bright eyes something
+fluttered desperately, seeking escape.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Who is writing to you?” Anne kept her voice gentle, in spite
+of the inflexible impulse behind her words. As Margaret rose, poised
+at the edge of flight, she added, “If I weren’t sure of you, Margie,
+I should think you were hiding something you were ashamed of!” She
+saw the girl flinch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s nothing,” she protested. “Just from a friend, from Miss
+Innsmere at the camp.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Won’t you show me her letter?” Anne sat very quiet. She
+<a id="page-353" class="pagenum" title="353"></a>
+stretched out one firm white hand toward Margaret, and her face
+showed nothing of the sharp fear that circled within her. Was Margaret
+lying to her? “You see, mother doesn’t know her.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s just a letter to me.” The girl’s hands clenched over her
+pocket and she retreated a step.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Anne rose deliberately and laid her fingers on the girl’s wrist.
+She was taller than Margaret; the child was a reed she could bend in
+her fingers. But the quiver of the wrist under her fingers disturbed
+her, and unexpectedly, she was aghast at the flame of defiance that
+leapt in the dark pupils of the girl’s eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In that moment Margaret wrenched her wrist free, and with a
+fierce “Oh-h—” was running across the tennis court toward the shore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At luncheon Anne felt Margaret’s eyes touch her warily; she
+paid no heed. Once when Margaret was a mere baby she had been
+stubborn, and Anne by quiet ignoring of her had brought her swiftly
+to her arms in hot tears.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then she knew that she must see that letter. Quickly she went
+along the hall to Margaret’s room. She must protect the child. There
+lay the child’s dress, but her fingers found no letter in the pocket.
+She stood in front of the little white desk, with a faint smile at the tiny
+yellow shells laid in a row along the top, and the flat, bleached sand-dollars,
+one at each corner of the blue blotter. Just a child, after all!
+Like a distant echo Anne felt the slow rhythm of the days before Margaret’s
+birth, when all her life had turned inward, dream-woven, to
+the making of this child.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There in one of the pigeonholes were the letters. Anne hesitated.
+Margaret need never know; there seemed no other way. She brushed
+aside the strange qualm and drew out the letters, several of them,
+addressed to Miss Margaret Duffy, in a bold, square hand. Freda
+Innsmere, Truesdale Camp, on the flap. At least the child hadn’t
+lied. She had the folded sheet in her fingers when behind her she
+heard a little strangled cry, and turning, she faced Margaret. She
+made an instinctive motion of concealment, but the envelope slipped
+to the floor. For an instant, as the wide, incredulous horror of Margaret’s
+gaze travelled from that white square up to her mother’s face,
+Anne shared that horror, as though she saw her guilty reflection in the
+girl’s dark stormy eyes. Only for an instant. Then she spoke, crisply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am sorry, Margaret. But if you insist upon concealment, it is
+necessary for me to do this.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret stood motionless, a little figure of bronze, save for her
+quick breathing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Perhaps you came back to hide these letters?” Anne added
+<a id="page-354" class="pagenum" title="354"></a>
+cruelly. She saw the adorable young curves of shoulder and knee melt
+from bronze to trembling flesh. “Unless you are ashamed, Margie,
+why do you hide them from mother?” Her voice filled again with its
+soft, rich tones. “Come, sit here beside me, and tell me about this new
+friend.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret shrank away from her outstretched hands, retreated
+along the end of the bed, clinging to the footrail, her knuckles showing
+white through the tan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, you shouldn’t touch them!” she cried out. “They are mine—and
+you shouldn’t touch them!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Margaret, dear, mother wants only what is best for you. You
+know that. This woman has made you secretive, ashamed.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m not ashamed!” Margaret’s lips struggled with tears.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Anne lifted the sheet and unfolded it. With a swift movement,
+Margaret was in front of her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If you read that—I—I’ll hate you!” she cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Anne dropped the letter and pulled the girl into her warm
+embrace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Margie, little Margie! You are my daughter! Flesh of my
+flesh, spirit of my spirit! I won’t have a stranger standing between
+us!” She felt the child’s tears on her throat, felt her body stiffen
+within her arms. “I shall not read those letters against your will.
+But you will bring them to me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She went slowly from the room. She turned at the door; Margaret
+stood motionless, her head averted. Something in her posture
+tore at Anne, like a rending of flesh from flesh. A strange fear hurried
+at her heels down the hall. Later she knew what that pain and
+fear had been; worse than birth-anguish, they were the labor pains of
+her new knowledge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Anne took her sewing down to the screened porch. She had
+discovered years earlier that whenever life snarled itself up, she had
+only to sit down with something in her hands, something requiring
+attention, and gradually, without effort on her part, things would
+smooth themselves out. So she sat now, her fingers busy with bright
+orange wool with which she embroidered a blouse for Margaret.
+Finally she heard Jamie wake, and scramble off in search of his
+brother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then she heard within the house Margaret’s voice, clear with
+delight;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Father! I didn’t know you were coming today!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-394" class="pagenum" title="394"></a>
+Anne laid aside her sewing with a secret
+faint dismay, which she banished instantly.
+She found Robert in the hall; Margaret,
+hanging over the banister, drew back at
+Anne’s approach.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hello, Anne.” Robert kissed the cool
+cheek Anne offered. “The city was so
+beastly I came out a day early. Had your
+swim, Margie? Fine, I want to see that new
+dive you wrote about.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ll wait for you down by the boathouse,”
+said Margaret, and she whisked
+down the stairs and out of the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t let her stay in the water too long,
+Robert,” said Anne. “She seems tired.
+And bring the boys back when you come.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Anne went slowly back to her sewing. A
+faint disturbance lingered under her ignoring
+concentration on the orange stitches.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dinner was rather silent, in spite of
+Anne’s gentle and insistent talk. Margaret
+and her father had come in just in time to
+dress. Margaret had twisted her damp hair
+on the crown of her head and bound it with
+a green ribbon. That, with her green linen
+dress, gave her small pointed face with its
+winged brows the look of a startled dryad.
+Anne glanced at her often; there hung about
+her a cloud of excitement, like light over
+water. Once she found Robert, too, eyeing
+her speculatively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Anne came down from Jamie’s
+goodnight she found the porch deserted.
+Little Robert came back presently, somewhat
+disconsolate because Dad and Margie
+were taking a long walk and didn’t want
+him. He sat beside Anne, telling her in his
+shrill young voice of all he had done since
+morning. She sent him to bed finally, and
+at his summons, climbed the stairs to bid
+him goodnight. As she descended she heard
+Margaret and her father at the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Goodnight, Bobs,” Margaret was saying.
+“And you’ll tell her? Oh, Bobs!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If you’ll promise to go straight to sleep
+and get unstrung a little. Goodnight,
+Margie.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret’s flight up the stairs carried her
+past her mother before she saw her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Goodnight, dear,” called Anne.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret hesitated, whirled, came back
+the few steps, lifting her face mutely toward
+Anne.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Goodnight, mother’s little girl.” Anne
+kissed her wistfully. “Sleep well.” Again
+at Margaret’s hasty withdrawal, she felt that
+strange fear. But she went calmly down to
+the porch, where Robert waited.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Have you time to talk awhile?” he asked
+abruptly, and she heard in his voice an excitement
+like Margaret’s. He waited until she
+had settled herself in a low chair, and then
+dropped opposite her against a pillar. He
+lighted a cigar, the light glowing within his
+fingers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you very tired this week?” she
+asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nothing unusual,” he dismissed her inquiry
+bruskly. “I want to talk about Margaret.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Had the child gone to her father, tale-bearing!
+That would be unendurable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She’s been telling me things—” Robert
+paused.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She didn’t tell you about her letters?”
+Anne spoke with frigid scorn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Letters? No.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well?” Anne waited, the autumn dusk
+wrapping her in outward tranquillity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The beginning, I suppose, is a call I had
+last week. I thought I wouldn’t write
+about it. A Miss Innsmere came into the
+office one day. She was at this camp where
+you sent Margaret, a dancing teacher. Quite
+a person, too, I judge, young, vigorous—a
+Danish girl. She came in about Margaret.
+Thinks the child has a talent for dancing.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why did she go to you?” Anne found
+it difficult to keep her voice from bristling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Because you weren’t in town, I suppose.
+<a id="page-395" class="pagenum" title="395"></a>
+She seemed to think we wouldn’t take to
+the idea, and so she came to talk it over.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What idea?” Anne’s antagonism rippled
+in her tone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, of Margaret’s dancing. She thinks
+she ought to study—Margie, I mean. On
+the side, for a few years. Then she’ll know
+whether it’s the thing. And Margie wants
+to.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You mean study dancing professionally?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ridiculous! I hope you told her we had
+our own plans for Margaret.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now, wait a minute, Anne. You see,
+Margaret has been talking to me, too. She
+wants to do it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You haven’t encouraged her!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have listened to her, Anne.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why hasn’t she come to me about this?”
+Anne shut her hands together in her lap.
+The letters! They were about this scheme!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Can’t you see? She is afraid you will
+disapprove. Afraid she can’t make you see
+how much she wishes to try it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She knows it is absurd, then, if she is
+so sure of my disapproval.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is it, Anne? Why?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A public dancer! That child? Are you
+mad, Robert?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Margaret said to me tonight, and she
+didn’t sound childlike, that she thought she
+had to dance. She studied last year, you
+know, at school. She says—and you know
+how shy she is with words—that it is the
+only thing she loves. That she can say
+things she feels and thinks that way. That
+she feels as though she has just been waiting
+until she found this out. We walked
+down through the Black Firs tonight, and
+she danced for me, a dance she had made
+for the trees, she said. Anne, it was the
+loveliest dream I ever saw!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Anne was silent. Her hands moved together
+up to her heart, as if to hold close
+the edges of a gaping wound. After the
+grief of the afternoon Margaret had taken
+her father away to dance for him. Margaret
+was afraid to come to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You know, Anne,” went on Robert eagerly,
+“I have a strong belief that a desire
+like that is—well, sort of sacred. That we
+haven’t any business to stand in the way.
+Don’t you think so?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She’s only a child,” said Anne coldly.
+“She doesn’t really know what she wants.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m not so sure. I knew what I
+wanted earlier than that. Didn’t you? I
+didn’t get it.” His voice dropped wrily.
+“That’s no reason why Margaret shouldn’t.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Surely, Robert, you don’t believe what
+you are saying—that a child knows better
+what it needs than its mother—its parents
+can know?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah, Anne, we don’t know much! If this
+isn’t the right thing, she has plenty of time
+to find it out.” Robert pulled himself to his
+feet, drew a chair near Anne’s, and seated
+himself. “You think, probably, that I don’t
+appreciate how this makes you feel. Shall
+I tell you? You are feeling as though a
+picture you had started to paint suddenly
+walked off your canvas!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He puffed strongly at his cigar, and the
+momentary glow touched into relief his
+cheekbones and temples, lighted his eyes
+with a glimmer of their old eagerness. They
+were Margaret’s eyes! The same pointed
+fold of eyelids, the same dark fire. What
+had he said? A picture, walking off the canvas—
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I wonder why I said picture,” he went
+on slowly, out of the darkness. “I must
+have been thinking of that career you might
+have taken. You chose children instead,
+and human beings aren’t so docile as paint
+and canvas, are they?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why discuss that?” Anne moved impatiently.
+“You must admit that I have no
+interests, no concern, except the good of the
+children. That’s why I won’t consent to
+this plan. You’ve been wheedled into it by
+a strange woman and a child! I—I think it
+rather unjust of you to encourage Margaret
+without consulting me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t be hasty, Anne. There are so
+many things I’d like to say tonight.” He
+flicked his cigar end over the railing.
+“You’ve no idea how much thinking I have
+done this week. It began after Miss Innsmere’s
+call. Then young Carsdale came in.
+Remember him? That boy at the university?
+He has carried through several of
+the things we started—and more of his own.
+He was telling me about them. When he
+left, he grinned at me and said, ‘They’ve got
+you properly domesticated and successful,
+haven’t they, Duffy?’ He was a little
+shabby in that gilt-edged office where I sit
+all day.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Anne caught her breath sharply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are suggesting, I suppose, that I am
+to blame for your—commercialization?”
+she asked, incredulity in her cool tone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I want to show you how I feel about
+Margie. I know why she is afraid to come
+to you with her desires. You are indomitable,
+Anne. You are like the earth itself.
+<a id="page-396" class="pagenum" title="396"></a>
+No one sees its motion, but no one can stop
+it and everyone is whirled along with it.
+Sometimes I have known that you chose me—shall
+we say to father your children for
+you? Sometimes I have pretended I was
+a free agent. Sometimes I have been sorry
+you didn’t devour me utterly—the female
+spider has a neat way with her spouse, you
+know! I shouldn’t say these things now,
+when it is all too late, except for Margaret.
+She doesn’t want to be eaten. The boys
+are still too young to mind.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How can you sit there and say those
+things!” Anne’s voice was thick with
+whirling rage. “As though I were a monster—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Anne, dear, you insist upon misunderstanding
+me. You have been a very beautiful
+mother. That I know. I am not blaming
+you that I am prosperous and respectable
+instead of lean and hollow-eyed from
+wrestling with ideas and schemes. There
+was at least a motive there. The children
+did need food and shelter. But Margaret is
+no longer a baby. She must have what she
+wants.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Something snapped in Anne, and a terrible
+grinding pain, a physical anguish seized
+her. She huddled back in her chair, her
+hands pressing against her breasts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, you can’t know!” she cried. “You
+think I am selfish, devouring! You can’t
+know! Before she was born I dreamed of
+her—beauty and health and loveliness. And
+since she was a baby I have watched her,
+worked to make her what she is. A dancer—in
+public—You have tried to get her away
+from me! You have tried—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Anne! You know that is a lie! I have
+been humble enough that she has cared for
+me. When I saw her dancing tonight I was
+jealous to frenzy that others might watch
+that. But if she wishes it, who are we to
+stand in her way?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She doesn’t know. She doesn’t need to
+dance—to do anything! I had planned so
+many things for years to come. Surely if I
+have made her what she is, I have a right to
+decide what she shall be!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Made her?” Robert sat forward; Anne
+could see his shoulders hunched against the
+dim light through the window behind him.
+“We like to think that, don’t we? Instead—I
+was a tool for you, and you, even you,
+Anne, were a tool for—what? An obscure
+drive of peoples behind us, craving embodiment.
+What have you made about her?
+When she was born you felt you had created
+her. What had you done, but wait, wait,
+while she grew?” He was silent. On the
+shore below them Anne heard the steady
+rhythm of the surf, like a great crowd shouting
+in the distance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What had she done but wait? But wait?
+The words slipped into the rhythm of the
+surf.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You know—” Robert’s voice dropped
+into a puzzled wonder. “That’s what all
+creative work seems to amount to. You
+wait. You think you are making something,
+but you only wait while it grows.”
+Another silence. “I have filled my days so
+full I had no time for that slow waiting.
+Do you see, Anne? We are nothing but the
+soil—lying fallow under the sun.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Anne sat very still. The dreadful rending
+within her had ceased, and a heavy, lethargic
+cessation of pain, like that after childbirth,
+brooded over her. Incredibly there
+hung about her a moment of white peace,
+like that of her old dream, in which she
+lay in the great windless meadow curving
+against the sky, part of the waiting
+soil.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Robert had spoken the truth. Margaret’s
+struggles had been only an inarticulate expression
+of the same truth. It had been as
+though the soil tried to drag under its warm
+darkness a flower, opening above.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Robert rose and stood near her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s all, Anne.” She felt his fingers
+brush her shoulder. “After all, you are an
+artist. Perhaps you should have chosen
+otherwise than children for your work.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Anne could not speak. Humility, a
+strange garment for her, enclosed her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It is late. Perhaps tomorrow—after you
+have slept on it.” He pulled his tone back
+to an ordinary level. “You are cold?” She
+had shivered under his fingers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. Only stripped.” Her laugh
+trembled into a sob.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Won’t you come in, now?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not yet, please.” A moment of hesitating
+silence, and Robert moved toward the
+door. “Robert—” Anne found words with
+cumbersome difficulty. “It may be—that tomorrow
+I can thank you.” She saw him
+draw his body erect, as though a weight had
+dropped from him. “Goodnight.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She sat for a long time, like one who
+accustoms himself to the thin, clear air of a
+mountain top. She had reached the plateau
+from which she could see the winding of the
+path she had followed. When, at last, she
+climbed silently to her room, she slept with
+the exhaustion which follows bodily suffering.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-397" class="pagenum" title="397"></a>
+She woke early, lying for a time with
+her eyes closed. Then she rose, and with a
+curious feeling of exaltation, as though she
+prepared herself for a sacrament, she wound
+her long braids of dark hair about her head
+and bathed. She could hear Jamie and
+little Rob, their tongues clattering in small
+boy early morning style, but no one else
+seemed awake. She dressed carefully,
+choosing a dull blue crepe morning gown that
+Margaret had always liked. Then she went
+to Margaret’s door, and knocked. After a
+silent moment she pushed it ajar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret stirred sleepily, her face flushed
+and young in a cloud of dusky hair. At the
+sight of Anne she woke instantly, and the
+wistful alertness in her eyes wrenched at
+Anne’s poise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She sat down on the edge of the bed, her
+hands clasped, her eyes caressing the sweet
+curve of the child’s body beneath the cover.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Margie, dear,” she said, “Father talked
+over with me your plans—” She saw terror
+leap in the girl’s eyes, but she kept her voice
+serene. “I shall be glad to have you study
+dancing. Will you, some day, show me
+some of your own dances?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret’s eyes widened, and a flame ran
+into her cheeks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh!” she cried. “Oh! I thought you
+wouldn’t like it—” She sat up against her
+pillow. “I must tell you—” a bewildered
+shame in her face—“that I burned up those
+letters yesterday. They—they were just
+about the dancing.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am sorry about the letters.” Anne’s
+serenity had a tinge of piteousness. “Margaret,
+can you understand how hard it is to
+find your baby has grown up? I am sorry.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret brushed away the episode impetuously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You really mean that you are glad about
+the dancing?” Her slim hand moved shyly
+along the blanket toward her mother. “You
+are glad?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The reticent caress winged into Anne’s
+heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes,” she said steadily. “I wanted to
+tell you, to begin your day!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She stood for an instant beside the bed,
+before she turned to leave. In that instant
+she had her vision of further waiting; a
+waiting into which Margaret might, some
+day, return.
+</p>
+
+<div class="trnote chapter">
+<p class="transnote">
+Transcriber’s Notes
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Transcribed from the first publication in: <i>The Touchstone, vol. 8, Feb. 1921,
+pp. 346-354, 394-397.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The original spelling and punctuation were preserved. Minor typesetting
+mistakes were silently corrected.
+</p>
+
+</div>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79250 ***</div>
+</body>
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+[Project Gutenberg](https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for eBook [#79250](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79250)