American Literature

1

Editha

By William Dean Howells

Between the Dark and the Daylight (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1907). The story was first published in

Harper's Monthly 110 (Jan. 1905).

The air was thick with the war feeling, like the electricity of a storm which had not yet burst. Editha

sat looking out into the hot spring afternoon, with

her lips parted, and panting with the intensity of the

question whether she could let him go. She had

decided that she could not let him stay, when she

saw him at the end of the still leafless avenue,

making slowly up towards the house, with his head

down and his figure relaxed. She ran impatiently out

on the veranda, to the edge of the steps, and

imperatively demanded greater haste of him with her

will before she called him aloud to him: "George!"

He had quickened his pace in mystical response to

her mystical urgence, before he could have heard her;

now he looked up and answered, "Well?"

"Oh, how united we are!" she exulted, and then she

swooped down the steps to him, "What is it?" she

cried.

"It's war," he said. and he pulled her up to him and

kissed her.

She kissed him back intensely, but irrelevantly, as to

their passion, and uttered from deep in her throat.

"How glorious!"

"It's war," he repeated, without consenting to her

sense of it; and she did not know just what to think at

first. She never knew what to think of him; that made

his mystery, his charm. All through their courtship,

which was contemporaneous with the growth of the

war feeling, she had been puzzled by his want of

seriousness about it. He seemed to despise it even

more than he abhorred it. She could have understood

his abhorring any sort of bloodshed; that would have

been a survival of his old life when he thought he

would be a minister, and before he changed and took

up the law. But making light of a cause so high and

noble seemed to show a want of earnestness at the

core of his being. Not but that she felt herself able to

cope with a congenital defect of that sort, and make

his love for her save him from himself. Now perhaps

the miracle was already wrought in him. In the

presence of the tremendous fact that he announced,

all triviality seemed to have gone out of him; she

began to feel that. He sank down on the top step, and

wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, while she

poured out upon him her question of the origin and

authenticity of his news.

All the while, in her duplex emotioning, she was

aware that now at the very beginning she must put a

guard upon herself against urging him, by any word

or act, to take the part that her whole soul willed him

to take, for the completion of her ideal of him. He

was very nearly perfect as he was, and he must be

allowed to perfect himself. But he was peculiar, and

he might very well be reasoned out of his peculiarity.

Before her reasoning went her emotioning: her nature

pulling upon his nature, her womanhood upon his

manhood, without her knowing the means she was

using to the end she was willing. She had always

supposed that the man who won her would have

done something to win her; she did not know what,

but something. George Gearson had simply asked

her for her love, on the way home from a concert,

and she gave her love to him, without, as it were,

thinking. But now, it flashed upon her, if he could do

something worthy to have won her--be a hero, her hero--it would be even better than if he had done it

before asking her; it would be grander. Besides, she

had believed in the war from the beginning.

"But don't you see, dearest," she said, "that it

wouldn't have come to this if it hadn't been in the

order of Providence? And I call any war glorious that

is for the liberation of people who have been

struggling for years against the cruelest oppression.

Don't you think so, too?"

"I suppose so," he returned, languidly. "But war! Is it

glorious to break the peace of the world?"

"That ignoble peace! It was no peace at all, with that

crime and shame at our very gates." She was

conscious of parroting the current phrases of the

newspapers, but it was no time to pick and choose

her words. She must sacrifice anything to the high

ideal she had for him, and after a good deal of rapid

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argument she ended with the climax: "But now it

doesn't matter about the how or why. Since the war

has come, all that is gone. There are no two sides any

more. There is nothing now but our country."

He sat with his eyes closed and his head leant back

against the veranda, and he remarked, with a vague

smile, as if musing aloud, "Our country--right or

wrong."

"Yes, right or wrong!" she returned, fervidly. "I'll go

and get you some lemonade." She rose rustling, and

whisked away; when she came back with two tall

glasses of clouded liquid on a tray, and the ice

clucking in them, he still sat as she had left him, and

she said, as if there had been no interruption: "But

there is no question of wrong in this case. I call it a

sacred war. A war for liberty and humanity, if ever

there was one. And I know you will see it just as I do,

yet."

He took half the lemonade at a gulp, and he

answered as he set the glass down: "I know you

always have the highest ideal. When I differ from

you I ought to doubt myself."

A generous sob rose in Editha's throat for the

humility of a man, so very nearly perfect, who was

willing to put himself below her.

Besides, she felt, more subliminally, that he was

never so near slipping through her fingers as when

he took that meek way.

"You shall not say that! Only, for once I happen to be

right." She seized his hand in her two hands, and

poured her soul from her eyes into his. "Don't you

think so?" she entreated him.

He released his hand and drank the rest of his

lemonade, and she added, "Have mine, too," but he

shook his head in answering, "I've no business to

think so, unless I act so, too."

Her heart stopped a beat before it pulsed on with

leaps that she felt in her neck. She had noticed that

strange thing in men: they seemed to feel bound to

do what they believed, and not think a thing was

finished when they said it, as girls did. She knew

what was in his mind, but she pretended not, and she

said, "Oh, I am not sure," and then faltered.

He went on as if to himself, without apparently

heeding her: "There's only one way of proving one's

faith in a thing like this."

She could not say that she understood, but she did

understand.

He went on again. "If I believed--if I felt as you do

about this war-- Do you wish me to feel as you do?"

Now she was really not sure; so she said: "George, I

don't know what you mean."

He seemed to muse away from her as before. "There

is a sort of fascination in it. I suppose that at the

bottom of his heart every man would like at times to

have his courage tested, to see how he would act."

"How can you talk in that ghastly way?"

"It is rather morbid. Still, that's what it comes to, unless you're swept away by ambition or driven by

conviction. I haven't the conviction or the ambition,

and the other thing is what it comes to with me. I

ought to have been a preacher, after all; then I

couldn't have asked it of myself, as I must, now I'm a

lawyer. And you believe it's a holy war, Editha?" he

suddenly addressed her. "Oh, I know you do! But

you wish me to believe so, too?"

She hardly knew whether he was mocking or not, in

the ironical way he always had with her plainer

mind. But the only thing was to be outspoken with

him.

"George, I wish you to believe whatever you think is

true, at any and every cost. If I've tried to talk you

into anything, I take it all back."

"Oh, I know that, Editha. I know how sincere you are,

and how-- I wish I had your undoubting spirit! I'll

think it over; I'd like to believe as you do. But I don't,

now; I don't, indeed. It isn't this war alone; though

this seems peculiarly wanton and needless; but it's

every war--so stupid; it makes me sick. Why

shouldn't this thing have been settled reasonably?"

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"Because," she said, very throatily again, "God meant

it to be war."

"You think it was God? Yes, I suppose that is what

people wi11 say."

"Do you suppose it would have been war if God

hadn't meant it?"

"I don't know. Sometimes it seems as if God had put

this world into men's keeping to work it as they

pleased."

"Now, George, that is blasphemy."

"Well, I won't blaspheme. I'll try to believe in your

pocket Providence," he said, and then he rose to go.

"Why don't you stay to dinner?" Dinner at Balcom's

Works was at one o'clock.

"I'll come back to supper, if you'll let me. Perhaps I

shall bring you a convert."

"Well, you may come back, on that condition."

"All right. If I don't come, you'll understand."

He went away without kissing her, and she felt it a

suspension of their engagement. It all interested her

intensely; she was undergoing a tremendous

experience, and she was being equal to it. While she

stood looking after him, her mother came out

through one of the long windows onto the veranda,

with a catlike softness and vagueness.

"Why didn't he stay to dinner?"

"Because--because--war has been declared," Editha

pronounced, without turning.

Her mother said, "Oh, my!" and then said nothing

more until she had sat down in one of the large

Shaker chairs and rocked herself for some time. Then

she closed whatever tacit passage of thought there

had been in her mind with the spoken words: "Well, I

hope he won't go."

"And I hope he will," the girl said, and confronted her mother with a stormy exaltation that would have

frightened any creature less unimpressionable than a

cat.

Her mother rocked herself again for an interval of

cogitation. What she arrived at in speech was: "Well,

I guess you've done a wicked thing, Editha Balcom."

The girl said, as she passed indoors through the same window her mother had come out by: "I haven't done anything--yet."

In her room, she put together all her letters and gifts

from Gearson, down to the withered petals of the

first flower he had offered, with that timidity of his

veiled in that irony of his. In the heart of the packet

she enshrined her engagement ring which she had

restored to the pretty box he had brought it her in.

Then she sat down, if not calmly yet strongly, and

wrote:

"George:--I understood when you left me. But I think

we had better emphasize your meaning that if we

cannot be one in everything we had better be one in

nothing. So I am sending these things for your

keeping till you have made up your mind.

"I shall always love you, and therefore I shall never

marry any one else. But the man I marry must love

his country first of all, and be able to say to me,

"'I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not honor more.'

"There is no honor above America with me. In this

great hour there is no other honor.

"Your heart will make my words clear to you. I had

never expected to say so much, but it has come upon

me that I must say the utmost. Editha."

She thought she had worded her letter well, worded

it in a way that could not be bettered; all had been

implied and nothing expressed.

She had it ready to send with the packet she had tied

with red, white, and blue ribbon, when it occurred to

her that she was not just to him, that she was not

giving him a fair chance. He had said he would go

and think it over, and she was not waiting. She was

pushing, threatening, compelling. That was not a

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woman's part. She must leave him free, free, free. She

could not accept for her country or herself a forced

sacrifice.

In writing her letter she had satisfied the impulse

from which it sprang; she could well afford to wait

till he had thought it over. She put the packet and the

letter by, and rested serene in the consciousness of

having done what was laid upon her by her love

itself to do, and yet used patience, mercy, justice.

She had her reward. Gearson did not come to tea, but

she had given him till morning, when, late at night

there came up from the village the sound of a fife and

drum, with a tumult of voices, in shouting, singing,

and laughing. The noise drew nearer and nearer; it

reached the street end of the avenue; there it silenced

itself, and one voice, the voice she knew best, rose

over the silence. It fell; the air was filled with cheers;

the fife and drum struck up, with the shouting,

singing, and laughing again, but now retreating; and

a single figure came hurrying up the avenue.

She ran down to meet her lover and clung to him. He

was very gay, and he put his arm round her with a

boisterous laugh. "Well, you must call me Captain

now; or Cap, if you prefer; that's what the boys call

me. Yes, we've had a meeting at the town-hall, and

everybody has volunteered; and they selected me for

captain, and I'm going to the war, the big war, the

glorious war, the holy war ordained by the pocket

Providence that blesses butchery. Come along; let's

tell the whole family about it. Call them from their

downy beds, father, mother, Aunt Hitty, and all the

folks!"

But when they mounted the veranda steps he did not

wait for a larger audience; he poured the story out

upon Editha alone.

"There was a lot of speaking, and then some of the

fools set up a shout for me. It was all going one way,

and I thought it would be a good joke to sprinkle a

little cold water on them. But you can't do that with a

crowd that adores you. The first thing I knew I was

sprinkling hell-fire on them. 'Cry havoc, and let slip

the dogs of war.' That was the style. Now that it had

come to the fight, there were no two parties; there

was one country, and the thing was to fight to a

finish as quick as possible. I suggested volunteering

then and there, and I wrote my name first of all on

the roster. Then they elected me--that's all. I wish I

had some ice-water."

She left him walking up and down the veranda,

while she ran for the ice-pitcher and a goblet, and

when she came back he was still walking up and

down, shouting the story he had told her to her

father and mother, who had come out more sketchily

dressed than they commonly were by day. He drank

goblet after goblet of the ice-water without noticing

who was giving it, and kept on talking, and laughing

through his talk wildly. "It's astonishing," he said,

"how well the worse reason looks when you try to

make it appear the better. Why, I believe I was the

first convert to the war in that crowd to-night! I never

thought I should like to kill a man; but now I

shouldn't care; and the smokeless powder lets you

see the man drop that you kill. It's all for the country!

What a thing it is to have a country that can't be wrong, but if it is, is right, anyway!"

Editha had a great, vital thought, an inspiration. She

set down the ice-pitcher on the veranda floor, and

ran up-stairs and got the letter she had written him.

When at last he noisily bade her father and mother,

"Well, good-night. I forgot I woke you up; I sha'n't

want any sleep myself," she followed him down the

avenue to the gate. There, after the whirling words

that seemed to fly away from her thoughts and refuse

to serve them, she made a last effort to solemnize the

moment that seemed so crazy, and pressed the letter

she had written upon him.

"What's this?" he said. "Want me to mail it?"

"No, no. It's for you. I wrote it after you went this

morning. Keep it--keep it--and read it sometime--"

She thought, and then her inspiration came: "Read it

if ever you doubt what you've done, or fear that I

regret your having done it. Read it after you've

started."

They strained each other in embraces that seemed as

ineffective as their words, and he kissed her face with

quick, hot breaths that were so unlike him, that made

her feel as if she had lost her old lover and found a

stranger in his place. The stranger said: "What a

gorgeous flower you are, with your red hair, and

your blue eyes that look black now, and your face

with the color painted out by the white moonshine!

Let me hold you under the chin, to see whether I love

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blood, you tiger-lily!" Then he laughed Gearson's

laugh, and released her, scared and giddy. Within

her wilfulness she had been frightened by a sense of

subtler force in him, and mystically mastered as she

had never been before.

She ran all the way back to the house, and mounted

the steps panting. Her mother and father were

talking of the great affair. Her mother said: "Wa'n't

Mr. Gearson in rather of an excited state of mind?

Didn't you think he acted curious?"

"Well, not for a man who'd just been elected captain

and had set 'em up for the whole of Company A," her

father chuckled back.

"What in the world do you mean, Mr. Balcom? Oh!

There's Editha!" She offered to follow the girl

indoors.

"Don't come, mother!" Editha called, vanishing.

Mrs. Balcom remained to reproach her husband. "I

don't see much of anything to laugh at."

"Well, it's catching. Caught it from Gearson. I guess it

won't be much of a war, and I guess Gearson don't

think so either. The other fellows will back down as

soon as they see we mean it. I wouldn't lose any sleep

over it. I'm going back to bed, myself."

Gearson came again next afternoon, looking pale and

rather sick, but quite himself, even to his languid

irony. "I guess I'd better tell you, Editha, that I

consecrated myself to your god of battles last night

by pouring too many libations to him down my own

throat. But I'm all right now. One has to carry off the

excitement, somehow."

"Promise me," she commanded, "that you'll never

touch it again!"

"What! Not let the cannikin clink? Not let the soldier

drink? Well, I promise."

"You don't belong to yourself now; you don't even

belong to me. You belong to your country, and you have a sacred charge to keep yourself strong and well

for your country's sake. I have been thinking,

thinking all night and all day long."

"You look as if you had been crying a little, too," he

said, with his queer smile.

"That's all past. I've been thinking, and worshipping

you. Don't you suppose I know all that you've been through, to come to this? I've followed you every

step from your old theories and opinions."

"Well, you've had a long row to hoe."

"And I know you've done this from the highest

motives--"

"Oh, there won't be much pettifogging to do till this

cruel war is--"

"And you haven't simply done it for my sake. I

couldn't respect you if you had."

"Well, then we'll say I haven't. A man that hasn't got

his own respect intact wants the respect of all the

other people he can corner. But we won't go into that.

I'm in for the thing now, and we've got to face our

future. My idea is that this isn't going to be a very

protracted struggle; we shall just scare the enemy to

death before it comes to a fight at all. But we must

provide for contingencies, Editha. If anything

happens to me--"

"Oh, George!" She clung to him, sobbing.

"I don't want you to feel foolishly bound to my

memory. I should hate that, wherever I happened to

be."

"I am yours, for time and eternity--time and eternity."

She liked the words; they satisfied her famine for

phrases.

"Well, say eternity; that's all right; but time's another

thing; and I'm talking about time. But there is

something! My mother! If anything happens--"

She winced, and he laughed. "You're not the bold

soldier-girl of yesterday!" Then he sobered. "If

anything happens, I want you to help my mother out.

She won't like my doing this thing. She brought me

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up to think war a fool thing as well as a bad thing.

My father was in the Civil War; all through it; lost his

arm in it." She thrilled with the sense of the arm

round her; what if that should be lost? He laughed as

if divining her: "Oh, it doesn't run in the family, as far

as I know!" Then he added gravely: "He came home

with misgivings about war, and they grew on him. I

guess he and mother agreed between them that I was

to be brought up in his final mind about it; but that

was before my time. I only knew him from my

mother's report of him and his opinions; I don't know

whether they were hers first; but they were hers last.

This will be a blow to her. I shall have to write and

tell her--"

He stopped, and she asked: "Would you like me to

write, too, George?"

"I don't believe that would do. No, I'll do the writing.

She'll understand a little if I say that I thought the

way to minimize it was to make war on the largest

possible scale at once--that I felt I must have been

helping on the war somehow if I hadn't helped keep

it from coming, and I knew I hadn't; when it came, I

had no right to stay out of it."

Whether his sophistries satisfied him or not, they

satisfied her. She clung to his breast, and whispered,

with closed eyes and quivering lips: "Yes, yes, yes!"

"But if anything should happen, you might go to her

and see what you could do for her. You know? It's

rather far off; she can't leave her chair--"

"Oh, I'll go, if it's the ends of the earth! But nothing

will happen! Nothing can! I--"

She felt her lifted with his rising, and Gearson was

saying, with his arm still round her, to her father:

"Well, we're off at once, Mr. Balcom. We're to be

formally accepted at the capital, and then bunched

up with the rest somehow, and sent into camp

somewhere, and got to the front as soon as possible.

We all want to be in the van, of course; we're the first

company to report to the Governor. I came to tell

Editha, but I hadn't got round to it."

She saw him again for a moment at the capital, in the

station, just before the train started southward with

his regiment. He looked well, in his uniform, and

very soldierly, but somehow girlish, too, with his

clean-shaven face and slim figure. The manly eyes

and the strong voice satisfied her, and his

preoccupation with some unexpected details of duty

flattered her. Other girls were weeping and

bemoaning themselves, but she felt a sort of noble

distinction in the abstraction, the almost

unconsciousness, with which they parted. Only at the

last moment he said: "Don't forget my mother. It

mayn't be such a walk-over as I supposed," and he

laughed at the notion.

He waved his hand to her as the train moved off--she

knew it among a score of hands that were waved to

other girls from the platform of the car, for it held a

letter which she knew was hers. Then he went inside

the car to read it, doubtless, and she did not see him

again. But she felt safe for him through the strength

of what she called her love. What she called her God,

always speaking the name in a deep voice and with

the implication of a mutual understanding, would

watch over him and keep him and bring him back to

her. If with an empty sleeve, then he should have

three arms instead of two, for both of hers should be

his for life. She did not see, though, why she should

always be thinking of the arm his father had lost.

There were not many letters from him, but they were

such as she could have wished, and she put her

whole strength into making hers such as she

imagined he could have wished, glorifying and

supporting him. She wrote to his mother glorifying

him as their hero, but the brief answer she got was

merely to the effect that Mrs. Gearson was not well

enough to write herself, and thanking her for her

letter by the hand of someone who called herself "Yrs

truly, Mrs. W. J. Andrews."

Editha determined not to be hurt, but to write again

quite as if the answer had been all she expected.

Before it seemed as if she could have written, there

came news of the first skirmish, and in the list of the

killed, which was telegraphed as a trifling loss on our

side, was Gearson's name. There was a frantic time of

trying to make out that it might be, must be, some

other Gearson; but the name and the company and

the regiment and the State were too definitely given.

Then there was a lapse into depths out of which it

seemed as if she never could rise again; then a lift

into clouds far above all grief, black clouds, that

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blotted out the sun, but where she soared with him,

with George--George! She had the fever that she

expected of herself, but she did not die in it; she was

not even delirious, and it did not last long. When she

was well enough to leave her bed, her one thought

was of George's mother, of his strangely worded

wish that she should go to her and see what she

could do for her. In the exaltation of the duty laid

upon her--it buoyed her up instead of burdening her-

-she rapidly recovered.

Her father went with her on the long railroad journey

from northern New York to western Iowa; he had

business out at Davenport, and he said he could just

as well go then as any other time; and he went with

her to the little country town where George's mother

lived in a little house on the edge of the illimitable

cornfields, under trees pushed to a top of the rolling

prairie. George's father had settled there after the

Civil War, as so many other old soldiers had done;

but they were Eastern people, and Editha fancied

touches of the East in the June rose overhanging the

front door, and the garden with early summer

flowers stretching from the gate of the paling fence.

It was very low inside the house, and so dim, with

the closed blinds, that they could scarcely see one

another: Editha tall and black in her crapes which

filled the air with the smell of their dyes; her father

standing decorously apart with his hat on his

forearm, as at funerals; a woman rested in a deep

arm-chair, and the woman who had let the strangers

in stood behind the chair.

The seated woman turned her head round and up,

and asked the woman behind her chair: "Who did you say?"

Editha, if she had done what she expected of herself,

would have gone down on her knees at the feet of the

seated figure and said, "I am George's Editha," for

answer.

But instead of her own voice she heard that other

woman's voice, saying: "Well, I don't know as I did get the name just right. I guess I'll have to make a

little more light in here," and she went and pushed

two of the shutters ajar.

Then Editha's father said, in his public will-now-

address-a-few-remarks tone: "My name is Balcom,

ma'am--Junius H. Balcom, of Balcom's Works, New

York; my daughter--"

"Oh!" the seated woman broke in, with a powerful

voice, the voice that always surprised Editha from

Gearson's slender frame. "Let me see you. Stand

round where the light can strike on your face," and

Editha dumbly obeyed. "So, you're Editha Balcom,"

she sighed.

"Yes," Editha said, more like a culprit than a

comforter.

"What did you come for?" Mrs. Gearson asked.

Editha's face quivered and her knees shook. "I came--

because--because George--" She could go no further.

"Yes," the mother said, "he told me he had asked you

to come if he got killed. You didn't expect that, I

suppose, when you sent him."

"I would rather have died myself than done it!"

Editha said, with more truth in her deep voice than

she ordinarily found in it. "I tried to leave him free--"

"Yes, that letter of yours, that came back with his

other things, left him free."

Editha saw now where George's irony came from.

"It was not to be read before--unless--until-- I told

him so," she faltered.

"Of course, he wouldn't read a letter of yours, under

the circumstances, till he thought you wanted him to.

Been sick?" the woman abruptly demanded.

"Very sick," Editha said, with self-pity.

"Daughter's life," her father interposed, "was almost

despaired of, at one time."

Mrs. Gearson gave him no heed. "I suppose you

would have been glad to die, such a brave person as

you! I don't believe he was glad to die. He was always a timid boy, that way; he was afraid of a good

many things; but if he was afraid he did what he

made up his mind to. I suppose he made up his mind

to go, but I knew what it cost him by what it cost me

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when I heard of it. I had been through one war before. When you sent him you didn't expect he would get

killed."

The voice seemed to compassionate Editha, and it

was time. "No," she huskily murmured.

"No, girls don't; women don't, when they give their

men up to their country. They think they'll come

marching back, somehow, just as gay as they went, or

if it's an empty sleeve, or even an empty pantaloon,

it's all the more glory, and they're so much the

prouder of them, poor things!"

The tears began to run down Editha's face; she had

not wept till then; but it was now such a relief to be

understood that the tears came.

"No, you didn't expect him to get killed," Mrs.

Gearson repeated, in a voice which was startlingly

like George's again. "You just expected him to kill

some one else, some of those foreigners, that weren't

there because they had any say about it, but because

they had to be there, poor wretches--conscripts, or

whatever they call 'em. You thought it would be all

right for my George, your George, to kill the sons of those miserable mothers and the husbands of those

girls that you would never see the faces of." The

woman lifted her powerful voice in a psalmlike note.

"I thank my God he didn't live to do it! I thank my

God they killed him first, and that he ain't livin' with

their blood on his hands!" She dropped her eyes,

which she had raised with her voice, and glared at

Editha. "What you got that black on for?" She lifted

herself by her powerful arms so high that her

helpless body seemed to hang limp its full length.

"Take it off, take it off, before I tear it from your

back!"

The lady who was passing the summer near Balcom's

Works was sketching Editha's beauty, which lent

itself wonderfully to the effects of a colorist. It had

come to that confidence which is rather apt to grow

between artist and sitter, and Editha had told her

everything.

"To think of your having such a tragedy in your life!"

the lady said. She added: "I suppose there are people

who feel that way about war. But when you consider

the good this war has done--how much it has done

for the country! I can't understand such people, for

my part. And when you had come all the way out

there to console her--got up out of a sick-bed! Well!"

"I think," Editha said, magnanimously, "she wasn't

quite in her right mind; and so did papa."

"Yes," the lady said, looking at Editha's lips in nature

and then at her lips in art, and giving an empirical

touch to them in the picture. "But how dreadful of

her! How perfectly--excuse me--how vulgar!"

A light broke upon Editha in the darkness which she

felt had been without a gleam of brightness for weeks

and months. The mystery that had bewildered her

was solved by the word; and from that moment she

rose from grovelling in shame and self-pity, and

began to live again in the ideal.