Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/919

Rh the end, and what he was to others inevitably affected her opinion of him. She did influence him, because, on the whole, she ran with, not counter to, his tendencies. It was sweet to be able to help,—but how much he needed of it! Under admiration and sympathy he did work well,—and grew more complacent and approbative. The dim corners of her consciousness seemed haunted, so she drew closer to the central glow and would not look. Of course the more one cared, the more sensitive one was to defects. So much warning, the consciousness of solitary conviction, almost hypnotized confidence. But faith had a psychological effect, too, on both subject and object. Something was gained by doing the things that would have been such pretty sentiment if Her mind drew back hastily and turned another way. At least she would be able to love her children fully—that is, she meant Anyway, it was simple nature to look forward to them.

Neither did she mistake her poet's loves for periodic new Beauties. They were purely abstract, imaginative. He wrote hymns to Bacchus,—and was so easily affected by stimulants as to be shy of a mug of beer. He wrote odes to splendid honor and high sacrifice, while she ran in from solitary dishwashing to keep up his hearth fire. He wrote of passion, ecstasy, longing,—that he never experienced. All of it in the minor key, ending in defeat, denial, disappointment; which was of itself evidence for the ideal. So there was not, of course, any desire to hold him, or coquetry or vanity, in her times of trying to learn a pretty coiffure that would stay up, of trying to remember to hook her plaquette. There was only admission of shortcomings, a desire to please, to be all he required. That she was the most, and the best, she knew. However other women attracted him, even if that implied partial criticism of her, she was the exception; his feeling for her was unique, real.

"She continues to radiate contentment," Anne Harcourt observed.

"Oh yes, she has set into that kindergarten smile and manner, that indestructible pleasantness and vivacity people get who are too exclusively with invalids and children. She'll never have a chance to be anything but cheerful."

"Oh, I'm beginning to give him credit at least for making her happy."

Mrs. Darcy looked at her sidewise. "Who makes her happy? She doesn't even bear me a grudge. I thought she would. It's hard to forgive people for speaking the truth. Living with people like Ed has a different effect on different persons. His poor mother died; and look at Gertrude, for instance, and at me." There was no way of judging to which she gave the palm. "She has a pretty name for everything, and an explanation,—until it would drive the most charitable to the other extreme. What I can't understand is how she cares so little for the truth!"

"What sense in hair-splitting " Gertrude would have said; she was happy—except that the years brought no mothering.

Darcy's energy never carried beyond the hour of inspiration, the applause of the immediate patron. If Gertrude urged him to publish, he sent off indiscriminately, so jealously fond of every line, he could not cut even the bad. So she took charge of that, too, her choice constituting a silent and unnoticed criticism that in seven or eight years marked a creditable number of creditable things.

"If I were you," Mrs. Darcy advised (Mrs. Darcy of course never hesitated to advise), "I'd see that he paid a little more attention to bookkeeping and less to mooning. He hasn't had a raise since you married. It strikes me his work is like that woman's in Kipling—no particular reason why it should be done at all."

"There's one good reason, at least," Gertrude said, "for which everybody does things—that they'd rather; it's their way of living."

At the last it was not only her secretaryship and business management, but finally her money from squab-raising, that published his little volume, dedicated to The Idea of Beauty.

Naturally she was not included in the blare of notoriety that kind and local critics gave both work and author. Nor was she invited to Mrs. Lang's musicale. Ned always had more time to keep up the social part. And his little book gave him a brief personality among the artistic dilettanti and amateurs of his