Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/72

48 inexplicably urges a friend to name a new little son by the name never like any other to her ears. And a little later she ends a note to the same mother, "Love for the child of the bravest name alive." Always afterward she called him so, whether the family adopted the suggestion or not, finding a strange little comfort, perhaps, in the mere naming of the name.

From this time on she clung more intensely to the tender shadows of her father's house. She still saw her friends and neighbors from time to time, but even then her life had begun to go on in hidden ways. "I am not at home," she often said; or, "When I was at home"—and only one faithful heart understood that love to her had been home for an instant, and that she lived in its remembrance, while her little form flitted tranquil through the sunny small industries of her day, until night gave her the right to watch with her flowers and liberated fancies. The dead of night and the closed door were ever to her synonyms of release.

Her father never opposed her slightest preference, and there was never the least recognition in the family of any lasting effect from the much-envied fatal sally into the great world beyond the purple rim of the home horizon. Whatever may in after years have been supposed or surmised was but the idle gossip of any country village provoked by any woman unmarried—especially a gifted girl like Emily Dickinson, whose family were so warmly included in all the society of her time. It was spoken of her father that to him compromise was disloyalty. One of her own sentences sums it all up for his daughter, "Alleviation of the irreparable degrades it." She was as truly a nun as any vowed celibate, but the