on the day
following this historic meeting we entered a car headed for the west,
acknowledging with a sigh, yet with a comfortable sense of having
accomplished our purpose, that it would be profitable to go into
retirement and ruminate for a month or two. The glories of New York had
been almost too exciting for Zulime, "I am ready to go home," she said.

Home! There was my problem. The only city residence I possessed was my
bachelor apartment on Elm Street, and at the moment I had no intention
of asking my wife to share its narrow space except as a temporary
lodging, and to take her back into that snow-covered little Wisconsin
village, back to a shabby farm house filled with ailing elderly folk
would amount to crime. From the high splendor of our stay in New York we
now fell to earth with a thump. My duties as a son, my cares as the head
of a household returned upon me, and my essential homelessness took away
all that assurance of literary success which my Eastern friends had
helped me attain. Of the elation in which I had moved while in New York
I retained but a shred. Once more the hard-working fictionist and the
responsible head of a family, I began to worry about the future. My
honeymoon was over.

The basic realities of my poverty again cropped out in a letter from my
mother who wrote that my aunt was very ill and that she needed me. To
Zulime I said, "You stay here with your sister and your friends while I
go up to the Homestead and see what I can do for our old people."

This she refused to do. "No," she loyally said, "I am going with you,"
and although I knew that she was choosing a dreary alternative I was too
weak, too selfishly weak, to prevent her self-sacrifice. We left that
night at the usual hour and arrived in time to eat another farmer's
breakfast with father and mother next morning. Aunt Susan was unable to
meet us.

Her sweet spirit was about to leave its frail body, that was evident to
me as I looked down at her, but she knew me and whispered, "I'm glad to
have you at home." She showed no fear of death, in fact she appeared
unconscious of her grave condition. She was a beautiful character and to
see her lying there beneath her old-fashioned quilt, so small and
helpless, so patient, lonely and sad, made speech difficult for me. She
had meant much in my life. The serene dignity with which she and her
mother had carried the best New England traditions into the rough front
rank of the Border, was st