ell of the prospects of my mother's son, our courtship was undisturbed.
Then, in the spring, when fortune was at its coldest and love at its
most feverish, her father accepted a call to a church in Boston, eight
hundred miles away.
To go to see her was impossible; how could the money be spared,--fifty
dollars, at the least? Once--when they had been gone about four
months--my mother insisted that I must. But I refused, and I do not know
whether it is to my credit or not, for my refusal gave her only pain,
whereas the sacrifices she would have had to make, had I gone, would
have given her only pleasure. I had no fear that Betty would change in
our separation. There are some people you hope are stanch, and some
people you think will be stanch, if--, and then there are those, many
women and a few men, whom it is impossible to think of as false or even
faltering. I did not fully appreciate that quality then, for my memory
was not then dotted with the graves of false friendships and littered
with the rubbish of broken promises; but I did appreciate it enough to
build securely upon it.
Build? No, that is not the word. There may be those who are stimulated
to achievement by being in love, though I doubt it. At any rate, I was
not one of them. My love for her absorbed my thoughts, and paralyzed my
courage. Of the qualities that have contributed to what success I may
have had, I put in the first rank a disposition to see the gloomiest
side of the future. But it has not helped to make my life happier,
invaluable though it has been in preventing misadventure from catching
me napping.
So another year passed. Then came hard times,--_real_ hard times. I had
some clients--enough to insure mother and myself a living, with the
interest on mortgage and note kept down. But my clients were poor, and
poor pay, and slow pay. Nobody was doing well but the note-shavers.
I--How mother fought to keep the front brave and bright!--not her front,
for that was bright by nature, like the sky beyond the clouds; but our
front, my front,--the front of our affairs. No one must see that we were
pinching,--so I must be the most obviously prosperous young lawyer in
Pulaski. What that struggle cost her I did not then realize; no, could
not realize until I looked at her face for the last time, looked and
turned away and thought on the meaning of the lines and the hollows over
which Death had spread his proclamation of eternal peace. I have heard
it said
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