nees, thankful that I happened to be the one.
Always I had longed for this mysterious sister's confidence, and always
I had seemed to her too simple, too obvious, to share and understand.

"You know, Lucy," she went on wistfully, "I was awfully happy at
first--so happy--you don't know. Why, I would do anything for Bob. I was
glad to give up riches for him. My worldly ambitions shriveled into
nothing. Comforts, luxuries--what were they as compared to Bob's love?
But, oh, Lucy, it is giving up little things, little independencies of
thought, little daily habits, which I can't do. I tried to give up
these, too. You know I did. I said that the book was just paper and
print and the cards just pasteboard. But all the time they were symbols.
I could destroy the symbols easily enough, but I couldn't destroy what
they stood for. You see, Bob and I have different ideals. That's at the
bottom of all the trouble. We tried for weeks not to admit it, but it
had to be faced finally."

"Your ideals aren't very different way down at their roots--both clean,
true, sincere, and all that," I said, with a little yawn, so she might
not guess how tremblingly concerned I really was.

"You don't know all the differences, Lucy," she said sadly. "There's
something the trouble with me--something left out--something that I
cannot blame Bob for feeling sorry about. I believe I'll tell you. You
see, Bob met me under a misapprehension, and I've been trying to live up
to his misapprehension ever since. The first time he ever saw me I was
tucked away in a little room by myself looking at the picture of a sick
child. I was crying a little. He thought that I was feeling badly out of
sympathy for the mother of the child--the mother in me, you see,
speaking to the mother in her. I wasn't really. I was crying because the
house that the picture happened to hang in was so dull and grimy beside
Grassmere. I was crying for the luxuries I had lost. I never told Bob
the truth about that picture until last week, and all this time he's
been looking upon me as an ideal woman--a kind of madonna, mother of
little children, you understand, and all that--and I'm not. Something
must be wrong with me. I don't even long to be--yet. Oh, you see how
unfitted I am for a man to weave idealistic pictures about--like that.
It seemed to hurt Bob when I told him the truth about myself, hurt him
terribly, as if I'd tumbled over and broken his image of me--at the
cradle, you know.