off at night, and woke to find myself saying, "It could come from
the jealousy of two sisters, now old women."

But that meant that under ordinary circumstances the lovers would have
been first cousins, and this might cause a subconscious wavering of
attention on the part of some readers ... just as well to get that stone
out of the path! I darned a sock and thought out the relationship in the
story, and was rewarded with a revelation of the character of the sick
old woman, 'Niram's step-mother.

Upon this, came one of those veering lists of the ballast aboard which
are so disconcerting to the author. The story got out of hand. The old
woman silent, indomitable, fed and deeply satisfied for all of her hard
and grinding life by her love for the husband whom she had taken from
her sister, she stepped to the front of my stage, and from that moment
on, dominated the action. I did not expect this, nor desire it, and I
was very much afraid that the result would be a perilously divided
interest which would spoil the unity of impression of the story. It now
occurs to me that this unexpected shifting of values may have been the
emergence of the element of tragic old age which had been the start of
the story and which I had conscientiously tried to smother out of sight.
At any rate, there she was, more touching, pathetic, striking, to my
eyes with her life-time proof of the reality of her passion, than my
untried young lovers who up to that time had seemed to me, in the full
fatuous flush of invention as I was, as ill-starred, innocent and
touching lovers as anybody had ever seen.

Alarmed about this double interest I went on with the weaving back and
forth of the elements of the plot which now involved the attempt to
arouse in the reader's heart as in mine a sympathy for the bed-ridden
old Mrs. Purdon and a comprehension of her sacrifice.

My daily routine continued as usual, gardening, telling stories, music,
sewing, dusting, motoring, callers ... one of them, a self-consciously
sophisticated Europeanized American, not having of course any idea of
what was filling my inner life, rubbed me frightfully the wrong way by
making a slighting condescending allusion to what he called the mean,
emotional poverty of our inarticulate mountain people. I flew into a
silent rage at him, though scorning to discuss with him a matter I felt
him incapable of understanding, and the character of Cousin Horace went
into the story. He was for the