ter House, and the refreshment
of these green and sunlit afternoon tranquillities.

Sometimes in her profounder moments my mother doubted whether all
this last phase of her life was not a dream.

"A dream," I used to say, "a dream indeed--but a dream that is one
step nearer awakening than that nightmare of the former days."

She found great comfort and assurance in my altered clothes--she
liked the new fashions of dress, she alleged. It was not simply
altered clothes. I did grow two inches, broaden some inches
round my chest, and increase in weight three stones before I was
twenty-three. I wore a soft brown cloth and she would caress my
sleeve and admire it greatly--she had the woman's sense of texture
very strong in her.

Sometimes she would muse upon the past, rubbing together her poor
rough hands--they never got softened--one over the other. She told
me much I had not heard before about my father, and her own early
life. It was like finding flat and faded flowers in a book still
faintly sweet, to realize that once my mother had been loved with
passion; that my remote father had once shed hot tears of tenderness in
her arms. And she would sometimes even speak tentatively in those
narrow, old-world phrases that her lips could rob of all their
bitter narrowness, of Nettie.

"She wasn't worthy of you, dear," she would say abruptly, leaving
me to guess the person she intended.

"No man is worthy of a woman's love," I answered. "No woman is
worthy of a man's. I love her, dear mother, and that you cannot
alter."

"There's others," she would muse.

"Not for me," I said. "No! I didn't fire a shot that time; I burnt
my magazine. I can't begin again, mother, not from the beginning."

She sighed and said no more then.

At another time she said--I think her words were: "You'll be lonely
when I'm gone dear."

"You'll not think of going, then," I said.

"Eh, dear! but man and maid should come together."

I said nothing to that.

"You brood overmuch on Nettie, dear. If I could see you married to
some sweet girl of a woman, some good, KIND girl------"

"Dear mother, I'm married enough. Perhaps some day------ Who knows?
I can wait."

"But to have nothing to do with women!"

"I have my friends. Don't you trouble, mother. There's plentiful
work for a man in this world though the heart of love is cast out
from him. Nettie was life and beauty for me--is--will be. Don't
think I've lost too much, mother."

(Because