e turned over on her
pillow and sobbed helplessly. "Jimmie had such ducky little curls,"
she explained incoherently. "I do this sometimes when I think of them.
Otherwise, I'm not a crying woman."

Margaret put out a hand to her; but long after Gertrude's breath began
to rise and fall regularly, she lay staring wide-eyed into the
darkness.

CHAPTER XXI

ELEANOR HEARS THE NEWS

"Dear Uncle Jimmie:

"I said I would write you, but now that I have taken this hour in
which to do it, I find it is a very, very hard letter that I have got
to write. In the first place I can't believe that the things you said
to me that night were real, or that you were awake and in the world of
realities when you said them. I felt as if we were both dreaming; that
you were talking as a man does sometimes in delirium when he believes
the woman he loves to be by his side, and I was listening the same
way. It made me very happy, as dreams sometimes do. I can't help
feeling that your idea of me is a dream idea, and the pain that you
said this kind of a letter would give you will be merely dream pain.
It is a shock to wake up in the morning and find that all the lovely
ways we felt, and delicately beautiful things we had, were only dream
things that we wouldn't even understand if we were thoroughly awake.

"In the second place, you can't want to marry your little niecelet,
the funny little 'kiddo,' that used to burn her fingers and the
beefsteak over that old studio gas stove. We had such lovely kinds of
make-believe together. That's what our association always ought to
mean to us,--just chumship, and wonderful and preposterous _pretends_.
I couldn't think of myself being married to you any more than I could
Jack the giant killer, or Robinson Crusoe. You're my truly best and
dearest childhood's playmate, and that is a great deal to be, Uncle
Jimmie. I don't think a little girl ever grows up quite _whole_ unless
she has somewhere, somehow, what I had in you. You wouldn't want to
marry Alice in Wonderland, now would you? There are some kinds of
playmates that can't marry each other. I think that you and I are that
kind, Uncle Jimmie.

"My dear, my dear, don't let this hurt you. How can it hurt you, when
I am only your little adopted foster child that you have helped
support and comfort and make a beautiful, glad life for? I love you so
much,--you are so precious to me that you _must_ wake up out of this
distorted, though lovely dream t