The Diary of a Saint

February 1. I wonder sometimes if human pride is not stronger than human affection. Certainly it seems sometimes that we feel the wound to vanity more than the blow to love. I suppose that the truth is that the little prick stings where the blow numbs. For the moment it seemed to me to-night as if I felt more the sudden knowledge that the village knows of my broken engagement than I did the suffering of the fact; but I shall have forgotten this to-morrow, and the real grief will be left.

Miss Charlotte, tall and gaunt, came in just at twilight. She brought a lovely moss-rose bud.

"Why, Miss Charlotte," I said, "you have never cut the one bud off your moss-rose! I thought that was as dear to you as the apple of your eye."

"It was," she answered with her gayest air. "That's why I brought it."

"Mother will be delighted," I said; "that is, if she can forgive you for picking it."

"It isn't for your mother," Miss Charlotte said, with a sudden softening of her voice; "it is for you. I'm an old woman, you know, and I've whims. It's my whim for you to have the bud because I've watched it growing, and loved it almost as if it were my own baby."

Then I knew that she had heard of the broken engagement. The sense of the village gossip, the idea of being talked over at the sewing-circle, came to me so vividly and so dreadfully that for a moment I could hardly get my breath. Then I remembered the sweetness of Miss Charlotte's act, and I went to her and kissed her. The poor old dear had tears in her eyes, but she said nothing. She understood, I am sure, that I could not talk, but that I had seen what she meant me to see, her sympathy and her love. We sat down before the fire in the gathering dusk, and talked of indifferent things. She praised Peter's beauty, although the ungrateful Peter refused to stay in her lap, and would not be gracious under her caresses. She did not remain long, and she was gay after her fashion. Miss Charlotte is apt to cover real feeling with a decent veil of facetiousness.

"Now I must go home and get my party ready," she said, rising with characteristic suddenness.

"Are you going to have a party?" I asked in some surprise.

"I have one every night, my dear," she returned, with her explosive laugh. "All the Kendall ghosts come. It isn't very gay, but it's very select."

She hurried away, and left me more touched than I should have wished her to see.

February 2. It was well for me that Miss Charlotte's visit prepared me last night, for to-day Kathie broke in upon me with the most childish frankness.

"Miss Ruth," she burst out, "ain't you going to marry George Weston?"

"No, my dear," I answered; "but you mustn't say 'ain't.'"

"'Aren't,' then. But I thought you promised years and years ago."

"Kathie, dear," said I, "this isn't a thing that you may talk about. You are too young to understand, and it is vulgar to talk to people about their private affairs unless they begin."

"But it's no wronger than" —

"There's no such word as 'wronger,' Kathie."

"No worse than to break one's word, is it?"

"When two persons make an agreement they have a right to unmake it if they change their minds; and that is not breaking their word. How do the skates work?"

"All right," Kathie answered; "but father said that you and George Weston" —

"Kathie," I said as firmly as I could, "I have told you before that you must not repeat what your father says."

"It isn't wrong," she returned rather defiantly.

I was surprised at her manner, but I suppose that she is always fighting with her conscience about right and wrong, so the mere idea makes her aggressive.

"I am not so sure," I told her, trying to turn the whole matter off with a laugh. "I don't think it's very moral to be ill bred. Do you?"

"Why, Father says manners don't matter if the heart is right."

"This is only another way of saying that if the heart is right the manners will be right. If you in your heart consider whether your father would wish you to tell me what he did not say for my ears, you will not be likely to say it."

That sounds rather priggish now it is written down, but I had to stop the child, and I could not be harsh with her. She evidently wanted much to go on with the subject, but I would not hear another word. How the town must be discussing my affairs!

February 5. Mother is certainly growing weaker, and although Dr. Wentworth will not admit to me that she is failing, I am convinced that he thinks so. She has been telling me this afternoon of things which she wishes given to this and that relative or friend.

"It will not make me any more likely to die, Ruth," she said, "and I shall feel more comfortable if I have these things off my mind. I've thought them out, and if you'll put them on paper, then I shall feel perfectly at liberty to forget them if I find it too much trouble to remember."

I put down the things which she told me, trying hard not to let her see how the tears hindered my writing. When I had finished she lay quiet for some time, and then she said, —

"May I say one thing, Ruth, about George?"

She has said nothing to me before except comforting words to show me that she felt for me, and that she knew I could not bear to talk about it.

"You know you may," I told her, though I confess I shrank at the thought.

"I know how it hurts you now," she said, "and for that I am grieved to the heart; but Ruth, dear, I can't help feeling that it is best after all. You are too much his superior to be happy with him. You would try to make him what you think he ought to be, and you couldn't do it. The stuff isn't in him. He'd get tired of trying, and you would be so humiliated for him that in the end I'm afraid neither of you would be happy."

She stopped, and rested a little, and then went on.

"I am afraid I don't comfort you much," she said, with a sigh. "I suppose that that must be left to time. But I want you to remember it is much less hard for me to leave you alone than it would have been to go with the feeling that you were to make a mistake that would hamper and sadden your whole life."

The tears came into her eyes, and she put out her dear, shadowy hand so feebly that I could not bear it. I dropped on my knees by the bed, and fell to sobbing in the most childish way. Mother patted my head as if I were the baby I was acting.

"There, there, Ruth," she said; "the Privets, as your father would have said, do not cry over misfortunes; they live them down."

She is right; and I must not break down again.

February 7. There are times when I seem like a stranger visiting myself, and I most inhospitably wish that this guest would go. I must determine not to think about my feelings; or, rather, without bothering to make resolutions, I must stop thinking about myself. The way to do it, I suppose, is to think about others; and that would be all very well if it were not that the others I inevitably think about are George and Miss West. I cannot help knowing that he is with her a great deal. Somehow it is in the air, and comes to me against my will. If I go out, I cannot avoid seeing them walking or driving together. I am afraid that George's law business must suffer. I should never have let him neglect it so for me. Perhaps I am cold-blooded.

What Mother said to me the other day has been much in my thoughts. I wonder how it was ever possible for me to be engaged to a man of whom neither Father nor Mother entirely approved. To care for him was something I could not help; I am sure of that. But the engagement is another matter. It came about very naturally after his being here so much in Father's last illness. George was so kind and helpful about the business that we were all full of gratitude, and in my blindness I did not perceive how Mother really felt. I realize now it was his kindness to Father, and the relief his help brought to Mother, which made it hard for her to say then that she did not approve of the engagement; and so soon after she became a helpless invalid that things went on naturally in their own course.

I am sure that if Mother could have known George as I have known him, she would have cared for him. She has hardly seen him in all these years. She hopes that I will forget, but I should be poorer if I could. One does not leave off loving just because circumstances alter. He is free to go his way, but that does not make me any the less his if there is any virtue in my being so.

February 8. I met Mrs. Webbe in the street to-day, her black eyes brighter, more piercing, more snapping than ever. She came up to me in her quick, jerky way, stopped suddenly, tall and strong, and looked at me as if she were trying to read some profound secret, hid in the very bottom of my soul. I could never by any possibility be half so mysterious as Mrs. Webbe's looks seemed to make me.

"Do you write to Tom?" she demanded.

"I don't even know where he is," I answered.

"Then you don't write to him?"

"No."

"That's a pity," Mrs. Webbe went on, her eyes piercing me so that they almost gave me a sensation of physical discomfort. "He ought to know."

I looked at her a moment in silence, thinking she might explain her enigmatic words.