Dorothy South

FROM the very beginning of her travels Dorothy revealed herself to Arthur in rapidly succeeding letters which were – at the first, at least – as frank as had been her talks with him during their long morning rides together. If in the end her utterance became more guarded, with a touch of reserve in it, and with a growing tendency to write rather of other things than of her own emotions, Arthur saw in the fact only an evidence of that increasing maturity of womanhood which he had intended her to gain. For Arthur Brent studied Dorothy’s letters as scrutinizingly as if they had been lessons in biology. Or, more accurately speaking, he studied Dorothy herself in her letters, in that way.

From Richmond she wrote half rejoicings, half lamentations over the long separation she must endure from him and from all else that had hitherto constituted her life. Arthur observed that while she mentioned as a troublesome thing the necessity of having still another gown made before leaving for the North, she told him nothing whatever about the gown itself.

“Gowns,” he reflected, “are merely necessary adjuncts of life to Dorothy – as yet. She’ll think of them differently after a while.”

From Washington she wrote delightedly of things seen, for although the glory of the national capital had not come upon it in 1860, there was even then abundant interest there for a country damsel.

From Baltimore she wrote:

“I’ve been wicked, and I like it. Edmonia took me to Kunkel and Moxley’s Front Street Theatre last night to hear an opera, and I haven’t yet wakened from the delicious dream. I think I never shall. I think I never want to. Yet I am very sorry that I went, for I shall want to go again and again and again, and you know that I mustn’t listen to such music as that. It will make me bad, and really and truly I’d rather die than be bad. I don’t understand it at all. Why is it wrong for me to hear great music when it isn’t wrong for Edmonia? And Edmonia has heard the greatest music there is, in New York and Paris and Vienna and Naples, and it hasn’t hurt her in the least. I wish you would tell me why I am so different, won’t you, Cousin Arthur?”

From New York she wrote of music again and many times, for she had accepted Arthur’s assurance that there was no harm but only good for her in listening to music; and in obedience to his injunction she went twice each week to the opera, where Edmonia’s friends, whose guest she was, had a box of their own. Presently came from her a pleading letter, asking if she might not herself learn to play a little upon the violin, and availing herself of Arthur’s more than ready permission, she toiled ceaselessly at the instrument until after a month or so Edmonia reported that the girl’s music master was raving about the extraordinary gifts she was manifesting.

“I am a trifle worried about it, Arthur,” Edmonia added. “Perhaps her father was right to forbid all this. Music is not merely a delight to her – it is a passion, an intoxication, almost a madness. She is very fond of dancing too, but I think dancing is to her little more than a physical participation in the music.

“And she mightily enjoys society. Still more does society enjoy her. Her simplicity, her directness and her perfect truthfulness, are qualities not very common, you know, in society, in New York or anywhere else. People are delighted with her, and, without knowing it, she is the reigning attraction in every drawing room. Ah me! She will have to know it presently, for I foresee that ‘the young Virginia belle’ as they all call her, will have many suitors for her hand before we sail – two weeks hence.

“She astonishes society in many ways. She is so perfectly well always, for one thing. She is never tired and never has a headache. Most astonishing of all, to the weary butterflies of fashion, she gets up early in the morning and takes long rides on horseback before breakfast.

“In certain companies – the sedater sort – she is reckoned a brilliant conversationalist. That is because she reads and thinks, as not many girls of her age ever do. In more frivolous society she talks very little and is perhaps a rather difficult person for the average young man to talk to. That also is because she reads and thinks.

“On the whole, Arthur, Dorothy is developing altogether to my satisfaction, but I am troubled about the music. Dr. South had a reason, of which you know nothing, for fearing music in her case, as a dangerous intoxication. Perhaps we ought not to disobey his instructions on the subject. Won’t you think the matter over, Arthur, and advise me?”

To this request Arthur’s reply came promptly. It was an oracular deliverance, such as he was accustomed to give only when absolutely sure of his judgment.

“Have no fear as to the music,” he wrote. “It is not an intoxication to Dorothy, as your report shows that indulgence in it is not followed by reaction and lassitude. That is the sure test of intoxication. For the rest Dorothy has a right to cultivate and make the most of the divine gifts she possesses. Every human being has that right, and it is a cruel wrong to forbid its exercise in any case. I am delighted to see from your letters and hers that she has not permitted her interest in music to impair her interest in other things. She tells me she has been reading a book on ‘The Origin of Species’ by Charles Darwin. I have heard of it but haven’t seen it yet, as it was published in England only a few months ago and had not been reprinted here when I last wrote to New York for some books. So please ask Dorothy to send me her copy as soon as she has finished it, and tell her please not to rub out the marginal notes she tells me she has been making in it. They will be helpfully suggestive to me in my reading, and, as expressions of her uninfluenced opinion, I shall value them even more than the text of the book itself. She tells me she thinks the book will work a revolution in science, giving us a new foundation to build upon. I sincerely hope so. We have long been in need of new foundations. But, pardon me, you are not interested in scientific studies and I will write to Dorothy herself about all that.”

At this point in her reading Edmonia laid the letter in her lap and left it there for a considerable time before taking it up again. She was thinking, a trifle sadly, perhaps, but not gloomily or with pain.

“He is right,” she reflected. “I sympathize with him in his high purposes and I share the general admiration of his character and genius. But I do not share his real enthusiasms as Dorothy does. I have none of that love for scientific truth for its own sake, which is an essential part of his being. I have none of his self-sacrificing earnestness, none of that divine discontent which is the mainspring of all his acts and all his thinking. It is greatly better as Fate has ordered it. I am no fit life partner for him. Had he married me I should have made him happy in a way, perhaps, but it would have been at cost of his deterioration. It is better as it is – immeasurably better, – and I must school myself to think of it in that way. If I am worthy even of the friendship that he so generously gives me, I shall learn to rejoice that he gives the love to Dorothy instead, and not to me. I must learn to think of his good and the fit working out of his life as the worthiest thing I can strive for. And I am learning this lesson. It is a little hard at first, but I shall master it.”

A few days later Dorothy, in one of her unconsciously self-revealing letters, wrote:

“I am sending you the Darwin book, with all my crude little notes in the margins. I have sealed it up quite securely and paid full letter postage on it, because it would be unjust to the government to send a book with writing in it, at book postage rates. Besides, I don’t want anybody but you to read the notes. Edmonia asked me to let her see the book before sending it, but I told her I couldn’t because I should die of shame if anybody should read my presumptuous comments on so great a book. For it is great, really and truly great. It is the greatest explanation of nature that anybody ever yet offered. At least that is the way it impresses me. Edmonia asked me why I was so chary of letting her see notes that I was entirely willing for you to see, and at first I couldn’t explain it even to myself, for, of course, I love Edmonia better than anybody else in the world, and I have no secrets from her. I told her I would have to think the matter over before I could explain it, and she said: ‘Think it out, child, and when you find out the explanation you may tell me about it or not, just as you please.’ She kindly laughed it off, but it troubled me a good deal. I couldn’t understand why it was that I couldn’t bear to let her see the notes, while I rather wanted you to read them. I found it all out at last, and explained it to her, and she seemed satisfied. It’s because you know so much. You are my Master, and you always know how to allow for your pupil’s wrong thinking even while you set me right. Besides, somehow I am never ashamed of my ignorance when only you know of it. Edmonia said that was quite natural, and that I was entirely right not to show the scribbled book to her. So I don’t think I hurt her feelings, do you?

“Now, I want to tell you about another thought of mine which may puzzle you – or it may make you laugh as it does other people. There’s a woman here – a very bright woman but not, to my taste, a lovely one – who is very learned in a superficial way. She knows everything that is current in science, art, literature, and fashion, though she seems to me deficient in thoroughness. She ‘has the patter of it all at her tongue’s end,’ as they say here, but I don’t think she knows much behind the patter. A wise editor whom I met at dinner a few days ago, described her as ‘a person who holds herself qualified to discuss and decide anything in heaven or earth from the standpoint of the cyclopædia and her own inner consciousness.’ She writes for one of the newspapers, though I didn’t know it when she talked with me about Darwin. I told her I thought of Darwin’s book as a great poem. You would have understood me, if I had said that to you, wouldn’t you? You know I always think of the grass, and the trees and the flowers, and the birds and the butterflies, and all the rest, as nature’s poems, and this book seems to me a great epic which dominates and includes, and interprets them all, just as Homer and Milton and Virgil and Tasso and especially Shakespeare, dominate all the little twitterings of all the other poets. Anyhow it seems to me that a book which tells us how all things came about, is a poem and a very great one. I said so to this woman, and next day I saw it all printed in the newspaper for which she writes. I shouldn’t have minded that as she didn’t tell my name, but I thought she seemed to laugh and jeer at my thought. She said something witty about trying to turn Darwin into dactyls and substitute dithyrambics for dogmatics in the writings of Sir Isaac Newton. Somehow it all sounded bright and witty as one read it in the newspaper. But is that the way in which a serious thought ought to be treated? Do the newspapers, when they thus flippantly deal with serious things, really minister to human advancement? Do they not rather retard it by making jests of things that are not jests? I have come to know a good many newspaper writers since I have been here, and I am convinced that they have no real seriousness in their work, no controlling conscience. ‘The newspaper’ said one of the greatest of them to me not long ago, ‘is a mirror of today. It doesn’t bother itself much with tomorrow or yesterday.’ I asked him why it should not reflect today accurately, instead of distorting if with smartness. ‘Oh,’ he answered, ‘we can’t stop to consider such things. We must do that which will please and attract the reader, regardless of everything else. Dulness is the only thing we must avoid as we shun the pestilence, and erudition and profundity are always dull.’

“ ‘But doesn’t the newspaper assume to teach men and women?’ I asked. ‘And is it not in conscience bound to teach them the truth and not falsehood?’

“ ‘Oh, yes, that’s the theory,’ he answered. ‘But how can we live up to it? Take this matter of Darwinism, for example. We can’t afford to employ great scientific men to discuss it seriously in our columns. And if we did, only a few would read what they wrote about it. We have bright fellows on our editorial staffs who know how to make it interesting by playing with it, and for our purpose that is much better than any amount of learning.’

“I have been thinking this thing over and I have stopped the reading of newspapers. For I find that they deal in the same way with everything else – except politics, perhaps, and, of course, I know nothing of politics. I read a criticism of a concert the other day in which a singer was – well, never mind the details. The man that wrote that criticism didn’t hear the concert at all, as he confessed to me. He was attending another theatre at the time. Yet he assumed to criticise a singer to her detriment, utterly ignoring the fact that she has her living to make by singing and that his criticism might seriously affect her prospects. He laughed the matter off, and when I seemed disturbed about it he said: ‘For your sake, Miss South, I’ll make amends. She sings again tomorrow, and while I shall not be able to hear her, I’ll give her such a laudation as shall warm the cockles of her heart and make her manager mightily glad. You’ll forgive me, then, for censuring her yesterday, I’m sure.’ I’m afraid I misbehaved myself then. I told him I shouldn’t read his article, that I hated lies and shams and false pretences, and that I didn’t consider his articles worth reading because they had no truth or honesty behind them. It was dreadfully rude, I know, and yet I’m not sorry for it. For it seemed to make an impression on him. He told me that he only needed some such influence as mine to give him a conscience in his work, and he actually asked me to marry him! Think of the absurdity of it! I told him I wasn’t thinking of marrying anybody – that I was barely seventeen, that – oh, well, I dismissed the poor fellow as gently as I could.”

But while the proposal of marriage by the newspaper man, and several other such solicitations which followed it, struck Dorothy at first as absurdities, they wrought a marked change in her mental attitude. Two at least of these proposals were inspired by higher considerations than those of the plantation which Dorothy represented, and were pressed with fervor and tenderness by men quite worthy to aspire to Dorothy’s hand. These were men of substance and character, in whose minds the fascination which the Virginia girl unwittingly exercised over everybody with whom she came into contact – men and women alike – had quickly ripened into a strong and enduring passion. Dorothy suffered much in rejecting such suits as theirs, but she learned something of herself in the process. She for the first time realized that she was a woman and that she had actually entered upon that career of womanhood which had before seemed so far away in the future that thoughts of it had never before caused her to blush and tremble as they did now.

These things set her thinking, and in her thinking she half realized her own state of mind. She began dimly to understand the change that had come over her attitude and feeling towards Arthur Brent. She would not let herself believe that she loved him as a woman loves but one man while she lives; but she admitted to herself that she might come to love him in that way if he should ever ask her to do so with the tenderness and manifest sincerity which these others had shown. But of that she permitted herself to entertain no hope and even no thought. His letters to her, indeed, seemed to put that possibility out of the question. For at this time Arthur held himself under severe restraint. He was determined that he should not in any remotest way take advantage of his position with respect to Dorothy, or use his influence over her as a means of winning her. He knew now his own condition of mind and soul in all its fulness. He was conscious now that the light of his life lay in the hope of some day winning Dorothy’s love and making her all and altogether his own. But he was more than ever determined, as he formulated the thought in his own mind, to give Dorothy a chance, to take no advantage of her, to leave her free to make choice for herself. It was his fixed determination, should she come back heart whole from this journey, to woo her with all the fervor of his soul; but the more determined he became in this resolution, the more resolutely did he guard his written words against the possibility that they might reveal aught of this to her. “If she ever comes to love me as my wife,” he resolved, “it shall be only after she has had full opportunity to make another choice.”

Accordingly his letters to her continued to concern themselves with intellectual and other external things. He wrote her half a ream of comment upon Darwin’s book, taking up for discussion every marginal note she had made concerning it. But that part of his letter was as coldly intellectual as any of their horseback conversations had been. In all the intimate parts of that and his other letters, he wrote only as one might to a sympathetic friend, as he might have written to Edmonia, for example. He even took half unconscious pains to emphasize the fatherly character of his relations with her, lest they assume some other aspect to her apprehension.

On her side Dorothy began now to write outside of herself, as it were. She described to him all her new gowns and bonnets, laughing at the confusion of mind in which a study of such details must involve him. In her childlike loyalty she told him of the wooings that so distressed her, but she did so quite as she might have written to him of the loves of Juliet and Ophelia and the Lady of Lyons. For the rest she wrote objectively now, in the main, and speculatively concerning certain of those social problems in which she knew him to be profoundly interested, and which she was somewhat studying now, because of the interest they had for him.

The word “slumming” had not been invented at that time by the insolence that does the thing it means. But Dorothy, chiefly under the guidance of her friends among the newspaper men, went to see how the abjectly poor of a great city lived, and she wrote long letters of comment to Arthur in which she told him how great and distressing the revelation was, and how she honored his desire to do something for the amelioration of these people’s lives. “Your aspiration is indeed a noble one,” she wrote in one of her letters; “the life you proposed to yourself, and from which you were diverted by your inheritance of a plantation, is the very greatest, the very noblest that any man could lead. I once thought you were doing even better in the care you are taking of the negroes at Wyanoke and Pocahontas, and in your efforts ultimately to set them free. But that was when I did not know. I know now, in part at least, and I understand your feeling in the matter as I never could have done had I not seen for myself.

“People here sometimes say things to me that hurt. But I am ready with my answer now. One woman – very intellectual, but a cat – asked me yesterday how I could bear to hold negroes in slavery, and to buy fine gowns with the proceeds of their toil. I told her frankly that I didn’t like it, but that I couldn’t help it, and in reply to her singularly ignorant inquiries as to why I didn’t end the wrong or at least my participation in it, I explained some difficulties to her that she had never taken the trouble to ask about. I told her how hard you were working to discharge the debts of your estate in order that you might send your negroes to the west to be free, and that you might yourself return to New York to do what you could for the immeasurably worse slaves here. She caught at my phrase and challenged it. I told her what I meant, and as it happened to be in a company of highly intellectual people, I suppose I ought not to have talked so much, but somehow they seemed to want to hear. I said:

“ ‘In Virginia I always visit every sick person on the plantation every day. We send for a doctor in every case, and we women sit up night after night to nurse every one that needs it. We provide proper food for the sick and the convalescent from our own tables. We take care of the old and decrepit, and of all the children. From birth to death they know that they will be abundantly provided for. What poor family around the Five Points has any such assurance? Who provides doctors and medicine and dainties for them when they are ill? Who cares for their children? Who assures them, in childhood and in old age, of as abundant a supply of food and clothing, and as good a roof, as we give to the negroes? I go every morning, as I just now said, to see every sick or afflicted negro on my own plantation and on that of my guardian. How often have you gone to the region of the Five Points to minister to those who are ill and suffering and perhaps starving there?’

“ ‘Oh, that is all cared for by the charitable organizations’ she said, ‘and by the city missionaries.’

“ ‘Is it?’ I answered. ‘I do not find it so. I have emptied my purse a dozen times in an effort to get a doctor for a very ill person here, and to buy the medicines he prescribed, and to provide food for starving ones. And then, next day I have found that the sick have died because the well did not know how to cook the food I had provided, or how to follow the doctor’s directions in the giving of medicine. I tell you these poor people are immeasurably worse off than any negro slave at the South is, or ever was. So far as I can learn there is no working population in the world that gets half so much of comfort and care and reward of every sort for its labor, as the negroes of Virginia get.’

“Then the woman broke out. She said: ‘You are dressed in a superb satin’ – it was at a social function – ‘and every dollar of its cost was earned by a negro slave on your plantation.’ I answered, ‘You are equally well dressed. Will you tell me who earned the money that paid for your satin gown?’ Then, Cousin Arthur, I lost my temper and my manners. I told her that while we in Virginia profited by the labor of our negroes, we gave them, as the reward of their labor, every desire of their hearts and, besides that, an assurance of support in absolute comfort for their old age, and for their children; while the laboring class in New York, from whose labor she profited, and whose toil purchased her gown, had nobody to care for them in infancy or old age, in poverty and illness and suffering. ‘It is all wrong on both sides,’ I said. ‘The toilers ought to have the full fruits of their toil in both cases. The luxury of the rich is a robbery of the poor always and everywhere. There ought not to be any such thing anywhere. The woman who made your underclothing was robbed when you bought it at the price you did. You wronged and defrauded the silk spinners and weavers and the sewing women when you bought your gown. Worse than that; you have among you men who have accumulated great fortunes in manufactures and commerce. How did they do it? Was it not in commerce by paying the producers for their products less than they were worth? Was it not in manufactures by paying men and women and children less than they have earned? Was not the great Astor estate based upon a shrewd robbery of the Indian trappers and hunters? And has it not been swelled to its present proportions by the growth of a city to whose growth the Astors have never contributed a single dollar? Isn’t the whole thing a wrong and a robbery? Isn’t the “Song of the Shirt” a reflection of truth? Isn’t there slavery in New York as actually as in Virginia, and isn’t it infinitely more cruel?’

“Then the woman shifted her ground. ‘But at least our laborers are free,’ she said. ‘Are they?’ I answered. ‘Are they free to determine for whom they will work or at what wages? Cannot their masters, who are their employers, discharge them at will, when they get old or feeble or otherwise incompetent, and leave them to starve? No master of a Virginia plantation can do that. His neighbors would actually lynch him should he turn a decrepit old negro out to die or even should he deny to him the abundant food and clothing and housing that he gives to the able-bodied negroes who make crops. And,’ I added, for I was excited, ‘this cruelty is not confined to what are ordinarily called the laboring classes. I know a man of unusual intellectual capacity, who has worked for years to build up the fortunes of his employers. He has had what is regarded as a very high salary. But being a man of generous mind he has spent his money freely in educating the ten or a dozen sons and daughters of his less fortunate brother. He is growing old now. He has earned for his master, a thousand dollars for every dollar of salary that he ever received just as all his fellow workers in the business have done. But he is growing old now, and under the strain of night and day work, he has acquired the habit of drinking too much. He hasn’t a thousand dollars in the world as his reward for helping to make this other man, his master, absurdly, iniquitously rich. Yet in his age and infirmity, the other man, luxuriating in his palatial summer home which is only one of the many palaces that other men’s toil late into the night has provided for him, decides that the old servitor is no longer worth his salary, and decrees his discharge. Is there anything so cruel as that in negro slavery? Is that man half so well off as my negro mammy, who has a house of her own and all the food and clothes she wants at the age of eighty, and who could have the service of a dozen negro attendants for the mere asking?’

“Now, Cousin Arthur, please don’t misunderstand me. Even what I have seen at the Five Points doesn’t tempt me to believe in slavery. I want of all things to see that exterminated. But, really and truly, I find an immeasurably worse slavery here in New York than I ever saw in Virginia, and I want to see it all abolished together, not merely the best and kindliest and most humane part of it. I want to see the time when every human being who works shall enjoy the full results of his work; when no man shall be any other man’s master; when no man shall grow rich by pocketing the proceeds of any other man’s genius or industry. I said all this to that woman, and she replied: ‘You are obviously a pestilent socialist. You are as bad as Fourier and Albert Brisbane and Horace Greeley.’ That was very rude of her, seeing that Mr. Greeley was present, but I’ve noticed that the people who most highly pride themselves on good manners are often rude and inconsiderate of others to a degree that would not be tolerated in Virginia society – except perhaps from Mr. Madison Peyton. By the way, Mr. Jefferson Peyton was present, and to my regret he said some things in defence of slavery which I could not at all approve. Mr. Greeley interrupted him to say something like this:

“ ‘The dear young lady is quite right. We have a horrible slavery right here in New York, and we ought to make war on that as earnestly as we do on African slavery at the South. I’m trying to do it in the Try-bune’ – that’s the way he pronounces the name of his paper – ‘and I’m going to keep on trying.’

“That encouraged me, for I find myself more and more disposed to respect Mr. Greeley as I come to know him better. I don’t always agree with him. I sometimes think he is onesided in his views, and of course he is enormously self-conceited. But he is, at any rate, an honest man, and a brave and sincere one. He isn’t afraid to say what he thinks, any more than you are, and I like him for that. Another great editor whom I have met frequently, seems to me equally courageous, but far less conscientious. He is inclined to take what he calls ‘the newspaper view’ of things, – by which he means the view that appeals to the multitude for the moment, without much regard for any fixed principle. Socially he is a much more agreeable man than Mr. Greeley, but I don’t think him so trustworthy. Mr. Greeley impresses me as a man who may be enormously wrong-headed, under the influence of his prejudiced misconceptions, but who, wrong-headed or right-headed, will never consciously wrong others. If he had been born the master of a Virginia plantation he would have dealt with his negroes in the same spirit in which he has insisted upon giving to his fellow workers on the Tribune a share in the profits of their joint work. Mr. Greeley is odd, but I like him better than any editor I have met.”

So the girl went on, writing objectively and instinctively avoiding the subjective. But she did not always write so seriously. She had “caught the patter” of society and she often filled pages with a sparkling, piquant flippancy, which had for Arthur a meaning all its own.

XXX

AT SEA

THE voyage to Europe in 1860 was a much more serious undertaking than the like voyage is in our later time. It occupied a fortnight or three weeks, for one thing, where now a week is ample time for the passage. The steamers were small and uncomfortable – the very largest of them being only half the size of the very smallest now regarded as fit for passenger service. There was no promenade deck or hurricane deck then, above the main deck, which was open to the sky throughout its length and breadth, except for the interruption of one small deck house, covering the companion way, a ventilator pipe here and there, and perhaps a chicken coop to furnish emaciated and sea sick fowls for the table d’hôte. There was no ice machine on board, and no distilling apparatus for the production of fresh water. As a consequence, after two days out, the warm water which passengers must drink began to taste of the ancient wood of the water tanks; at the end of a week it became sickeningly foul; and before the end of the voyage it became so utterly undrinkable that the most aggressive teetotaler among the passengers was compelled to order wine for his dinner and to abstain from coffee at breakfast.

The passenger who did not grow seasick in those days was a rare exception to an otherwise universal rule, while, in our time, when the promenade deck is forty or fifty feet above the waves, and the passengers are abundantly supplied both with palatable food and with wholesome water, only those suffer with mal de mer who are bilious when they go on board, or who are beset by a senseless apprehension of the sea.

The passenger lists were small, too, even allowing for the diminutive size of the ships. One person crossed the ocean then where perhaps a hundred cross in our time.

There were perhaps twenty passengers in the cabin of the ship in which Dorothy sailed. By the second day out only two of the ship’s company appeared at meals or at all regularly took the air on deck. Dorothy was one of these two. The other she herself introduced, as it were, to Arthur, in a long, diary-like letter which she wrote on shipboard and mailed at Liverpool.

“I’m sitting on a great coil of rope, just behind the deck house,” she wrote, “where I am sheltered from the wind and where I can breathe my whole body full of the delicious sea air. The air is flavored with great quantities of the finest sunshine imaginable. Every now and then I lay my paper down, and a very nice old sailor comes and puts two big iron belaying pins on it, to keep it from blowing overboard while I go skipping like a ten-year-old girl up and down the broad, clean deck, and enjoying the mere being alive, just as I do on horseback in Virginia when the sun is rising on a perfect morning.

“I ought to be down stairs – no, I mustn’t say ‘down stairs,’ when I’m at sea, I must say ‘below.’ Well, I ought to be below ministering to Edmonia and her friend Mrs. Livingston, – or Mildred, as she insists on my calling her – both of whom are frightfully sick; but really and truly, Edmonia won’t let me. She fairly drove me out, half an hour ago. When I didn’t want to go she threatened to throw her shoes at my head, saying ‘You dear little idiot, go on deck and keep your sea-well on, if you can.’ And when I protested that she seemed very ill and that I hadn’t the heart to go on the beautiful deck and be happy in the delicious air and sunshine while she was suffering so, she said: ‘Oh, I’m always so for the first three or four days, and I’m best let alone. My temper is frightful when I’m seasick. That’s why I took separate staterooms for you and me. I don’t want you to find out what a horribly ill-tempered, ill-mannered woman I am when I’m seasick. How can I help it? I’ve got a mustard plaster on my back and two on my chest, and I’ve drunk half a bottle of that detestable stuff, champagne, and I’m really fighting mad. Go away, child, and let me fight it out with myself and the stewardesses. They don’t mind it, the dear good creatures. They’re used to it. I threw a coffee cup full of coffee all over one of them this morning because she presumed to insist upon my swallowing the horrible stuff, and she actually laughed, Dorothy. I couldn’t get up a quarrel with her no matter what I did, and so I tried my hand on the ship’s doctor. I don’t like him anyhow. He’s just the kind that would make love to me if he dared, and I don’t like men that do that.’ Then Edmonia added: ‘He wouldn’t quarrel at all. When I told him he was trying to poison me with bicarbonate of soda in my drinking water, he seriously assured me that bicarbonate of soda isn’t poisonous in the least degree, that it corrects acidity, and all that sort of thing. I gave him up as hopeless, – but remind me, Dorothy, that when we go ashore I must put half a dozen sovereigns into his hand – carefully wrapped up in paper, so that he shan’t even guess what they are – as his well earned fee for enduring my bad temper. But now, Dorothy, you see clearly that this ship doesn’t provide any proper person for me to quarrel with, and so I must fall back upon you, if you persist in staying here and arrogantly insulting me with your sublime superiority to seasickness. So get out of my room and stay out till I come on deck with my mind restored to a normal condition.’ I really think she meant it, and so I’m obeying her. And I should be very happy with the air and the sunshine and my dear old sailorman who tells me sailor stories and sings to me the very quaintest old sailor songs imaginable, if I could be sure that I’m doing right in being happy while Edmonia is so very miserable.

“As for Mildred – Mrs. Livingston – she lies white-faced and helpless in her bunk – there, I got the sailor term right that time at the first effort – while her husband simply sleeps and moans on the sofa. The doctor says they are ‘progressing very satisfactorily’ and so I am taking his advice and letting them alone. But why anybody should be seasick, how anybody can be sick at sea, I simply cannot understand. The ship’s doctor tried to explain it to me this morning, but he forgot his explanation. He – well, never mind. He ought to have a wife with a plantation or something of that sort, so that his abilities might have an opportunity. I don’t think much of his abilities, and I don’t like him half as well as I do my old sailor. He is going to tell me – the old sailor, I mean and not the doctor – all about his life history tonight. We are to have a moon, you know, and, as he’s on the ‘port watch,’ whatever that may mean, he’s going to come on deck and tell me all about himself. I’ll tell you about it in tomorrow’s instalment of this rambling letter.”

On the following day, or perhaps a day later even than that, Dorothy wrote:

“This is another day. I don’t just know what day. You know they keep changing the clock at sea, and I’ve got mixed up. Edmonia still throws shoes and medicine bottles and coffee cups at me whenever I thrust my head inside the portière of her stateroom, and Mildred, though she has sufficiently recovered to come on deck, lies helpless in a deck chair which my sailor has ‘made fast’ – you see I’m getting to be an expert in nautical terms – to a mast or a spar or something, and when I speak to her, says, ‘Go away, child, and be happy in the midst of human misery, if you can. Let me alone.’ When I ask her concerning her husband she answers: ‘I suppose he’s comfortable in his misery. At any rate, he has two bottles of champagne by his side, and he is swearing most hopefully. I always know he is getting over it when he begins to swear in real earnest, and with a certain discretion in the choice of his oaths. Now, run away, you ridiculously well girl or I’ll begin to borrow from Rex’s vituperative vocabulary.’ Rex is her husband you know.

“The sailor’s story didn’t amount to anything, so I’ll not bother you with a repetition of it.”

[As a strictly confidential communication, not to be mentioned to anybody, the author so far intrudes upon attention at this point, as to report that the sailorman, at the end of his picturesque and imaginative narrative, professed a self-sacrificing willingness to abandon the delights of a sea-faring existence, and to content himself thereafter with the homelier and less romantic duties of master of Pocahontas plantation. Dorothy, in continuing her letter, was quite naturally reticent upon this point. But she went on liking that old sailorman, in whose devotion to her comfort on deck nothing seemed to make the slightest difference. Perhaps this chronic mariner already had ‘a wife in every port’ and was only ‘keeping his hand in’ at courtship. At any rate after duly disciplining him, Dorothy went on liking him and accepting his manifold, sailorly attentions. Ah, these women! How very human they are in face of all their airs and pretensions!]