The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 62, December, 1862

I am sure she felt as much strange, sweet shyness sealing her girlish lips at that moment as when she came, very slowly and silently, a year after, to tell me she was engaged to Mr. Hermann. I had to smile and sigh both.

"Tell me, then, Laura; for I cannot guess."

"I'll tell you the gentleman's name, and perhaps you can guess the lady's then: it is Frank Addison."

"Frank Addison!" echoed I, in surprise; for this young man was one I knew and loved well, and I could not think who in our quiet village had sufficient attraction for his fastidious taste.

He was certainly worth marrying, though he had some faults, being as proud as was endurable, as shy as a child, and altogether endowed with a full appreciation, to say the least, of his own charms and merits: but he was sincere, and loyal, and tender; well cultivated, yet not priggish or pedantic; brave, well-bred, and high-principled; handsome besides. I knew him thoroughly; I had held him on my lap, fed him with sugar-plums, soothed his child-sorrows, and scolded his naughtiness, many a time; I had stood with him by his mother's dying bed and consoled him by my own tears, for his mother I loved dearly; so, ever since, Frank had been both near and dear to me, for a mutual sorrow is a tie that may bind together even a young man and an old maid in close and kindly friendship. I was the more surprised at his engagement because I thought he would have been the first to tell me of it; but I reflected that Laura was his cousin, and relationship has an etiquette of precedence above any other social link.

"Yes,—Frank Addison! Now guess, Miss Sue! for he is not here to tell you,—he is in New York; and here in my pocket I have got a letter for you, but you shan't have it till you have well guessed."

I was—I am ashamed to confess it—but I was not a little comforted at hearing of that letter. One may shake up a woman's heart with every alloy of life, grind, break, scatter it, till scarce a throb of its youth beats there, but to its last bit it is feminine still; and I felt a sudden sweetness of relief to know that my boy had not forgotten me.

"I don't know whom to guess, Laura; who ever marries after other people's fancy? If I were to guess Sally Hetheridge, I might come as near as I shall to the truth."

Laura laughed.

"You know better," said she. "Frank Addison is the last man to marry a dried-up old tailoress."

"I don't know that he is; according to his theories of women and marriage, Sally would make him happy. She is true-hearted, I am sure,—generous, kind, affectionate, sensible, and poor. Frank has always raved about the beauty of the soul, and the degradation of marrying money,—therefore, Laura, I believe he is going to marry a beauty and an heiress. I guess Josephine Bowen."

"Susan!" exclaimed Laura, with a look of intense astonishment, "how could you guess it?"

"Then it is she?"

"Yes, it is,—and I am so sorry! such a childish, giggling, silly little creature! I can't think how Frank could fancy her; she is just like Dora in "David Copperfield,"—a perfect gosling! I am as vexed"–

"But she is exquisitely pretty."

"Pretty! well, that is all; he might as well have bought a nice picture, or a dolly! I am out of all patience with Frank. I haven't the heart to congratulate him."

"Don't be unreasonable, Laura; when you get as old as I am, you will discover how much better and greater facts are than theories. It's all very well for men to say,—

'Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat,'—

the soul is all they love,—the fair, sweet character, the lofty mind, the tender woman's heart, and gentle loveliness; but when you come down to the statistics of love and matrimony, you find Sally Hetheridge at sixty an old maid, and Miss Bowen at nineteen adored by a dozen men and engaged to one. No, Laura, if I had ten sisters, and a fairy godmother for each, I should request that ancient dame to endow them all with beauty and silliness, sure that then they would achieve a woman's best destiny,—a home."

Laura's face burned indignantly; she hardly let me finish before she exclaimed,—

"Susan Lee! I am ashamed of you! Here are you, an old maid, as happy as anybody, decrying all good gifts to a woman, except beauty, because, indeed, they stand in the way of her marriage! as if a woman was only made to be a housekeeper!"

Laura's indignation amused me. I went on.

"Yes, I am happy enough; but I should have been much happier, had I married. Don't waste your indignation, dear; you are pretty enough to excuse your being sensible, and you ought to agree with my ideas, because they excuse Frank, and yours do not."

"I don't want to excuse him; I am really angry about it. I can't bear to have Frank throw himself away; she is pretty now, but what will she be in ten years?"

"People in love do not usually enter into such remote calculations; love is to-day's delirium; it has an element of divine faith in it, in not caring for the morrow. But, Laura, we can't help this matter, and we have neither of us any conscience involved in it. Miss Bowen may be better than we know. At any rate, Frank is happy, and that ought to satisfy both you and me just now."

Laura's eyes filled with tears. I could see them glisten on the dark lashes, as she affected to tie her hat, all the time untying it as fast as ever the knot slid. She was a sympathetic little creature, and loved Frank very sincerely, having known him as long as she could remember. She gave me a silent kiss, and went away, leaving the letter, yet unopened, lying in my lap. I did not open it just then. I was thinking of Josephine Bowen.

Every summer, for three years, Mr. and Mrs. Bowen had come to Ridgefield for country-air, bringing with them their adopted daughter, whose baptismal name had resigned in favor of the pet appellation "Kitten,"—a name better adapted to her nature and aspect than the Impératrice appellation that belonged to her. She was certainly as charming a little creature as ever one saw in flesh and blood. Her sweet child's face, her dimpled, fair cheeks, her rose-bud of a mouth, and great, wistful, blue eyes, that laughed like flax-flowers in a south-wind, her tiny, round chin, and low, white forehead, were all adorned by profuse rings and coils and curls of true gold-yellow, that never would grow long, or be braided, or stay smooth, or do anything but ripple and twine and push their shining tendrils out of every bonnet or hat or hood the little creature wore, like a stray parcel of sunbeams that would shine. Her delicate, tiny figure was as round as a child's,—her funny hands as quaint as some fat baby's, with short fingers and dimpled knuckles. She was a creature as much made to be petted as a King-Charles spaniel,—and petted she was, far beyond any possibility of a crumpled rose-leaf. Mrs. Bowen was fat, loving, rather foolish, but the best of friends and the poorest of enemies; she wanted everybody to be happy, and fat, and well as she was, and would urge the necessity of wine, and entire idleness, and horse-exercise, upon a poor minister, just as honestly and energetically as if he could have afforded them: an idea to the contrary never crossed her mind spontaneously, but, if introduced there, brought forth direct results of bottles, bank-bills, and loans of ancient horses, only to be checked by friendly remonstrance, or the suggestion that a poor man might be also proud. Mr. Bowen was tall and spare, a man of much sense and shrewd kindliness, but altogether subject and submissive to "Kitten's" slightest wish. She never wanted anything; no princess in a story-book had less to desire; and this entire spoiling and indulgence seemed to her only the natural course of things. She took it as an open rose takes sunshine, with so much simplicity, and heartiness, and beaming content, and perfume of sweet, careless affection, that she was not given over to any little vanities or affectations, but was always a dear, good little child, as happy as the day was long, and quite without a fear or apprehension. I had seen very little of her in those three summers, for I had been away at the sea-side, trying to fan the flickering life that alone was left to me with pungent salt breezes and stinging baptisms of spray, but I had liked that little pretty well. I did not think her so silly as Laura did: she seemed to me so purely simple, that I sometimes wondered if her honest directness and want of guile were folly or not. But I liked to see her, as she cantered past my door on her pony, the gold tendrils thick clustered about her throat and under the brim of her black hat, and her bright blue eyes sparkling with the keen air, and a real wild-rose bloom on her smiling face. She was a prettier sight even than my profuse chrysanthemums, whose masses of garnet and yellow and white nodded languidly to the autumn winds to-day.

I recalled myself from this dream of recollection, better satisfied with Miss Bowen than I had been before. I could see just how her beauty had bewitched Frank,—so bright, so tiny, so loving: one always wants to gather a little, gay, odor-breathing rose-bud for one's own, and such she was to him.

So then I opened his letter. It was dry and stiff: men's letters almost always are; they cannot say what they feel; they will be fluent of statistics, or description, or philosophy, or politics, but as to feeling,—there they are dumb, except in real love-letters, and, of course, Frank's was unsatisfactory accordingly. Once, toward the end, came out a natural sentence: "Oh, Sue! if you knew her, you wouldn't wonder!" So he had, after all, felt the apology he would not speak; he had some little deference left for his deserted theories.

Well I knew what touched his pride, and struck that little revealing spark from his deliberate pen: Josephine Bowen was rich, and he only a poor lawyer in a country-town: he felt it even in this first flush of love, and to that feeling I must answer when I wrote him,—not merely to the announcement, and the delight, and the man's pride. So I answered his letter at once, and he answered mine in person. I had nothing to say to him, when I saw him; it was enough to see how perfectly happy and contented he was,—how the proud, restless eyes, that had always looked a challenge to all the world, were now tranquil to their depths. Nothing had interfered with his passion. Mrs. Bowen liked him always, Mr. Bowen liked him now; nobody had objected, it had not occurred to anybody to object; money had not been mentioned any more than it would have been in Arcadia. Strange to say, the good, simple woman, and the good, shrewd man had both divined Frank's peculiar sensitiveness, and respected it.

There was no period fixed for the engagement, it was indefinite as yet, and the winter, with all its excitements of South and North, passed by at length, and the first of April the Bowens moved out to Ridgefield. It was earlier than usual; but the city was crazed with excitement, and Mr. Bowen was tried and worn; he wanted quiet. Then I saw a great deal of Josephine, and in spite of Laura, and her still restless objections to the child's childish, laughing, inconsequent manner, I grew into liking her: not that there seemed any great depth to her; she was not specially intellectual, or witty, or studious, or practical; she did not try to be anything: perhaps that was her charm to me. I had seen so many women laboring at themselves to be something, that one who was content to live without thinking about it was a real phenomenon to me. Nothing bores me (though I be stoned for the confession, I must make it!) more than a woman who is bent on improving her mind, or forming her manners, or moulding her character, or watching her motives, with that deadly-lively conscientiousness that makes so many good people disagreeable. Why can't they consider the lilies, which grow by receiving sun and air and dew from God, and not hopping about over the lots to find the warmest corner or the wettest hollow, to see how much bigger and brighter they can grow? It was real rest to me to have this tiny, bright creature come in to me every day during Frank's office-hours as unintentionally as a yellow butterfly would come in at the window. Sometimes she strayed to the kitchen-porch, and, resting her elbows on the window-sill and her chin on both palms, looked at me with wondering eyes while I made bread or cake; sometimes she came by the long parlor-window, and sat down on a brioche at my feet while I sewed, talking in her direct, unconsidered way, so fresh, and withal so good and pure, I came to thinking the day very dull that did not bring "Kitten" to see me.

The nineteenth of April, in the evening, my door opened again with an impetuous bang; but this time it was Frank Addison, his eyes blazing, his dark cheek flushed, his whole aspect fired and furious.

"Good God, Sue! do you know what they've done in Baltimore?"

"What?" said I, in vague terror, for I had been an alarmist from the first: I had once lived at the South.

"Fired on a Massachusetts regiment, and killed—nobody knows how many yet; but killed, and wounded."

I could not speak: it was the lighted train of a powder-magazine burning before my eyes. Frank began to walk up and down the room.

"I must go! I must! I must!" came involuntarily from his working lips.

"Frank! Frank! remember Josephine."

It was a cowardly thing to do, but I did it. Frank turned ghastly white, and sat down in a chair opposite me. I had, for the moment, quenched his ardor; he looked at me with anxious eyes, and drew a long sigh, almost a groan.

"Josephine!" he said, as if the name were new to him, so vitally did the idea seize all his faculties.

"Well, dear!" said a sweet little voice at the door.

Frank turned, and seemed to see a ghost; for there in the door-way stood "Kitten," her face perhaps a shade calmer than ordinary, swinging in one hand the tasselled hood she wore of an evening, and holding her shawl together with the other. Over her head we discerned the spare, upright shape of Mr. Bowen looking grim and penetrative, but not unkindly.

"What is the matter?" went on the little lady.

Nobody answered, but Frank and I looked at each other. She came in now and went toward him, Mr. Bowen following at a respectful distance, as if he were her footman.

"I've been looking for you everywhere," said she, with the slightest possible suggestion of reserve, or perhaps timidity, in her voice. "Father went first for me, and when you were not at Laura's, or the office, or the post-office, or Mrs. Sledge's, then I knew you were here; so I came with him, because—because"—she hesitated the least bit here—"we love Sue."

Frank still looked at her with his soul in his eyes, as if he wanted to absorb her utterly into himself and then die. I never saw such a look before; I hope I never may again; it haunts me to this day.

I can pause now to recall and reason about the curious, exalted atmosphere that seemed suddenly to have surrounded us, as if bare spirits communed there, not flesh and blood. Frank did not move; he sat and looked at her standing near him, so near that her shawl trailed against his chair; but presently when she wanted to grasp something, she moved aside and took hold of another chair,—not his: it a little thing, but it interpreted her.

"Well?" said he, in a hoarse tone.

Just then she moved, as I said, and laid one hand on the back of a chair: it was the only symptom of emotion she showed; her voice was as childish-clear and steady as before.

"You want to go, Frank, and I thought you would rather be married to me first; so I came to find you and tell you I would."