Twenty-one years later I was sailing for England, the wife of a diplomat who was one of Boston's wealthy and aristocratic sons.
The road between--well, let it speak for itself. Merely to set this story on paper opens old wounds, deep, but mercifully healed these many years. Yet, if other women may find here comfort and illumination and a certain philosophy, I am glad, and I shall feel repaid.
The first thing I remember is being grateful for windows. I was three years old. My mother had set me to play on a mattress carefully placed in the one ray of sunlight streaming through the one glass window of our log cabin. Baby as I was, I had ached in the agonizing cold of a pioneer winter. Lying there, warmed by that blessed sunshine, I was suddenly aware of wonder and joy and gratitude. It was gratitude for glass, which could keep out the biting cold and let in the warm sun.
To this day windows give me pleasure. My father was a school-teacher from New England, where his family had taught the three R's and the American Constitution since the days of Ben Franklin's study club. My mother was the daughter of a hardworking Scotch immigrant. Father's family set store on ancestry. Mother's side was more practical.
The year before my birth these two young people started West in a prairie schooner to stake a homestead claim. Father's sea-man's chest held a dictionary, Bancroft's History of the United States, several books of mathematics, Plutarch's Lives, a history of Massachusetts, a leather-bound file of Civil War records, Thackeray's “Vanity Fair”, Shakespeare in two volumes, and the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” My mother took a Bible.
I can still quote pages from every one of those books. Until I was fourteen I saw no others, except a primer, homemade, to teach me my letters. Because “Vanity Fair” contained simpler words than the others, it was given me first; so at the age of seven I was spelling out pages of the immortal Becky.
My mother did not approve, but father laughed and protested that the child might as well begin with good things.
After mother's eighth and last baby, she lay ill for a year. The care of the children fell principally on my young shoulders. One day I found her crying.