I looked at him in wonder. If ever there was a man who seemed unromantic, it was he, heavy and prosaic and so shy that he was visibly agitated even in bowing to a woman acquaintance.
"I met her," he was saying, "when I was driving that way,--the horse ran, I was thrown out, and her parents had to take me in and let her nurse me. You've seen her face,--or faces like it. Most of those Madonnas over on the other side in all the galleries suggest her. Well,--her parents were furious,--wouldn't hear of it,--you know Shakers think marriage and love and all those things are wicked. And she thought so, too. How she used to suffer! It wore her to a shadow. She wouldn't marry me,--wouldn't let me so much as touch her hand. But we used to meet and--then she caught a cold--waiting hours for me, one winter night, when there'd been a misunderstanding about the place--I was in one place, she in another. And the cold,--you see, she couldn't fight against it. And--and--there won't be another, Harvey. All women are sacred to me for her sake, but I couldn't any more marry than I could--could stop feeling her sitting beside me, just a little way off, wrapped in her drab shawl, with her face--like a glimpse through the gates of Heaven."
Within me up-started the memories that I kept battened down.
"Your children are mine, too, Harvey," he ended.
I took from Carlotta's work-basket an unfinished bit of baby clothing. I went to him and held it up and pointed to the monogram she had embroidered on it.
"E. R. S.," he read aloud. Then he looked at me with a queer expression beginning to form in his eyes.
"Edward Ramsay Sayler, if it's a boy," said I. "Edwina Ramsay Sayler, if it's a girl."
He snatched the bit of linen from me and buried his face in it.
The baby was a boy,--fortunately, for I don't admire the name Edwina, and I shouldn't have liked to handicap a child with it. Carlotta and Ed were delighted, but I felt a momentary keen disappointment. I had wanted a girl. Girls never leave their parents completely, as boys do. Also I should rather have looked forward to my child's having a sheltered life, one in which the fine and beautiful ideals do not have to be molded into the gross, ugly forms of the practical. I may say, in passing, that I deplore the entrance of women into the world of struggle. Women are the natural and only custodians of the ideals. We men are compelled to wander, often to wander far, from the ideal. Unless our women remain aloof from action, how are the ideals to be preserved? Man for action; woman to purify man, when he returns stained with the blood and sin of battle.