LITMIR.BIZ

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with an aim of my own, nobody understands.

      "You see," she pleaded, "it is impossible for me to live out at home my beliefs. It is a Christian home, they say, and yet my family feels a great deal more responsible to social convention than to its faith. I cannot have simple relations there. My position in regard to the maids in my father's house contradicts my idea of the Gospels."

      "You are a new kind of Saint Francis," said Anne with a smile. "You seem to have taken a vow of poverty and disobedience."

      The door was suddenly pushed open. ​A little girl in a calico gown and broken straw hat appeared.

      "Why, Annabel!" exclaimed Miss Bradford.

      "I beg your pardon, ma'am," said Annabel, with utmost politeness, to the mistress of the studio. "You said 'Come,' didn't you? My mamma wanted me to ask you if you have any laundry. The janitress recommended you."

      "How are your little sisters, Annabel?" asked Anne.

      "Pretty well, thank you. They've almost got to Greenland."

      Annabel still panted from rapid walking.

      "I thought they were going to Japan."

      A troubled look came into the child's face. She touched Miss Bradford's arm affectionately; then her eyes brightened in triumph.

      "They're going to Greenland first, and Japan afterward. I've travelled a good deal in my day, too," said Annabel, looking up guilelessly into Miss Wistar's face. "It runs in the family. I went with my ​sailor uncle to Switzerland and Greenland and Iceland and Africa and New Jersey!"

      "Indeed!" said Miss Wistar gravely.

      "We went past Asia too, but we didn't stop to Asia."

      "That's Annabel," explained Anne, after the child had gone. "Her real name is Sarah Orr. She insists on Annabel because it is romantic. She is the mainstay of an entire family. It is 'personally conducted' by Annabel. She's one of the most interesting characters in Bohemia."

      "Why does she tell such queer tales?"

      "That's genius. It is Annabel's way of escaping from her hard world. Her imagination has been fed by geography and a few stray books. She lies with such accuracy and precision that she would deceive the very elect. Sometimes she tells the truth, and that complicates things. She never lies about business matters."

      Miss Bradford lingered on the threshold.

      "It is rather strange that Mr. Stanton should come here to work just now," she said.

      ​"Here!" cried Helen.

      "Yes. Didn't you know?"

      "No. I thought he was still at Eliot."

      Across the way an open door gave a glimpse of the mysterious recesses of a studio. Hidden behind the tall green plants and Japanese screens was some one playing a violin.

      "Oh!" exclaimed the girl. "It is glorious! Life is so free, and so full of things to do!"

      "Maybe the child thinks that this is altruistic passion, but I doubt if it is," meditated Anne.

      Suddenly Helen turned, with a quiver on her lips that completed the conquest of the older woman's heart.

      "Oh, Miss Bradford! I do so want to help! Do you think I can?"

      ​

CHAPTER V

       Table of Contents

      "Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,

       And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,

       And I in the middle as with companions and as holding the hands of companions——"

      Walt Whitman.

      From her windows Mrs. Kent watched the life in the Square with something akin to interest. Picturesque models came and went. Artists walked in meditation under the trees. The shabby clientele of the Charity Organization used it as a thoroughfare to the great Charity Building on High Street.

      Outside there was only the sight of strange faces, and the sound of unknown feet; within, the four walls of her room, and her thought of the past. Memories of old days drifted between her and the pamphlets which she persistently tried to read. On autumn evenings, when there ​were concerts in the Music Hall, the insistent cry of music set broken chords to vibrating and destroyed her hard-won calm.

      Mrs. Kent had come to the city, she told herself, to forget her sorrow in caring for the poor. There were no claims upon her now. But she had not come to forget. She had come to remember. She wanted solitude, where the sound of familiar voices would not break the silence of her grief. Throughout the meaningless future she would keep fast hold of the meaning of the past.

      Six months of work in the Charity Building; endless reports; endless committee meetings on spring afternoons and hot summer mornings; then suddenly the monotony was broken by the sight of a new face across the table. Anne Bradford had begun to take her dinners at the house where Mrs. Kent lived.

      They were friends now. They had walked together, and had talked of many things. There was something contagious in Anne's interest in life and in people.

      ​"I called on my new neighbour yesterday," said Anne, as she strolled one day with Mrs. Kent about the Square. "She's charming. She has spent a year in a woman's college, and is very wise. Now she's going to make the world all over."

      "Don't laugh at her," begged Mrs. Kent.

      "I'm not laughing at her. I like her immensely. She belongs to a wealthy old Connecticut family. Their religious, social, and economic views are not to her mind. Her criticism of her unenlightened parents rather stuns one. She has come on a mission to us, because her conscience won't permit her to stay at home. It used to be the bad boy who ran away from home. Now it's the good girl, in search of philanthropic adventure."

      Mrs. Kent smiled.

      "The child is brimful of that vain, hungry, ungenerous idealism of the young," continued Anne. "Heaven deliver us all from the abstract wisdom of the utterly untried!"

      "Is she an artist?"

      ​"That depends on your definition," Anne replied dryly. "She decided to keep on with art, after a year's study, because her instructor showed her how really serious a thing art is!"

      From these slight demands for human interest, Mrs. Kent turned with relief to her work. This was largely mechanical. She did her duty with precision, and went her way, sweet, sad, and remote. The harder the work, the more content she was. She liked to come home late in the afternoon, so tired that the old sense of physical and mental paralysis which had come to her when she first knew how great a grief was hers, returned and took possession. That feeling carried her back nearer and nearer to all that she had lost.

      Her imagination slowly acquired a new power. Through the golden autumn air and the misty rain, scenes from her former life drifted back to her. In the long silences she said over and over the old words, those that she had listened to, those that she had spoken. She had ​forgotten nothing. Even in the street her feet beat time to the familiar phrases. Playing both parts in this dialogue of memory, she came to feel that both voices were one, and she forgot to regret the few bitter words that had broken the happiness of those years.

      Grief turned often into rebellion. Once a glimpse of Anne Bradford and Miss Wistar walking together under the falling leaves brought hot tears to Mrs. Kent's eyes. It was like looking from the end of life down a long vista, into the hope and freshness of life's beginning. For her life was over, yet she was still so young.

      "Please, will you come to the studio for a Bohemian supper?" Anne Bradford begged one day. "And will you play chaperon?"

      "Chaperon?"

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