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“But in spite of all this there is a truth that must be spoken. I feel a thousand times better and stronger than when I came. And yesterday, exercising in the privacy of my room, I discovered that there are once more calves upon my legs. This is truth, too. I have no one to talk to but your letters. So don’t stint me. Stint me with money if you can (here I defy you), but for the love of Heaven keep me posted. If you will promise to write every day I will tell you the name of the prettiest girl in Aiken. She goes by eight times every day, and she looks my way out of the corner of her eye. And I pretend to be reading and try very hard to look handsome and interesting…. Mother! … just now I rested my hand on the arm of my chair and the wood felt hot to the touch! It’s high noon and the sun’s been on it since eight o’clock, but still it seems very wonderful. Willcox says that the winter is practically over; but I begged him not to hurry….”

Such was the usual trend of his letters. But that one dated March 7 began with the following astonishing statement:

“I love Aiken …” and went on to explain why.

But Mister Masters was not allowed to love Aiken until he had come through the whole gauntlet of gossip. It had first been suggested that he was a consumptive and a menace (“though of course one feels terribly sorry for them, my dear”). This had been disproved. Then it was spread about that he belonged to a wealthy family of Masters from the upper West Side (“very well in their way, no doubt, and the backbone of the country, my dear, but one doesn’t seem to get on with them, and I shouldn’t think they’d come to Aiken of all places”). But a gentleman who knew the West Side Masters, root and branch, shook his head to this, and went so far as to say, “Not much, he isn’t”; and went further and shuddered. Then it got about that Mister Masters was poor (and that made people suspicious of him). Then it got about that he was rich (and that made them even more so). Then that he wrote for a living (and that was nearly as bad as to say that he cheated at cards–or at least it was the kind of thing that they didn’t do). And then, finally, the real truth about him, or something like it, got out; and the hatchet of suspicion was buried, and there was peace in Aiken. In that Aiken of whose peace the judge, referring to a pock-marked mulatto girl, had thundered that it should not be disturbed for any woman–“no–not even were she Helen of Troy.”

This was the truth that got out about Mister Masters. He was a nephew of the late Bishop Masters. His mother, on whom he was dependent, was very rich; she had once been prominent in society. He was thirty, and was good at games. He did not work at anything.

So he was something that Aiken could understand and appreciate: a young man who was well-born, who didn’t have to work–and who didn’t want to.

But old Mrs. Hotchkiss did not know of these things when, one bright day in passing Willcox’s (she was on one good foot, one rheumatic foot, and a long black cane with a gold handle), she noticed the young man pale and rather sad-looking in his fur coat and steamer-rug, his eyes on his book, and stopped abruptly and spoke to him through the gap in the hedge.

“I hope you’ll forgive an old woman for scraping an acquaintance,” she piped in her brisk, cheerful voice, “but I want to know if you’re getting better, and I thought the best way to find out was to stop and ask.”