FullReads

She took me up-stairs after a while and left Billy to smoke on the porch. She said that she had something that she wanted me to see. Her room was a huge square one at the southwest corner of the house. There was a massive four-poster bed with faded blue satin curtains, and there was a fireplace with fire-dogs and an Adam screen. Lady Crusoe carried a candle, and as she stood in the center of the room she seemed to gather all of the light to her, like the saints in the old pictures. She was so perfectly lovely that I almost wanted to cry. I can’t explain it, but there was something pathetic about her beauty.

She set the candle down and opened an old brass-bound chest. She took out a roll of cloth and brought it over and laid it on the table beside the candle.

“I bought it with some of the money that your Billy got for my Sheffield tray,” she said. Then she turned to me with a quick motion and laid her hands on my shoulders. “Oh, you very dear–when I saw you making those little things–I knew that–that the good Lord had led me. Will you–will you–show me–how?”

I told Billy about it on the way home.

“She doesn’t know anything about sewing, and she hasn’t any patterns, and I am to go up every day, and William Watters will come for me with his mule–“

Then I cried about her a little, because it seemed so dreadful that she should be there all alone, without any one to sustain her and cherish her as Billy did me.

“Oh, Billy, Billy,” I said to him, “I’d rather live over a grocery store with you than live in a palace with anybody else–“

And Billy said, “Don’t cry, lady love, you are not going to live with anybody else.”

And he put his arm around me, and as we walked along together in the April night it was like the days when we had been young lovers, only our joy in each other was deeper and finer, for then we had only guessed at happiness, and now we knew–

Well, I went up every day. William Watters came for me, and I carried my patterns and we sat in the big west room, and right under the window a pair of robins were building a nest.

We watched them as they worked, and it seemed to us that no matter how hard we toiled those two birds kept ahead. “I never dreamed,” Lady Crusoe remarked one morning, “that they were at it all the time like this.”

“You wait until they begin to feed their young,” I told her. “People talk about being as free as a bird. But I can tell you that they slave from dawn until dark. I have seen a mother bird at dusk giving a last bite to one squalling baby while the father fed another.”

Lady Crusoe laid down her work and looked out over the hills. “The father,” she said, and that was all for a long time, and we stitched and stitched, but at last she spoke straight from her thoughts: “How dear your husband is to you!”

“That’s what husbands are made for.”

“Some of them are not, dear,” her voice was hard, “some of them expect so much and give so little–“

I kept still and presently she began again. “They give money–and they think that is–enough. They give jewels–and think we ought to be profoundly grateful.”

“Well, my experience,” I told her, “is that the men give as much love as the women–“

She looked at me. “What do you mean?”

“Love costs them a lot.”

“In what way?”

“They work for us. Now there’s Billy’s grocery store. If Billy didn’t have me, he’d be doing things that he likes better. You wouldn’t believe it, but Billy wanted to study law, but it meant years of hard work before he could make a cent, and he and I would have wasted our youth in waiting–and so he went into business–and that’s a big thing for a man to do for a woman–to give up a future that he has hoped for–and that’s why I feel that I can’t do enough for Billy–“