“By the way,” she wrote in another letter, “there will be trouble if you come down here.  I was telling Dr. Perrin about you, and your ideas about fasting, and mental healing, and the rest of your fads.  He got very much excited.  It seems that he takes his diploma seriously, and he’s not willing to be taught by amateur experiments.  He wanted me to take some pills, and I refused, and I think now he blames you for it.  He has found a bond of sympathy with my husband, who proves his respect for authority by taking whatever he is told to take.  Dr. Perrin got his medical training here in the South, and I imagine he’s ten or twenty years behind the rest of the medical world.  Douglas picked him out because he’d met him socially.  It makes no difference to me—­because I don’t mean to have any doctoring done to me!”

Then, on top of these things, would come a cry from her soul.  “Mary, what will you do if some day you get a letter from me confessing that I am not happy?  I dare not say a word to my own people.  I am supposed to be at the apex of human triumph, and I have to play that role to keep from hurting them.  I know that if my dear old father got an inkling of the truth, it would kill him.  My one real solid consolation is that I have helped him, that I have lifted a money-burden from his life; I have done that, I tell myself, over and over; but then I wonder, have I done anything but put the reckoning off?  I have given all his other children a new excuse for extravagance, an impulse towards worldliness which they did not need.

“There is my sister Celeste, for example.  I don’t think I have told you about her.  She made her début last fall, and was coming up to New York to stay with me this winter.  She had it all arranged in her mind to make a rich marriage; I was to give her the entrée—­and now I have been selfish, and thought of my own desires, and gone away.  Can I say to her, Be warned by me, I have made a great match, and it has not brought me happiness?  She would not understand, she would say I was foolish.  She would say, ’If I had your luck, I would be happy.’  And the worst of it is, it would be true.

“You see the position I am in with the rest of the children.  I cannot say, ’You are spending too much of papa’s money, it is wrong for you to sign cheques and trust to his carelessness.’  I have had my share of the money, I have lined my own nest.  All I can do is to buy dresses and hats for Celeste; and know that she will use these to fill her girl-friends with envy, and make scores of other families live beyond their means.”

5.  Sylvia’s pregnancy was moving to its appointed end.  She wrote me beautifully about it, much more frankly and simply than she could have brought herself to talk.  She recalled to me my own raptures, and also, my own heartbreak.  “Mary!  Mary!  I felt the child to-day!  Such a sensation, I could not have credited it if anyone had told me.  I almost fainted.  There is something in me that wants to turn back, that is afraid to go on with such experiences.  I do not wish to be seized in spite of myself, and made to feel things beyond my control.  I wander off down the beach, and hide myself, and cry and cry.  I think I could almost pray again.”