Leaf VII.

Heart Agonies.

I have suffered this day until I want to lay my face down against the hem of His garment and wait in the dust for Him to pick me up.  I shall never be able to do it myself, and how He’s going to do it I can’t see, but He will.

That dinner-party last night was bad enough, but to-day’s been worse.  I didn’t sleep until long after daylight and then Jane came in before eight o’clock with a letter for me that looked like a state document.  I felt in my trembly bones that it was some sort of summons affair from Judge Wade; and it was.  I looked into the first paragraph and then decided that I had better get up and dress and have a cup of coffee and a single egg before I tried to read it.

Incidental to my bath and dressing, I weighed and found that I had lost all four of those last surplus pounds and two more in three days.  Those two extra pounds might be construed to prove that I was in love, but exactly with whom I was utterly unprepared to say.  I didn’t even enjoy the thinness, but took a kind of already married look in my glass and tried to slip the egg past my bored lips and get myself to chew it down.  It was work; and then I took up the judge’s letter, which also was work and more of it.

He started at the beginning of everything, that is at the beginning of the tuberculosis girl, and I cried over the pages of her as if she had been my own sister.  At the tenth page we buried her and took up Alfred, and I must say I saw a new Alfred in the judge’s bouquet-strewn appreciation of him, but I didn’t want him as bad as I had the day before, when I read his own new and old letters, and cried over his old photographs.  I suppose that was the result of some of what the judge manages the juries with.  He’d be apt to use it on a woman, and she wouldn’t find out about it until it was too late to be anything but mad.  Still when he began on me at page sixteen I felt a little better, though I didn’t know myself any better than I did Alfred when I got to page twenty.

What I am, is just a poor foolish woman, who has a lot more heart than she can manage with the amount of brains she got with it at birth.  I’m not any star in a rose-coloured sky, and I don’t want to inspire anybody; it’s too heavy an undertaking.  I want to be a healthy, happy woman and a wife to a man who can inspire himself and manage me.  I want to marry a thin man, and when I get to be thirty I want my husband to want me to be as large as Aunt Bettie, but not let me.  An inspiration couldn’t be fat, and I’m always in danger from hot cakes and chicken gravy.

However, if I should undertake to be all the things Judge Wade said in that letter he wanted me to be to him, I should soon be skin and bones from mental and physical exercise.  Still, he does live in Hillsboro, and I won’t let myself know how my heart aches at the thought of leaving my home—­and other things.  It’s up in my throat, and I seem always to be swallowing it, the last few days.