Then there came a day when the yellow-haired child---shall I call her
Kathy?--wanted to go to a pageant in a neighboring town. It was to
last two days, and there was to be a night parade, and floats and a
carnival. Many of the students were going, and it was planned that
Kathy and I should take a morning train on the first day, so that we
might miss nothing. Kathy's mother would come on an afternoon train,
and they would spend the night at a certain quiet hotel, while I was to
go with a lot of fellows to another.
Well, when that afternoon train arrived, the mother was not on it. Nor
did she come. Without one thought of unconventionality, I procured a
room for Kathy at the place where she and her mother would have
stopped. Then I left her and went to the other hotel to join my
classmates. But carnival-mad; they did not come in at all, and went
back on an express which passed through the town in the early morning.
When Kathy and I reached home at noon, we found her mother white and
hysterical. She would listen to no explanations. She told me that I
should have brought Kathy back the night before--that she had missed
her train and thus her appointment with us. And she told me that I was
in honor bound to marry Kathy.
As I write it, it seems such melodrama. But it was very serious then.
I have never dared analyze the mother's motives. But to my boyish eyes
her anxiety for her daughter's reputation was sincere, and I accepted
the responsibility she laid upon me.
Well, I married her. And she put her slender arms about my neck and
cried and thanked me.
She was very sweet and she was my--wife--and when I was given a parish
and had introduced her to my people, they loved her for the white
gentleness which seemed purity, and for acquiescent amiability which
seemed--goodness.
I have myself much to blame in this--that I did not love her. All
these years I have known it. But that I was utterly unawakened I did
not know. Only in the last few months have I learned it.
Perhaps she missed what I should have given her. God knows. And He
only knows whether, if I had adored her, worshiped her, things would
have been different.
I was very busy. She was not strong. She was left much to herself.
The people did not expect any great efforts on her part--it was enough
that she should look like a saint--that she should lend herself so
perfectly to the ecclesiastical atmosphere.