to ask me if I’d had a pleasant day?”
Ann Eliza turned with a quiet smile. “I guess I don’t have to. Seems to me it’s pretty plain you have.”
“Well, I don’t know. I don’t know HOW I feel— it’s all so queer. I almost think I’d like to scream.”
“I guess you’re tired.”
“No, I ain’t. It’s not that. But it all happened so suddenly, and the boat was so crowded I thought everybody’d hear what he was saying.—Ann Eliza,” she broke out, “why on earth don’t you ask me what I’m talking about?”
Ann Eliza, with a last effort of heroism, feigned a fond incomprehension.
“What ARE you?”
“Why, I’m engaged to be married—so there! Now it’s out! And it happened right on the boat; only to think of it! Of course I wasn’t exactly surprised—I’ve known right along he was going to sooner or later—on’y somehow I didn’t think of its happening to-day. I thought he’d never get up his courage. He said he was so ‘fraid I’d say no—that’s what kep’ him so long from asking me. Well, I ain’t said yes YET—leastways I told him I’d have to think it over; but I guess he knows. Oh, Ann Eliza, I’m so happy!” She hid the blinding brightness of her face.
Ann Eliza, just then, would only let herself feel that she was glad. She drew down Evelina’s hands and kissed her, and they held each other. When Evelina regained her voice she had a tale to tell which carried their vigil far into the night. Not a syllable, not a glance or gesture of Ramy’s, was the elder sister spared; and with unconscious irony she found herself comparing the details of his proposal to her with those which Evelina was imparting with merciless prolixity.
The next few days were taken up with the embarrassed adjustment of their new relation to Mr. Ramy and to each other. Ann Eliza’s ardour carried her to new heights of self-effacement, and she invented late duties in the shop in order to leave Evelina and her suitor longer alone in the back room. Later on, when she tried to remember the details of those first days, few came back to her: she knew only that she got up each morning with the sense of having to push the leaden hours up the same long steep of pain.
Mr. Ramy came daily now. Every evening he and his betrothed went out for a stroll around the Square, and when Evelina came in her cheeks were always pink. “He’s kissed her under that tree at the corner, away from the lamp-post,” Ann Eliza said to herself, with sudden insight into unconjectured things. On Sundays they usually went for the whole afternoon to the Central Park, and Ann Eliza, from her seat in the mortal hush of the back room, followed step by step their long slow beatific walk.
There had been, as yet, no allusion to their marriage, except that Evelina had once told her sister that Mr. Ramy wished them to invite Mrs. Hochmuller and Linda to the wedding. The mention of the laundress raised a half-forgotten fear in Ann Eliza, and she said in a tone of tentative appeal: “I guess if I was you I wouldn’t want to be very great friends with Mrs. Hochmuller.”
Evelina glanced at her compassionately. “I guess if you was me you’d want to do everything you could to please the man you loved. It’s lucky,” she added with glacial irony, “that I’m not too grand for Herman’s friends.”
“Oh,” Ann Eliza protested, “that ain’t what I mean—and you know it ain’t. Only somehow the day we saw her I didn’t think she seemed like the kinder person you’d want for a friend.”
“I guess a married woman’s the best judge of such matters,” Evelina replied, as though she already walked in the light of her future state.
Ann Eliza, after that, kept her own counsel. She saw that Evelina wanted her sympathy as little as her admonitions, and that already she counted for nothing in her sister’s scheme of life. To Ann Eliza’s idolatrous acceptance of the cruelties of fate this exclusion seemed both natural and just; but it caused her the most lively pain. She could not divest her love for Evelina of its passionate motherliness; no breath of reason could lower it to the cool temperature of sisterly affection.
She was then passing, as she thought, through the novitiate of her pain; preparing, in a hundred experimental ways, for the solitude awaiting her when Evelina left. It was true that it would be a tempered loneliness. They would not be far apart. Evelina would “run in” daily from the clockmaker’s; they would doubtless take supper with her on Sundays. But already Ann Eliza guessed with what growing perfunctoriness her sister would fulfill these obligations; she even foresaw the day when, to get news of Evelina, she should have to lock the shop at nightfall and go herself to Mr. Ramy’s door. But on that contingency she would not dwell. “They can come to me when they want to—they’ll always find me here,” she simply said to herself.
One evening Evelina came in flushed and agitated from her stroll around the Square. Ann Eliza saw at once that something had happened; but the new habit of reticence checked her question.
She had not long to wait. “Oh, Ann Eliza, on’y to think what he says—” (the pronoun stood exclusively for Mr. Ramy). “I declare I’m so upset I thought the people in the Square would notice me. Don’t I look queer? He wants to get married right off—this very next week.”
“Next week?”
“Yes. So’s we can move out to St. Louis right away.”
“Him and you—move out to St. Louis?”
“Well, I don’t know as it would be natural for him to want to go out there without me,” Evelina simpered. “But it’s all so sudden I don’t know what to think. He only got the letter this morning. DO I look queer, Ann Eliza?” Her eye was roving for the mirror.
“No, you don’t,” said Ann Eliza almost harshly.
“Well, it’s a mercy,” Evelina pursued with a tinge of disappointment. “It’s a regular miracle I didn’t faint right out there in the Square. Herman’s so thoughtless—he just put the letter into my hand without a word. It’s from a big firm out there—the Tiff’ny of St. Louis, he says it is—offering him a place in their clock-department. Seems they heart of him through a German friend of his that’s settled out there. It’s a splendid opening, and if he gives satisfaction they’ll raise him at the end of the year.”
She paused, flushed with the importance of the situation, which seemed to lift her once for all above the dull level of her former life.
“Then you’ll have to go?” came at last from Ann Eliza.
Evelina stared. “You wouldn’t have me interfere with his prospects, would you?”
“No—no. I on’y meant—has it got to be so soon?”
“Right away, I tell you—next week. Ain’t it awful?” blushed the bride.
Well, this was what happened to mothers. They bore it, Ann Eliza mused; so why not she? Ah, but they had their own chance first; she had had no chance at all. And now this life which she had made her own was going from her forever; had gone, already, in the inner and deeper sense, and was soon to vanish in even its outward nearness, its surface-communion of voice and eye. At that moment even the thought of Evelina’s happiness refused her its consolatory ray; or its light, if she saw it, was too remote to warm her. The thirst for a personal and inalienable tie, for pangs and problems of her own, was parching Ann Eliza’s soul: it seemed to her that she could never again gather strength to look her loneliness in the face.
