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By Root 753 0

of a friend so much older than herself, Millicent could not stop talking about ‘Gildud’. But when the two were introduced Millicent was struck dumb. Mabel would have liked to see female wiles: was Millicent coy? But the child’s huge black eyes were hesitant. She was silent in company, waiting to judge whom to trust. Mabel found reserve strange; it was not her way to hang back. Millicent would have to be taught a more pleasing vivacity. After another speechless encounter with ‘Gildud’, Millicent began to cry. How could she disappoint this beautiful Mamma? Missing ‘Muggler’, her grandmother, Millicent clung and fell ill. Mabel, impatient to take up an invitation to stay with the Dickinsons during the Commencement festivities, hired a nurse.

‘I have not the quality of motherhood sufficiently developed,’ she excused herself. ‘I do not in general care for children.’

Released, she shot off to The Evergreens. Whenever there, she saw a house and way of life that was everything she might have wished for herself, had she made a better marriage. As an orphan without funds, Susan Gilbert had once been in a weak position but had married a gentleman who could bestow on a wife all the advantages of his family. Sue had flourished. She grew prize flowers, turned out elegant feasts, invited out-of-town thinkers to The Evergreens and was rearing three children: Ned (Edward), nearing twenty-one; Mattie (Martha), aged fifteen; and little Gib. Sue continually praised Mabel as a model to Ned and Mattie, who were soon running over to see Mabel every day. Mattie was attached enough to spend the night once or twice a week and Ned undertook to improve Mabel’s waltz in the latest style. Whenever she came to The Evergreens there was a whirl with Ned in the hall while Mattie played the piano. Though still a boy, he was graceful in his attentions to his sister and mother, and extended these graces to Mabel who was charmed to find a ‘knight errant’ in the Dickinson family. Triumphantly, her journal records his declarations and her replies.

Ned told Mabel she had his ‘every thought’. It made him restless, inattentive in class. After his family went to bed he would go downstairs to the library and commune with Mabel’s photograph, as he confessed to her in the direct manner of the Dickinsons.

‘Oh! Mrs Todd, I’m afraid I love you, and what shall I do?’

‘I’m very fond of you,’ Mabel assured him.

‘Ah, what you are kind enough to call your affection for me is nothing for you to give; but I love you as you love your husband.’

‘I don’t know but I ought to be stern and disagreeable,’ Mabel offered. ‘To cure you.’

‘You could not cure me.’

Accustomed to flirtation, Mabel was a little taken aback by Ned’s emotion, all the more so because he was so innocent. Since he meant no harm, he thought love could not be wrong.

Once, dressed in velvet pantaloons and riding boots, Ned was visiting Mabel when Mattie’s red hat appeared at the window. Mabel dashed outside to head off Mattie , so that Ned might slip away.

Susan, meanwhile, went on thinking it a fine thing for her son to have (as Mabel put it to herself) ‘a brilliant & accomplished married lady for his friend’. She did feel some unease over Susan’s blindness. It would take years for Ned to get over this, Mabel realised, and she was honest enough to admit to herself, ‘I am vain & selfish enough to be glad.’

Tiring a little of Ned’s needs, Mabel cast her eye on the Squire, a more challenging figure. When Mabel glanced at Austin Dickinson she saw his superiority. Tall, sour, contemptuous, he felt no need to prove himself. Mabel’s history had sharpened her sensitivity to social codes and hierarchies. As much as the Dickinsons were drawn to Mabel, she was entranced by them: the uprightness of their ties and intensities; their family pride; their challenging, interrogative tones; the rhetorical questions they put to themselves as they trod the paths of introspection; their strength of will - flaunted, not kept like her own under wraps; their witty sarcasms; their fine horses and carriages; and the narrative paintings