Stepping Heavenward [45]
that his mother is dangerously ill, and seems in great distress. I am mean enough to want all his love myself, while I should hate him if he gave none to her. Poor Ernest! If she should die he would be sadly afflicted!
FEB. 27.-She died the very day he wrote. How I long to fly to him and to comfort him! I can think of nothing else. I pray day and night that God would make me a better wife.
A letter came from mother at the same time with Ernest's. She evidently misses me more than she will own. Just as soon as Ernest returns home I will ask him to let her come and live with us. I am sure he will; he loves her already, and now that his mother has gone he will find her a real comfort. I am sure she will only make our home the happier.
FEB. 28-Such a dreadful thing is going to happen! I have cried and called myself names by turns all day. Ernest writes that it has been decided to give up the old homestead, and scatter the family about among the married sons and daughters. Our share is to be his father and his sister Martha, and he desires me to have two rooms got ready for them at once.
So all the glory and the beauty is snatched out of my married life at one swoop! And it is done by the hand I love best, and that I would not have believed could be so unkind.
I am rent in pieces by conflicting emotions and passions. One moment I am all tenderness and sympathy for poor Ernest, and ready to sacrifice everything for his pleasure. The next I am bitterly angry with him for disposing of all my happiness in this arbitrary way. If he had let me make common cause with him and share his interests with him, I know I am not so abominably selfish as to feel as I do now. But he forces two perfect strangers upon me and forever shuts our doors against my darling mother. For, of course, she cannot live with us if they do.
And who knows what sort of people they are? It is not everybody I can get along with, nor is it everybody can get along with me. Now, if Helen were coming instead of Martha, that would be some relief. I could love her, I am sure, and she would put up with my ways. But your Marthas I am afraid of. Oh, dear, dear, what a nest of scorpions this affair has stirred up within me! Who would believe I could be thinking of my own misery while Ernest's mother, whom he loved so dearly, is hardly in her grave! But I have no heart, I am stony and cold. It is well to have found out just what I am!
Since I wrote that I have been trying to tell God all about it. But I could not speak for crying. And I have been getting the rooms ready. How many little things I had planned to put in the best one, which I intended for mother I have made myself arrange them just the same for Ernest's father. The stuffed chair I have had in my room, and enjoyed so much, has been rolled in, and the Bible with large print placed on the little table near which I had pictured mother with her sweet, pale face, as sitting year after year. The only thing I have taken away is the copy of father's portrait. He won't want that!
When I had finished this business I went and shook my fist at the creature I saw in the glass.
"You're beaten I" I cried. "You didn't want to give up the chair, nor your writing-table, nor the Bible in which you expect to record the names of your ten children I But you've had to do it, so there!"
MARCH 3.-They all got here at 7 o'clock last night, just in time for tea. I was so glad to get hold of Ernest once more that I was gracious to my guests, too. The very first thing, however, Ernest annoyed me by calling me Katherine, though he knows I hate that name, and want to be called Katy as if I were a lovable person, as I certainly am (sometimes). Of course his father and Martha called me Katherine, too.
His father is even taller, darker, blacker eyed, blacker haired than he.
Martha is a spinster.
I had got up a nice little supper for them, thinking they would need something substantial after their journey. And perhaps there was some vanity in the display of dainties that needed the mortification I felt at seeing
FEB. 27.-She died the very day he wrote. How I long to fly to him and to comfort him! I can think of nothing else. I pray day and night that God would make me a better wife.
A letter came from mother at the same time with Ernest's. She evidently misses me more than she will own. Just as soon as Ernest returns home I will ask him to let her come and live with us. I am sure he will; he loves her already, and now that his mother has gone he will find her a real comfort. I am sure she will only make our home the happier.
FEB. 28-Such a dreadful thing is going to happen! I have cried and called myself names by turns all day. Ernest writes that it has been decided to give up the old homestead, and scatter the family about among the married sons and daughters. Our share is to be his father and his sister Martha, and he desires me to have two rooms got ready for them at once.
So all the glory and the beauty is snatched out of my married life at one swoop! And it is done by the hand I love best, and that I would not have believed could be so unkind.
I am rent in pieces by conflicting emotions and passions. One moment I am all tenderness and sympathy for poor Ernest, and ready to sacrifice everything for his pleasure. The next I am bitterly angry with him for disposing of all my happiness in this arbitrary way. If he had let me make common cause with him and share his interests with him, I know I am not so abominably selfish as to feel as I do now. But he forces two perfect strangers upon me and forever shuts our doors against my darling mother. For, of course, she cannot live with us if they do.
And who knows what sort of people they are? It is not everybody I can get along with, nor is it everybody can get along with me. Now, if Helen were coming instead of Martha, that would be some relief. I could love her, I am sure, and she would put up with my ways. But your Marthas I am afraid of. Oh, dear, dear, what a nest of scorpions this affair has stirred up within me! Who would believe I could be thinking of my own misery while Ernest's mother, whom he loved so dearly, is hardly in her grave! But I have no heart, I am stony and cold. It is well to have found out just what I am!
Since I wrote that I have been trying to tell God all about it. But I could not speak for crying. And I have been getting the rooms ready. How many little things I had planned to put in the best one, which I intended for mother I have made myself arrange them just the same for Ernest's father. The stuffed chair I have had in my room, and enjoyed so much, has been rolled in, and the Bible with large print placed on the little table near which I had pictured mother with her sweet, pale face, as sitting year after year. The only thing I have taken away is the copy of father's portrait. He won't want that!
When I had finished this business I went and shook my fist at the creature I saw in the glass.
"You're beaten I" I cried. "You didn't want to give up the chair, nor your writing-table, nor the Bible in which you expect to record the names of your ten children I But you've had to do it, so there!"
MARCH 3.-They all got here at 7 o'clock last night, just in time for tea. I was so glad to get hold of Ernest once more that I was gracious to my guests, too. The very first thing, however, Ernest annoyed me by calling me Katherine, though he knows I hate that name, and want to be called Katy as if I were a lovable person, as I certainly am (sometimes). Of course his father and Martha called me Katherine, too.
His father is even taller, darker, blacker eyed, blacker haired than he.
Martha is a spinster.
I had got up a nice little supper for them, thinking they would need something substantial after their journey. And perhaps there was some vanity in the display of dainties that needed the mortification I felt at seeing