e
respected, and I had a small earthenware jar containing her ashes placed
in my own family vault. On this jar Susan had had the following words
inscribed:

MALVINA GOUCHER
A GENTLE WOMAN

VII

On one point Susan was from the first determined: Miss Goucher's death
should make no difference in her struggle for independence; she would go
on as she had begun, and fight things through to a finish alone. Neither
Phil nor I could persuade her to take even a few days for a complete
change of scene, a period of rest and recuperation. Simply, she would
not. She settled down at once to work harder than ever, turning out
quotable paragraphs for _Whim_, as daring as they were sprightly; and
she resolutely kept her black hours of loneliness to herself. That she
had many such hours I then suspected and now know, but on my frequent
visits to New York--I had been appointed administrator of Miss Goucher's
more than modest estate--she ignored them, and skillfully turned all my
inquiries aside. These weeks following on Miss Goucher's death were for
many reasons the unhappiest of my life.

Never since I had known Susan, never until now, had our minds met
otherwise than candidly and freely. Now, through no crying fault on
either side--unless through a lack of imagination on mine--barriers were
getting piled up between us, barriers composed of the subtlest, yet
stubbornest misunderstandings. Our occasional hours together soon became
a drab tissue of evasions and cross purposes and suppressed desires.
Only frankness can serve me here or make plain all that was secretly at
work to deform the natural development of our lives.

There are plays--we have all attended them to our indignation--in which
some unhappy train of events seems to have been irrationally forced upon
his puppets by the author; if he would only let them speak out freely
and sensibly, all their needless difficulties would vanish! Such plays
infuriate the public and are never successful.

"Good Lord!" we exclaim. "Why didn't she _say_ she loved him in the
first place!"--or, "If he had only told her his reasons for leaving home
that night!"

We, the enlightened public, feel that in the shoes of either the hero
or the heroine we must have acted more wisely, and we refuse our
sympathy to misfortunes that need never have occurred. Our reaction is
perhaps inevitable and aesthetically justified; but I am wondering--I am
wondering whether two-thirds of t