Produced by David Widger
By William Dean Howells
The evening when March closed with Mrs. Green's reduced offer, anddecided to take her apartment, the widow whose lodgings he had rejectedsat with her daughter in an upper room at the back of her house. In theshaded glow of the drop-light she was sewing, and the girl was drawing atthe same table. From time to time, as they talked, the girl lifted herhead and tilted it a little on one side so as to get some desired effectof her work.
"It's a mercy the cold weather holds off," said the mother. "We shouldhave to light the furnace, unless we wanted to scare everybody away witha cold house; and I don't know who would take care of it, or what wouldbecome of us, every way."
"They seem to have been scared away from a house that wasn't cold," saidthe girl. "Perhaps they might like a cold one. But it's too early forcold yet. It's only just in the beginning of November."
"The Messenger says they've had a sprinkling of snow."
"Oh yes, at St. Barnaby! I don't know when they don't have sprinklings ofsnow there. I'm awfully glad we haven't got that winter before us."
The widow sighed as mothers do who feel the contrast their experienceopposes to the hopeful recklessness of such talk as this. "We may have aworse winter here," she said, darkly.
"Then I couldn't stand it," said the girl, "and I should go in forlighting out to Florida double-quick."
"And how would you get to Florida?" demanded her mother, severely.
"Oh, by the usual conveyance Pullman vestibuled train, I suppose. Whatmakes you so blue, mamma?" The girl was all the time sketching away,rubbing out, lifting her head for the effect, and then bending it overher work again without looking at her mother.
"I am not blue, Alma. But I cannot endure this—this hopefulness ofyours."
"Why? What harm does it do?"
"Harm?" echoed the mother.
Pending the effort she must make in saying, the girl cut in: "Yes, harm.You've kept your despair dusted off and ready for use at an instant'snotice ever since we came, and what good has it done? I'm going to keepon hoping to the bitter end. That's what papa did."
It was what the Rev. Archibald Leighton had done with all theconsumptive's buoyancy. The morning he died he told them that now he hadturned the point and was really going to get well. The cheerfulness wasnot only in his disease, but in his temperament. Its excess was always alittle against him in his church work, and Mrs. Leighton was right enoughin feeling that if it had not been for the ballast of her instinctivedespondency he would have made shipwreck of such small chances ofprosperity as befell him in life. It was not from him that his daughtergot her talent, though he had left her his temperament intact of hiswidow's legal thirds. He was one of those men of whom the country peoplesay when he is gone that the woman gets along better without him. Mrs.Leighton had long eked out their income by taking a summer boarder ortwo, as a great favor, into her family; and when the greater need came,she frankly gave up her house to the summer-folks (as they call them inthe country), and managed it for their comfort from the small quarter ofit in which she shut herself up with her daughter.
The notion of shutting up is an exigency of the rounded period. The factis, of course, that Alma Leighton was not shut up in any sense what