UNA MARY 
 
 THE INNER LIFE OF A CHILD 
 
UNA MARY 
 
 THE INNER LIFE OF A CHILD 
 
 BY 
 
 UNA HUNT 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS 
 1914 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS 
 
 Published September, 1914 
 
TO 
 MY FATHER AND MOTHER 
 
 324948 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THIS is the true story of the inner life of my 
 childhood. It is the story of the life of any 
 imaginative child, differing from others only in 
 details of the material which came my way and 
 from which I built my life, my friendships, my 
 world, and my beliefs with the needs felt by 
 every sensitive child, the same searching for an 
 explanation of life and the universe and the same 
 hunger for a religion through which to become 
 part of what I saw and felt, to link me with the 
 known and the unknown, the unseen mystery of 
 which a child is so acutely conscious and which 
 I felt pressing in upon me from every side. 
 
 The life of Una Mary ended when I was four 
 teen years old. It was hardly a case of dual per 
 sonality. I did not feel that I was two people. 
 She was the rest of me, the deep, inner, real part 
 that no one else seemed to know was there; the 
 part of me that felt, felt with an intensity that 
 was almost pain, a dumb ache of emotion. 
 
 The outward surroundings and circumstances 
 as I have used them are partly real, partly imag- 
 
 vii 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 inary, and very often adapted to conceal the iden 
 tity of other people who were part of my life but 
 might not care to have me trespass on their per 
 sonalities. I have changed all the names except 
 my own and have taken liberties with many of 
 the places and events, but in every case I have 
 kept the essential truth of their relation to my life 
 and their influence upon the mind of Una Mary. 
 All that concerns her, everything that is descrip 
 tive of Una and the Imp, my kaleidoscopic ideas 
 about religion, and my imaginary existence with 
 Edward in My Country, I have told with absolute 
 literalness, and have tried, in doing so, to give 
 some vague idea of chronological development, 
 though to avoid confusion it seemed simpler to 
 arrange the book roughly, according to subjects; 
 therefore many ideas and beliefs that were emerg 
 ing at the same time are necessarily described in 
 separate chapters. 
 
 My one object in writing has been the hope 
 that some of my readers might say, "I remember 
 I felt so, too," the hope that they might become 
 vividly conscious of their own half-forgotten points 
 of view as children, with their tragedies, bewil 
 derments, and joys. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. FROM THE BEGINNING TO CHRISTMAS .... i 
 
 II. UNA MARY AND THE IMP 19 
 
 III. GOD, DEATH, AND THE ANGELS 36 
 
 IV. CERTAIN GAPS IN MY INFORMATION .... 54 
 V. MY COUNTRY 64 
 
 VI. FROM ARCTURUS TO MINERVA 84 
 
 VII. THE UNKNOWN POWER 101 
 
 VIII. UNA S TASTE AND UNA MARY S WONDER . . . 117 
 
 IX. SUMMERS BY THE SEA 134 
 
 X. MAMMY 154 
 
 XI. MY ALTAR TO THE VIRGIN 177 
 
 XII. SCHOOL AND FRIENDSHIP 200 
 
 XIII. THE GAMES WE PLAYED 218 
 
 XIV. WORDS, NEW AND OLD 235 
 
 XV. THE SOLUTION 254 
 
UNA MARY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 FROM THE BEGINNING TO CHRISTMAS 
 
 T WISH, as far as I am able, to write the inner 
 -*- imaginative and religious life of my childhood, 
 beginning with my earliest memories. This was 
 the part of my life of which I spoke to no one 
 until after I was nine years old, but of which I 
 was always conscious with an intensity that at 
 times made my outer life seem a dream and this 
 the only reality, in which I grouped and arranged 
 all that was most precious to me, and from the com 
 binations worked out successive theories of the 
 meaning of life and beauty, of God, and the rela 
 tion of these elusive feelings to the spirit within 
 myself that I felt was the Real Me and named 
 Una Mary to distinguish her from my outer self, 
 named Una. 
 
 Like every child, I was conscious of the special 
 personality of all objects, making them terrible or 
 lovable, and responsive to me, but more than that, 
 
2 UNA MARY 
 
 I, Una Mary, was part of them; I understood them 
 as themselves, and we were altogether parts of 
 some vast, unseen whole, all symbols of an infinite 
 greatness just beyond my grasp. I felt it in the 
 ache of beauty, in the wild power of the wind and 
 sea, in the brooding mystery of mountains, in a 
 star-clear night, in the joy of running water, in the 
 miracle of flowers, in the Presence-haunted forest, 
 in the pulse of great cities, in the dauntlessness of 
 ships, and, above all, in the radiance of certain 
 human faces. I had been at the heart of them all, 
 but our hearts were the heart of something greater, 
 and we had known each other and this Some 
 thing, and been interrelated from all time. Of 
 course the full consciousness of this did not come to 
 me as a small child, yet I never remember the 
 time when it was not in some measure present. 
 
 As I look back I first find myself standing on 
 the porch of the house we lived in until I was two 
 and a half years old. I stood between the piazza. 
 posts facing Mamma, some strange old lady dressed 
 in black with a large lace cap, and Lizzie, the 
 cook, all of them horrified because I had just 
 swallowed an orange seed. I felt it prick as it 
 went down, and then, when I saw how frightened 
 the others were, I had my face puckered up ready 
 to howl with terror, the tears beginning to stream 
 down my cheeks, when I was arrested by hearing 
 
FROM THE BEGINNING 3 
 
 Lizzie say, "I wonder if it will grow inside her?" 
 and I winked back the tears at once, entranced at 
 the thought of myself as a flower-pot. I have no 
 idea what happened next; the picture is blurred 
 out, for always my memories are pictures. I see 
 the whole scene, the grouping and expressions of 
 the people, and I even know how all of them are 
 dressed. I wore a blue coat with white pearl but 
 tons the day the seed went down. 
 
 The next scene that comes to me must have 
 been a few weeks later, when we were moving into 
 our new house. I sat on a table in the pantry 
 watching Mamma and Lizzie arrange the china on 
 the shelves. There were an iron mortar and pestle 
 which I had never seen before, as they always lived 
 on the top shelf, and it seemed to me very pathetic, 
 after such an exclusive existence, that they should 
 have to travel over in a moving van, jumbled to 
 gether with all the common kind of lower-shelf 
 crockery. I felt very sorry for the mortar and 
 pestle, and kept them beside me where I could 
 pat and comfort them. Then, when the whole 
 pantry was in order, I watched Lizzie, who stood 
 on the step-ladder, carefully put them in their 
 proper place on the top shelf where I could no 
 longer see them a retreat worthy of their dignity. 
 Afterward I insisted upon being present when they 
 were taken down for the yearly pickling and pre- 
 
4 UNA MARY 
 
 serving, that opulent week when the whole house 
 and even out to the sidewalk smelled of aromatic 
 deliciousness, all made possible by the pounding 
 of the pestle in the mortar. They seemed to me 
 the king and queen of the preserves, and much 
 more to be thanked than Lizzie for the sticky joys 
 of the large spoon I was allowed to "scrape" after 
 the stirring of each kettle of jam. 
 
 One morning about six weeks later I was playing 
 alone in the kitchen it impressed me because I 
 had almost never been alone before when Papa 
 called me to come up-stairs. As I toiled up the 
 stairs, which were still quite a mountain for me 
 to climb, stepping up, as I did, with one foot and 
 hitching the other up after it, Papa, who stood at 
 the top, told me to come quickly and see my sister 
 who had just been born. He seemed greatly 
 pleased and excited, but I was quite calm, only 
 so surprised that nothing seemed real. I stood 
 still on the next to the top step, holding on to the 
 banister, trying to believe it was true, until Papa 
 leaned over, took me in his arms, and kissed me 
 as he carried me into Mamma s room. I was 
 sorry to find Mamma sick in bed, but she looked 
 very happy in spite of it, and after I had kissed 
 her, "very careful," as Papa told me to, he uncov 
 ered the basket in front of the open fire over which 
 Lizzie and a strange woman were hovering, and in 
 
FROM THE BEGINNING 5 
 
 it I saw a queer little squirming red-faced creature 
 that they said was the baby, my sister! I was never 
 so disappointed in my life, and went back to the 
 kitchen to cry because she was so ugly. 
 
 As she grew older other people seemed to think 
 she was a very pretty baby, but she was not my 
 idea of beauty, and my only consolation about her 
 was that now everybody kissed her dimples in 
 stead of mine the ones in a row along the back of 
 her hand. I had hated it. On my hands, instead 
 of the dimples, they now only noticed the mole 
 on the little finger of my left hand, which they 
 said was a pity, but I might outgrow it. I hoped 
 not, for I was very fond of the mole. It looked 
 to me like the stone in a ring, giving that finger 
 an air of extreme elegance, and I used to hold my 
 cup, when I drank, with the little finger crooked 
 out as I had seen a much-beringed lady hold hers. 
 And besides, without it, if the two looked exactly 
 alike, how could I ever tell my right hand from 
 my left? 
 
 With the next thing I remember came for the 
 first time that over-feeling of a something beyond 
 and more than the thing itself, the personality that 
 was part of something greater. It was the first 
 of those deep, vague feelings which made up the 
 life of Una Mary, and it was on that day that my 
 inner life began, although it was not until a year 
 
6 UNA MARY 
 
 later that I gave the name of Una Mary to my 
 Inner Self, the self who seemed so apart from the 
 Una who was just a member of a family, so dif 
 ferent from the me our friends saw and talked to, 
 who played with toys, sat on people s laps, and 
 "took walks," dragged about the streets by the 
 nurse who wheeled my sister s carriage ; and, above 
 all, who wore the clothes I hated, of dark blue or 
 brown, because they "did not show the soot like 
 white." My clothes were so unlike me, so unlike 
 the person I felt I was inside, and made me look 
 so unlike myself, to myself, that I think they were 
 one of the main reasons for my inventing Una 
 Mary. I had to be some one unlike the child 
 who wore them. 
 
 This next thing was in itself a curious object 
 to impress a child of three. I can still feel the 
 shiver of awe that went through me that summer 
 afternoon, when I saw outlined against a hot blue 
 sky, the intense dry blue that only the sky of the 
 Middle West can produce, two large gas tanks 
 painted red. It was partly, I think, the sudden 
 rousing of my color sense in response to the pos 
 itive shout of the contrast of the red against the 
 blue strong color has always thrilled me but 
 more than that I felt a sense of silent strength 
 and reserve power, a feeling of inevitableness that 
 I have felt ever since in large, simple masses of 
 
FROM THE BEGINNING 7 
 
 construction. I feel it always with tanks, often 
 when I see great office buildings, and sometimes 
 it grips me when I see the girders of a bridge out 
 lined black against the sky or the slow-moving 
 arm of an immense derrick swinging, heavy-laden 
 and serene, above a hurrying swarm of workmen. 
 They all seem the embodiment of something tre 
 mendous and relentless, and I feel the sort of fear 
 many people feel during a thunder-storm, fear of 
 a power beyond my understanding or control, and 
 with the fear there is exultation in its very strength. 
 
 All this did not come to me, of course, that first 
 afternoon. I often saw the tanks afterward, and 
 the sensation they gave me gradually became 
 clearer and more conscious, but I shall never for 
 get my first sight of them, when a feeling of over 
 whelming loneliness swept over me, and the way 
 in which, although I knew he could not under 
 stand, I tightened my grasp on my father s hand 
 to assure myself that protection was near. I felt 
 it as Una Mary, because it was something I could 
 not explain, could not tell any one about, could 
 only feel, and feel it, I was sure, as no one else 
 could. 
 
 Whether I was told they were filled with some 
 thing that might explode, or whether it was be 
 cause of the similarity of shape and color, I cannot 
 tell, but always after the next Fourth of July I 
 
8 UNA MARY 
 
 associated them with cannon crackers, the largest 
 and most awful form of the ordinary fire-cracker, 
 and felt that the tanks might be a gigantic night 
 mare of the same shattering confusion, ready at 
 any moment to burst their quiet red cylinders. 
 
 The following summer a tornado swept through 
 the town where we were staying, and as I watched 
 from the windows and saw the great elm trees that 
 surrounded the house bend like blown grass, their 
 tortured branches snapped off like leaves, or whole 
 trees uprooted and flung aside as lightly as if they 
 had been weeds, I had again the feeling the gas 
 tanks had given me, except that this time there 
 was less fear and more exultation. I clapped my 
 hands and shouted with excitement, and then be 
 came more excited still, but silent, as I realized 
 that I could not hear my own voice, the noise of 
 the destruction outside was so terrific, the very 
 soul of power seemed let loose power, the tre 
 mendous, invisible something that all my life -has 
 fascinated and perplexed me, which I am always 
 trying to confine in some embodiment to bring 
 it within the control of my imagination, power 
 that cannot even be described and so brought 
 within the boundaries of fixed words. I felt less 
 afraid of the tornado than I had of the tanks, be 
 cause in the storm the power was more obvious. 
 It seemed to be doing what must be its worst. I 
 
FROM THE BEGINNING 9 
 
 could see its full strength let loose. This same 
 tumult of destruction I felt was bottled up inside 
 the tanks, but in them, with their deadly stillness 
 and immobility, there might be much more be 
 sides. There seemed no limit to their possibilities 
 for danger. 
 
 All the memories connected with the Una Mary 
 side of me are either shot darkly with this un 
 known terror or lit by an unearthly glamour of 
 beauty and suggestion of enchantment which I 
 felt, for the first time, on the Christmas eve when 
 I was three years old and saw my first Christmas 
 tree. Whatever we discard in our theories about 
 children, I hope we may always keep the Christ 
 mas tree, that every one may have the memory 
 of this miracle of childlike beauty, this supreme 
 creation of genius, in that it is the embodiment of 
 all a child can feel, brimming over with wonder 
 and bursting joy, of the very soul of toys and 
 fairy-land. 
 
 Mine was at the house of the German consul. 
 He and his wife were young people recently mar 
 ried, and this tree celebrated their first Christmas 
 in America, and so it was all a perfect German tree 
 should be. We were the only people asked to it, 
 my parents, Agnes, and I. I can see the room 
 still, in a typical rented suburban house, new and 
 tasteless, with stiff black-walnut furnishings, all 
 
io UNA MARY 
 
 throwing more strongly into relief the glory of the 
 marvellous glittering tree towering to the ceiling, 
 shining with threads of fine-spun gold, wreathed 
 with chains and festoons of red and silver, hung 
 with iridescent balls of gleaming metallic colors, 
 with long icicles and toys and silver stars, and 
 at the very top a snowy angel blowing on a tiny 
 trumpet. Then my father and the consul began 
 to light the candles. Real living flames, one by 
 one they quivered into being like stars that are 
 born at twilight, until the whole tree shimmered 
 and breathed with their beauty. 
 /Of course children believe in fairies and radiant, 
 half-seen presences, and they always will as long 
 as we give them Christmas treesN As I sat at the 
 foot of this personification of all enchantment, all 
 beauty, and all dreams, I felt as if a spirit had 
 been called into being before my very eyes, as the 
 children in the fairy-tales must feel when the fairy 
 with the magic wand appears, and I burst into 
 tears, not because I was afraid, but because I 
 could not bear the ache of all it meant to me. 
 
 To comfort me, my Wonder Lady, as I after 
 ward called the consul s wife, took from the tree 
 a gilded walnut, which she gave me, telling me to 
 pull the loop of ribbon that made its stem. As I 
 did so the two halves flew apart, and there inside, 
 on beds of pale-blue cotton, lay two tiny dolls. 
 
FROM THE BEGINNING n 
 
 Could any one have been dull to the charm of 
 that two real little dolls as the kernel of a magic 
 nut! It was like the Wonder Lady to give it to 
 me to quiet my tears. She always understood Una 
 Mary. A real toy or an ordinary doll would have 
 tumbled me to earth too suddenly, but the magic 
 golden nut with its dolls of unmistakable china 
 was the one perfect link between the tree and me, 
 the one thing that could make the glamour real and 
 tangible enough to belong to me and yet no less 
 marvellous and beautiful. 
 
 Afterward we went home through a snow-storm 
 just as the street lamps were being lit. I had 
 never seen them before, and as I saw the lamp 
 lighter put up his little ladder, light the lamp, 
 and almost with the click of its closing door run off 
 to light the next, I felt as if the whole city was a 
 Christmas tree with the lamps for its candles, 
 and I longed to hang presents for everybody on 
 the lamp-posts. 
 
 I loved the whirling snow, the orange lights 
 cast on the whiteness, and, above all, the moving 
 shadows, especially the one of Papa with me in 
 his arms, that crept long and thin ahead of us 
 until something frightened it, when back it scut 
 tled and squatted down at our very feet. 
 
 As Mamma put me to bed that night she told 
 me about Santa Claus and read me "The Night 
 
12 UNA MARY 
 
 before Christmas" a poem sacred to many of 
 my most precious memories. Then we all hung 
 up our stockings around the fireplace in Mamma s 
 room, and, sure enough, in the morning they were 
 filled and overflowing in piles on the floor with 
 presents for all of us, proving that the poem had 
 been true and Santa Claus really had come down 
 the chimney and galloped away with a much light 
 ened sleigh. And when I went down-stairs to wish 
 Lizzie a Merry Christmas, there, on the kitchen 
 table, stood a statue of Santa Claus himself, the 
 snow still sprinkled over him and in his arms a 
 small Christmas tree, so I knew that the marvel 
 lous tree of the day before had come from him, 
 top. It had seemed too beautiful for the earth. 
 [ Christmas became the great day of the year, 
 the day all the other days seemed merely shadows 
 of, and Santa Claus was its spirit, the only person 
 I associated with Christmas, for it was not until I 
 was nine A^ears old that I heard it was Christ s 
 birthday. ^ 
 
 I got Lizzie to write letters to Santa Claus for 
 me, asking for everything I wanted, from a brother 
 to a toy broom, and the year my youngest sister 
 was born I wrote to him at once to tell him of 
 her arrival, and at Christmas the presents in and 
 below her minute sock, all of them labelled cor 
 rectly with her name, I looked upon as a personal 
 
FROM THE BEGINNING 13 
 
 achievement, for no one else had remembered to 
 tell Santa Glaus about her. 
 
 I always drew three large kisses at the bottom 
 of the page and signed the letters "Una Mary." 
 I felt Santa Glaus would understand letters from 
 her better than he possibly could from Una, for 
 it was Una Mary who loved his Christmas tree 
 and who dreamed off in his sleigh. Each night 
 before going to sleep I used to say: 
 
 "Santa Glaus, Santa Claus, 
 Send your sleigh 
 And Una Mary whisk away." 
 
 Then I imagined myself sitting in it, the reindeer 
 pulling faster and faster over the snow, until we 
 rose up in the air over the housetops, flying up, 
 up, and then I was asleep always I was asleep 
 before I got high enough to find out where Santa 
 Claus lived, whether it was behind a cloud or up 
 in the moon. Perhaps he was the Man in the 
 Moon except at Christmas, smiling down on the 
 world by night and busy making our presents by 
 day. 
 
 Once, when I said I hated a certain toy, Lizzie 
 told me I ought to be very thankful for everything 
 I had as there were a great many children who had 
 no toys at all. Instead of making me thankful 
 it roused all my sense of injustice. I could not 
 
i 4 UNA MARY 
 
 bear the thought of those other children; it seemed 
 so unfair that they should have no toys. It must 
 be because Santa Claus did not know about them; 
 so each night afterward, as soon as I had called 
 for his sleigh, I really prayed to him and implored 
 him, between Christmases, to be sure and find 
 the names and addresses of all the children there 
 were so that no one should ever be left out again. 
 
 Perhaps Santa Claus is as good a preparation 
 as a child can have for God. I know they were 
 real prayers I prayed to him. 
 
 The Wonder Lady played an important part 
 in my life for the next five years she was so at 
 heart a child herself. In a cabinet in her parlor 
 there were some china dogs and a little tub in 
 which I was allowed to wash them with make- 
 believe water just the sort of things to put in 
 a cabinet, it seemed to me and I cared for them 
 more than for any of my own toys, except a stick 
 on which some one had carved for my mother the 
 head of the Old Man of the Mountain. They 
 appealed particularly to Una Mary, who did not 
 care much for regular toys. 
 
 The Wonder Lady had several children of her 
 own during those years, but she still kept a place 
 forme, and each time she came back from Ger 
 many, where they spent the summers in a castle 
 
FROM THE BEGINNING 15 
 
 in the Black Forest I was sure it was the cas 
 tle where Grimm s Princesses used to live she 
 brought me a wonderful present. Once it was a 
 sash from Algiers, striped in the softest living 
 colors of raw silk. I was only allowed to wear 
 it on rare occasions, but I used to love to open the 
 drawer where it was kept and stroke its clinging 
 smoothness. I have it still and am glad to know 
 that I felt it was beautiful even then. 
 
 Another year she brought me a necklace of 
 cloudy amber, fine, round, graduated beads, and 
 in one of them there was a speck which, when I 
 examined it, proved to be a tiny fly. Papa told 
 me that amber had been the gum of a tree at the 
 time when the fly was caught, and afterward such 
 great changes had gone over the world that the 
 trees had turned to stone and were now covered 
 with water, so men dug for the gum in mines un 
 der the sea. \ It was my interest in the amber, my 
 own amber, that first opened my mind to glim 
 merings of the stupendous shaping of the world, 
 its vast changes and its curious continuity, for 
 even in those far-off times, when what was now 
 sea had been dry land, the familiar fly had buzzed 
 and blundered his way to the first sticky surface 
 he found, exactly as he might do to-day. \ 
 
 The last time I saw the Wonder Lady was just 
 before we moved to Washington. She had come 
 
16 UNA MARY 
 
 to say good-by, and as I stood beside her she let 
 me play with a pin she wore, made in the shape of 
 a tiny box of crystal, set in gold, with a lid that 
 opened, and inside a tiny crystal that moved 
 around like a drop of water. It had always seemed 
 to me the most entrancing jewel, and as she went 
 away she gave it to me. Mamma used "to wear 
 it for me until I grew up," but I found it on the 
 pincushion occasionally, and then I would pin it 
 to my nightgown so Una Mary could wear it all 
 night. 
 
 I wonder if she was just kind or if the Wonder 
 Lady realized a little what her presents meant to 
 me, knew how much food she was giving to the 
 imaginative, beauty-loving Una Mary side of me. 
 I think she must have known. I remember her 
 as always dressed in soft, lustrous materials that 
 I loved to rest my cheek against, a harmony of 
 dull browns and tans melting into the tones of her 
 smooth, dark hair. With her I always think of 
 Agnes, who became, through me, a friend of hers, 
 and my mother s most intimate friend; but she 
 was my friend first. 
 
 I was born in a curious little gabled house 
 across the street from what I remember as the 
 large and stately mansion where Agnes lived. Our 
 house was on the side of the hill above the city, 
 there so steep that the back yard went down in 
 
FROM THE BEGINNING 17 
 
 terraces to the roofs of the houses below, while 
 on the street side there was a long flight of steps 
 up to the sidewalk on a level with the second-story 
 windows so Agnes from her house always knew, 
 by the commotion of getting my carriage up the 
 steps, when "the baby was going out," and used 
 often to come over and wheel me up and down. 
 But as she was fourteen years old and I three 
 months old when we first met and smiled, most 
 of my memories of her come later and are con 
 nected with her growing up and becoming a young 
 lady, a time of great excitement, with many con 
 fidences to my mother, interspersed with teasing 
 from my father, at which she always giggled so 
 delightfully I laughed, too, in sympathy. 
 
 I knew one other real young lady it never oc 
 curred to me that married people could be young 
 Maud. I only remember the way she looked. 
 Dressed always in black, her clothes seemed a long 
 sheath for the gorgeous flower of her head with 
 its flame of copper-red hair. I was sure she and 
 my mother were the most beautiful people on 
 earth. Maud had a hat with drooping ostrich 
 feathers, and how I longed for one like it for 
 Mamma, who said she could not afford it! 
 Later Agnes bought one, which was next best to 
 Mamma s having it, with a long, green plume so 
 drooping that it almost touched her shoulder. 
 
i8 UNA MARY 
 
 One day when she was lunching with us I went 
 up-stairs and found the hat lying on the floor, 
 with only the rib of the feather left and the fluff 
 scattered all over the room. I rushed down-stairs 
 crying, and told her the feather was dead and 
 only its skeleton left. Just then we caught sight 
 of Agnes s dog, a puppy, with telltale green fuzz 
 sticking to the corners of his mouth. Only the 
 week before he had chewed up Emerson s Essays. 
 I begged for the scraps of the feather and care 
 fully put all the bits I could find into a box, and 
 next day gave it a most elaborate funeral in the 
 back yard, with the puppy dragged at the end of 
 a string as chief mourner. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 UNA MARY AND THE IMP 
 
 IX/TY greatest friend was Harry. His mother 
 ^ * and mine had gone to school together in 
 Cambridge and, both marrying at about the same 
 time and going to Cincinnati to live, had clung 
 together, and taken houses on the same street. 
 
 At first they had felt out of place in what 
 seemed, in contrast with Cambridge, the crude 
 materialism of much of the Western life, but very 
 soon they found friends in a circle of most charm 
 ing and cultivated people, most of them, like our 
 selves, of the professional class, for Harry s father 
 was a lawyer and mine a professor. 
 
 As Harry and I were the same age we were 
 brought up together and were inseparable com 
 panions. We had all our toys in common and 
 shared everything except my inner life as Una 
 Mary. That went on quite apart, with its imag 
 inary people, places, and worships. Harry s mind 
 was of the concrete order, and I realized even 
 then that he could not possibly understand. 
 
 19 
 
20 UNA MARY 
 
 Among our toys there was a large, black boy 
 doll, with buttons sewed on for eyes, named Sam, 
 to whom Harry was devoted he used to take 
 him. to bed with him every night and there was 
 a rubber baby named Jemima who belonged to 
 me. They were our favorite toys, for they had 
 as many lives as a cat and bobbed up serenely 
 through everything. 
 
 We always played as Harry pleased, and he 
 bullied and teased me a great deal, which I bore 
 meekly, until one day when he bit a hole in Je 
 mima I could stand it no longer. All the pent-up 
 rage of Una Mary burst out at once and I flew at 
 him like a wildcat. I was smaller than he, but I 
 was ready to fight to the death for my rights, so 
 I grabbed him by the shoulders ready to shake 
 him with all my might, but before I even began 
 the expression of my face was so fierce that he 
 burst at once into loud wails for help. I shall 
 never forget my surprise and triumph as I real 
 ized that I had conquered conquered in spite of 
 being small, with a strength I could always com 
 mand. I only had to set Una Mary free, to let 
 her come outside, and she could do anything. 
 
 After that I had only to make myself feel like 
 Una Mary and put on an expression of grim de 
 termination to have Harry wilt at once. I soon 
 knew that particular expression by the way it 
 
UNA MARY AND THE IMP 21 
 
 made my face feel, and I used to do it by putting 
 my hands in front of my face while I frowned and 
 fixed my jaws. Then, when the muscles were all 
 in place, the feeling that corresponded with the ex 
 pression would come over me until I felt as fierce 
 as I looked. It became so well recognized among 
 the children we played with that I had only to 
 say, "I ll fix my face," to get my own way at 
 once. 
 
 One day I was told Harry could not come and 
 play with me as he had measles. I did not in the 
 least know what measles was, but, as I always had 
 half of whatever he had, I at once trotted down to 
 his house to share measles, too. Their front door 
 being unlatched, I walked in and up to his room 
 undiscovered, and when his mother came in 
 presently to read to him, there I sat on the bed 
 drawing pictures. I most certainly shared the 
 measles later, greatly to the delight of Harry, who 
 used to come and dance a war-dance under my 
 window, shouting: " Una s got the measles, Una s 
 caught the measles!" But he always brought me 
 a present, so I forgave him. Usually it was ice 
 cream or jelly. In fact, being ill when I was a 
 small child, as I look back upon it, seems always 
 to have been a prolonged orgy of delicacies; even 
 medicine went down in jelly or lemonade. Agnes 
 consoled the measles with a pair of toy scales on 
 
22 UNA MARY 
 
 which I weighed the sugar for my oatmeal. They 
 gave generous weight, those scales! 
 
 All the children we knew had the measles that 
 spring. One after another it tumbled them down 
 like a row of dominoes, and we used to trace its 
 whole genealogy, singing it like a chant, until we 
 got back to 
 
 "John caught it from Una, 
 Una caught it from Harry," 
 
 and then came the question of where Harry got 
 his, until one child said, "God dropped his measles 
 down from heaven; everything starts there," which 
 seemed to all of us a satisfactory explanation, so 
 we ended our chant with: "And Harry caught it 
 from God." 
 
 We had two favorite games. One was to jump 
 up and down in the centre of a large double bed, 
 the springs sending us high in the air again at the 
 end of each jump. It was blissful in itself, this 
 effortless being shot straight up, like coming to 
 the surface of the water after a dive; and then on 
 coming down on the soft, bouncing mattress, to 
 keep one s balance was almost as skilful as the 
 circus rider s poise on the back of her horse. We 
 played circus rider at first, but later I had the 
 theory that just jumping for its own sake made 
 Christmas come sooner, that it made time go 
 
UNA MARY AND THE IMP 23 
 
 faster, so each day we always did " twenty jumps 
 nearer Christmas." The whole year to me was 
 "going on Christmas/ as soon as the first of 
 January came with its change of date, just as 
 I, the very night after my birthday, was always 
 "going on five," or whatever my next age was 
 to be. 
 
 Our other game we only played when the 
 family were all out. We felt it would not be 
 approved. The servants certainly took that view 
 of it, but, as they never told on us, we kept on 
 playing it with a feeling of wickedness that was 
 half its excitement. This was indoor coasting. We 
 did it sitting on brooms or a tin tea-tray, down 
 the front staircase in Harry s house his stairs 
 were steeper than ours. The broom was the safe 
 and conservative method, as the handle went in 
 front and broke the fall at the bottom; also it 
 went more slowly; but my soul was only satisfied 
 by the perils and joys of the tea-tray. I started 
 at the top, collecting my small self and super 
 fluous skirts as near the centre of the tray as 
 possible, holding fast to the carpet until I was 
 ready. Then I gave a push with both hands, and 
 down through bumping, clattering space I tore 
 with such impetus that I only stopped, when shot 
 off the tray at the bottom step, by bumping into 
 the front door at the opposite end of the hall. 
 
24 UNA MARY 
 
 Mamma could never understand how children got 
 so many black-and-blue spots. 
 
 I have since been down the "helter-skelter light 
 house" at Earl s Court. I was with two very 
 dignified barristers in evening dress and high hats 
 at the time, and, as we all sat on our little mats 
 and shot down the spiral track, I felt the inventor 
 had a true though dim ideal of real pleasure; and 
 certainly the crowd that watched us shoot out at 
 the bottom minus our hats were appreciative. I 
 have also slid down a grassy mountainside in 
 Hawaii, sitting on a palm-leaf as the old kings 
 used to do, but it could not compare with tea- 
 tray coasting. 
 
 The children I knew and played with during 
 the eight years I lived in Cincinnati were nearly 
 all boys. There were a few girls I remember 
 them in the background-Abut boys cared for the 
 things I liked; that is, the things I liked as Una.) 
 Una Mary never played with any one. She walked 
 alone, like the cat in Kipling s story. So I spent 
 most of my time with Harry and his friends, and 
 together we climbed every tree and shed in the 
 neighborhood. I have always admired my mother s 
 courage in allowing it, for I was often badly hurt, 
 but after each fall, when vinegar and brown paper 
 had been applied, her only comment was, "You 
 must learn to climb better," and I did. Soon I 
 
UNA MARY AND THE IMP 25 
 
 could get to almost any roof by way of the water 
 spout and gutters. Then one fatal day I climbed 
 to the top of the belfry of the church. I had 
 climbed up safely and laboriously, but getting 
 down the steep slate roof from the ridge-pole to 
 the gutter, so high above the ground, was more 
 than I could do. Panic seized me, and there I 
 sat until rescued by ladders from the fire-engine 
 house. After that, Mamma drew the line at roofs, 
 and the boys, who had none of them dared try it 
 themselves, were unbearable on the subject, while 
 the minister, whose church it was, called me his 
 " sparrow on the housetop." I wondered if spar 
 rows were trying to screw up their courage to fly 
 when they sat so long on the ridge-pole. 
 
 It was really all the fault of my Imp. It would 
 never have occurred to me to be afraid if it had 
 not been for him. But it was just the sort of 
 thing he was always doing, whispering in my ear 
 as he did then: "You don t dare go down. You re 
 scared." 
 
 The boys had said, "You dasn t do it," and 
 that had sent me up at once; and then at the 
 height of my triumph, as I looked down at the 
 awe-struck group below, while a frantic policeman 
 shook his club and yelled, "Come down or I ll 
 arrest you," suddenly the Imp had paralyzed me. 
 He has been the curse of my life, that Imp, for he 
 
26 UNA MARY 
 
 is always there, just behind my left ear, a little 
 black demon watching and jeering at everything, 
 and he has a hateful, hunchbacked sort of mind. 
 He actually seemed to giggle whenever I coughed 
 during my prayers and was delighted when I was 
 unhappy. I knew he was not real, but that made 
 him more awful. A real demon I could do some 
 thing about, but one that was just in my own 
 mind there seemed no way of controlling, until I 
 had a brilliant idea of pretending to cry or to be 
 naughty just to amuse him. As he always seemed 
 to be taken in by it, I gradually grew to despise him, 
 but he required a great deal of time and attention. 
 (The other girls were all afraid to climb, and 
 hated pet toads, or "pretending," and the other 
 things I cared for; but besides our lack of tastes 
 in common there was a deeper gulf that separated 
 me from all the girls I knew, and that was Clothes 
 and everything that had to do with outward ap 
 pearance. | 
 
 My parents had been brought up in Boston 
 among the most unworldly and transcendental set 
 of people, so their point of view was wholly that^ 
 of "plain living and high thinking," the " plain, "J 
 whatever it was, being of the best and most whole 
 some materials, but lacking a lightness of touch 
 I longed for. So my clothes were good but very 
 severe and usually dark in color. 
 
UNA MARY AND THE IMP 27 
 
 At parties the other little girls wore fluffy mus 
 lins trimmed with lace ruffles and bows. I looked 
 at pictures of them the other day in an old fash 
 ion book, and they must have been nightmares 
 of fussiness, those children s dresses of the early 
 eighties, but to me then they seemed the quin 
 tessence of loveliness, for at the parties when the 
 other little jrjrlsjwore them T alway* harl on plain^ 
 _stiff white pique. JHow_I have hated that ma- 
 Oterial ever since! Then, too, the others all had 
 long, flowing hair with bangs or a single curl tied 
 by a large bow on one side of the head, while my 
 hair was cropped short like a boy s, so short I did 
 not even know it was curly, of the true angel kind, 
 and might have floated in ringlets down my back 
 if only it had been allowed to grow. As it was, 
 I looked exactly like Papa s nickname for me: 
 "Little Lanky To whead."( It perfectly described 
 Una, and how Una Mary abhorred her! J 
 
 Parties were a deep misery to me, I felt so 
 unlike the others, and the sort of discomfort the 
 older boys seemed to feel in their overgrown hands 
 and feet I felt all through my whole body. How 
 I wished I knew how to make myself invisible, 
 for then I should have adored parties, they were 
 so pretty and so gay! Once a little boy gave me 
 the ring he had found in his slice of cake at a 
 birthday party, and I almost cried with pride at 
 
28 UNA MARY 
 
 being treated as if I were a real girl, and for a 
 time forgot all about how Una looked and was 
 in the full swing of feeling as if I were really Una 
 Mary and having a magnificent time, when the 
 Imp brought me to myself by whispering: "Look 
 at your boots!" I looked and collapsed like a 
 pricked bubble, for those boots were the worst 
 trial of my outward life. The other girls all wore 
 shiny kid buttoned ones or thin little slippers 
 with a strap over the instep, while I was con 
 demned to perpetual lacing boots, the only ones 
 in Cincinnati, of the best quality calf, though that 
 mattered nothing to me then, ordered each year 
 from Tuttle s, in Boston. (^Poor Mamma, with her 
 care and truest economy, little guessed the agony 
 she caused me. I hated those shoes as I hated 
 nothing else on earth, with a hatred of absolute 
 despair, for it did no good to scuff out a pair as 
 quickly as possible. / I tried that once by kicking 
 at a pile of stones for hours. Their exact dupli 
 cate, only a little larger, at once appeared."^ 
 
 All the other children wore kid gloves, while I 
 had to wear mittens in winter until I was twelve 
 years old; and then my sense of justice was utterly 
 outraged because my sister was given kid gloves 
 at the same time, and yet she was nearly three 
 years younger than I! 
 
 It was all tragedy to me and gave me a feeling 
 
UNA MARY AND THE IMP 29 
 
 of fundamental difference from the others in a rich 
 Western town where little girls of five wore jew 
 elry and carried parasols. They even had their 
 ears pierced for earrings. They wore thread run 
 through at first, then straws to keep the holes 
 open, and after that ravishing little forget-me-nots 
 of turquoise or pearls, while my ears just ended 
 in lumps of skin even a straw run through, I 
 thought, gave a more finished appearance. But 
 Mamma was firm when I implored her to let Lizzie, 
 who had done her nieces , stick a threaded needle 
 through each of my ears. 
 
 I was once given a ring and a parasol by a kind 
 and pitying person, but I was never allowed to 
 use them. I tried on the ring and then they were 
 put away until I got older, put away with the 
 precious sash and amber necklace that I was only 
 
 lowed to wear on my birthday and Christmas. 
 
 Of course I am glad of it all now and know that 
 my mother was right, but it was iron in my soul 
 at the time. I am especially glad because it 
 tended to throw me so .entirely with boys.) They 
 said I was not silly like the other girls how could 
 I be with such a handicap? But iLwag the out- 
 door life_of_adyenture I lived 
 
 peculiarly needed as a balance to my own inner 
 imaginary life that went on quite apart andr-lof- 
 which I saved a stated time each day, when I be- 
 
30 UNA MARY 
 
 came wholly Una Mary and my imaginary-clothes 
 were simply an orgy of ribbons and lace. 
 
 Una Mary at this period was always dressed 
 in white muslin that absolutely frothed ruffles all 
 around her knees, with a red sash tied in a bow 
 as large as a bustle behind and a scarlet hair rib 
 bon tying up the single curl that rose above the 
 bang on her forehead for, while other children 
 had either a bang or a tied-back curl, I decided 
 to give Una Mary both and she wore just as 
 many rings and bracelets and necklaces as she 
 pleased, and, of course, had earrings and slippers 
 with heels. How I admired her and how I felt 
 her appearance did justice to what I really was! 
 Sometimes after a party I wished I could die at 
 once, because my celestial self, I was sure, would 
 look like Una Mary, and then God and the angels, 
 anyhow, would know what I was really like, and 
 perhaps I could be a ghost and haunt the party 
 people, and then it would scare them to see how 
 lovely I was and they would cry to think they 
 had never known it while I was still alive. 
 ( Even with the boys I felt different and some 
 thing of an outsider because of my pronunciation. 
 I was brought up with the accent of Boston and 
 all my being longed for the rolling Western R. 
 But family influences proved too strong for me. 
 Although I grew up entirely in the West and the 
 
UNA MARY AND THE IMP 31 
 
 South, so far as I knoto I have not picked up a 
 trace of either accent. \ 
 
 All the other children called their parents 
 popper and mommer while I had been taught to 
 say papa and mamma, clipped-off and meagre 
 words in comparison. I remember once, when I 
 met a new child, referring casually to my mother 
 as mommer and the feeling of relief it gave me 
 to have it taken for granted, instead of the 
 sneers of " stuck up," followed by a mimic of my 
 " mamma" that was the usual beginning of my 
 friendships, and yet wjth.f.hft relief we.nf. snr.h a._ 
 sense of disloyalty that T never no id it nrm n 
 / The story of the Ugly Duckling seemed to me 
 to pathetic I could hardly bear to have it read. 
 I knew just how he felt, and yet the boys were 
 nice to me in their way after they got over the 
 first "queerness." The trouble was that I could 
 not myself get over the feeling that it was true. 
 I was queer. My Imp kept me reminded of it 
 continually. ^ 
 
 Next door to us lived a boy of fourteen, Richard, 
 who became one of my heroes, and besides being 
 part of my outer life gave a real impetus to my 
 inner life by teaching me to play with chessmen, 
 not chess, of course, but games of fairy-land and 
 battle on the carpet in his room when I went over, 
 as I occasionally did, to have supper with him. 
 
32 UNA MARY 
 
 I had sometimes played with a carved ivory set 
 of chess Mamma had at home, but it was Richard 
 who taught me the names of the different pieces 
 and explained in terms of the fairy-tale world 
 what they meant kings, queens, bishops, knights, 
 . and pawns. I was simply entranced by the vis- 
 , tas of romance they opened before the eyes of Una 
 Mary, and at once made them a part of my imag 
 inary world. The knights became the sworn ene 
 mies of my Imp, and persistently joisted against 
 him when he cut a preposterous figure, perched 
 on a big, gray horse, like a little, black monkey 
 dressed up in armor. Edward, my imaginary 
 friend, the companion of my whole childhood, was 
 the over-prince at the head of the chess world. 
 
 The first time I had supper with Richard is 
 indelibly impressed upon my mind, because it was 
 the first time I had ever gone anywhere alone, 
 except to Harry s house, and in honor of the 
 occasion I wore my best dress gf dark-blue cash 
 mere, with a lace collar, my handkerchief securely 
 fastened with a safety-pin to the belt that defined 
 my knees rather than my waist-line. 
 
 I must have been very small, for it was the 
 first time I had sat in a real chair instead of a 
 high chair the fact that I had a hassock and a 
 dictionary under me in no way detracted from 
 the dignity and I drank out of a glass tumbler 
 
UNA MARY AND THE IMP 33 
 
 instead of a silver mug. I was so impressed by 
 the grownupness of the occasion that I decided 
 to hold my fork and spoon as Lizzie had often 
 told me " ladies always did," balanced lightly be 
 tween my thumb and forefinger like a pen, instead 
 of clutched securely with my whole fist as I had 
 always held them before. I even struggled with v 
 my knife and fork at the same time, but that was 
 too much for me to engineer. It was like learn 
 ing to skate. They seemed possessed to go off in 
 opposite directions, until Richard advised me to 
 concentrate my mind on the knife and let the fork 
 take care of itself. Then I began to succeed. 
 The fork was as meek as a lamb if I paid no at 
 tention to it, and after that day I always cut up 
 my own food and held my fork the grown way, 
 much to the disgust of Harry, who was months 
 in learning to imitate me. 
 
 The next time I went into society alone was 
 for lunch with some children I had met during my 
 brief career at kindergarten. Before I went 
 Mamma impressed it upon me that I was to eat 
 whatever was given to me whether I liked it or 
 not, and not behave like a little girl who was at 
 our house one day when we had bread pudding, 
 which she refused to eat, and when Mamma had 
 urged her to try some and see how nice it was 
 had replied: "It looks familiar." I had sympa- 
 
34 UNA MARY 
 
 thized with her deeply, but Mamma said it was 
 bad manners, and if I did such a thing people 
 would all think my mother had brought me up 
 badly. So I sat down at table fairly solemn with 
 good intentions. 
 
 I had never seen olives before, but when they 
 were passed to me I took one and bit into it 
 politely. Then, after my first wild struggle with 
 disgust at its taste, I wondered what I should 
 do. I simply could not bite into the horrid thing 
 again, and yet it must be eaten. Only one course 
 seemed possible, so I took a huge drink of water, 
 gulped hard, and swallowed the olive, stone and 
 all. Though almost choked, I was supported by 
 the feeling that the family was not to be disgraced 
 through me. Even if we could not live in a house 
 with a mansard roof, as all really grand people 
 did, I had proved I was well brought up ! 
 
 A little later one of the children asked for my 
 olive stone, and my calm statement that I had 
 swallowed it created such a delightful excitement 
 and made me such a heroine that soon after, at 
 home, when Harry was lunching with us, in order 
 to impress him I decided to swallow a whole prune, 
 as we had no olives. But it proved too large to 
 go down, in spite of all my efforts, so I dropped the 
 stone behind the side-table and then announced 
 that I had swallowed it. The immediate effect 
 
UNA MARY AND THE IMP 35 
 
 was all I could wish. Harry s eyes almost popped 
 out of his head with excitement. The frightened 
 household gathered around me, and everything 
 was perfect until Lizzie rushed in from the kitchen 
 with the suggestion of standing me on my head 
 and shaking me by the legs, as that was the way 
 they got the penny out of her sister s Tommy. 
 She seemed on the point of carrying it out, so I 
 hastily remarked k was only a make-believe stone 
 I had swallowed. (jFrom the grieved dignity with 
 which I was treated^ fox -several d&ys, it was-te- 
 impressed upon me that, in the grown world, 
 
 make-believes are called lies.l 
 
 Imp was delighted with the whole affair. 
 It was just the sort of thing that suited him, and 
 he held it over me for years. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 GOD, DEATH, AND THE ANGELS 
 
 1\/|"Y parents were Unitarians, a form of belief 
 *" not easily made clear to a small child, so 
 they decided it was better to bring me up with 
 very little religious teaching of any kind until I 
 was old enough fully to grasp its meaning and 
 reason a way out for myself. When I asked the 
 theological questions all children ask I was told 
 nothing except that there was a God who had made 
 the world, about whom I could not understand 
 until I grew older. They felt that left me free 
 to work out my own salvation, when the time 
 came, unhampered by preconceptions. ILthe re 
 sult wasjio religion, at least it would be a sincere 
 negative. If --some., form o^-creed, Unitarianism 
 seemed to them inevitable; it would be maturely 
 thought out and really believed. This attitude was 
 Characteristic of their conscientious fair-minded- 
 ness^ and Harry, the only child I knew well, was 
 brought up in the same way. 
 
 It was at the time when the conflict between 
 36 
 
GOD, DEATH, AND THE ANGELS 37 
 
 Reason and Religion was most acute. Nearly all 
 our friends had become either agnostics or Uni 
 tarians, though a few of them were still Episco 
 palians. Agnes was going through the agonies of 
 emancipation when I was a small child, and her 
 difficulties, I think, strengthened my parents in 
 their theories about bringing me up. pThe only 
 trouble was, they never for a moment suspected 
 that their attitude tended to throw a veil of mys 
 tery and terror over the whole subject which 
 made me wonder about it continually. I longed 
 to know more, yet a certain family loyalty pre 
 vented my asking other people the questions my 
 parents refused to answer?) I laboriously worked 
 out my own solutions from the scanty information 
 I picked up incidentally from Lizzie or from other 
 children and from my own observations, and so 
 made my belief out of strange and twisted mate 
 rials. _JTligories_of_gorne sort I had to have every 
 child must who_lhinks at all :andJ Wfl - s , T ^Ink^, 
 T>y n^I^e^rejLllyLJ^ligious-^rthat is, Una Mary was 
 -^and all my successive religious beliefs were 
 founded on the highest insight I had and my vari 
 ous cults were conducted with real worship and ab 
 solute sincerity. 
 
 (Harry and I were most carefully brought up on 
 the ethical side.) That, we were supposed to be 
 able to understand. Even truth was not con- 
 
3 8 UNA MARY 
 
 sidered too abstract for our minds, though where 
 the line was drawn between "pretending" and lies 
 was too much for me. Grown-ups were so un 
 reasonable and unexpected about it! Why it was 
 wrong to swallow a make-believe prune stone but 
 rather a virtue to see a make-believe bear was 
 more even than my Imp could understand.^ Harry 
 early gave up the struggle of discrimination, and 
 decided offhand that everything you did not know 
 about was lies and nothing was true except what 
 you were able to preface with 
 
 "Honest true 
 Black and blue, 
 Lay me down % 
 
 And cut me in two." ) 
 
 Harry was eminently practical. He liked his 
 world simplified, spiritually, mentally, and actually. 
 He was always inventing labor-saving devices, 
 and could slip off his clothes at night by only un 
 buttoning four buttons. The rest he left but 
 toned, so that in the morning he could put them 
 on whole, so to speak, like a shell. 
 
 In moments of moral stress, especially on those 
 occasions when one had to give up something be 
 cause one was the oldest, our parents seemed to 
 base their pleadings and reasonings entirely upon 
 the ethical system of "Mr. Dooun Tothers." It 
 
GOD, DEATH, AND THE ANGELS 39 
 
 was Harry who discovered his sex. He had heard 
 some one say, "He said, Dooun Tothers," which 
 proved he was masculine, though to me he had 
 seemed rather feminine, a^ vague, much-resented 
 srmjLof pathos whose grip was s^ft as velvet fait 
 powerful as steel,, 
 
 We were never ordered to do anything or told 
 arbitrarily that we must obey. The matter was 
 always explained to us and left to our own better 
 natures to decide. How I detested^iny Better 
 Nature! It seemed a precipitate of all the tears 
 and flabbiness of which Una and Una Mary, both 
 of them, were capable. It was the most weak- 
 kneed, lackadaisical creature and gave in at once. 
 The pathos of Mr. Dooun Tothers was always more 
 than it could bear. 
 
 As soon as I heard Mamma say, "Remember, 
 Una, Dooun Tothers," I felt the battle was lost. 
 I knew in a moment I should be handing over 
 whatever it was he wanted, and the worst of it 
 was, it was usually something I already had; for 
 he not only took away future joys but snatched 
 them out of your very hand. It was rare, indeed, 
 when he allowed you to keep the largest apple. 
 
 Once he took the most unkind advantage. My 
 grandmother had sent me money to buy a dog. I 
 wanted a dog more than anything else in the world. 
 We were at the seashore at the time, and Mamma 
 
40 UNA MARY 
 
 read to me from the newspaper about the vacation 
 work for poor children, a scheme that had just 
 been started. That all children could not go away 
 for the summer was a quite new and terrible idea, 
 but that some of them had never even picked 
 a wild flower or been in the woods seemed as 
 unfair as being left out at Christmas worse, for 
 here there was no one who could rectify the mis 
 take, no Santa Claus to whom one could appeal. 
 As I talked it over with Mamma she said that we 
 could, each of us, help, and if we all saved up and 
 sent money there would soon be enough to take 
 most of the children to the country; that the 
 money my grandmother had given me for a dog, 
 for instance, would be enough to send two children 
 to the country for two weeks, and she was sure 
 grandmother would be glad to have me give it to 
 the vacation fund instead of using it to buy a dog. 
 That was the sort of thing Dooun Tothers meant. 
 
 My heart was wrung with sympathy for those 
 poor children, and yet with all my being I longed 
 for a dog, an Irish setter, a puppy, a red one, that 
 I could bring up myself. The conflict was really 
 agonizing, but when I heard the name of Dooun 
 Tothers I knew I was doomed. I might as well 
 give up that puppy at once. So the money was sent. 
 
 Later I derived such satisfaction from seeing 
 my name in the newspaper as a benefactor that 
 
GOD, DEATH, AND THE ANGELS 41 
 
 Harry, from sheer jealousy, was compelled to send 
 the money from his pig bank to get his name in 
 the paper, too. But he always considered it an 
 additional grievance against Dooun Tothers. 
 
 That was one of the very rare times when Mr. 
 Dooun Tothers gave us any material compensa 
 tion. Surely the magnitude of the sacrifice de 
 manded it! Usually the only satisfaction was 
 having the hurt feeling inside you stop the hurt 
 feeling he alone had created by battering against 
 the Better Self. 
 
 Grown people had another way of working upon 
 us which we welcomed quite unsuspectingly, until 
 I one day woke up to what they were really doing. 
 This jvas by means of bribes. On and on they 
 lured us along the patE~6T~virtue, made smooth 
 and pleasant by ice-cream for dessert, new pennies, 
 or, on Lizzie s part, by the tin-foil saved from 
 yeast-cakes tin-foil from which priceless jewels 
 could be made and once I collected the pieces for 
 a whole month and made a silver ball like the one 
 the Princess lost in the fountain in the story of the 
 Frog Prince. As I say, we welcomed the spoils 
 system, and Harry remained its faithful supporter 
 as long as I knew him, but I looked at it askance 
 from the day when I made my discovery, which 
 came about in this way: 
 
 My mother was very ill, so ill my grandmother 
 
42 UNA MARY 
 
 had come on to take care of her. The whole house 
 had to be kept very quiet, and I used to sit on the 
 stairs outside Mamma s room playing softly with my 
 doll, hoping and hoping she would soon be better. 
 Then came the happy day when she was better, 
 able to sit up, and my grandmother began to pack 
 to go home. I was sorry she was going home be 
 cause she used to tell me stories about when she 
 was a little girl and could paint on china. During 
 this visit she had given Mamma a tea set painted 
 with yellow cowslips. When I said I was sorry she 
 was going she asked me if I would go with her to 
 Cambridge and make a long visit. I did not want 
 to go at all. I wanted to stay and be near Mamma 
 so that I could be sure she was getting better. 
 Then my grandmother added that if I went home 
 with her I could have an orange to suck every day, 
 and I said at once that I would go. She gave me 
 an orange on the spot to make me realize imme 
 diately the joys that were before me, and as I sat 
 on the stairs luxuriously sucking it the full enor 
 mity of the situation came over me| By saying 
 I would go, just because I was to have an orange 
 every day, I had seemed to say that I cared more 
 for oranges than I did for Mamma, and I knew that 
 was not true. r> Was that what grown people always 
 did when they offered us presents for doing as 
 they wished? Did _they make us sell J:he things 
 
GOD, DEATH, AND THE ANGELS 43 
 
 best ior material joy Hk_aiL_Qrange_jQr-_-. 
 letting you wear your best _.dress?__ Translated into 
 my own terms, it seemed as if what they did was 
 to_pay Una to ^beJjay-JJn^r-Maryy and from- that 
 day on I was ^cym^j-bquLbiib-es^and never took 
 them unless, like the tin-fpjl j _ih^-we^e-^- Una 
 Mary s "worlcL That seemed fair and was Jgj>_ 
 chajQg_e^np^bribery\. ,_My father and mother never 
 used this method. rThey always asked me to do as 
 they wished because they wished it, because it 
 would please them, or because it would make them 
 unhappy if I failed to do so. This I wholly under 
 stood, and it seemed perfectly fair to me and to 
 them. My respect for their moral judgment was 
 never clouded by the doubts which made me feel < 
 more and more uncertain about the rest of the 
 grown-up world. \ 
 
 My mother says she read stories aloud to me 
 from a children s version of the Old Testament, but 
 I cannot remember hearing them at all, which is 
 curious, as other stories which were read tome made 
 a most vivid impression. The Bible itself was quite 
 unknown ground until I was ten and stumbled 
 upon the Apocrypha in an old edition of the Bible 
 printed with long s s and beautiful early type. I 
 puzzled over it at first simply because of the quaint 
 lettering and then became utterly fascinated by 
 the stories themselves. They seemed as rich and 
 
44 UNA MARY 
 
 glowing as the mythology stories of the Gods and 
 Goddesses, but it never occurred to me that the 
 Lord God they spoke of could be the God that I 
 had always heard about and said a prayer to. He 
 had seemed too cold and remote to be brought into 
 stories. The Lord God must be some especial 
 person of olden times like Jupiter. I grew exceed 
 ingly fond of the Apocrypha, but it was not until 
 I was twelve that I went on from it to the Bible; 
 in fact, it was not until then that I knew there was 
 any connection between the two. 
 
 I was taught to say a prayer, "The Prayer," I 
 called it, and for years had no idea there could be 
 any others. It was the utterly unchristian rhyme 
 dear to so many people from childhood associations : 
 
 "Now I lay me down to sleep, 
 I pray to God my soul to keep. 
 If I should die before I wake, 
 I pray to God my soul to take." 
 
 So often it is the only religious food given to chil- 
 ren, who either pay no attention to it or repeat it 
 quite mechanically, with often no more impression 
 of its meaning than the children in " Auton House," 
 to whom it was 
 
 "Now a llama down to sleep," 
 
 or else they wonder about it as I did and feel it 
 as a nightly terror, for the prayer is most terrifying 
 
GOD, DEATH, AND THE ANGELS 45 
 
 in itself with its suggestion of a prowling Death 
 always ready to pounce; and the God who seems 
 only waiting to snatch a soul away from Death 
 is not much more reassuring. So I quaked with 
 fear as I said it, and if I forgot a word or coughed 
 or sneezed in the midst of it I was panic-stricken, 
 and for fear I had offended God would hastily 
 apologize; and as I often had colds, my prayers 
 were punctuated with, "I beg your pardon, God," 
 or "I am very sorry, God, I tried not to cough," 
 would be gasped out after I was purple in the face 
 from trying to keep it back. 
 
 When I asked what my soul was I was told it 
 was part of me that I could not see, and this 
 puzzled me greatly, for I could see all the rest of 
 me, even my back, and the top of my head I had 
 managed to screw a view of in the duplex mirror. 
 I wondered what my soul could be, until one day 
 when I was taken to a museum and saw a skeleton 
 I found the solution. Papa told me it was the 
 inside framework of a man, the part of him that 
 was left after he died. The Boned Man I called 
 it at first, and then, when I heard there was one 
 inside me, too, I knew of course, that must be the 
 soul, the part I asked God to keep. 
 
 Before this I had thought of Death as a sort of 
 purple-black ghost with long-reaching arms, like 
 the huge shadows that waved across my ceiling 
 
46 UNA MARY 
 
 when the gas flickered in the wind at night. Often 
 I have lain, almost paralyzed with terror, watch 
 ing them with awful fascination until I could bear 
 it no longer, and would shout that I wanted a 
 drink of water; for as soon as some one came into 
 the room the terror seemed to go and they were 
 just ordinary shadows again. Sometimes I heard 
 the far-off whistle of a train, and that, too, seemed 
 to make the shadows normal at once. How I used 
 to strain my ears for a train! At the farm where 
 we boarded in the summer I slept in a " trundle- 
 bed." During the day it was pushed under the 
 big bed where Mamma slept, but at night it was 
 pulled out, all nicely made up with the small pink- 
 and- white patchwork quilt, the "pitty kilt," as 
 my sister called it. After I had been tucked in 
 and the lamp turned low I used to grab the sides 
 of the large bed and pull the " trundle" back to 
 the dark stuffiness under it, almost smothered, 
 but happy because the ceiling with the Death 
 shadows was shut away from me. 
 
 After I saw the skeleton, Death became even 
 more awful, able to slip one s flesh off one s bones 
 and leave the soul "naked and white." I had 
 heard Lizzie apply those adjectives to the Soul, 
 and they were certainly an accurate description 
 of a skeleton. 
 
 I felt as I said The Prayer before going to bed, 
 
GOD, DEATH, AND THE ANGELS 47 
 
 that Death was more than likely to appear during 
 the night The Prayer gave no hint of his being 
 able to come in the daytime so each night I was 
 careful, as soon as I had taken off my stockings 
 I kept them on while I said my prayers to 
 scramble into bed as quickly as possible in order 
 to hide my bare feet under the bedclothes and so 
 prevent Death s catching hold of them. I had 
 gotten the idea that he could not lay hold of my 
 skeleton through clothes but had to find a spot of 
 bare skin to begin on, and if he once got hold of 
 even a single toe I was sure one pull would be 
 enough out would come my bones, leaving my 
 body turned inside out like an empty glove. 
 
 I was in a panic if I woke at night to find the 
 bedclothes kicked off. I was sure it was the Imp 
 who pulled them off and, as soon as I had bundled 
 them over me again, would clutch my feet to see if 
 the skinning process had begun. I never thought 
 of my head and hands as bare skin; they belonged 
 uncovered; and mercifully my long-sleeved, long- 
 legged nightclothes left only the tips of my toes 
 which could possibly get uncovered; though even 
 the feeling of comparative safety this gave me 
 never reconciled me to those awful canton flannel 
 night drawers, like a boy s. 
 
 In the summer I often went barefoot. It was 
 quite safe in the daytime, of course; but it hap- 
 
48 UNA MARY 
 
 pened several times when we were on picnics that 
 the sun set before we got home, so I sat, tailor fash 
 ion, to cover up my feet, and, if I had to walk at all, 
 ran instead, as if I were running on red-hot iron. 
 And once I tied my feet up in handkerchiefs; but 
 that was an especially terrible picnic in a dark, dank 
 sort of cavern, called Purgatory, cut by a water 
 fall between narrow, dripping walls of rock. It 
 was just the place for Death to lurk, and as the 
 shadows lengthened, crawling their way from rock 
 to rock, and it grew darker and darker and the 
 waterfall muttered louder and louder, my teeth 
 fairly chattered from chill and terror, while my 
 feet turned a horrible purple, almost the color of 
 Death s shadows, until I felt as if Death himself 
 were getting inside me, as if I were turning into 
 Death. Then I began to cry, but all I could say 
 was: "My feet are so cold!" Death, I felt, could 
 get me at once if I said I was afraid. So Papa 
 gave me two handkerchiefs, and in them I swathed 
 and knotted my feet, even having to walk on one 
 knot, but the hurting of that seemed rapture. 
 
 I was less afraid of Death for myself than for 
 my family. If he came for me I felt I should 
 be able to cope with him in some way, but the 
 others might be asleep or, without me to help 
 them, might not know what to do. So each 
 morning as soon as I was awake I ran into Mam- 
 
GOD, DEATH, AND THE ANGELS 49 
 
 ma s room, my heart in my mouth as I opened 
 the door for fear I should find only skeletons 
 lying there. 
 
 That prayer was the black terror of my child 
 hood. Of course one word to my parents about 
 it would have cleared up all my fears; but chil 
 dren never do tell about those things, and, besides 
 that queer natural reserve, I knew it was the for 
 bidden subject as it had to do with God. I felt 
 if it was wrong for me to ask questions about it, 
 it must be equally wrong to even speak of it. 
 Then, again, I was sure it was like all the other 
 things Una Mary felt no one else could under 
 stand them. And it was not until I was eight 
 years old that I knew other people had religions, 
 too. so I never told any one about my religious 
 theories until after I was grown up. 
 
 God, as I first remember thinking about Him at 
 all, I rather took for granted and placed in some 
 far-off world called Heaven, from which He occa 
 sionally looked over the rim of mountains that 
 bounded Heaven on the Earth side to see what 
 we were doing here below. Only the upper part 
 of His head, from the bridge of His nose up, ever 
 showed above the mountains. He was just fore 
 head, eyes, and flowing white hair that mixed in 
 with the clouds. My sister thought there was a 
 Mrs. God who lived with Him in Heaven, but I 
 
50 UNA MARY 
 
 was doubtful about her. I was sure only of the 
 Angels and Santa Claus as His companions. 
 
 I had seen pictures of Angels and there was 
 always one on the Christmas tree, so I knew ex 
 actly how they looked, lovely little girls with golden 
 curls and white wings growing out of the shoul 
 ders of their nightgowns. Two children I knew 
 had died, and Lizzie said thay had gone to be 
 Angels in Heaven. I could quite understand it 
 must be true, as they had had curls of the right 
 golden color and always wore real nightgowns 
 like ladies. 
 
 One of my griefs about my own hated night- 
 clothes, with legs instead of skirts, was that be 
 cause of them and my short-cropped hair I knew 
 if Death did succeed in catching me some night, 
 whatever happened to little boys would have to 
 be my fate, and I did so long to be a lovely Angel, 
 flying around in the sky and eating nothing but the 
 wonderful, airy sort of pudding my grandmother 
 knew how to make, called Angel s Food. Once 
 when I went to visit her, because Mamma was sick, 
 I asked for it every day for dessert, thinking I 
 would get all I could of it in this world, anyway. 
 It was always made in a rabbit-shaped mould, 
 and I poured cream over it from a pitcher that 
 was shaped like a cow with its tail curled over its 
 back for a handle. 
 
GOD, DEATH, AND THE ANGELS 51 
 
 The Angel idea had in it one element of comfort 
 even for me, as it seemed to show that God wanted 
 to keep and bury in the ground I knew the dead 
 were buried only the inside part, the skeleton 
 Soul, so perhaps the outside still belonged to the 
 people themselves, and after the heavy soul had 
 been slipped out, the body, now light as a soap- 
 bubble, could sail off into the sky to stay with 
 Santa Claus forever. 
 
 I wondered if all people had Una Mary selves 
 inside them. If so, perhaps it was they who sailed 
 off dressed in the outsides, for surely Una Mary 
 had to go somewhere. She could not possibly 
 ever end, and I did not much care what happened 
 to Una. What puzzled me most was why God 
 preferred to keep the ugly soul part. In His 
 place, I should have taken the Angel outsides. 
 
 One day Lizzie told me about Cherubim-and- 
 Seraphim. I thought it was all one magnificent 
 word, Angels with many pairs of wings, and I won 
 dered where the wings grew out and how they flew 
 with so many. It was still one of the unsolved 
 problems when Papa and Agnes took me to the 
 circus. Then, as the circus ladies came out, bal 
 anced lightly, standing first on one foot then on 
 the other, on the backs of snow-white horses, their 
 stiff, spangled tulle skirts a glittering, snowy flutter 
 around their hips, I cried out loud in excitement: 
 
52 UNA MARY 
 
 "Those must be the Cherubim-and-Seraphim. 
 And they re real Angels, with wings all round 
 their waists, and their nightgowns have legs just 
 like mine, only tighter." And then, when they rose 
 in the air and went lightly through the huge disks 
 the clowns held up to stop them, dropping unerr 
 ingly on the other side to the backs of their gal 
 loping steeds, that was flying, indeed, and they 
 could go where they pleased, through anything. 
 
 When I see them now, the hard-featured, painted 
 circus riders, I hope some of them have the com 
 pensation of knowing that to most children they are 
 high Celestial Beings, for one miraculous day con 
 descending to this earth. Much should be for 
 given and endured for the sake of such high des 
 tiny. 
 
 One rider had a poodle who rode and jumped 
 with her, so clearly there were both horses and 
 dogs in Heaven, and, probably, all the other ani 
 mals, too, and as I cared passionately for animals, 
 Heaven from that day on became a much more 
 desirable goal, a glorified Circus World, with all the 
 glamour of the Christmas tree, combined with An 
 gels, animals, and toys come to life. For that was 
 what the clowns seemed to me, with their painted 
 white faces living rag dolls, full of humor and 
 with the same habit of falling about in grotesque 
 attitudes, then looking up with a stare of comic 
 
GOD, DEATH, AND THE ANGELS 53 
 
 surprise that was the charm of those comfortable, 
 disjointed things, except these transcendent dolls 
 had a taking-you-into-their-confidence sort of wink, 
 which I have missed in rag dolls ever since. And 
 all these glittering wonder people played the most 
 marvellous games and did tricks that were sim 
 ply amazing, and I loved the color and the splendid 
 dresses. 
 
 With my style of nightclothes there seemed 
 some hope of my becoming a Cherubim-and- 
 Seraphim, so for months after the circus I took 
 two pieces of string to bed with me, and each night 
 after I was safely under the covers I rolled my night 
 drawers tightly around each leg, like a furled um 
 brella, and tied them securely at the ankles, so in 
 case Death succeeded in catching me my legs 
 would be ready to float off like circus tights, and 
 I was sure, from the feeling of my hip-bones, that 
 incipient wings were there ready to burst out at 
 once and surround me like one of those fans that 
 looks like an ivory stick until you press a spring, 
 when it instantly flies open, a lovely, pleated ro 
 sette of silk with the ivory stick for its handle 
 Mamma had a white one that she took to parties. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 CERTAIN GAPS IN MY INFORMATION 
 
 afternoon when I was still so small he had 
 to drag me in a toy express-wagon, my father 
 took me to some deep woods. It is the first time 
 I remember the country for itself, and the sense 
 of the Enchanted Forest came to me then never 
 to leave me, though never since have I seen woods 
 as radiantly hushed and miraculous as those 
 seemed, though for years I hunted for them. 
 
 It was like another life, that sudden plunge 
 from the sunlit commonplace into the emerald, 
 gold-flecked shadow and whispering silence, into 
 its mystery, calm, and aloofness. I instantly felt 
 singularly at home, as if I had come to a place I 
 already knew, the place where Una Mary lived. 
 I could almost understand what the birds twit 
 tered to say as they fluttered among the branches, 
 and all the pungent odors compounded of damp 
 earth, sun-steeped pine, and prodigal luxuriance 
 had wafted over me in some dream life long ago. 
 
 What I afterward named My Country dates 
 
 54 
 
GAPS IN MY INFORMATION 55 
 
 from this afternoon in the woods, with the cool, 
 green light sifting through the leaves, lighting the 
 marvel-carpeted ground. It was the ground that 
 fascinated me most that day: the pine-cones lying 
 on the moss, the tiny ferns and flowers growing 
 everywhere, all new and strange to me, for before 
 I had seen only field and garden flowers. But 
 what I remember best are the mushrooms. We 
 found them in all shades of brown, yellow, and red, 
 from velvet darks up to the most vivid orange 
 scarlet. But most wonderful of all were the deep 
 purple ones. Purple has always been to me the 
 mystery color, the magician s color. All the mush 
 rooms looked very wise and as if they could weave 
 spells and incantations, but the purple ones were 
 the Merlins of the wood. 
 
 My father was interested in studying mush 
 rooms, and this must have been one of his collect 
 ing trips. He probably told me a great deal about 
 them as they stand out so vividly in my mind. 
 Always he was keen to have me care for nature 
 as he did, both scientifically and for its beauty. 
 He himself was by profession a scientist of the 
 most rigid and exact type a chemist. He was 
 professor of chemistry in the Cincinnati Univer 
 sity, but temperamentally he was a poet, and I 
 think what most appealed to him in science was 
 the tremendous swing its theories allowed to the 
 
56 UNA MARY 
 
 imagination. His was the mathematical side of 
 chemistry, and where are there wider and bolder 
 flights into the unknown and more careful ladders 
 built to reach the moon than in the higher branches 
 of mathematics? 
 
 He devoted himself to science not as a career, 
 but embraced it as a cause, the great cause of 
 Reason that had risen in those days when Darwin 
 was still alive, a new Religion on the earth de 
 throning the systems of the past; and to it he 
 dedicated all his powers, taking an active part, 
 writing, and lecturing in the science-and-religion 
 controversies. 
 
 I think the theory of evolution had a great deal 
 to do with my own bringing up, was responsible 
 really for religion s being carefully left out and a 
 great deal of science given to me in its place. 
 Natural history was taught me, not as miscella 
 neous names and detached facts, but cosmically, 
 showing the growth, relationship, and interdepen 
 dence of creatures and their environment. When 
 I was a mere baby I knew men had had apes for 
 ancestors, and I stuck to my belief in spite of the 
 unbelief of all the other children. 
 
 I remember one little girl, the daughter of a 
 Presbyterian minister, was forbidden to play with 
 me in consequence. She said her father said, "It 
 was worse than hearing swear words," and, having 
 
GAPS IN MY INFORMATION 57 
 
 delivered this shaft, she stuck out her tongue and 
 flounced off with great ostentation of virtue. I 
 can see her still, in a blue gingham dress standing 
 straight out around her knees and a hat wobbly 
 with poppies. 
 
 I had a general idea of the different geological 
 periods and the changes the earth had gone through; 
 but, with all the rich variety of information which 
 was given to me, there were strange gaps, impor 
 tant links taken for granted. For instance, it was 
 not until I was in school that I heard for the first 
 time in geography class that the earth turned 
 around each day while the sun stood still. The 
 obvious mistake was as great a shock to my intel 
 ligence as it had been to the contemporaries of 
 Galileo, and I gravely assured the teacher it could 
 not be true and, as a final argument, said my father 
 had never told me so and he had taught me all 
 about the earth. The smiling teacher told me to 
 ask him about it when I got home, which I did. 
 And when he, greatly surprised to find he had not 
 already explained the matter, assured me it was 
 true and told me about the other planets and their 
 movements around the sun, I had one of my most 
 terrible moments of readjustment. 
 
 The full force of the fact of the earth s move 
 ments and the whirling of the stars in their orbits 
 took hold of my imagination, and for days I was 
 
58 UNA MARY 
 
 really giddy and seemed to feel the moving of this, 
 my solid ground, grown suddenly as unreliable as 
 a merry-go-round. I expected each moment to 
 hear a crash as we bumped into some other star, 
 and I was really afraid when I went up-stairs that 
 I might be caught off into space by the attraction 
 of the sun; and it was only after Papa had ex 
 plained fully and illustrated by having me whirl 
 around my head a pail full of water at the end of 
 a string, and I saw how the water stayed in even 
 when the pail was upside down, that I realized 
 that in the very whirling of the earth lay my safety, 
 that it was this which kept even the upside-down 
 Chinese from flying off into space. This made 
 me feel a little steadier on my feet and gave me 
 the courage to try an experiment. I went into 
 the back yard and, after carefully marking around 
 each foot with chalk, jumped as high as I could to 
 see if I came down again in exactly the same spot 
 or if the earth slid under me a little while I was in 
 the air. Convinced at last that my environment 
 at least was stationary, I calmed down after what 
 had been a week of most intense excitement. 
 
 My father and I were great companions, partly 
 because we were very congenial and also because 
 my mother was most of the time an invalid and all 
 of her spare strength had to go to my sister, who 
 was then so delicate that Lizzie said we could 
 
GAPS IN MY INFORMATION 59 
 
 never raise her. While Papa hoped he was train 
 ing me to be a scientist, it was really my imagina 
 tion and sense of beauty that were stimulated by 
 his own unconscious enthusiasm; and he made me 
 long, instead, to be a painter. 
 
 It is curious how often science and the arts run 
 through families, cropping out in alternate gen 
 erations. I have noticed it again and again in 
 reading biographies, which would seem to prove 
 that really they are of the same spirit, these two 
 apparently opposed points of view, differing only 
 in method and emphasis. 
 
 One great advantage of my training in natural 
 history was that I learned not to be afraid of any 
 sort of creature. For the other children, even the 
 boys, the world was full of terrors. There were 
 many insects, especially the praying-mantis and 
 green beetles, which to them were " deadly pizen" 
 even to touch, while I was on friendly terms with 
 all insects and collected beetles for years. That 
 it was cruel to collect them never even occurred 
 to me; they died so quietly in my insect bottle. 
 I was not interested in them scientifically, but 
 purely for their color and the strange patterns on 
 their backs. In the end they appealed to me tre 
 mendously, though I began to collect them for 
 quite a different reason. 
 
 When I was nine years old I heard a story about 
 
60 UNA MARY 
 
 Darwin s boyhood which influenced me greatly. It 
 was said that when he was nine years old a gypsy, 
 in telling his fortune, told him if he collected beetles 
 he was sure to become famous when he grew up. 
 Papa, when I asked him, said Darwin had become 
 one of the most famous men who ever lived, so it 
 seemed to me, as I was the same age, a good plan 
 to follow his example and collect beetles, too. 
 Fame seemed wonderfully attractive. I felt it 
 would be like being Una Mary, and the whole 
 world would then see what I really was and no 
 longer think I was merely what Una seemed. 
 
 In the natural history I learned, there was always 
 a conspicuous gap. It was on the subject of birth. 
 For with all the breadth of view Transcendental 
 Boston had given my father and mother was 
 blended their inheritance of the old Puritanical 
 reticence on the origins of life. I was told abso 
 lutely nothing. It seemed like religion, for when 
 I asked questions I was told it was something I 
 could not understand, but that I should know when 
 I grew up where kittens and babies came from. 
 But when I was only six I had found out for my 
 self, for that Easter Lizzie gave me an Easter egg 
 with a small chicken inside it, and a rabbit so fully 
 hatched that only half the shell was left, glued to 
 his hind leg, and in it he sat up and begged like 
 a dog. I already knew that chickens and birds 
 
GAPS IN MY INFORMATION 61 
 
 came from eggs, and the summer before had found 
 some hatching turtles, so if rabbits came in the 
 same way it was probable that everything else did 
 and there must be babies eggs somewhere. I kept 
 my eyes open for one of their nests in the hope of 
 finding a hatching boy I could take home for a 
 brother. 
 
 Harry was given the stork-and-basket solution, 
 which satisfied him completely, because, as he 
 pointed out, babies always slept in baskets. But 
 even this conclusive proof failed to convince me, 
 as no one I knew had ever seen a stork in Cin 
 cinnati except at the Zoo, and surely the single 
 sleepy, one-legged bird in the cage there was inad 
 equate to carry all the baby creatures that arrived 
 each day, and, besides, the baskets babies slept in 
 had no handles for the stork to carry them by 
 and might as plausibly be nests instead to hold 
 the eggs. 
 
 The next year my second sister was born. For 
 several days I had been visiting at Harry s, spend 
 ing the nights there as well as the days, and one 
 morning, just as we had succeeded in building a 
 Chinese pagoda of cards eight stories high, Lizzie 
 blew it all down by the draught she made hurrying 
 into the room to tell me to come home because I 
 had a new sister. I was furious at having the 
 pagoda knocked down and much more concerned 
 
62 UNA MARY 
 
 over that than at having a sister. I took no in 
 terest in a sister if it had been a brother it would 
 have been different but by the time my hat and 
 coat had been put on, and my rubbers, which al 
 ways stuck at the heel, everybody else seemed so 
 pleased about her that I felt, perhaps, it would not 
 be so bad, after all; anyway, she could be the 
 Little Bear when we played the Three Bears. 
 
 Lizzie told me she was a very pretty baby, and 
 when I saw her she really did look very cunning 
 and her fascinating little fists had real tiny finger 
 nails. Those finger nails won me completely, and 
 I was her slave from that day on. I taught myself 
 to knit in order to make a cap for her and prac 
 tised making strange facefc and noises with which 
 to surprise her. She was always most apprecia 
 tive of them, receiving them first with a blank 
 stare and then a wild gurgle of delight. To her 
 I was as comic as a circus clown, and my mere 
 appearance made her dance and crow with expecta 
 tion. 
 
 The day she was born, as soon as I had fully 
 examined her I dashed down to the cellar to hunt 
 in the ash barrel for the pieces of the shell from 
 which she had hatched, for she looked so big I was 
 sure it must be simply huge, even larger than the 
 ostrich egg in Agnes s cabinet. But not a scrap 
 of shell could I find, so I concluded it must have 
 
GAPS IN MY INFORMATION 63 
 
 been burned up in the open fire in Mamma s room 
 in front of which the baby nest stood in which she 
 had been hatched. It seemed quite natural that 
 baby nests should be baskets trimmed with mus 
 lin and lace. Swallows nests were most carefully 
 woven of sticks almost like basketwork, and the 
 birds always lined them with the softest, fluffiest 
 things they could find, so, of course, human par 
 ents would make the nest to hold their babies as 
 beautiful as possible. 
 
 A few days later, when Harry and I were play 
 ing at his house, in a closet we happened to open 
 for hide-and-seek we found a brand-new baby 
 nest all pink inside. Otfrs was blue. In a few 
 weeks Harry, too, had a baby sister, and the 
 strange old woman with false teeth and a black, 
 frizzed bang, who was at our house when our baby 
 came, was there to take care of her. I always 
 saw her at every house where there was a new 
 baby, so I supposed she must be the person who 
 sold baby eggs to everybody. I only wished she 
 had some way of telling beforehand whether they 
 were going to hatch out as boys or girls. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 MY COUNTRY 
 
 T CANNOT remember the time when Edward 
 * was not part of my inner life. He was a boy 
 older than I. I think he must have been about 
 ten years old and dressed in a dark-blue Norfolk- 
 jacket suit with a red tie when I first created him. 
 He had brown hair and a fascinating way of snap 
 ping his eyes when he laughed. I do not know 
 whether he was some one I first saw and then took 
 over to be Una Mary s invisible friend, whether 
 he was pure invention, or a composite of various 
 people I admired I seem to detect traces of Rich 
 ard about him. But in the beginning he was the 
 sort of boy I have described and my perpetual com 
 panion in all my imaginary life. A cousin of mine, 
 when she was a small child, had a friend she called 
 The General who was always with her, invisible, 
 of course, to every one else, but to her so real that 
 she had to have a chair for him beside her wherever 
 she was and a place set at table. Edward was 
 as real to me as The General was to her, but as I 
 
 6 4 
 
MY COUNTRY 65 
 
 *iever spoke of him no one else ever knew about 
 him, and I never felt he was near me when I was 
 just Una. He was only there when I became Una 
 Mary. 
 
 As I grew older he changed, growing less and less 
 vivid in outward appearance, until he became a 
 sort of detached personality with scarcely any out 
 ward form, a feeling rather than a mental vision, 
 but quite distinct in his effect upon me from the 
 memory of any real person I knew. He was more 
 personal and much more intense. I loved him 
 better than any one except my family, and he 
 seemed to belong to me even more than they did, 
 for he was wholly mine while they belonged to 
 each other as well. 
 
 He was the one person who could at all coun 
 teract the influence of my Imp, for sometimes when 
 the Imp was simply crushing me by telling me of 
 my defects Edward would rush to the rescue and 
 tell me not to listen, as the Imp was only talking 
 about Una, who did not count at all, but that he, 
 Edward, knew how lovely Una Mary was and she 
 was the only part of me that really mattered. 
 Often when the Imp had made me especially mis 
 erable, as he did one day when he pointed out to me 
 that all the other baby carriages in the park had 
 straw canopies over the babies heads while the 
 carriage our baby was in had nothing but a parasol 
 
66 UNA MARY 
 
 covered with muslin swinging over it, Edward 
 told me to turn myself into Una Mary as quickly 
 as possible, which I did, when everything at once 
 had quite a different aspect. The parasol, instead 
 of being a family disgrace, became a lovely flutter 
 of light and filmy, broken shadows as exquisite as 
 if^X.cloud had floated down to shade my sister s 
 head, while the Imp shrank back into nothingness 
 and in his place stood Edward, loving, as I did, 
 the new-found beauty of the parasol. 
 
 Why he was named Edward I have forgotten. 
 He simply always was Edward, and that was his 
 only name until I was seven years old, when, for 
 the first time, I heard of Christ. I liked the sound 
 of the name for some reason, and the only other 
 thing I heard besides the name was that he was an 
 invisible person, so it seemed to me just possible, 
 as Edward was also invisible, that they might be 
 the same, and I renamed Edward, Edward-Christ. 
 
 It was during this period that he lost his Nor 
 folk-jacket outward appearance and became a 
 vague young man of about nineteen, his face being 
 all I really saw of him. 
 
 He was a great friend of my various heroes from 
 books and " Princes in Disguise," and it was he 
 who presented them at my court where I was, of 
 course, "The Princess Una Mary," throned in a 
 Palace of Enchantment. It is with My Country 
 
MY COUNTRY 67 
 
 that Edward is most closely associated, the imag 
 inary world where he and Una Mary lived, which 
 began to form soon after the trip into the woods 
 when Papa and I collected mushrooms. It grew 
 from the impression the woods made upon me, 
 combined with a pond where white water-lilies 
 floated and a little brook I had seen in the coun 
 try cascading over mossy rocks to silent pools 
 where slender ferns trailed their delicate fingers 
 in the clear water. It had, too, the glamour of a 
 Christmas tree and the splendor of jewels and my 
 Algerian sash, and there were castles perched on 
 all the hilltops. 
 
 It was the land of magical beauty, high adven 
 ture, incredible courage, hair-breadth escapes, and 
 romantic attachments expressed in magnificent 
 speeches to Una Mary, who replied to them with 
 gracious condescension; where Edward and I wore 
 robes of samite and cloth of gold and in all our 
 adventures had the luck of a Seventh Son; where 
 revenge was sweet and dramatically swift cross 
 nurses were at once boiled alive in olive-oil from 
 which they emerged unscathed at their first kind 
 word of repentance; where all our wishes came 
 true in a flash and we "lived upon strawberries, 
 sugar, and cream" supplemented by Hermit cook 
 ies made after my grandmother s recipe and cut 
 out with a rooster-shaped cutter the land, in 
 
68 UNA MARY 
 
 other words, of my interior reality, the sum total 
 of all my desires. 
 
 It was a place well suited to the romance of tlje 
 set of chessmen that had been one of my moth 
 er s wedding presents she herself had carved the 
 board, with leaves all around the edge, on which 
 she and Papa played chess. But the board always 
 seemed too circumscribed, so it was mainly to pro 
 vide another scene for their activities that I in 
 vented the rug part of My Country. The chess 
 men were really beautiful pieces made of ivory 
 and finished with a lavish affection for detail which, 
 to my mind, was proof of their artistic perfection. 
 One could even tell whom the Queen was to marry 
 by counting "Rich man, poor man, beggar man, 
 thief" on the buttons of her cloak, and it always 
 came out, as it naturally should, that the beggar 
 man was to be her fate, though there was always 
 the nervous moment when it might have been the 
 thief. 
 
 TJie Kings, Queens, and Bishops had great dig 
 nity, and the Knights were full of suppressed dash, 
 while the Castles were very solid and battlemented 
 in a satisfactory way. My favorite dress had 
 scallops on it just the shape of the battlements. 
 The Pawns met the usual neglect of life as far as 
 I was concerned and were only useful to kill off 
 in battle. 
 
MY COUNTRY 69 
 
 I was allowed to play with these wonderful be 
 ings as a great treat when I had been very good 
 or had a cold. How I welcomed colds, the sniffly 
 kind, for which one did not have to go to bed but 
 just stayed in the house sipping hot lemonade 
 and being an invalid, not expected for those bliss 
 ful days "to give up" anything because I was the 
 oldest, and allowed to play to my heart s content 
 with the chessmen on the rug in the parlor! 
 
 That rug had an important role in the early 
 days of My Country. It was a Persian pattern of 
 the bold blue and yellow palm-leaf and sprawling 
 flower type, with much detail inside the large forms 
 and endless touches of bright color, all so well 
 proportioned that the effect of the whole was a 
 rich, quiet blue in tone. I am glad< it was a good 
 carpet. With the Boston severity in clothes, my 
 family also lived up to that other Boston ideal of 
 having their household effects solid and good in 
 line and materials. 
 
 When I think of that first house of ours, bare 
 and serviceable, of necessity, furnished as it was 
 from the salary of a professor in a small University, 
 it is with real aesthetic pleasure that I recall it. 
 My mother had the true genius for arrangement 
 and the taste which rejected all that was ornate, 
 badly proportioned, or poor in color. So, although 
 she married at the height of the black-walnut 
 
70 UNA MARY 
 
 period, her few pieces of furniture were simple 
 and really good. Black walnut in itself is a fine, 
 honest sort of wood if treated fairly, and they 
 still look well, those tables and chairs of Mamma s 
 first housekeeping, combined though they now are 
 with old mahogany. There is one chair in par 
 ticular. It was designed by William Morris, an orig 
 inal " Morris Chair," and a really lovely thing it 
 still seems. I used to sit for hours on one of its 
 arms, my feet in the seat, looking off into space, 
 making up stories about My Country. 
 
 The rug was, I think, the thing in the whole 
 house that I liked best, and I chose different parts 
 of its pattern for various adventures of the chess 
 men. One part was a place we had been to in the 
 summer, Mount Vefnon, N. H., because down the 
 centre of a le^ on the rug there went a curving 
 brown vein, broken by flowers in places, like the 
 brook at Mount Vernon that ran disappearing 
 and reappearing in the grass and daisies of the 
 meadow behind the barn, where the elm-trees 
 grew. I had caught trout and frogs on a bent 
 pin in that brook, and I longed to have Edward 
 and the chessmen know the thrill of safely jerking 
 the flashes of wriggling silver to the bank. 
 
 A very yellow palm-leaf in one corner of the 
 pattern was the Holy Land. I thought it was 
 holey, full of holes. I had simply heard some one 
 
MY COUNTRY 71 
 
 speak of having been there the winter before, and 
 the name sounded sunny and yellow, a cheerful 
 sort of place, full of caves in the soft rock. I 
 thought the whole country must look rather like 
 Swiss cheese to deserve its name. The Holy Land 
 was, of course, simply infested by robbers. The 
 Forty Thieves lived there, each with a cave to him 
 self, all in a row, and for some reason it was always 
 there that we hid from pirates. 
 
 The outside border of the rug was the sea. I 
 felt sure, of course, that the world was bounded 
 by the sea and if you sailed to the edge the ship 
 would fall off, so the chessmen were always careful 
 not to go beyond the second stripe of the border 
 outside. It used to remind me of Lizzie s favorite 
 hymn. She always sang it when she was crochet 
 ing in the evenings. She crochetec^ the most re 
 markable tidies with animals on them. She did 
 one for me with a cat on it that had a mysterious 
 hole for an eye, and in spite of there being no 
 stitch there it never unravelled, quite unlike my 
 own crocheting. As she sang I thought she said: 
 "God, the sailor, tossing on the deep blue sea." 
 So I thought of God as taking summer vacations 
 from Heaven and going, as many of our friends 
 did, to the seashore, where He went sailing all day 
 long. 1 always pictured Him on a sloop, standing 
 leaning against the mast, dressed, of course, in a 
 
72 UNA MARY 
 
 white sailor suit with a dark-blue collar and with 
 anchors embroidered on his sleeves. I had a sailor 
 doll that was dressed so. I liked to think of Him 
 there instead of always up in Heaven and grew 
 very fond of "God, the sailor." He seemed so 
 much nearer to me than God in Heaven. 
 
 The stem of one flower was the Charles River, 
 where I had found the turtle eggs, and another was 
 The Amazon. Always that name has fascinated 
 me, The Amazon, and I feel sure the river itself is 
 a tawny orange zigzag with huge, many-colored 
 leaves and flowers growing out of it at unexpected 
 angles. It was like that on the rug, and I chose 
 that particular stem to be The Amazon because 
 its color was like the sound of the word. There 
 was another reason besides the fascination of the 
 name itself which later made me include it in the 
 geography of My Country, and that was because 
 Brazil was my only association with Royalty. 
 
 A cousin of the Emperor Dom Pedro was a stu 
 dent of my father s at the University and used 
 to come to our house. Once the Emperor himself 
 had come to Cincinnati and Papa had talked to 
 him. It used to be my favorite boast that my 
 father had talked to an Emperor, until I met the 
 Johnsons, whose father was in the Diplomatic Ser 
 vice, and George quite took the wind out of my 
 sails by telling me he had once sneezed as he was 
 kissing the hand of an Empress. 
 
MY COUNTRY 73 
 
 This cousin of Dom Pedro s I have quite for 
 gotten his name one day gave me a bottle of 
 cologne. So I thought of Royalty as bathing 
 daily in perfumes, and The Amazon, I was sure, 
 smelled like cologne. In fact, I had a strong sus 
 picion that my bottle was simply filled with water 
 dipped from the river itself, and when I led my 
 chessmen down The Amazon in search of " ad 
 ventures in the jungle" I used, as long as the bot 
 tle lasted, to sprinkle a few drops on my handker 
 chief and, as I luxuriously sniffed it, felt we were 
 breathing the native air of the country. No river 
 of Lethe, no spring of Perpetual Youth could be 
 as sweet as my " Waters of The Amazon." One 
 whiff of cologne to this day, of the Johann Maria 
 Farina variety, brings back the old rug in the par 
 lor at home, and I am Una Mary, who looks to the 
 world like Una, floating on a magic bark down the 
 waters of the river of enchantment. 
 
 It may have been because of the scarcity of 
 ladies in the chess world or because I played so en 
 tirely with boys my sisters were too small to be 
 companions then; in any case, there were very 
 few women in My Country and in the games I 
 played there. I, as Una Mary, was, of course, the 
 heroine, usually in a totally masculine environ 
 ment. 
 
 By the time I was seven years old My Country 
 ,was a place quite in itself, wholly imaginary and 
 
74 UNA MARY 
 
 no longer connected with Rug Geography, except 
 that I kept The Amazon. The largest part of this, 
 which was properly My Country, was the En 
 chanted Forest, enchanted with a spell of magic 
 beauty that no great poet has even been able to 
 approach, though I think Spenser had the vision, 
 too, and in his dreams at least knew what it was 
 like. I was named for the Una in Spenser s " Faerie 
 Queene," so I read and loved him from an early 
 age. In Grimm s " Fairy Tales," too, there is here 
 and there the true forest touch. I have never seen 
 real woods as beautiful as these imaginary ones of 
 mine, though in a sun-flecked, fern-grown glade, 
 with a spring bubbling in its centre, I have occa 
 sionally caught my breath, thinking I had come 
 upon it at last, and once at twilight in an old Eng 
 lish forest of beech-trees, their trunks deep in hare 
 bells and tiny vines of small-leaved ivy, in the rich, 
 many-patterned shade of its silence, I felt the fa 
 miliar thrill of my own Forest of Enchantment. 
 
 My Forest, where springs crystal-clear bubbled 
 from beds of moss and frolicked through open 
 glades, where the white stag grazed, where there 
 were dark pools of mysterious black water in 
 which the tall trees were reflected darkly as in 
 a Claude Lorrain glass, and where between the 
 trunks of the trees now and then were glimpses 
 of shining, lily-covered ponds laughing in the sun- 
 
MY COUNTRY 75 
 
 (T* 
 
 light; and in the Forest rode armed Knights, their 
 steeds " richly caparisoned/ and ladies in silken 
 kirtles. Una Mary was dressed in green velvet 
 and was always mounted on a snow-white palfrey, 
 and Edward had a deep-blue velvet mantle that 
 he wore flung carelessly over his armor. It made 
 a superb bit of color as he rode in the sun and 
 shadow of the path before me, its beauty enhanced 
 because it was startlingly like an opera-cloak I had 
 seen the Wonder Lady wear. All was splendor 
 and happiness in that hushed Forest, and, best of 
 all to me, the Imp was never there. It was all 
 sacred from his carping eye. 
 
 On the boundary of the Forest to the West was 
 "Over Seas, 7 a mixed tropical island of the Rob 
 inson Crusoe type, plus all the wild animals in the 
 Zoo, with lotus and all the gorgeous flowering trees 
 I had seen pictures of and swamps full of crocodiles 
 and boa-constrictors. I barred out cannibals after 
 trying them for a time. They seemed uncomfort 
 able to have about, as there were only the people I 
 created for them to eat and they might even catch 
 Una Mary or Edward. I longed to have them eat 
 up the Imp, but it did not seem safe to put him 
 in My Country even to be eaten. He might es 
 cape and be there forever afterward. 
 
 Over Seas I really made up from a sense of duty, 
 for I had heard " Robinson Crusoe" and the "Swiss 
 
76 UNA MARY 
 
 Family Robinson" read aloud and had been a good 
 deal bored by them, but Mamma had said I ought 
 to like them as they were very famous books. So I 
 made up Over Seas to see if I could get acclimated 
 and really like the Robinson Crusoe world, but it 
 never became a great favorite of mine. It rather 
 offended my taste and was too unromantic. 
 
 I usually lived, when in My Country, not in one 
 of my castles I only held audiences or tourna 
 ments in them but in the Castle Tree, a huge, 
 spreading maple that grew in the pasture of the 
 farm where we spent our summers. It could only 
 be climbed by swinging up on one of the branches 
 which I could barely reach by jumping from the 
 ground and then pulling myself up like chinning a 
 bar and crawling along to the main trunk. Here I 
 lived in great state, and, whether I was climbing 
 s t|ie real tree or only sitting in imagination among 
 ks branches, it was always my Castle, my inmost 
 retreat from all the troubles and tribulations of 
 this world. 
 
 The very tip- top of the tree was my watch- 
 tower, from which I could look off "Over hill and 
 dale," like Sister Anne and other congenial spirits, 
 and incidentally see what was going on in all parts 
 of the farm, ready at any moment to stop being 
 the Princess Una Mary and scramble down to be 
 Una, riding on a hay load or driving the ducks out 
 
MY COUNTRY 77 
 
 of the vegetable garden. There was a small crotch 
 just strong enough to hold me, and there, up above 
 the leaves, swaying with every breeze, I used to sit 
 for hours, reading. I read the whole of "Ivanhoe" 
 and the "Last of the Mohicans" as I sat perched 
 up there, and there, too, I fell hopelessly in love 
 with successive superhuman heroes from Miss 
 Young. 
 
 Whenever I was hungry I could let down a basket 
 on a string to be filled with apples or doughnuts by 
 the other children, to whom it was just an ordinary 
 tree. They were all too heavy to climb to the 
 watch-tower and used to play among the lower 
 branches where we had fixed a box to hold the pro 
 visions the farmer s wife kept us supplied with, her 
 theory being that "growing things couldn t have 
 too much to eat." Whether they were calves or 
 humans, the same rule held and we absolutely 
 agreed with her. 
 
 There were several very pliable low branches and 
 these were our horses, and on them we solemnly 
 sat, the boys astride, but I always sideways, like a 
 lady, and teetered up and down a good deal like 
 " Going to B anbury Cross," though to our imag 
 inations we were leading Crusaders to the Holy 
 Land or jousting in a tourney. Castles, it seemed 
 to me, should always be leaf-green and sun-gilt 
 with staircases of rough, purple-gray bark. 
 
78 UNA MARY 
 
 I had a veil of magic that I was early obliged to 
 invent. It was a sort of atmosphere I had the 
 power of throwing round anything I pleased and so 
 transforming it at once to pa^rt of My Country it 
 was because of the veil that only I knew the maple 
 tree was a Castle and very queer were some of 
 the things included under its spell, for even my 
 
 ^catholic tastes felt that Pat, the coachman next 
 door, to whom I was devoted, needed many thick 
 nesses of magic before he quite belonged with my 
 Knights and Ladies and with the Wonder Lady, 
 
 who scarcely needed any veil at all as she was a 
 real born Countess in Germany. 
 
 A range of mountains formed the northern bound 
 ary of My Country and behind these View lived. 
 One summer I was much puzzled, as a group .of 
 people sat on the hillside watching the sun set be 
 hind the distant White Mountains, by what they 
 meant when they said the View was magnificent., I 
 could only see perfectly familiar and normal ar 
 rangements of land and sky, but with that al 
 ways-haunting wonder as to what lay behind the 
 mountains. I wondered if that could be what they 
 called View, and perhaps, as they were grown 
 people, all taller than I, they could see over the 
 mountains and catch sight of what I missed. So I 
 climbed a tree, where I was lifted high above the 
 heads of them all, and still I could not see beyond 
 
MY COUNTRY 79 
 
 or catch a glimpse of View. I was sure that must 
 be the name of the strange something I felt, The 
 Wonderful Presence in what I saw before me. I 
 thought it probably looked, if one could see it, like 
 the stick Mamma had with the carving of the head 
 of the Old Man of the Mountains, the stick that 
 had been one of my favorite toys since I was a baby, 
 which had been in turn, according to the exigencies 
 of the occasion, a doll, an Indian s club, and the 
 sceptre of the Princess Una Mary, but which had 
 always had for me an uncanny, powerful quality in- 
 itself which made me treat it most respectfully. The 
 great stone face that it represented was, I knew, 
 somewhere in the mountains, vast, rugged, and un 
 approachable. Was that, if one could find it, the 
 actual person of View or only a larger carving, a 
 mountain-sized statue to represent him? I thought 
 it must be a statue, for surely that haunting quality 
 I felt could no more be confined to one embodiment 
 than Power, intangible, all-pervading Power, could 
 be imprisoned in one form and place. 
 v That same summer I watched the cloud shadows 
 float over the country, and though it was explained 
 to me that they were shadows cast by the clouds, I 
 was sure it must be a mistake, for how could any 
 thing in the sky cast shadows? One had to be on 
 the earth for that. So it seemed to me these shad 
 ows must be the shadows of invisible beings, and 
 
So * UNA MARY 
 
 .when they came to me from over the peaks of 
 mountains I felt they were cast by View, and in the 
 awe of their passing over me I caught my breath as 
 the dark coolness slipped under my feet and then 
 enveloped everything about me, and I almost felt 
 that through it I could see View Himself. He be 
 came the central mystery and Unknown Spirit of 
 My Country, the magic Over King of it all, and al 
 ways I thought of him as View until I was eleven 
 years old, when suddenly I was sure he must be 
 really God. Still, I feel God is nearer to me in the 
 mountains than in any other place. I, too, "Lift 
 up mine eyes unto the hills." 
 
 Each night I was anxious to hurry into bed, for 
 as soon as the lights were out and I was alone was 
 the time of all others when I could go to My Coun 
 try, and the dark, shutting out the familiar world, 
 served as a magic curtain on which to throw the 
 shifting scenes of my dramas, most varied and 
 wonderful dramas, going on, continued from night 
 to night, until I drifted off into half dreams, when 
 all became yet more vivid; and sometimes I had 
 "My Dream," as I called it, the dream I have had 
 at intervals all my life, and went to The Land of 
 Little People a place only to be found and visited 
 in dreams. I still go there occasionally, when I 
 stumble on its entrance, a huge tin kitchen funnel 
 hidden behind a thicket of young birch trees on 
 
MY COUNTRY 81 
 
 the edge of the Forest. I can never find it when I , 
 hunt; it can only be found by accident. 
 
 I push through a thicket that is just like any 
 other thicket, and there it is, a shallow, yawning 
 trumpet of tin painted inside with alternate rings 
 of green and pink. I step inside, and as I go toward 
 the neck at the other end, far off, as small as if 
 seen through the wrong end of an opera-glass, I 
 see the Land bathed in sunlight, with strange little 
 people walking about, their shadows around their 
 feet like neat, dark mats spread for them to stand 
 on, giving the effect of tiny statues on ebony 
 stands, foreshortened as they would seem if looked 
 at from the ceiling of a room. I see thoroughly 
 only the tops of their heads, on which they wear 
 flat, round hats like the ones Chinese coolies wear 
 at work in the rice-fields. I wonder if the first 
 suggestion came from being told that if I dug a 
 hole in the ground, straight through the earth, I 
 would come out at China? 
 
 Harry and I once spent two whole days digging 
 a hole in the old quarries near us. We selected a 
 place where a rock had been blasted out, so there 
 was quite a deep hole to start with, and even after 
 two whole days of digging China still seemed a 
 long way off. So I asked Papa how long it would 
 take us to get through, and when he said we should 
 
 have to go through the centre of the earth first, x 
 
82 UNA MARY 
 
 where everything was a mass of molten fire, we de 
 cided to stop digging at once and felt we had had 
 rather a narrow escape, for the very next lunge of 
 the spade might have broken through the cool 
 crust and let the melted rock boil out over us. 
 
 I never get through the funnel down into the 
 Land itself. I begin to slide faster and faster down 
 the smooth tin sides toward the neck. The little 
 people look up and see me coming, which makes 
 them at once tumble off their shadows and lie 
 about like a spilled box of tin soldiers, and then 
 with ari awful jump I wake up, saying, "Little Peo 
 ple, keep your heads/ which wakes me thoroughly 
 and I know I have been once more to The Land 
 of Little People. 
 
 Whenever I had a bad day, because I was ill 
 or^in disgrace, I consoled myself with the thought 
 that it did not really matter as the Una in the 
 ordinary world was not the real Una at all, that I 
 only really lived as Una Mary, in My Country, so 
 I had merely to endure until night, when, as soon 
 as I was in bed, a little door in my chest seemed 
 to open and out came Una Mary and my real life 
 began. 
 
 I made myself a gold paper crown to wear in 
 bed, for I did want to make even Una look wor 
 thy of these marvellous night adventures ; but the 
 paper tore to bits before morning, so in its place I 
 
MY COUNTRY 83 
 
 painted points of gold on a black ribbon, the 
 point in front ending in a star. This I used to 
 wear all night, tied so it hid my two tight pigtails 
 of hair that were fastened with dreadful rub 
 ber bands. 
 
 Una Mary always came very quickly, and her 
 adventures were especially exciting when the wind 
 blew at night. When I was twelve years old I 
 wrote this poem about her: 
 
 "The far-off wind is calling me. 
 Una Mary, shake yourself free, 
 Tuck up your skirts and run away 
 To the Land where the story people play. 
 
 "Call to Edward to come with you 
 Where clouds are floating in skies of blue, 
 Where clothes are made of velvet and gold, 
 And Knights are noble, gentle, and bold. 
 
 "We ll run away from the outside Me, 
 And from the Imp be wholly free. 
 My flowing hair in ringlets dressed, 
 We ll only do what we like best." 
 
 \ 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 FROM ARCTURUS TO MINERVA 
 
 TN Harry s house there was an attic dimly 
 lighted by a skylight and one dormer-window 
 where on rainy days we were allowed to play. It 
 had dark corners for hide-and-seek; there were rob 
 ber dens behind trunks, railway trains to be made 
 from the chairs banished because of broken cane 
 seats, and, best of all, clothes for dressing up 
 whatever we did, set to the music of pattering drops 
 thudding on the roof and splashing on the skylight. 
 To this day rain on a roof directly over my head 
 has a dusty smell tinctured with the leather of old 
 trunks. 
 
 In one of these trunks we found some maps and 
 a Chart of the Heavens with the constellations 
 drawn out as elaborate pictures in outline on a pale- 
 blue ground. We called it The Sky Map and used 
 to pore over it for hours, making up stories about 
 the people and animals with the strange, long 
 names. In answer to our questions about them, 
 Mamma began to read us stories from Greek 
 
 84 
 
FROM ARCTURUS TO MINERVA 85 
 
 Mythology. These had a great influence upon me 
 religiously and gave the stars a most dramatic and 
 personal interest added to their firefly sort of 
 beauty. 
 
 I had rarely seen them, the real stars, as I went 
 to bed before they were fairly out; but they had 
 flashed at me through the blown curtains of my 
 room, and when we went away for the summer 
 I used to see them from my berth. We always 
 took a night train, and there they were, travelling 
 quietly along with us above the flying country, 
 serene and silent spirits robbing night of all its 
 terrors even Death must shrink back abashed un 
 der their clear gaze. So I felt Death could only 
 catch us in stuffy, dark rooms, and if we might lie 
 every night under the steadfast stars Death would 
 vanish and we should become immortal as the 
 Gods. 
 
 There was one especially brilliant star that shone 
 above the railroad station as the train pulled out. - 
 It was the first star I ever saw. We had driven* 
 down to the station and gotten on board the train 
 while it was still light. I recall it all most vividly, 
 as it is the first time I remember travelling, and 
 when I was put to bed I was far too excited by the 
 fascinations of my berth, with its curtains, its 
 mirror, and the little hammock for my clothes, to 
 think of going to sleep, and as soon as the train 
 
86 UNA MARY 
 
 started I peeped behind the edge of the curtain at 
 the moving station. Then when we got outside 
 I saw a bright light in the sky. At first I thought 
 it was a lamp on a tall pole, but while the rest of 
 everywhere was rushing from me this light stayed 
 perfectly still, always in the same place, directly 
 opposite my window, and it gave me such a queer 
 feeling to see it there that I called to Papa, who 
 had explained before we started that everything 
 would look as if it was rushing past us, and asked 
 him what he thought this one stationary light 
 could be. Was it, somehow, part of our train? He 
 told me it was a star and that the sky each night 
 was full of many stars that came out like fairies 
 after it was dark, and soon he pointed out others. 
 Faster and faster they came until the whole space 
 of blue-black sky opposite my window sparkled 
 with them, as thick as the spangles on Agnes s 
 gauze party dress. 
 
 But of all those I could see, the star I had seen 
 first was the largest and brightest. Papa said 
 the stars all had names like people and that that 
 star was called Arcturus. Each year as the train 
 started I watched for it, and there it was, above 
 the station. I took it for Una Mary s star and 
 used to talk and really pray to it, though I did not 
 know that anything except "Now I lay me" could 
 be praying. 
 
FROM ARCTURUS TO MINERVA 87 
 
 Arctunis was the first thing I consciously wor 
 shipped, and I even used to brave the fear of Death 
 when I woke up at night and crept from my bed 
 to the window, managing, however, to pull down 
 enough slack of my nightclothes to crawl on and 
 so keep my feet covered. Crouching by the sill, I 
 would find the unmistakable group of stars that 
 made the Great Dipper and then, as Papa had 
 shown me, trace from the two stars at the end of 
 the handle to the largest star they pointed toward, 
 Arcturus, My Star. It seemed to look down on 
 earth just to smile at me and listen to me when I 
 talked to it. 
 
 It was of the greatest help to me when I won 
 dered whether or not I was real. During those 
 strange moments when I felt as remote from the 
 world of sense as if I were a ghost looking on at 
 the life of earth Arcturus steadied me. I was sure 
 the stars were real, and with that fact to stand on 
 I could build up some sort of solid theory of exis 
 tence. What sort of theory I never found out, for 
 the feeling of unreality passed as suddenly as it 
 / came and the objects around me became so con 
 crete and tangible that I knew that I was Una in 
 the world of every day. 
 
 The first time I had the unreal feeling I was 
 playing house with my sister under the dining- 
 room table when suddenly I gasped as I wondered 
 
88 UNA MARY 
 
 which of us was real, my sister, the dining-room 
 table, or I. At first I felt sure it must be I, and 
 the rest of the world with all the things and peo 
 ple in it dreams of mine dreams of Una Mary s 
 and then came the horrible thought that perhaps 
 it was the other way round : perhaps I was just a 
 dream myself while all the rest were real. Or were 
 we all only dreams, and, if so, whose dreams were 
 we? For there must be some one real somewhere 
 to dream us into seeming, just as Edward, the 
 Imp, and all the dramas of My Country were 
 waking dreams of mine. 
 
 As the stars were the only things I was sure 
 about I knew they were really there in the sky 
 it might be that we were dreams of theirs, and, 
 if so, I knew I was a dream of Arcturus. This 
 took away the lost feeling that had been the horror 
 of thinking I might not be real, and I used to 
 pray each night to Arcturus to make me a happy 
 dream and make my life what I would make it if 
 I were always Una Mary. 
 
 To carry on our interest in Greek Mythology 
 after we had been told the stories of the constel 
 lations, Mamma that winter read to us " Haw 
 thorne s Wonder Book," and "The Tanglewood 
 Tales," supplemented by Bulfinch s "Tales from 
 Mythology" as a sort of "Who s Who" of the 
 Olympic World. Over and over we insisted upon 
 
FROM ARCTURUS TO MINERVA 89 
 
 having them read, and for two years Harry and I 
 revelled in an atmosphere of Gods and Goddesses, 
 and all the games we played together were made 
 up about them. It was Una who played the 
 Mythology games but Una Mary to whom parts 
 of Mythology became religion. 
 
 My favorite game was Europa and the Bull. 
 Of course it could only be played in summer, and 
 then under many difficulties. As there was no 
 bull, a reluctant cow had to take his place. I 
 used to make long wreaths of leaves and wild 
 flowers and put them around the neck of the cow 
 I had selected and then catch her by the tail, 
 and when she rushed frantically forward, kicking 
 and plunging to shake me off, on I hung, dragged 
 over bushes and rocks, bumping about like a tin 
 can tied to a cat s tail, waiting until I was yanked 
 up to some really good-sized stone, when, using 
 it as a mounting-block, I would give a wild leap 
 and often succeeded in swinging myself to the 
 back of the astonished and outraged cow, and 
 there I stuck, lying flat on my face and holding on 
 by her horns until finally sjg. -managed to buck me 
 off over her head. The bliss of those mad rushes 
 about the fortunately secluded pasture, my face 
 pressed into the daisy chains around the poor 
 beast s neck, the wind fairly whistling in my ears! 
 The smell of a daisy brings it all back to this day. 
 
go UNA MARY 
 
 One cow, but only one, succeeded in tossing me 
 on her horns, and then it was only a mild toss; 
 but often the greatest excitement of all came after 
 I had been thrown off and had to roll as fast as 
 I could behind rocks or trees to escape being gored 
 or trampled in the stampede of the whole frantic 
 herd. Being Europa was really magnificent! 
 
 Once I tried driving a chariot in the pasture 
 instead. I was the chariot with a pair of calves 
 for my galloping steeds. They were fair-sized 
 ones and pulled so hard I was afraid they would 
 get away, so I tied the ends of their ropes around 
 my waist, and then, as the calves suddenly dashed 
 off in opposite directions, I flew about like a jump- 
 ing-jack and was only rescued by a convulsed hired 
 man when I was almost cut in two. I never played 
 chariots again. I could cope with cows, but for 
 calves I had a wholesome respect. 
 
 Harry was crazy to fly. He had always wanted 
 to and often had flying dreams at night, and when 
 he heard the story of Icarus he was fired with the 
 ambition to really try. We made a pair of wings 
 as tall as he was, cut out of cardboard, fastened 
 together with glue, so overcoming the weakness in 
 the ones Icarus had used, for glue could not melt 
 in the sun as his wax had done, and there seemed 
 nothing to prevent the flight from being a great 
 success; but, to be absolutely on the safe side, we 
 
FROM ARCTURUS TO MINERVA 91 
 
 waited for a cloudy day not raining, that would 
 have melted the glue, just overcast. I tied the 
 wings securely to each of Harry s arms. Then he 
 climbed on to the sill of a second-story window and 
 jumped out with his arms spread as if he were 
 swimming. But, to my horror, instead of floating 
 in the air, soaring gradually up over the housetops, 
 straight as a stone he fell crash ! through a grape 
 arbor to the ground below, where he lay, fortu 
 nately unhurt, but crying bitterly for his lost illu 
 sions. 
 
 It was a long time before he cared for Mythology 
 games after that he said, "They just take a fel 
 low in" but his faith was a little revived by find 
 ing that the story of Clytie was true. It had fas 
 cinated us botanically, this story of a lady who was 
 so in love with Apollo that she turned her head 
 all day long in order to watch him when he drove 
 the chariot of the sun until she pined away with 
 love and longing and was changed to a sunflower, 
 and still, so the story said, turned each day to face 
 the sun. To test the story we went to spend the 
 day with Lizzie, who was now married and, we 
 knew, had sunflowers in her yard. We picked out 
 the largest one as most likely to be Clytie, and all 
 day long, between games, we watched her, measur 
 ing her course by holding up a pencil as my grand 
 mother did when she sketched, and by afternoon 
 
v. 
 
 92 UNA MARY 
 
 she had turned completely round. So that story, 
 at any rate, was true. 
 
 It was a wonderful thing to live for two years 
 with and as those radiant Olympic Beings. We 
 talked about them continually to our families and 
 to Agnes. The other children were bored by them 
 and preferred to play as moderns. Agnes was a 
 great help as she was wonderful at draping tunics 
 of towels and sheets and could make laurel wreaths 
 out of maple leaves fastened together by their own 
 stems, and Papa each spring made us Pan s Pipes 
 from willow twigs. 
 
 One side of Mythology I never talked about, 
 however, even to Harry or Agnes, because it be 
 longed wholly to Una Mary. She had appropri 
 ated it in the very beginning. That was the re 
 ligious side, and it became part of the very fibre of 
 my inner life, more precious even than Edward or 
 My Country, and the thing my Imp hated most. 
 He particularly objected to all my religions. 
 
 When I heard of Sacred Trees inhabited by 
 Immortals, who were their inner spirits, I knew at 
 once that the great apple-tree in our yard, gnarled, 
 knotted, and too old to bear fruit, with broad, 
 mothering seats next its trunk, must be one of 
 these sacred and spirit-haunted trees. Its bark, 
 when I rested my cheek against it, had almost told 
 me secrets, and I knew that it loved me. I knew we 
 
FROM ARCTURUS TO MINERVA 93 
 
 understood each other. Una Mary and its spirit 
 were akin. So I transferred my worship from Aro 
 turus to the apple-tree, quite as wonderful and 
 magical-looking as if it had been an olive or an 
 ilex tree. It seemed much nearer and more inti 
 mate than the stars, which now began to lose their 
 individuality, for my new knowledge of the move 
 ment of the earth had robbed the stars of personal 
 being. If they were not hovering and circling 
 around us, trying to reach us with their love and 
 sympathy but were merely motionless, far-off suns 
 for other worlds, how could they be beings worthy 
 of my worship and my love? Even Arcturus 
 could be no longer a Celestial Person. I thought 
 of them as holes instead, pricked through the blue 
 cover of this world, letting in the light of the world 
 beyond, air-holes for the earth letting the wind 
 from far away blow through, and peep-holes for 
 the all-seeing Gods. 
 
 It was wonderful to be able to touch my Sacred 
 Tree and whisper, as it were, into its very ear 
 through a huge knot-hole hollowed far into the 
 heart of the tree. It was at this same hole that I 
 used to listen for messages and omens, but all I 
 ever heard was the rustling of the branches, mur 
 muring with half-articulate tongues sounds I al 
 most understood. 
 
 It was the year of the Great Comet, and one day 
 
94 UNA MARY 
 
 Harry was allowed to spend the night at our house 
 in order to get up at midnight and see it. After we 
 had been asleep for hours Mamma wakened us and, 
 wrapped in shawls, we stood on the balcony, and 
 there arching the whole sky, as large as the Milky 
 Way, as I remember it, was the tail of the comet 
 spreading like the feathers of a peacock from the 
 star at its head. I always think of it as a fiery 
 peacock with closed tail trailing across the sky. 
 It gave so much light that I could see My Tree 
 distinctly at the far end of the yard, and the comet 
 was arched directly above it as if the whole sky 
 had become a halo, so transfiguring it that the 
 Tree seemed to rise a few feet into the air. The 
 
 / whole experience was stupendous, as real and deep 
 
 , to me as any vision of the Saints. It proved that 
 
 Una Mary had been right. My Tree was of the 
 
 sacred ones. The whole sky proclaimed it with 
 
 - trumpetings of light and flame. 
 
 The next morning I went, as I did each day 
 
 while my garden was in bloom, to lay flowers at 
 
 the foot of My Tree. They were morning-glories, 
 
 ^ magical four-o clocks, and a yellow-flowered vine 
 
 / named money, but which I called Midas-touch 
 
 instead, and lying on the grass under the Tree I 
 
 found a bunch of fine-spun gold. That it should 
 
 have blown there on that particular morning was 
 
 / one of those positively unearthly coincidences. 
 
\ 
 
 FROM ARCTURUS TO MINERVA 95 
 
 But there it was, a tangle of gleaming golden 
 threads vibrating with light as it lay on the dark- 
 green moss, and I grew cold with excitement as I 
 realized that the Comet had dropped a piece of its 
 tail at the foot of My Tree, a great miracle and 
 sign of endless portent. I felt myself in the pres 
 ence of the Gods in very deed. I did not dare 
 touch the shining thing for fear it would vanish 
 like the dewdrops on a cobweb, so I rushed 
 into the house and called the family to come and 
 see! 
 
 I have never gotten over the agony of disap 
 pointment that crushed me as they all burst out 
 laughing when I showed it to them, saying it was 
 a piece of the Comet s tail, and as they laughed 
 they told me it was only a bit of tinsel from some 
 old Christmas tree. My disappointment was not 
 because it was not part of the Comet that belief 
 was unshaken; I knew I was right but because 
 they could not see it as I did and understand. It 
 seemed a reversal of the story of "The Emperor s 
 Clothes." To them it was only tinsel, but I saw 
 it as it really was the texture of light and the 
 sky itself. My faith triumphed over all the facts 
 they tried to prove to me. Even when they showed 
 me a piece of tinsel from our own box of Christmas 
 decorations and I saw that the two were exactly 
 alike, my senses only admitted it: ^ My soul still 
 
96 UNA MARY 
 
 knew the Comet had sent me a sign and a message 
 and had blessed My Tree. 
 
 Perhaps it had power to do so only with earthly 
 tinsel, and perhaps all tinsel came from comets in 
 the beginning. I had seen meteorites and knew 
 they were fallen fragments of stars, certainly much 
 transformed when they reached the earth. My 
 father had told me the Comet s tail was made of 
 light, but so was a star; so possibly a comet could 
 become solid and fall to the ground without losing 
 any of its light and loveliness, could drift down as 
 softly as a snowflake in wisps of filmy gold. 
 
 After the family had gone into the house, still 
 laughing, I took the celestial piece of tinsel, put it 
 in a box that I had lined with lace paper from the 
 edge of the pantry shelves, and buried it at the foot 
 of the Sacred Tree, a miraculous relic, and on the 
 ground above it I always afterward laid my offering 
 of flowers. Surely those threads of gold held a 
 message for Una Mary, and she showed her deeper 
 insight by clinging to the awe that had gripped her 
 soul. 
 
 / After a time the Tree-worship failed to satisfy 
 me. I needed something even more personal, more 
 human. The spirit within the Tree was too re 
 mote, too cautious about revealing himself. After 
 4 watching for a year I had never caught a glimpse 
 
 \of him and he had not once spoken a single word 
 
 \ 
 
FROM ARCTURUS TO MINERVA 97 
 
 that I could understand. I did not lose faith in his 
 being there. How could I when the whole flaming 
 sky had confirmed the instinct that had led Una 
 Mary to his worship? ^What I really Jost faith in 
 was myself. He could not reveal himself to me, 
 because, evidently, I lacked the power to hear 
 oracles. 
 
 The Greek stories with their immortal Gods and 
 Goddesses were a great consolation to me, for these 
 gay and genial, though at times hasty- tempered, 
 beings were of the sort that I could understand. 
 They were naturally of Una Mary s world, and as 
 they sometimes conferred immortality on the hu 
 man worshippers who won their favor, who could 
 tell, if I devoted myself wholly to one of them, 
 whether Una Mary might not become immortal? 
 Not Una, I preferred to have her die; but as Una 
 Mary I should love to live forever on Olympus, 
 or, if not worthy of such a high destiny, to be 
 turned into a flower or a star was almost all that 
 one could wish. 
 
 How I loved the narcissus ! and when we had one 
 growing in a flower-pot I used to hold a hand mirror 
 so that he could look down and still see his loveli 
 ness reflected and fall in love with his own image 
 all over again as he had done when he gazed in the 
 fatal spring. To become a flower, even if one were 
 turned into it as a punishment, was much better 
 
g8 UNA MARY 
 
 than believing one s bones skinned out by Death. 
 So Death retreated into the far distance and even 
 the shadows on the ceiling lost theif terrors. God 
 I still accepted, but as I now thought of Him He 
 was not concerned with the fate of men. All that 
 had to do with us He had turned over to the Gods. 
 He was the first cause, the far-off Being who had 
 made the Gods. 
 
 In the hope of winning immortality for Una 
 Mary I decided to worship Minerva. She has 
 since seemed so austere and forbidding that I am 
 surprised I picked her out. Venus was out of the 
 question because she had no arms (there was a 
 statue of her on the mantelpiece in Mamma s 
 room), but either Juno Dr Diana would have seemed 
 a more natural choice. I I think -sfre was dear to me 
 because of her masculine traits, as I felt I myself 
 that is, Una was a boy-girl, so she, the man- 
 woman, was appropriately my chosen GoddessJ I 
 may also have been influenced by my silver knife, 
 fork, and spoon, my own, the ones I always used, 
 given to me when I was a baby, with handles that 
 ended in medallions that were decorated with heads 
 of Minerva; and our pepper-pots were made in the 
 shape of her owls, making meals, when I remem 
 bered to think about it, rather sacramental affairs. 
 
 I built an altar to her in the far cprner of the 
 back yard where the fence touched an adjoining 
 
FROM ARCTURUS TO MINERVA 99 
 
 house. Between ceremonies I carefully concealed 
 it under sticks and leaves, though it would have 
 conveyed nothing even to the most curious if left 
 in full view, as outwardly it was merely a pile of 
 scraps of broken china and glass, the most gayly 
 colored I could find. / I deliberately broke a red 
 vase of Mamma s to get the pieces from the ash 
 barrel, as red was the color my altar lacked. 
 
 On top of this pile during ceremonies I used to 
 put a real quartz crystal I had begged from Papa 
 and always carried about between times in my 
 pocket. It was one of those crystals, perfect on 
 all sides, that are found loose inside of geodes. 
 
 The whole service to Minerva consisted, after I 
 had arranged the crystal on the altar, in lying flat 
 on my stomach on the grass in front of it, watch 
 ing the light shine through the various angles and 
 planes of the crystal. In their perfect precision 
 and the cold clearness of the quartz I felt the per 
 sonality of Minerva and seemed to be almost in 
 her presence. Una Mary always had a sure in 
 stinct for resemblances in the selection of her sym 
 bols. 
 
 Whenever I had any candy we were only al 
 lowed crystal of sugar on a string or colt s-foot 
 rock, provided on the / slightest suspicion of a cold^ 
 by Harry s grandmother I always saved a piece 
 to put on the altar, and there I religiously left it 
 
ioo UNA MARY 
 
 to be melted away by the rain. Once and once 
 only I succumbed to temptation and took a suck, 
 licking it smooth again so Minerva would never 
 know; but my conscience never let me do it again 
 , and my Imp, who seemed intimately related to my 
 conscience never allowed me to forget about it. 
 
 I really loved Minerva, symbolized in the crystal, 
 and used to pour out all of my troubles before her; 
 above all, my grief at not looking and seeming 
 Una Mary to all the world. That most secret 
 grief I felt she could understand. Minerva her 
 self must have often had the same feeling my 
 dreadful party feeling when she moved among the 
 other Goddesses on Olympus. 
 
 During the firefly season my religious parapher- \ 
 nalia was greatly enriched by small paper boxes, 
 the only thing I had learned to make at kinder 
 garten, in which I put live fireflies and ranged them 
 in front of the altar, that with their light they might 
 serve as Vestal Virgins. There was a large and V 
 serious toad who used to come out in the spring 
 and often join me at the services. I had a great 
 respect for him and felt he must be deeply religious, 
 though since then I have suspected him of designs 
 upon the Vestal Virgins, who used mysteriously to 
 disappear. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 THE UNKNOWN POWER 
 
 ROM some old quarries near us, the quarries 
 where Harry and I had tried to dig through 
 to China, one could look over the city below and 
 across the Ohio River to Kentucky, rolling off in 
 blue undulations to the horizon. This blue haze 
 of distance was to me the blue-grass from which 
 the State got its name, almost as blue as the sky, 
 only darker, it seemed. 
 
 I loved the thought that I could see another 
 State, and once when Harry and I were taken 
 across the river and actually set foot on its soil, I 
 felt I had really travelled, much more so than when 
 we went East for the summer. The two nights 
 and a day that it then took to reach Boston by 
 train blurred the impression of change of State, 
 while here it was immediate just driving in a 
 carriage like any other drive yet we had come to 
 a new State with a different Governor. 
 
 Governors and politics in general were of real 
 importance to me, because of the interest taken in 
 them by Pat, my coachman friend. I used to sit 
 
 101 
 
102 - -UNA MARY 
 
 on a bucket and watch him, in high rubber boots 
 up to his hips, as he washed carriages with a hose. 
 I admired him greatly, though at the same time I 
 was sorry he had to wash carriages for the Browns 
 without the final e. We had some cousins who had 
 the e, so I knew how important it was. As he 
 worked he regaled me with his political views. 
 
 Pat was a Democrat, I think. I remember he 
 convinced me, as he gesticulated with his hose, that 
 "Grover Cleveland wuz the finest man this coun 
 try iver produced." He gave me, too, a great deal 
 of the history of politics, so full of details that the 
 names of the various parties and men were jumbled 
 in my mind with sayings about "Tippecanoe and 
 Tyler too," and log cabins on wheels that were 
 dragged in the torchlight processions because the 
 backbone of the country and most of the Presi 
 dents were born in log cabins. I felt keenly the 
 fact that Papa had been born in a brick house and 
 so was barred forever from becoming President. 
 
 The last year I knew Pat, the ominous word 
 " Mugwumps" had begun to be used. He liked 
 it, but often other men growled it out in such a 
 venomous way that I got the impression that it 
 must be some sort of snake that stung people and 
 changed them completely, so my horror was great 
 when I heard that Papa, after "sitting on the 
 fence," had become one. But it did not change 
 
THE UNKNOWN POWER 103 
 
 him at all, which cheered me so that I began to 
 wonder if my other terror could be as bad as I had 
 thought. I hoped not, for it was one of Una Mary s 
 horrors at night the Ku-Klux-Klan. You just 
 whispered the word to yourself and shuddered. I 
 could always make Harry turn pale by murmuring 
 it into his ears. Pat described them fully, white- 
 masked Riders who rode at night and killed people 
 or tied them to trees and beat them, and the police 
 thought they were all in prison and so did nothing 
 about catching them. White Caps was another 
 name for them, but that sounded too cheerful. 
 Ku-Klux-Klan was the word that expressed them. 
 Ku-Klux sounded so like some awful stealthy thing 
 coming up behind you, and then at the Klan it 
 clutched, and if you happened to be Harry when 
 I said the word to him, by the time I reached Klan 
 you had ducked under the bed. 
 
 The most important thing in Politics as I im 
 bibed it from Pat seemed to be roosters. People 
 wore them as badges, and Pat himself even had 
 a whole stuffed one that he had worn perched on 
 top of his hat when he drove the horses that 
 dragged the log cabin in the torchlight procession. 
 I was sure the Governor and President in some way 
 needed the help of roosters in governing, and I al 
 ways thought of them with crowing cocks perched 
 on the arms of their official chairs. 
 
io 4 UNA MARY 
 
 On the eventful day when we went to Ken 
 tucky I found in the garden of the house where we 
 lunched a queer, lumpy, crimson flower that I had 
 never seen before, and when I heard its name, cocks 
 comb, I was convinced it must later grow out a 
 whole rooster, like the Mythology story of the war 
 riors who sprang up in the field where the dragon s 
 teeth were sown, coming out of the ground head 
 first, a little at a time. This plant, when I saw it, 
 had only gotten as far as the comb. My theories 
 of birth were a little upset by it, as I wondered if 
 there were human plants, too; but on the whole I 
 decided in favor of the egg theory, as the stems of 
 plants seemed too weak even to hold up a puppy. 
 I watched the rooster plant for some time in the 
 Jiope jthat at least an eye might grow out while I 
 watched, but it grew too slowly and looked exactly 
 the same all the time I was there. I studied it 
 with great reverence as the parent of all true Poli- 
 tics and the associate of future Presidents. When 
 Ptold Pat about it next day he said: "Shure and ye i 
 
 ( ought to be a blissed Catholic with the sinse yeVe 
 
 v got fur miracles." 
 
 x My only disappointment about Kentucky came 
 in finding that the grass instead of being blue was 
 most aggressively green, though I found a small blue 
 flower that Mamma said was blue-eyed grass. So I 
 hoped it, at any rate, carpeted the rest of the State. 
 
THE UNKNOWN POWER 105 
 
 It was a wonderful day of many experiences. 
 The friends we were with had, before the Civil 
 War, been part of the " Underground Railway," 
 which I had supposed to be a good deal like the 
 Hoosac Tunnel. So it was surprising to find it 
 was made up of people, and as they told my mother 
 about smuggling slaves to the North and the nar 
 row escapes some of them had had and the hatred 
 they had brought upon themselves in a slave- ^_ 
 owning community, I, listening unnoticed but 
 breathless, suddenly had a glimmering of how 
 much people, real people who were not book people 
 at all, might be willing to do and risk for others, 
 even for people they had never seen; and the 
 wrongs and needs of the blacks became so vivid / 
 to me that the next day I presented a bird-shaped 
 whistle, one of my treasures, to the janitor of a 
 church near us, the only colored person I had ever 
 seen. He was greatly pleased and said he would 
 give it to his little boy. But I was much disap- v 
 pointed, feeling that would frustrate my object,^ 
 and urged him to keep it for himself, as it never 
 occurred to me that his little boy could be black 
 also. 
 
 The house where these Kentucky friends had . 
 lived during the war was burned to the ground by 
 a guerilla band as a reprisal on the part of their 
 Confederate neighbors, and the family themselves 
 
io6 UNA MARY 
 
 had barely escaped with their lives. All their sil 
 ver, which I later inspected with great awe, was 
 buried in the woods for months before they dared 
 to go back and get it. 
 
 Their stories made Harry rush out-of-doors and 
 play war by chopping off the heads of daisies with 
 a stick, yelling at each stroke, "Curse ye for 
 Yanks," as the Rebels had shouted when they 
 burned down the house. I did not care to play 
 .with him, for the fierce and relentless side of war 
 had been brought home to me even more vividly 
 than by handling the sword Harry s father had 
 used during the war, a sword that had really cut 
 people and dripped blood as he slashed at the 
 enemy from horseback. He had been a captain 
 of cavalry. Over the mantelpiece in their dining- 
 room there was a large painting of him, in uniform, 
 charging the enemy. Harry was consequently our 
 authority on war, but as he talked about it, it had 
 never seemed terrible. 
 
 Now I longed to hear more and used to question 
 
 every man who was older than my father, for 
 
 Papa I knew had been too young to enlist, and I 
 
 found that nearly every one we knew had either 
 
 1 fought himself or had stories about relatives who 
 
 had. It became the most absorbing subject to me, 
 
 and I perfectly understood their reticence and the 
 
 "bald, abrupt way in which they so often spoke of 
 
THE UNKNOWN POWER 107 
 
 battles, escapes, and the wounds they had received. 
 It was just like not making a fuss over a cut finger. 
 Our doctor had only one leg, and when I asked him 
 about it, his answer, "I left that foot at Gettys 
 burg," thrilled me more than the most detailed 
 account. 
 
 I was troubled when I thought of all the stray 
 arms and legs on different battle-fields, and hoped 
 Death knew them apart so that when the skeletons 
 were put together people would get the souls of 
 their own arms and legs. It would be so horrible 
 if they got mixed arid a person wore part of some 
 one else! I wondered, too, if the outsides of the 
 arms and legs became little, separate angels. I 
 knew Cherubs were just detached heads with wings, 
 so now I had a most vivid picture before my mind w 
 of a battle-field at dusk I had seen one, just a 
 common, grassy pasture with hundreds of de 
 tached limbs sailing off to the sky, each with its\ 
 own pair of wings, while Death wandered about be- J 
 low tying paper tags with the names onto all ther K 
 bones that were left before sticking them into the j 
 ground. When the rest of the man died, I won- [ 
 dered if Death put his skeleton in a grave on the / 
 battle-field or went and dug up the part that waS 
 there and buried it in the cemetery with the rest 
 of the body. Fortunately, I had never heard of 
 a Day of Judgment to complicate my difficulties. \ 
 
io8 ^ UNA MARY 
 
 That people were actually killed in battle I did 
 not know. No one happened to mention that part 
 to me. I thought from the stories I heard that 
 they were often wounded and barely escaped with 
 their lives, but they always did escape and often 
 they were incredibly brave. 
 
 Pat had been a drummer for his regiment. He 
 often played to us after work with a pair of sticks 
 on a turned-up bucket. We thought it was won 
 derful music. He had no hesitation about telling 
 us all the details of how superbly he had behaved 
 and what he had accomplished single-handed. H$ 
 often seemed to have been alone in the forefront 
 of battle surrounded by the enemy whom he kept 
 off with a pistol in one hand and a drumstick in the 
 other until he managed to wrench a sword or a gun 
 from one of the gray coats. And once he knocked 
 down three men by butting into them with his 
 drum! Harry tried it on me and it knocked out 
 my wind completely. It was clever of Pat to 
 think of it in the thick of battle! 
 
 That was the one of all his adventures that we 
 liked best, but he did not in the end get off scot- 
 free. Even the marvellous Pat with all his skill 
 had lost one finger in battle and had a mysterious 
 stitch in his side as the result of another. Harry 
 had seen it once. Pat showed it to him as a great 
 favor. 
 
THE UNKNOWN POWER 109 
 
 Now for the first time the human drama, as 
 something real and existing outside of books or the 
 imagination, became vivid and absorbing to me. 
 Una Mary could do all sorts of magnificent things 
 that Una was afraid to do, but that real, living men 
 actually did those things positively awed me, and 
 their courage made me thrill as books never had, 
 and it made me shudder, too, reminding me of the 
 gas tanks against the blue sky. There was the 
 same element here in human life, the same splen 
 did, immeasurable terror which I could not under 
 stand. 
 
 That same year several things happened to 
 deepen this impression of a dangerous, unknown 
 Power woven through and yet outside of all our 
 lives. 
 
 The first was a riot down in the city. Of course 
 I only heard about it, but people talked of nothing 
 else for days. As I remember, the troops were 
 called out, and during the fight several people were 
 killed. I had seen a hawk shot, had heard the 
 crack of the gun, seen the bird waver an instant 
 in the air, then fall flopping and whirling to the 
 ground, where I picked him up, a warm, limp mass 
 of feathers that seemed tragically remote from 
 the creature proudly soaring in the air a moment 
 before. And now men had been shot down near 
 us! The thought haunted me for weeks, and each 
 
no UNA MARY 
 
 day when my father went to the laboratory I was 
 afraid he, too, might be shot. The University was 
 on the side of the hill half-way down to the city, 
 where it could be reached by a cable inclined plane 
 known as the " Ink-line," and I imagined all the 
 rioters in the city shooting up at the descending 
 cars. It was horrible! It was even worse than 
 the snatching of Death himself, this killing of 
 human beings by other human beings. It was as 
 monstrous as an old sow eating her suckling, an 
 event, that had shocked me inexpressibly at. the 
 farm the summer before. 
 
 The next terror was a smallpox epidemic. I re 
 member seeing the signs outside many houses and 
 on Mount Auburn Avenue, the street that joined 
 ours at right angles, there was an almost continuous 
 procession of funerals all day long to the cemetery 
 in the country beyond. I am sure now that the 
 smallpox could not have been responsible for them, 
 but I thought so then, and used to watch them with 
 a grewsome fascination and count the hearses I 
 
 ^ could see from the bay window in the parlor. It 
 was the day of hearses splendid with carving, metal 
 trimmings, and black plumes, and the horses had 
 more plumes on their heads and coverings of tas- 
 ,, selled net on their backs. Una Mary felt they 
 Were magnificent and I turned a toy wagon into a 
 
 ?. hearse drawn by a rocking-horse covered with an 
 
THE UNKNOWN POWER in 
 
 old dotted veil of Mamma s and had iunerals ev 
 ery day for my dolls, with old calling cards stand 
 ing up against blocks for their gravestones. 
 
 I secretly felt that our house lacked dignity 
 because we had never had a real funeral in it. 
 Most of the other children had at their houses and 
 bragged about it awfully. It all seemed part of 
 our difference from other people, like our clothes. 
 But I did not want a smallpox funeral, as Lizzie 
 said no mourners were allowed to go to those. So 
 I quite sympathized with our nurse, a person I 
 remember only as a being who pushed baby car 
 riages and dragged a protesting Me about the 
 streets, when she always crossed over to the other 
 side if we came to one of the smallpox signs. And " 
 as I zigzagged on our walks I got the impression 
 that smallpox was a creature ready to jump out 
 like a jack-in-a-box and seize us if we ever got 
 within reach of his arms, or if we even looked 
 afraid he had some strange power over us. So I 
 used to walk past the signs with a very brave and 
 unconcerned expression of countenance to deceive 
 him, though inside Una Mary quaked with her old 
 mysterious fear and was always afraid the Imp 
 would in some way betray me. 
 
 My brave outside was very much like my be-v, 
 havior one night when I thought I heard burglars 
 in the next room. I knew Mamma and Papasjiad 
 
ii2 UNA MARY 
 
 gone to a party, and I was afraid the burglars would 
 kill my small sister who was in their room, and I 
 knew if I screamed or acted as if I were afraid 
 everybody would be killed at once. Our nurse had 
 said burglars always killed people who were scared. 
 So I decided to frighten them off in a way they 
 would never suspect, and, quaking with terror, 
 my throat so dry I could scarcely make a sound, 
 I called as loudly as I could, "Mamma, Mamma, 
 I ve got an awful pain!" and when Mamma came 
 running in for of course it was she I had heard, 
 back from the party I was so relieved I took the 
 Jamaica ginger she gave me without a murmur. 
 
 The next summer while we were in New Hamp 
 shire the famous " yellow day" shut in upon us like 
 a dry and very yellow fog. Darker and darker it 
 grew. The air was breathless and still and the 
 sun, which had seemed when I got up to be an 
 orange balloon waiting in suspense in the sky to see 
 what was going to happen, gradually grew paler 
 and paler until it looked like the moon by daylight. 
 The lamps had to be lighted for lunch and the 
 chickens all went to roost at noon. The cows 
 refused to eat and stood huddled in a group at 
 the pasture bars, and all day the horses neighed 
 despairingly. 
 
 The "Millerites," a sect of Second Adventists, 
 of whom there were five in the town, said it was 
 
THE UNKNOWN POWER 113 
 
 the end of the world their leader had predicted, so 
 they wound themselves in sheets and climbed to 
 the roof of a barn and all day they sat there like 
 enormous white birds, lamenting the destruction 
 of the world and praying and exhorting the rest of 
 us to join them before it was too late, and the tears 
 streamed down their faces as they prayed. One of 
 them was the hired man on our farm, and it seemed 
 very strange to think of him as among the very few 
 elect. No one else joined them, but the sight of 
 them on the roof, combined with the eerie quality 
 in the day and the awful stillness broken only by 
 their prayers and the cries of frightened animals, 
 so worked upon the nerves of the whole community 
 that the bells of the church were rung to call the 
 people to prayer-meeting and there all the ortho 
 dox gathered and prayed that the end of the world 
 might be postponed, and it was all their fault, 
 "working on the sympathies of the Lord," that 
 prevented the Millerites from " rising up to glory" 
 so, at least, the Millerites said afterward to ex 
 plain the fact that about nine o clock they climbed 
 down from the roof, very tired and hungry, for of 
 course no one of them had bothered about food 
 on that their last exalted day. 
 
 I saw one woman stirring up some chicken food 
 the famished hens collected about her feet still 
 dressed in her sheet that flopped clumsily at every 
 movement of her arm. 
 
ii 4 UNA MARY 
 
 The hired man stayed all night on the roof, and 
 it almost broke his heart that the end of the world 
 did not come. When you have expected to "float 
 in glory, blowing on a golden trumpet near the 
 throne/ it is hard next day to have to kill potato- 
 bugs instead. 
 
 I had been much excited all day myself, but 
 rather interested than frightened, I was so curious 
 as to what it would be like if the world did end. 
 Yet it made me distinctly nervous tHat Mamma 
 had not gone to the prayer-meeting. Perhaps that 
 would count against her if it were the Day of Judg 
 ment. I myself did creep into the back of the 
 church, and there that usually satisfied and deco 
 rous assembly were praying and crying like the 
 "shouting Methodist" our cook once took me to 
 see. The whole day was decidedly a strain and 
 most disquieting, and my Imp kept reminding me 
 of all the things I had done that I ought not to 
 have done. And even if the world did not end, the 
 yellow day itself was still a fact, an unexplained 
 and creepy fact. It had come upon us from some 
 where and many more like it might descend upon 
 us, and then I was sure we should all scream. If 
 it had only done something it would have been 
 more bearable. One longed for a terrific thunder 
 storm to shatter the heavy stillness. 
 
 The last spring we lived in Cincinnati was the 
 
THE UNKNOWN POWER 115 
 
 year of one of the great Ohio floods, and Harry and 
 I were taken down to see it. We drove through 
 blocks and blocks of streets where the water came 
 to the hubs of the wheels of our carriage and all 
 the lower stories of the houses were flooded, the 
 people living up-stairs and going about in boats 
 that they had to climb out of windows to reach. 
 
 Finally, we came to a place where we could go 
 up some steps to the bridge, and from there we saw 
 the whole snarling, turbulent, orange-colored mon 
 ster foaming down upon us, tossing uprooted trees 
 and wreckage like the leaves on a brook. There 
 were even whole houses, small wooden ones, tum 
 bling along on their sides, jerked this way and that, 
 their slanting windows looking up at us with a 
 cock-eyed expression of despair as they went reel 
 ing under us. Harry had a splendid time counting 
 the objects that tore past us, some dangerously 
 near the bridge, and longed for a house with 
 wrecked family inside. But it was the river itself 
 that fascinated and appalled me. I felt I was 
 in the very Presence of the Person itself of all the 
 terrors that I had vaguely and awfully felt during 
 my life. It was the sum total of all Una Mary s 
 nightmares personified into this gigantic, implac 
 able wild beast, which yet was not a wild beast 
 and was more terrible so. He was alive, untam 
 able, impersonal, and to be touched by no appeal. 
 
ii6 UNA MARY 
 
 very sky, dimmed by the mist of his foaming, 
 seemed remote and helpless. 
 
 It was so wild and fierce I knew it was like Death 
 and smallpox and war. Everything dreadful that 
 I knew or had imagined was summed up in that 
 Flood, and later, when I heard of the " Wrath of 
 God," I knew it must be like that seething ma 
 lignity. 
 
 s 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 V 
 
 UNA S TASTE AND UNA MARY S WONDER 
 
 AS I look back over those eight years when we 
 * ^ lived in Cincinnati I cannot remember a sin 
 gle funny thing that happened that seemed funny 
 to me at the time, I mean. I cannot tell whether 
 my sense of humor did not develop until later or 
 whether nothing of the sort made a lasting impres 
 sion upon me. The only things from books that 
 appealed to my sense of humor began with "Hey! 
 diddle diddle. " That the dish ran away with 
 the spoon just because the cow jumped over the 
 moon seemed to me deliciously absurd, exuberantly 
 funny. But funnier still was "John Gilpin s Ride. 7 
 I had it with Caldicott s illustrations, and both 
 the pictures and the text were an unfailing source 
 of laughter. Dear, fat John Gilpin with his bald 
 pate, clinging fast to his horse s neck while his wig 
 and cloak float down the wind behind him ! All the 
 Caldicott picture-books I liked, but " John Gilpin" 
 best of all. He seemed really funniest; and then, 
 too, there was nothing to be sorry for as there was 
 117 
 
n8 UNA MARY 
 
 in the "Mad Dog." The expression of that poor 
 dog haunts me to this day. 
 
 Among my father s books I discovered "The 
 Foreign Tour of Brown, Jones, and Robinson" and 
 their absurd troubles while travelling in Europe. 
 For years all my ideas of foreign travel were based 
 on their adventures, and I have never quite gotten 
 over my disappointment each time I go abroad to 
 find it all so tame. I feel the fault must lie with 
 me. There are now no stage-coaches, to be sure, 
 but Brown, Jones, and Robinson going over now 
 would still, I feel sure, show their old capacity 
 for creating situations. Neither steam nor elec 
 tric lights could deter them from getting in and 
 out of difficulties. Every one ought to have been 
 brought up on that book. And there was another 
 which ranked with it in my estimation, "The Ad 
 ventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck." This was a 
 series of comic drawings illustrating his wonderful 
 exploits in search of a sweetheart. I found this 
 book in my grandfather s attic and each time I 
 went there spent a great deal of time poring over 
 its pages. How many people, I wonder, have had 
 the privilege of knowing Mr. Obadiah, his dog, 
 and his horse, and of watching the Beloved Object 
 grow fat or thin according to the nature of her 
 adventures? Very few people, I am sure, really 
 know what it means to turn over a new leaf, a per- 
 
UNA S TASTE 119 
 
 fectly simple proceeding as it only means putting < 
 on a clean shirt. Mr. Obadiah does it between 
 all his attempts at suicide; just disappears com 
 pletely under a fresh shirt, emerges a new man, 
 and, of course, his luck changes at once. 
 
 Many of the books that made grown people 
 laugh seemed to me pathetic instead. Most of 
 the Anderson stories made me weep and his humor 
 wholly escaped me. They made me so miserable 
 that I finally refused to have them read aloud, 
 though I loved fairy-tales and was devoted to 
 Grimm. Two other books that always made me 
 weep were " Pilgrim s Progress" and "Water Ba 
 bies." These we gave up in the middle and I 
 have never to this day been able to finish either 
 of them. 
 
 I had several picture-books by Kate Greenaway 
 which I liked immensely, and was delighted to see 
 that the houses she drew were very like the funny 
 gabled one in which I had been born, which was so 
 unlike any other house I had ever seen. It made 
 me feel quite related to the Greenaway children. 
 And then I had Walter Crane s illustrated fairy 
 tales, but those were too sacred to be talked about 
 as he almost, not quite, drew My Country in them. 
 
 On one of my birthdays I was given a book I 
 wish all children could have. We called it the 
 "Big Book." It had been lent and rebound so 
 
120 UNA MARY 
 
 many times the title-page was lost, but I have 
 since discovered its real name is "The Children s 
 Book," compiled by Horace Scudder, a collection 
 of classics for children in poetry and prose, mainly 
 fables, ballads, and fairy-tales, as I recall it. It 
 was the source of most of the material that made 
 up My Country, though Grimm had contributed 
 his share; and two other books that helped were 
 Irving s " Tales of the Alhambra" and his " Con 
 quest of Granada. * 
 
 In Irving I loved the combinations of descrip 
 tions of scenery and palaces and the romantic ad 
 ventures of the characters with wonderful names 
 and strange titles that sounded a good deal like 
 the Arabian Nights and yet were different and nw 
 to me. I remember the horror of one of my moth 
 er s friends when, in answer to her question as to 
 what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said: "The 
 Illegitimate Son of an Illegitimate Son. They al 
 ways have such wonderful adventures in Granada." 
 And, of course, one of the favorite heroes in My 
 Country was a reckless, melancholy Moor, an Ille 
 gitimate Son, which to me was just an especially 
 high-sounding title like The Heir Apparent. 
 
 There was "Don Quixote," too, with Dore illus 
 trations, a large and sumptuous volume bound in 
 green leather tooled with gold. Fantastic he never 
 seemed to me. I took to him quite gravely and 
 
UNA S TASTE 121 
 
 sympathetically. And there were many other 
 books, all dearer to me and of more moment in 
 my life than most of the people I have known. 
 
 If I lacked a sense of humor, a sense of beauty 
 I surely had, a very acute one of my own kind, 
 though what people usually meant when they 
 said things were pretty or beautiful puzzled me 
 greatly as I rarely agreed with them, and they 
 seemed quite indifferent to all that I thought beau 
 tiful. Easter Eggs, for instance, I greatly admired, 
 the kind with a hole in front edged with pink sugar 
 roses, where I could look through a pane of glass 
 into a fairy-tale world of houses, people, and ani- i 
 mals, all standing in moss of the most violent ani 
 line green with the translucent arch of the sugar egg 
 for its sky. These I considered supremely beau 
 tiful ; and of the same high order were balls of glass 
 I gave one to Papa one Christmas for a paper 
 weight that had whole scenes inside them, a good 
 deal like the Easter-Egg scenery, only here it was 
 always winter with snow over everything, and 
 when you shook the ball and stood it up again you 
 had stirred up a driving snow-storm that filled the 
 whole country inside the ball and took five whole 
 minutes to settle again. I had my eggs hard-boiled 
 by it instead of the dull minute-glass the rest of 
 the family used. 
 
 Of this same quality of beauty were Valentines, 
 
122 UNA MARY 
 
 Real Valentines, that came in large, embossed en 
 velopes and opened up layer on layer of lace paper 
 like an accordion, framing some deep-set face of 
 doll-like loveliness or a painted cupid with his 
 bow and arrows aimed straight at you; and dec 
 orating the lace were detached flowers, hearts, and 
 linked hands fastened on at random and looking 
 almost as lovely as Lizzie s dress when she went 
 to the Policemen s Fancy Dress Ball with Pat and 
 wore white tarlatan on which I had helped her sew 
 dozens and dozens of real red and yellow autumn 
 leaves. I told Pat she looked lovely enough to be 
 a Valentine, which made Lizzie turn as red as one 
 of the leaves, and Pat gave me a brand-new cent 
 as bright as gold. 
 
 All this sense of beauty belonged to Una. Una 
 Mary cared only for the things that were of a love 
 liness I could scarcely believe. Among the pictures 
 that Una liked best were the illustrations that came 
 with the Christmas number of the London Graphic. 
 They were large and colored and decorated the 
 nursery walls for years. There was one of Miss 
 Muffet that I considered very fine. She sat on a 
 stool dressed in white with black mitts and a blue 
 ribbon round the crown of her cap, from below 
 which curled hair that looked like molasses candy. 
 And there was another of two little girls in pink 
 mob-caps with smocked dresses to match standing 
 
UNA S TASTE 123 
 
 beside a gray wolfhound. This for years was my 
 ideal of Art and made me change Una Mary s 
 every-day costume from white ruffled muslin to a 
 pink smocked frock. 
 
 The paintings that hung in our parlor, painted 
 by a young Cincinnati artist who has since become 
 very famous, I heartily despised they were, to 
 my mind, so dauby. They were heads of people, 
 but so blurred I could not make out their fea 
 tures clearly. The landscape that hung near them, 
 "The Picture," as it was called with almost bated 
 ^ breath, I liked better. I loved the patch f of sun 
 light on its meadow and the mountains wreathed 
 in mist. In it I could almost feel my own Beyond 
 the Mountains. 
 
 This picture was a great family event. It had 
 hung during the winter in the window of an art 
 store and been greatly admired by all our friends 
 but was too expensive for any of them to buy; and 
 then one day as my father was passing it wa4 
 marked with a ridiculously low price, the painter 
 being anxious to sell it, and Papa had gone in and 
 bought it at once the one family extravagance. 
 It was years before we could afford a proper gold 
 frame for it, but, unframed or framed, it has always 
 hung in the place of honor in the parlor ever since 
 that breathless day when Papa brought the huge 
 bundle home himself and untied it before Mamma,- 
 
i2 4 UNA MARY 
 
 who almost cried with pleasure. And later the 
 excitement of all our friends at our luck in getting 
 it and their admiration of the picture itself were 
 to me tremendous. Every one who came to the 
 hou^e I used to take into the parlor at once "to 
 see our picture." I felt as if Papa had been 
 knighted or some equally great honor bestowed 
 upon the family with its ownership. 
 
 This one picture really appealed to Una Mary, 
 had in it some of the sky quality that always made 
 her throat ache, and I loved it. But I got more 
 real enjoyment out of the Easter-Egg style of 
 beauty, and I greatly liked textures and stuffs, 
 especially if they were draped. 
 
 I remember the summer Garfield was shot prin 
 cipally by the mourning festooning all the princi 
 pal buildings. We were in the country at the time 
 and heard a man galloping through the village 
 street on horseback shouting: "The President has 
 been shot." My father rushed to the window to 
 question him, and then I heard Papa say: "It 
 can t be true. There must be some mistake." 
 But the next day we heard it was true, and later, 
 when he died, they draped the pillars of the town 
 hall and the porch of the church with black cloth, 
 beautifully festooned and resetted, so satisfying 
 to my sense of decoration that I wished Presidents 
 would die often. 
 
UNA S TASTE 125 
 
 mother seemed to me the most absolutely 
 beautiful person I had ever seen. Her light, curly 
 hair and blue eyes seemed to me perfection; in 
 fact, there was only one thing about her that failed 
 to satisfy me absolutely her clothes! Again that 
 tragic difference, and I felt it for her as keenly as 
 " I felt my own queerness in dress. It never occurred 
 to me that she chose to dress as she did; it seemed 
 some sort of curse on our whole family. 
 
 The people I most admired, especially our ser 
 vants on their "days out," wore very large and 
 swaying bustles with great wobs of clothes bunched 
 out behind, "and in front lovely festooned over- 
 skirts draped in folds as deep as pockets, while 
 Mamma wore scarcely any bustle at all and 
 only straight, simple draperies. I would have died 
 rather than admit it to any one, but to me her 
 clothes did a little mar her beauty. 
 
 I was especially troubled about it after I over 
 heard two old ladies in the country discussing her. 
 These pillars of respectability still wore hoop-skirts, 
 probably the only ones in existence. It always 
 fascinated me to see their balloon-like swaying as 
 they walked. They wore them conscientiously, 
 feeling it a duty to themselves and the community 
 as a protest against the terrible immodesty of the 
 age. One of them had just said: "I ll keep my 
 modesty to the end. If I be the only righteous 
 
i26 UNA MARY 
 
 person left, I ll go to my coffin dressed in hoops." 
 And I was wondering what modesty meant when 
 the other old lady answered: "Me, too. It s a 
 Christian example. What is the world a-comin 
 to when people goes out a doors with nothin but 
 a bustle to cloak their form? And now, there s 
 this lady from the city who hain t got no more 
 bustle n if she walked out in her petticoat." I 
 naturally concluded modesty meant fashionable- 
 ness and felt it keenly that other people should see, 
 as I did, that Mamma was unfashionable. The 
 Imp gloated over her clothes. 
 
 Later, when I was eight years old and first went 
 to dancing-school, I found that all the other little 
 girls wore bustles or reeds, long pieces of bamboo 
 tied at the ends so that they stuck out behind like 
 half a barrel hoop, and I begged so hard to stick 
 out myself that in a new maroon cashmere made 
 in the middle of the winter I was allowed to have 
 a sash arranged almost like an overskirt, and in 
 the back one small reed but tied so limply that it 
 scarcely showed at all. 
 
 The dress came just to my knees and seemed to 
 me the height of elegance, especially after I had 
 gotten to the dressing-room at dancing-school and 
 had tied the two ends of the reed until they almost 
 met. I always brought a piece of string for that 
 purpose, and then, looking back over my shoulder, 
 
UNA S TASTE 127 
 
 I could see a flat table-land of cashmere going 
 straight out from my waist with the ends of my 
 sash cascading over its edge. How I must have 
 looked with skirts only to my knees in front! I 
 shudder to think where they were hoisted to be 
 hind but none of the other children noticed any 
 thing except my style; and as our parents were 
 only allowed to come on Exhibition days, the rest 
 of the time I "switched my bustle/ as the darkies 
 expressed it, to my heart s content. 
 
 Una Mary appreciated beauty of quite another 
 order. She felt it always in flowers. The first 
 grief I ever had was once when I knocked a ge- 
 \ ranium off a window-sill in the second story and on 
 running to the yard to pick it up found it broken 
 to bits, plant and pot all mixed in with lumps of 
 earth, and my agony of grief that I had killed so 
 lovely a thing, and then the hopelessness of ever 
 being understood when the family, to comfort me, 
 said they knew it was an accident, so, of course, 
 I should not be punished. 
 
 When we went to Boston each spring to visit 
 my grandmother we took a car at the corner of 
 Bowdoin Square to go out to Cambridge. The car 
 only ran every half-hour, so the waits were often 
 long; but the longer the better for me, as there was 
 a bird store on the corner with windows full of 
 tiny cages of marvellous and dainty birds of quite 
 
128 UNA MARY 
 
 unbelievable colors and shapes, and the air was 
 sweet always, above the roar of the city, light and 
 g clear with the songs of canaries and faint, woodsy 
 
 twitterings or liquid cascades of melody from birds 
 I did not know. The shop was kept by a little old 
 man who was lame, and I think he was the only 
 real person that Una Mary ever envied. 
 
 Often, sitting in front of the store I am sure 
 they chose that place because of the birds, as I 
 should have done were boys selling pond-lilies. 
 They had them in buckets, masses of wonderful, 
 sweet white perfection, smelling, it seemed to me, as 
 the canaries sounded. I thought them the most 
 beautiful flowers I had ever seen, and I had all the 
 ponds in My Country covered with them, and only 
 Edward or Una Mary were allowed to pick them. 
 
 When I was ill once in Cambridge I was ill 
 quite often in those days I asked for some pond- 
 lilies, and my aunt that evening brought me two 
 from Boston, and I cried with disappointment 
 because I wanted a whole pailful. I wanted both 
 arms full of their loveliness, not just two single 
 flowers. My aunt said I was greedy and, to pun 
 ish me, was going to take away the ones she had 
 brought me, but I begged so hard I was allowed to 
 keep them; and, as the first disappointment had 
 worn off by then, I lay looking with perfect rapture 
 at the two flowers lying on the sheet on either side 
 
UNA S TASTE 129 
 
 of me, though my grandmother said I looked as if 
 I was "laid out," whatever that meant. They 
 seemed the most perfect and exquisite things on 
 earth, too lovely for earth, more like flowers 
 dropped from the crown of some Goddess. . . 
 
 Both families of my grandparents lived in sub- \ 
 urbs of Boston, and both had gardens. They were 
 all flower lovers to an unusual degree, so their 1 
 gardens were lovely, and I remember the joy the / 
 flower-beds gave me with their glories of color and / 
 texture. We usually arrived in the afternoon, \ 
 and at once I rushed to the garden. After tfye 
 days in the stuffy train from the West the sweet- 
 scented air, the warm sunshine with a touch of sea 
 east wind, the color, and the magic of it all seemed 
 more than I could believe. It seemed too beauti 
 ful for even Una Mary to see and feel, and some 
 times my own unworthiness almost overcame me. 
 I seemed as out of place as the toad hopping along 
 the path. Why were we allowed there, the toad 
 and I? 
 
 I felt that Una was very plain, and I knew my 
 aunts thought so too, for I had overheard one 
 of them apologize to some one for my looks and 
 say she could not see whom I looked like in the 
 family, but that my sisters were both pretty. And 
 the person she was talking to had politely an 
 swered: " Perhaps she ll grow up better-looking." 
 
130 UNA MARY 
 
 It all simply confirmed my own impression. Una 
 was plain, and my only consolation was that she 
 had never had warts on her hands. 
 
 The reason for the ugly things in the world 
 always troubled me. I could not see why God had 
 ever made them until it occurred to me they might 
 be like some of the paper dolls I painted that would 
 turn out ugly in spite of all my efforts. Perhaps 
 we were just God s mistakes and He had really 
 meant Una to look like Una Mary. If people 
 could only see her I was sure they would think she 
 was pretty. 
 
 I rarely wanted to pick the flowers in grand 
 mother s garden. They seemed too alive and per 
 sonal for that, but I used to love to take whole 
 plants in my arms and press my cheek against the , 
 flowers and kiss them. The roses and tall Madonna 
 lilies were the ones I loved best. I cared for them 
 so much that I always had a feeling of hurt surprise 
 when the thorns pricked me or the lilies left telltale 
 markings of orange pollen on my face. 
 
 Then there was a little pink semi- weed which was 
 only tolerated in a few places in the garden that I 
 loved, too, because I felt it must be so puzzled 
 about itself, not able to tell if it were really a wild 
 or a cultivated flower. It must feel out of place, 
 as I did in a group of Real Girls. 
 
 In the garden in Cambridge there were two large 
 
UNA S TASTE 131 
 
 cherry-trees with a hammock swung between, and 
 it was so dark and damp below them that moss 
 grew on the ground instead of grass, and at one 
 side, in the perpetual shade, a rockery of ferns had 
 been made. They were wild ferns from the woods, 
 the glamour-haunted woods, and I pitied them with 
 all my heart, prisoned in this dark, cheerless place, 
 grown fragile and pale from homesickness, with 
 fat, vulgar, prosperous robins hopping about and 
 eating cherries all over them. How those robins 
 did disgust me! I have never liked them. They 
 seem so typically nouveau riche. 
 
 There were syringa bushes behind the fernery 
 and bushes with uncanny white berries. For some 
 reason I felt they were all enemies of the ferns and 
 I hated them. I loathe syringa to this day. When 
 I was ten my grandmother sold this place, and so 
 deep was my feeling for the forlornness of the part 
 of the garden shaded by the cherry-trees that when 
 I grew up, though I spent eleven years living in 
 Boston, I never once felt willing to go down that 
 street and pass her house the little red house that 
 I had really liked. I could not bear to see those 
 same complacent robins and the bland syringas. 
 The ferns I felt sure were dead. They could not 
 have survived such companionship for all those 
 years. 
 
 Morning-glories or poppies with the sunlight on 
 
132 UNA MARY 
 
 them I adored. They seemed like butterflies, 
 tangible spirits of air and light. I knew light was 
 many-colored. I had seen it broken by a prism 
 into a rainbow on our dining-room ceiling, for a 
 glass prism always hung in one of the dining-room 
 windows. Una Mary used to love to "Play But 
 terfly" by making it move in the sunlight with one 
 hand, while with the other hand she tried to catch 
 the changing, darting color spot that danced like 
 magic from floor to ceiling. 
 
 Another favorite game was "Playing the Wind" 
 with pieces of down or small feathers squeezed out 
 of the corners of pillows. This game really be 
 longed to Una, as I shared it with other children, 
 but Una Mary invented it. We used to blow the 
 feathers off the tips of our fingers and follow them 
 about the room, blowing all the time to keep them 
 in the air. We had races to see whose feathers 
 could stay up longest. I had one much-coveted 
 piece of down that was the champion, it was so 
 soft and light. I was offered two real agate mar 
 bles and a top in exchange for it, but I scorned to 
 barter it away though I confess the agates had a 
 charm that was very powerful. Stones of all kinds 
 always fascinated me, and when they were semi- 
 transparent as agates often were they had a real 
 magic about them. Quartz crystals I had loved 
 from the Minerva days, and later I saw them in 
 
UNA S TASTE 133 
 
 the rocks in Maine and found other crystals too. 
 I was never tired of hunting for these wild min 
 erals, as I called them. I discovered tiny garnets 
 in the granite and found that they often lay loose 
 in the disintegrated rocks, in the cracks, or at the 
 foot of the large, gray bowlders. There was one 
 great rock in the Sheep Pasture that was especially 
 rich in them. I have patiently sifted the sand at 
 its base for hours, picking out the tiny red balls, 
 some almost too small to see, the largest no bigger 
 than the head of a fair-sized pin, but each one a 
 complete and perfect crystal complete in itself and 
 fulfilling all the laws of its kind. One could so rely 
 upon minerals; they always did exactly what they 
 were supposed to do. Their variations were only 
 trifling details of size and clearness, though they 
 did do surprising things in regard to color now 
 and then. For instance, one of my father s assis 
 tants in the laboratory discovered a white garnet. 
 He gave me a piece, as garnet is my birthstone. 
 It looks like a piece of white jade. So, even 
 stones were not wholly reliable, after all a dis 
 covery that shocked Una Mary, but the Imp said : 
 " Of course." 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 . v 
 
 SUMMERS BY THE SEA 
 
 ;/ 
 
 T WAS four years old, I think, when I first saw 
 
 * the sea. My mother always longed for it as 
 only those born by the sea and living in the great, 
 flat Middle West can long, and always she had told 
 me about it and took me to see it as a sacred rite. 
 We went to a beach near Boston, probably Nan- 
 tasket, and as my mother held my hand and 
 breathed full breaths of rapture I looked at her in 
 amazement. What could she find to love in this 
 tame, lead-colored streak that vaguely rippled at 
 our feet! It was one of the great disappointments 
 of my life. 
 
 Later we spent three summers at East Glouces 
 ter and there I, too, learned to love the sea, love 
 it as I do the sky, for then I lived with it 
 and heard it talk to me in all its vast variety of 
 being. I knew and loved it, glittering and calm 
 as glass, on sun-bleached August days. I knew it, 
 green and sullen, gathering passion for a storm, or 
 copper-gray in the sultry hush of thunder-laden air. 
 I knew it, blue and joyous, the dancing waves 
 
 134 
 
SUMMERS BY THE SEA 135 
 
 white-tipped as they pressed in from the bay. I 
 knew it in the Equinox, when all the world was 
 flying scud of sky and sea, waves breaking on 
 the clouds and tearing at the rocks, the air a salt- 
 laden lash of rain and spray. 
 
 I saw a shipwreck and I saw monstrous, serpent- 
 like leaves of seaweed torn from the very heart of 
 the deep, they were so large and black, tossed with 
 the wreckage on the shore. It was like the Ohio 
 River in flood; and then I knew the sea, too, was 
 the voice of God, but a voice gentle and serene 
 after the day of wrath. So, with the stars and 
 trees and the feeling of the sky behind the moun 
 tains, the sea became part of Una Mary s worship 
 and her love. 
 
 The sea! Every sort of enchantment is bound 
 up with the word. There was the tossing creature 
 itself to be watched, gloried in, and worshipped. 
 I never felt any fear of it, only exaltation and a 
 wild sympathy even with its fiercest storms. And 
 then there was the shore! the beach trampled 
 flat by the tides, smooth as a floor made of tiny 
 particles of glittering, many-colored stones. I 
 used to let the sand trickle through my fingers to 
 see the different shapes pid colors as they fell upon 
 my lap. And more brilliant and beautiful even 
 were the shells and bits of seaweed, yellow, vivid 
 green, and pink, scattered with larger stones on 
 
136 UNA MARY 
 
 the gleaming, golden beach, all brought by the 
 waves as presents from the sea to me. 
 
 Some of the pebbles were dark, some white, some 
 so smooth they felt like velvet and seemed almost 
 warm against my cheek. These soft-feeling ones 
 I used to hunt for especially, to keep as pets. I 
 called them Una Mary s cats. They were very 
 consoling to stroke, and even in the cold city winter 
 the feel of them brought back like magic the sun- 
 warmed beach under a kind blue sky, with days of 
 long, untroubled joyousness in a world ready made 
 for Una Mary days untroubled by the Imp, for 
 he never existed by the sea. It was all too vast to 
 allow his corroding littleness. 
 
 Then there were the rare, most-coveted pebbles, 
 rough, as a rule, with a ring of another color going 
 round them like a collar. These, of course, were 
 my dogs. I had an oblong, brownish, streaky one 
 with a very distinct collar that was my favorite of 
 them all. I named him Carlo, after my aunt s dog. 
 Once when I lost him out of my pocket I walked 
 up and down the beach all the morning calling, 
 " Carlo, Carlo! sure that if he heard me he would 
 in some way will me to hunt in the place where he 
 was, and, sure enough, I felt impelled to look in a 
 tiny pool among the rocks where I felt certain I 
 could not have lost him. Yet there he lay. I loved 
 him with a deep devotion and felt sure there was 
 
SUMMERS BY THE SEA 137 
 
 real understanding between us. For three whole 
 summers I played with him, but only in the sum 
 mers. I could not bear to take him to town with 
 me, away from the beach and the smell of the sea. 
 It was all necessary to Carlo. He would have 
 smothered in the city. I did not mind taking the 
 cats; they could get along anywhere. So Mamma 
 always had to pay excess luggage, I poured so 
 many of them into the trunks. 
 
 I used to bury Carlo to keep him safe for the 
 winter. Each autumn, the day before we left, I 
 put him on a certain ledge of a great bowlder called 
 "The Castle Rock," just on the edge of the Downs 
 a few feet from the shore, a ledge where I used to 
 play for hours. It was Una Mary s Sea Castle, 
 and deep under the moss, in a dark crevice, I hid 
 Carlo and two other "best stones" to keep him 
 company. 
 
 The third summer was our last at Gloucester, 
 but on a day not long ago I motored there, and as 
 the rest of the party walked on the beach I went 
 to the Rock, felt back in the crevice, and there were 
 my stones, still safely hidden. Carlo was smaller 
 than I remembered him to be. I carefully put 
 them back, covered them up again, and there they 
 probably are now meaningless pebbles to any one 
 else, but to me symbols of the joy of three whole 
 summers. 
 
138 UNA MARY 
 
 I used to feed them on morsels of pale-pink and 
 vivid-green seaweed served on dishes of flat gray 
 and orange colored lichens, and they drank from 
 the moss that grows in tiny goblets of green with 
 a rim of scarlet. These dishes were obligingly na 
 tive to rocky shelves of my Castle a fairies 
 pantry. They slept on rugs of soft, dark velvet 
 moss. I can see Carlo still he lay down in such 
 a proud way, his collar showing plainly. 
 
 The pools in the rocks at low tide were another 
 world of enchantment to me. There were splendid 
 ones in the cliffs on the open ocean side, where 
 during a storm the surf used to dash as high as a 
 house. 
 
 The best pools were difficult to reach across 
 the slippery, kelp-grown rocks. Everything at low 
 tide was covered deep in kelp and it dipped down 
 into the pools on all sides like a fringe that swayed 
 gently on top of the water; and it was when one 
 parted this to see the shadowed rock below that 
 one found the marveis of starfish pulling them 
 selves about on the rich purple-brown of the stones 
 or on the kelp leaves, their stars all skewed out 
 of shape as they moved. Near them were whole 
 plantations of sea-anemones; some tight shut, look 
 ing like wizened, brown, baked apples, some with 
 their delicate, swaying flowers fully open, lovely, 
 impalpable rosettes. 
 
SUMMERS BY THE SEA 139 
 
 There were creeping, living shells blue, white, 
 brown, and brightest yellow carrying their houses 
 on their backs, or an empty shell house rented for 
 the season by a pretentious hermit-crab, and some 
 times a large, dark, blotchy lobster looking like 
 the ogre of an enchanted castle in that world of 
 magic, living beauties. Once we saw two lobsters 
 fighting, gripping and clutching with their deadly 
 front claws until they had nearly torn each other 
 to pieces. But it was all unreal, for, instead of the 
 crash and clatter one expected as of knights fight 
 ing in coats of mail, it was all silent under the 
 water and scarcely a ripple swayed the surface. 
 There were spiny sea-urchins, hedgehogs of thd 
 sea, with their beautifully patterned mouths like\ 
 closed starflowers cut in stone; and, best of all, 
 now and then would come a day when we found a 
 prisoned jellyfish the enchanted Princess of it 
 all, Spirit of Water, made barely tangible by the 
 flower-shaped, opaque figure on its back, irides 
 cent, of many colors, with long, floating tentacles 
 and streamers beneath the slowly undulating scal 
 lops of its disk. Then there were the marvels of 
 sea-weed growing in the pool or floating, left there 
 by the tide. 
 
 At our hotel one summer there was a German 
 professor who was collecting seaweeds, and he al 
 ways took me with him, as I was better at getting 
 
140 UNA MARY 
 
 down to the pools than he and lucky in my finds. 
 I am very grateful to him and, though all I remem 
 ber is a beaming kindliness bounded by spectacles 
 and a brown beard, he is still one of my dear mem 
 ories, we were so sympathetic about the magic 
 pools, and without him I should not have been 
 allowed to explore them as I did. On rainy days 
 we mounted our seaweeds, and he used to fill in 
 the spare moments as we waited for the cards to 
 dry by reading aloud to me from "Fin, Feathers, 
 and Fur," a book my father had given to me, 
 stories about the creatures we found in the sea- 
 pools, or from a book of his own on Natural His 
 tory, which was as delightfully expanded as Izaak 
 Walton in having an appendix which gave vari 
 ous recipes for cooking, not fish this time, but 
 shell-fish and sea-urchins. We tried the sea-urchins 
 X boiled, as the Greeks liked them best so the book 
 
 said eating them out of the shells, seasoned with 
 vinegar, pepper, and salt, and found them so pecu 
 liarly horrible that I have never dared try cooking 
 fish in the ways recommended by "The Gentle 
 3* Angler." I could not bear another such disillu 
 sionment. 
 
 In the course of our explorations along the cliffs 
 we even found two sea caves where the surf thun 
 dered and spouted as the tide rushed in; one we 
 called the Spouting Whale, for the Professor told 
 
SUMMERS BY THE SEA 141 
 
 me whales threw up fountains of spray in the same 
 way. He had seen them from the steamer as he 
 came over to America. I longed to see one do it, 
 too. I had seen a whale in the flesh, but it was 
 dead on the beach, where it had been washed dur 
 ing a storm, a vast mountain of horrible, fishy 
 stench, so large it had taken the combined efforts of 
 all the town and ten bonfires lit on all sides to de 
 stroy it. Now I longed to see one alive, proud as a 
 ship at sea, playfully tossing a shock of foam 
 against the sky. I was so surprised when I first 
 saw a whale years later to find that he did not 
 roar with the sound of the sea cave as he spouted. 
 Our richest finds were all in certain large pools, 
 only uncovered for a short time at the lowest ebb 
 of low tide, and always, as we leaned over shoulder- 
 deep in the cool water, reaching with a stick for the 
 long, floating wisps of seaweed, which turned into 
 damp sops of dull nothingness as we lifted them 
 into the air, we had to keep one eye on the shining 
 sea, a dancing line of blue against the sky, with its 
 inconsequent ripples creeping nearer and nearer, to 
 be noticed first in the gradual growing and swelling 
 of the pools as little trickles pushed their way surely 
 and imperceptibly under the surface of the kelp 
 until it all began to rock on unseen waters. Then 
 came the mad scramble to reach the "Neck" 
 before we were cut off from the shore, as these 
 
142 UNA MARY 
 
 best pools were on a headland that became an 
 island at high tide. Often we had delayed a mo 
 ment too long and had to wade knee-deep along 
 a narrow strip of water to the beach. 
 
 Then came the joys of the walk home across 
 "The Down of the Forty Caves." It is now dot 
 ted with summer cottages, I hear, their foundations 
 probably built from the rocks of my caves, but 
 when I knew it, a wild confusion of bowlders piled 
 and tumbled as if tossed there by the sea, with 
 wind-blown, stunted oak and pine trees clutching 
 a foothold among them, and billowing reaches of 
 huckleberry, bayberry, and wild rose-bushes all 
 gay with pink and white flowers in summer and 
 gaudy with the reds and yellows of leaves, golden- 
 rod, and the purple of asters in autumn, thrown 
 into relief by the always vivid green of the bay 
 bushes, for we never stayed late enough to see 
 them turn. 
 
 Against the sky on the land side of the Cape 
 were the church spires and roofs of Gloucester, 
 fronted by the ever-present masts of the fishing 
 fleet; on the other three sides, the giddy, wavering 
 line of dark-blue sea against the sky. 
 
 Vivid, splendid days of warm, sea-swept breezes 
 sweet with bay-leaves aromatic in the sun; days 
 when I wandered with the Professor or all alone, 
 but never lonely, for Edward was always with me, 
 
SUMMERS BY THE SEA 143 
 
 along the sheep paths through the Downs, the 
 bushes higher than my head in places where I 
 pushed through gnarled and knotted growths like 
 miniature forests drawn by Dore, through boggy 
 hollows where the Venus fly-catch and exquisite 
 orchids greeted me, lovely in their delicate distinc 
 tion, haunted presences among the flowers, or the 
 pitcher-plant held up her crown of brimming cups. 
 All touched with a magic of My Country were those 
 paths across the Downs, which became intensified 
 when I reached the rocks. 
 
 The wild central ridge of the Cape was flung 
 together in such gaunt confusion that there were 
 great crevices among the rocks forty we found in 
 all, ranging in size from cracks just large enough 
 fcfr me to squeeze in my small body, but still caves 
 because I could get inside them, up to two caves, 
 each large enough for a grown person to stand up 
 straight. 
 
 There was one deep, narrow crack that we could 
 only look into from above. My sister s doll, Je 
 mima, fell down into it one day, and there she 
 may still be, alone in the blackness of its depths. 
 We tried fishing for her with a hook and line, but 
 could not catch her, so all we could do was to 
 mark the place as her grave by putting up a white 
 stone at the mouth of the crevice, on which we 
 wrote: 
 
i 4 4 UNA MARY 
 
 "Jemima, aged two years. 
 Her bocj^ rests below." 
 
 How stupid it seems to blast those rocks and use 
 them for foundations, treating them as if they were 
 just common stone instead of Una Mary s magic 
 forty caves! 
 
 Perhaps they found Jemima! 
 
 Jt was at Gloucester that I had one of the most 
 painful experiences of my life, one from which I 
 never wholly recovered. 
 
 Besides the Professor, I had another grown-up 
 friend with whom I used to play on the shore. We 
 drew pictures in the sand together and he helped 
 me hunt for shells and stones. I gave him one of 
 my best dog stones, named Patsy. He was a very 
 brilliant and fascinating man whose family had 
 been old friends of my mother, so he rather joined 
 our party. I was told to be very nice to him as 
 he had been ill and was trying to get well. I know 
 he used to lie for hours on the sand basking in the 
 sunshine, and there I used to lie beside him, talking 
 to him as I had to no one else, for it was almost 
 Una Mary who talked to him, as he knew all the 
 places that she loved and he, too, lived in castles 
 in a fair, enchanted country. No one had ever 
 come so close to me as he, and with all Una Mary s 
 dumb, pent-up affection I adored him. 
 
 Then one day he disappeared "went to town," 
 
 / 
 
SUMMERS BY THE SEA 145 
 
 we heard, but without saying a word about it to 
 any one and my mother and his brother for some 
 reason were greatly worried about him. The next 
 morning I had gotten up early and was sitting 
 quite alone on the piazza of the hotel when a 
 closed carriage drove up, and out of it two men 
 helped my friend that is, it was the human body 
 of my friend, alive, but possessed of some terrible 
 repellent demon that was not himself at all. The 
 man I had known, all sweetness and gentle, 
 swift perceptions, was transformed to a truculent, 
 swearing bully with an insane, hiccoughing laugh. 
 The two men who had brought him hurried him 
 into the house between them, and I was the only 
 person who saw. I had no idea then what the 
 matter was, and I was too profoundly shocked by 
 what I had seen to speak of it to any one. 
 
 I crept away by myself to the Downs to think 
 out the dreadful discovery I had made. Here was 
 the man I had known and loved suddenly become 
 the most repulsive and awful creature I had ever 
 seen. Which was the real person? For a long 
 time I had thought all people had Una Mary 
 selves inside them, and, as I knew Una Mary was 
 really much better and finer than Una, so I had 
 supposed that other people s inner selves must be 
 their best selves, the selves they really were. Now 
 here was an inner self, coming out where I could 
 
146 UNA MARY 
 
 see it, in a man whose outside self was all that 
 I could love, and it was frightful the inner self 
 seemed all that was most horrible. Was that his 
 real self? The foundation of everything rocked 
 under me, for if people inside might be worse in 
 stead of better than they were outside, what could 
 one rely upoji, whom could one really trust? 
 
 . It was a |&thetic little Una Mary with a bruised 
 and battered brain and heart who came back from 
 that struggle in the Downs, came back to a world 
 of people she knew but all of whom had changed, 
 seen through this murky veil of new suspicion. 
 Were their inner selves black and wicked, too? 
 
 Mamma said my friend was ill, and he did not 
 appear until the next day, when he came down 
 looking pale and shaky. As soon as he saw me he 
 at once came to where I stood and stooped over 
 to kiss me. Instinctively I put up both hands to 
 shield my face and rushed away from him crying 
 as if my heart were broken, for suddenly I knew 
 that I should die if he touched me. I could not, 
 could not bear it, for I felt it would be not the 
 man he seemed but that other repulsive creature 
 I had seen who would really be the one who kissed 
 me. The fierce, relentless cruelty of children! In 
 a flash the man understood me. It cut him to the 
 quick, but he never drank again that summer and 
 he never tried again to kiss me, and while I avoided 
 
SUMMERS BY THE SEA 147 
 
 him I suffered inexpressibly, and still suffer, for 
 each time I see a drunken man that old horror 
 comes over me and that terrible question, \V\at 
 is his real self? 
 
 The day we left, as I saw him lying on the sand 
 without even attempting to say good-by to me, 
 I could bear it no longer. All my old affection for 
 him flooded through me, and I ran, flung my arms 
 round him, and kissed him, saying: "I know this 
 is the Real You, isn t it? " He held me tightly for 
 a moment, then he took both of my hands and, 
 looking at me with hurt eyes full of pain and terri 
 ble earnestness, said: "With God s help, this shall 
 be the Real Me always." 
 
 I never saw him again. A short time ago he 
 died, and among his papers they found a wonderful 
 poem. I read it in a magazine. It was written 
 by his "Real Self," the man Una Mary had adored, 
 and could only have been written by one who had 
 ben down to the depths and risen from there 
 shining, strong, and free. 
 
 I think I must have played alone a great deal 
 during those seashore summers, for besides my 
 small sisters and their nurse I remember only my 
 two grown friends and the fifteen-year-old daughter 
 of the proprietor of the hotel, a tall, lanky girl 
 named Nellie. 
 
 I seem to see her in the background a great deal, 
 
148 UNA MARY 
 
 reading novels. She read me bits from one called 
 "Lady somebody or other s Jewels." The only 
 thing about it that I vividly remember is that the 
 heroine was carried away drugged, lying in a coffin, 
 passed off as dead, by a dark-haired young man 
 who had some mysterious designs upon her. Then 
 there was a fair-haired young man who was de 
 voted to his mother, who seemed to want the hero 
 ine also, and who always appeared at the last criti- 
 cal moment to rescue her. He got her out of the 
 coffin somehow and took her to his mother, who 
 was always ready to welcome her with open arms, 
 only to have her snatched out of them again. He 
 finally fought a duel in which he killed the dark- 
 haired man, which seemed to me a pity, though 
 Nellie said "Thanks be to gracious" when she read 
 that part. 
 
 To me it was all gloriously blood-curdling, but 
 to Nellie it was entirely Love. She could, and did, 
 talk at great length to me on Love, and thought 
 she had felt it for the head waiter, but he, dull 
 creature, was evidently born without the true ro 
 mantic soul, for he threw himself away and mar 
 ried the cook, a blow under which Nellie bore up 
 nobly, supported by the conviction that one day 
 a man would come who would gladly risk all for 
 her lightest wish. 
 
 It seemed to me a magnificent idea, and I, too, 
 
SUMMERS BY THE SEA 149 
 
 decided to Love, only I felt it would be more 
 exciting to be myself the person who risked 
 everything the other role seemed too passive. 
 And when I asked Nellie about it she thought a 
 woman could have that kind of love as well as a 
 man if I really wanted it. 
 
 There was a dreamy, dark-haired young painter, 
 Mr. Phillips, staying at the hotel. He looked, in 
 fact, a good deal like my friend Edward-Christ, 
 and I decided he was the person for whom I could 
 risk all. My only difficulty lay in lack of oppor 
 tunity. His existence, on the surface, at least, 
 seemed absolutely peaceful and secure. 
 
 I used to follow him when he went out sketching, 
 and sit quite silent on the ground beside his easel 
 as he painted, hoping that the great adventure 
 would arrive. It was Una Mary who sat there, her 
 heart big with courage and an ingenuity to meet 
 and overcome all the dangers which even she could 
 imagine. But dangers never came to that peace 
 ful, sunny beach, so the artist never knew that I 
 was trying to be his Romantic Lover. Instead, 
 he used me as a model and painted me in several 
 of his pictures, a thin mite, for this was my "little- 
 lanky- to whead" period, dressed in blue or scarlet 
 cotton, sitting with my hands clasped round my 
 knees. 
 
 He painted beaches with rocks and dories drawn 
 
150 UNA MARY 
 
 up among them, and the sea beyond, and I, in 
 watching him, unconsciously learned a good deal 
 about the mysteries of art, learned that pictures 
 could be dauby and slight and yet seem real and 
 quivering with sunlight. It was an upsetting 
 knowledge, and I began to respect the paintings 
 of heads in our parlor at home, for he could paint 
 me without my features at all just three or four 
 dabs of yellow, red, and blue, and yet I knew it 
 looked exactly like Una. You could not mistake 
 it for any one else. Color seemed like words. 
 You could describe a person in three or four words 
 if you hit upon the right ones; so, if you mixed 
 exactly the right notes of color, that also seemed 
 enough. A few dabs did it, and there I sat on the 
 painted beach. 
 
 One day he gave me a piece of paper and some 
 paints, not the gritty cakes I had in my own box, 
 which were so dry they only came off in the palest 
 watery tints after endless scrubbing with the brush, 
 but real artist paints that squeezed out of tubes 
 in luscious, soft gobs of color, when I could fill my 
 brush with a touch and really let myself go in an 
 absolute delirium of color. It was autumn then, 
 and trailing over a wall near where I sat was a 
 spray of scarlet woodbine with blue berries, and 
 this I painted. There was a worm-hole in one leaf 
 which I copied most realistically, I remember, but 
 
SUMMERS BY THE SEA 151 
 
 in spite of that my artist was really surprised and 
 interested by my efforts, which pleased me greatly 
 and made me feel that I had done something for 
 him after all, even if I had not been killed at his 
 feet and heard him say as I died: "How she must 
 have loved me to have done this for my sake!" 
 That was what they said in Nellie s books, and I 
 only hoped he knew about it so that he would be 
 able to say it if the great moment did come. He 
 took the painting to my mother and told her that 
 I must be given drawing lessons, as he was sure 
 I should be an artist when I grew up. 
 
 Mamma has it still, that painting of woodbine. 
 I saw it the other day, pasted into a scrap-book of 
 our early attempts at art. The book begins with 
 my very first painting, done when I was fif^ years 
 old. I had drawn ever since I could hold a pencil, 
 doing outlines of men absolutely staggering under 
 tall hats many sizes too large for their bodies, 
 which seemed to be kept together only by the rows 
 and rows of buttons that adorned them from their 
 necks to their heels, or pictures of ladies with mops 
 of corkscrew curls above stiff, triangular trains. 
 But this first painting was made with my origi 
 nal paint-box, given me by Agnes for a Christ 
 mas present. It is the scene from the study win 
 dow during a snow-storm. There, black against 
 a gray sky, are the church tower and my apple- 
 
iS2 UNA MARY 
 
 tree with a sparrow sitting on one of its branches, 
 and snowflakes ! great, splashing, single flakes larger 
 than the sparrow, put on generously with Chinese 
 white, for of course it was the snow that I was 
 painting; the rest was wholly its background. 
 
 My bent showed even then, for it has always 
 been landscape I have wanted to paint; and, 
 though it was the snow I was trying for then snow 
 against the sky I felt the necessity of giving it a 
 background, a world to exist in. I think I never 
 drew or painted the detached, suspended-in-space 
 subjects of most children s art. There was always 
 at least a horizon line; or, if it were a flower or 
 a figure I drew, I invariably put in its shadow. 
 Nothing ever seemed complete without a shadow. 
 
 After the painting of woodbine I was given bet 
 ter materials. Some of them were given to me by 
 Mr. Phillips, and when we got back to town I was 
 sent to a drawing class. Harry and I both went; 
 but, while I took a real interest in doing studies of 
 still life in charcoal because of the shadows, he 
 cared only about scribbling steam-engines and 
 trains on the margin of his paper. It was at home 
 that we really let ourselves go in art. We were 
 very strong on paintings of fruit, especially bunches 
 of cherries with a white place left on the red for 
 the high light. Our sunsets were very gorgeous. 
 My specialty was stage-coaches, the old-fashioned 
 
SUMMERS BY THE SEA 153 
 
 four-horse kind we had ridden on in the mountains. 
 I also made them in cardboard with wheels that 
 really turned and thread reins connecting the 
 six galloping horses my horses always had all 
 four feet off the ground at once, their speed was 
 so terrific, like the horse ridden by Mr. Obadiah 
 Oldbuck. 
 
 But to return to my first love-affair. When My 
 Artist said good-by to me that autumn he added 
 that he knew he should hear of me some day as a 
 fellow painter, and I quite gravely promised that 
 he should and for years painted with that promise 
 in my mind. 
 
 When we were living in Washington a plumber 
 came one day to fix the kitchen boiler, and he 
 looked so like Mr. Phillips that I was sure it must 
 be he ; and after watching him work for some time 
 soldering with bright lead heated in a portable 
 charcoal stove seemed an even, more noble and en 
 trancing operation than painting I asked him if 
 he were not Mr. Phillips; but he said no, his name 
 was Mike Dulen. I was fearfully disappointed 
 but politely answered: "I beg your pardon, I 
 thought you might be Mr. Phillips come to see me 
 in disguise." Later, in talking it over with the 
 cook, the plumber s comment was: "Begorra, I felt 
 as lonesome as me first communion, she looked that 
 disappointed at me bein no wun but meself. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 MAMMY 
 
 TI7"HEN I was nine years old my family moved 
 * * to Washington, and there I lived until I 
 grew up, a change of environment that did a great 
 deal for Una Mary in giving her a broader horizon. 
 As soon as we reached Washington a colored 
 nurse was engaged for us Mammy. We are still 
 her "family," and she works for us intermittently as 
 the mood seizes her, dividing her loyalty between 
 my mother and a convent of Roman Catholic nuns. 
 She was so black that when she first gave me a 
 bath I rubbed my wet hand on hers, sure the color 
 would come off. She was the old-fashioned kind 
 of nurse, a real Mammy, and to please her I 
 changed the counting-out rhyme we had used in 
 Cincinnati: 
 
 "Eeny, meeny, miney, mo, 
 Catch a nigger by the toe. 
 If he hollers let him go, 
 Eeny, meeny, miney, mo." 
 
 Mammy said there were no niggers since the War, 
 only "colored pussons," so I changed that line to: 
 
 154 
 
MAMMY 155 
 
 "Catch a fellow by the toe." 
 
 She herself had been a slave, born on a planta 
 tion down South and brought up in the " Before 
 the War" atmosphere, with all its typical affection, 
 superstition, and plantation songs and stories. 
 
 "Oh, dem golden shoes! 
 Oh, dem silver slippers! 
 We s all a gwine to wear dem 
 Walkin in the streets ob gold," 
 
 is a verse I remember from one song. Instead of 
 lacing boots of calf, how those gold and silver slip 
 pers did appeal to me! 
 
 She told me stories about animals, the very ones 
 that have been collected as " Uncle Remus," and 
 there were many others I have never seen published. 
 She had always heard them as a child down on the 
 Plantation, and there were also stories of the Saints, 
 as she was a Roman Catholic. 
 
 When we first arrived in the city we went to a 
 boarding-house kept by a Southern lady, and at 
 the table were several typical politicians, the first 
 ones I had ever seen in the flesh and less super 
 human than I had been led to suppose from Pat s 
 descriptions of them. Two of them were Congress 
 men, and when I inquired for their roosters, as I 
 had seen none about, they replied with a laugh 
 that they were Republicans at that table and did 
 not need roosters to do their crowing for them. 
 
156 UNA MARY 
 
 I lost all interest in them after that and was 
 secretly relieved, for surely Democratic Congress 
 men would be more what Pat had painted them 
 to be, probably glorified versions of the "Colonel," 
 for at the house there was also the traditional 
 Southern Colonel, a Democrat and, as I now sus 
 pect, a professional lobbyist. But at that time 
 he impressed me greatly with his thick, white hair, 
 bushy eyebrows, frock coat, soft hat, and flamboy 
 ant collar. His manners were so elegant that he 
 always addressed my father as "Sir," even after 
 I had assured him that we had no title in the 
 family, and he called me "Miss Una." I felt really 
 solemn over that and was glad Mamma had let 
 my hair begin to grow. It had already reached the 
 round-comb length. 
 
 I often used to see the Colonel afterward sitting 
 on a bench in the Park smoking a cigar, the curling 
 smoke seeming a fitting atmosphere for his genial, 
 expansive leisure. He habitually wore a carnation 
 in his buttonhole, and when we met he always 
 took it out and gallantly pinned it to my coat, 
 kissing my hand when he had done so, just as if I 
 were really the Princess Una Mary. His ivory- 
 headed cane, disguised as a riding horse, was always 
 at the command of my two sisters. Mammy 
 highly approved of him, and we were allowed to 
 talk to him as much as we liked, though most of 
 
MAMMY 157 
 
 the other people in the Park whom I thought 
 looked nice we were kept severely away from by 
 Mammy s sniff of "Huh, dat s no quality. Dat s 
 jest po white trash." I was always abashed by 
 these social mistakes and finally decided it was 
 like my inability to hear omens spoken by the 
 Sacred Tree I evidently also lacked the instinct 
 to recognize "quality." 
 
 v After several weeks of hunting, a house was de 
 cided upon and in we moved. I disliked the house 
 for itself, and it gave me a most forlorn, homesick 
 feeling to see the Cincinnati furniture arranged dif 
 ferently in rooms that it had never seen before. It 
 must all feel so lost. Things that had been side 
 by side for all those years were, some of them, sep 
 arated by the length of a room or banished to a 
 different part of the house. All the social relation 
 ships were broken up. It was as drastic as the 
 French Revolution. The only spot that remained 
 impregnable was the dining-room. The furniture 
 there could not be shifted about. It all belonged 
 together. And for the first two or three weeks the 
 dining-room was my one refuge, the only room 
 where Una Mary felt at home. There I used to 
 stay cramped under the velvet cloth that covered 
 the table between meals it was my paladin s tent 
 and make up stories inspired by the little chinks 
 of firelight which shone through the mica front of 
 
1 5 8 UNA MARY 
 
 the Latrobe below the black-marble mantelpiece. 
 That fire was in turn my setting sun, setting in a 
 bank of dark clouds the fire where I burned my 
 witches and later the heart of the Inferno, with 
 eager, glowing Imps and once the Devil himself 
 busy among the coals. 
 
 The one joy of the house was the back yard, 
 and here, in a shady corner, we made a wild-flower 
 garden, for Washington was then so small that we 
 could easily walk, even wheeling the baby carriage, 
 into the real country, where we could pick wild 
 flowers and dig up plants for our gardens we each 
 had our own, my sister and I. I planted yellow 
 and white violets in mine as well as blue ones and 
 lady s-slippers and bloodroot. They were the 
 great glory of the back yard, those two wild gar 
 dens, with the high, red-flowered trumpet- vine that 
 draped the side of the house above them. There 
 was a peach-tree, too, beside them, that blossomed 
 beautifully, and a gourd vine grew over the shed 
 the pink shed, the color of peach-blossoms, on the 
 roof of which one could bask in the sun and enjoy 
 a commanding view of all the other back yards in 
 the block, even those that fronted on the next 
 street. 
 
 It was in one of these that I discovered my future 
 uncle, the man who soon afterward married my 
 aunt and was always one of my greatest admira- 
 
MAMMY 159 
 
 tions. When I first saw him from the shed roof 
 he was sawing a board in his yard, and on his 
 head, instead of a hat, he wore a red Turkish fez. 
 I had never seen one before and liked it, so I gave 
 a hail to the wearer, and when he invited me over 
 I dropped down into his yard and helped him car 
 penter while he told me about Morocco, where he 
 had recently been on a trip around the world. He 
 was a geologist, a born explorer, and I loved his 
 stories of travel; so that visit was the beginning of 
 many back-yard calls. One day I cut my finger, 
 and he brought me home by the front door to ex 
 plain to my mother; so the family began to know 
 him, and very soon he had married my aunt and 
 belonged to us. 
 
 It took a great deal of courage to jump down into 
 the black gulf of the alley from the shed roof. A 
 Real Girl once spent the day with me, and to show 
 off before her I gathered all my courage together, 
 shut my eyes, and jumped. Then I dared her to 
 follow. She was afraid but refused to get -down 
 any other way; so for two hours she sat weeping 
 on the roof until I, in desperation, told her that I 
 had really been afraid to do it myself, which so 
 cheered her that she jumped off at once quite fear 
 lessly. 
 
 We jumped a great deal when we were out walk 
 ing in the country, and my uncle, who often went 
 
1 66 UNA MARY 
 
 with us, told us never to be afraid to jump across 
 a hole just because it was deep. Depth had noth 
 ing to do with the question, which was solely 
 whether or not it was too far across. It made no 
 difference whether it was one foot deep or twenty. 
 This struck me as a profound maxim for the whole 
 of life, and I applied it so logically to climbing that 
 one night I appeared at a third-story window of my 
 uncle s house, a few houses away from ours, having 
 walked along the copper gutter that ran the length 
 of the block. The whole family was horrified, but 
 I pointed out that I knew I could walk on the gut 
 ter, so what did it matter how high up it was? 
 But my uncle, whom I had badly frightened, sud 
 denly coming like a ghost out of the night he was 
 tying a necktie in front of the mirror and saw me 
 reflected in it as I balanced on the sill did not at 
 all agree with this application of his principle. 
 
 Between our house and the next on one side 
 there was a space, but the two houses were con 
 nected by a sort of Bridge of Sighs made by two 
 large wooden closets suspended in air. One opened 
 off my room and the other belonged to the next 
 house, with a nailed-up door between. Why they 
 were ever built I do not know, but in that closet, 
 hanging over space, with its window toward our 
 yard, was my special lair and here I always played 
 dolls. 
 
MAMMY 161 
 
 I had no friends the first year we lived in Wash 
 ington. I missed Harry dreadfully, and, as my 
 sisters were too young to play with, my mother 
 still ill a great deal, and my father very busy, I 
 was thrown back upon myself more than ever, and 
 playing with dolls, when she was not reading or 
 " pretending," became Una Mary s absorbing oc 
 cupation. 
 
 I had two favorite dolls, Elizabeth and Isabella. 
 Isabella was made of French bisque china, as it was 
 called, jointed at the shoulders and hips, had golden 
 curls and eyes that shut. She was given to me 
 by my uncle-to-be and was a person one could 
 dress very fashionably, she had such innate style. 
 I made her the most ravishing clothes, the sort I 
 should have liked to wear myself. 
 
 In my closet there was an old Chinese basket as 
 tall as I, the "Canton Basket," brought back by 
 some sea-captain ancestor, and in it were kept all 
 the pieces of cloth that were too large to go into 
 the rag-bag, and any of these I was allowed to cut 
 up for dolls dresses. I had to stand on a chair 
 in order to reach down into the basket, and there, 
 perilously tottering on a very rickety one, I used 
 to dive blissfully down, dragging up fascinating, un 
 expected treasures, bits of velvet, silk, lace, or mus 
 lin of many periods and patterns, for the family 
 since the days of my grandmother had kept their 
 
162 UNA MARY 
 
 "pieces" in the Canton Basket. It was so deep 
 I never got to the bottom except once. Then I 
 leaned over, reaching the full length of my arm, tug 
 ging at an end of apple-green velvet sprigged with 
 flowers, lost my balance, out the chair jumped from 
 under me, and into the basket I plunged head first, 
 and was fished out by the legs by Mammy. Later, 
 when I made my own instead of my dolls clothes, 
 I went to the basket each time I wanted a new 
 blouse or trimming for a hat, until one of my 
 friends said: "That basket of yours must be as 
 close-packed as the box Pandora opened." I have 
 never liked any clothes as well as those I made 
 from scraps from the Canton Basket. 
 
 My other favorite doll, Elizabeth, was bought 
 one Christmas with money a cousin had sent me 
 from California the cousin who gave me my Mi 
 nerva silver. I selected her myself. She had a 
 kid body, bisque head and hands one finger was 
 gone when I got her and for hair there was pasted 
 on her head some brownish lamb s wool. She was 
 not beautiful. I knew that quite well. And she 
 was broken. I saw that, too, and pitied her ac 
 cordingly; and no amount of argument on the part 
 of my mother and aunt, who were with me, could 
 persuade me not to buy her. She appealed to 
 something deep within me the instant I saw her 
 lying there among the ringleted blond and brown 
 
MAMMY 163 
 
 haired beauties. She was as unlike a Real Doll as 
 I was unlike a Real Girl; so we simply belonged 
 together, and I loved her better than I did all the 
 others, even more than I did my Big Doll brought 
 to me from Paris, who was the size of a real child 
 and the climax of all that Paris could achieve. The 
 Big Doll was my great pride, but Elizabeth was 
 my love. 
 
 I made all the clothes for my dolls and used to 
 sew on them on Sundays quite as much as on other 
 days. No one ever told me not to until Mammy 
 came. She was perfectly horrified and told me 
 that every stitch I sewed on Sunday I should have 
 to rip out with my teeth when I got to Purgatory. 
 
 She drew very vivid pictures of Purgatory, a place 
 I had never heard of before, and she also touched 
 lightly on Hell, a place she scarcely dared to men 
 tion above her breath, but which to me, from the 
 little she did say, held a dreadful sort of charm, 
 with the same fascination I found in an old book 
 one of my friends had discovered in her attic, 
 "The Tortures of the Spanish Inquisition." We 
 used to read it by the hour, hidden under the cloth 
 of the dining-table, which was as dungeon-like a 
 place as we could find. From Mammy I heard, 
 too, for the first time of the Devil, the King of 
 Purgatory and Hell. He came to me as quite a 
 new and delightful personage. I am sure Mammy 
 
1 64 UNA MARY 
 
 loved the creeps and shudders the thought of him 
 gave her. I did, and would have felt his loss 
 deeply if any one had been able to persuade her 
 that he was not real I felt certain my Imp must 
 be one of his near relations. Her description of the 
 Devil was most realistic and detailed. I met him 
 in his full glory of horns, hoofs and forked tail, 
 breathing brimstone and fire, running over the 
 earth eager and ingenious to create mischief, for 
 it was mischief, not actual malice, that seemed his 
 pleasure. As Mammy described him it was really 
 the body of the Devil animated by the spirit of 
 Puck. Of course, he was likable ami at the same 
 time a person so clever that it was a real triumph to 
 circumvent him, and I got the best of him on the 
 subject of Sunday sewing. 
 
 I had tried to rip out stitches with my teeth, 
 thinking I would learn how to do it before I reached 
 Purgatory, but found it was quite impossible. Not 
 one stitch could I start, so I gave up sewing on 
 Sundays until Mamma got a new sewing-machine. 
 It was a Wilcox and Gibbs chain-stitch, the kind of 
 machine I still feel all really nice people use, for, as 
 my mother said: "You may like people very much, 
 but they are never your real friends unless they 
 have had that machine in the family." I have 
 since found it invariably true, and with it has usu 
 ally gone Canton china, another essential part of 
 
MAMMY 165 
 
 the background of the thoroughly well-brought-up. 
 I watched Mamma use the machine and tried it 
 myself, and found I could run it quite easily. 
 Then I took one of the seams I had sewed and 
 chewed at it until I had started the end, when 
 with one whiz of crinkled thread I pulled the whole 
 thing out with my teeth! After that I did all my 
 Sunday sewing on the sewing-machine, feeling it 
 would only be an added pleasure to rip it out in 
 Purgatory, and with a deep satisfaction at having 
 gotten the best of the Devil. 
 
 Mammy also presented to me the quite new idea 
 of modesty. I had only heard of it before from the 
 two old ladies in the country who still secured it 
 for themselves by wearing hoops. But this mod 
 esty of Mammy s was different. So far as I could 
 gather, it displeased the Saints and the Devil to 
 see naked little girls, and they could see them 
 straight through the walls of houses everywhere 
 except in bathrooms they seemed to have no 
 objection to baths and neither could they see 
 them through clothes. So I learned a system of 
 dressing and undressing under the tent-like shelter 
 of my petticoat, a garment so small it only covered 
 my head, but I had the optimism of the ostrich and 
 felt my modesty secured. No reason was given 
 for this dislike of nakedness, but to me it seemed 
 quite plausible, remembering my old idea that 
 
i66 UNA MARY 
 
 Death pulled the skeleton out through a piece of 
 bare skin. It was certainly best to be on the safe 
 side! 
 
 I used to read a great deal to myself. My fa 
 vorite book now was Howard Pyle s " Merry Ad 
 ventures of Robin Hood." I lived that, winter 
 and summer, and in the life of My Country, Una 
 Mary, instead of being a Princess in Disguise, 
 became Ellen-a-Dale, and Edward was Little John, 
 while the Forest of Enchantment needed only a 
 change of name to be ready made as Sherwood 
 Forest; and it was very consoling to call the Imp 
 the Sheriff of Nottingham, whom everybody com 
 bined to torment. 
 
 I used to read perched on the arm of a big chair 
 that stood in the bay window of the parlor, screened 
 from the rest of the room by some large potted 
 plants. A rubber-tree, of course, was among them, 
 an inevitable part of the Boston inheritance. But 
 the gracious lady of them all I named her Rene 
 was my pink oleander tree, my very own, which 
 I had raised myself from a small slip brought me 
 by Aunt Louisa, an old colored woman who worked 
 for us and "enjoyed misery." It was in a bottle, 
 its roots just starting, when she gave it to me. I 
 took all the care of it myself, and when I was ten 
 it was taller than I and had twice been a cascade 
 of pink flowers. How Una Mary had loved it! 
 
MAMMY 167 
 
 I used to wash and stroke the glossy leaves and 
 carry single flowers, when it was in bloom, to deco 
 rate my Altar to the Virgin. The second time it 
 blossomed was most opportune, for Mamma was 
 going to have a party and the President s wife was 
 coming, the beautiful young White House bride 
 almost a real Princess she seemed to me. I spent 
 the whole afternoon washing each leaf of the ole 
 ander in her honor, for surely I felt that would be 
 the first thing her eyes would light upon. 
 
 The whole house was full of the excitement of 
 preparation. It was the first grown-up party we 
 had given. The kitchen was sticky with cake 
 frosting and raisins. All the morning Mammy and 
 I had stoned them, assisted by the baby, who got 
 in everybody s way but was called "Pudden en 
 Plush" through it all, showing the state of amia 
 bility that prevailed, for that was Mammy s term 
 of highest approbation. 
 
 Then after an early supper had come the excite 
 ment of dressing Mamma. Her wavy hair was 
 done in puffs on top of her head, and she wore the 
 heirloom brocade, the family splendor that had first 
 been worn at a ball given by the Empress Joseph 
 ine, and had been made over for each generation 
 since. My grandmother had that winter sent it 
 on to Mamma with the other great family dress, the 
 pink pina that was brought back by Perry s expe- 
 
i68 UNA MARY 
 
 dition to Japan. They are both still being worn, 
 these dresses, almost as immortal as old lace. I 
 wish we had pictures of them in their various in 
 carnations. It would be a history of fashions for 
 a hundred years. They are charming dresses to 
 wear. They are so full of the ghosts of great and 
 gay occasions, one seems to slip on the happiness 
 that steeps their shining folds. 
 
 For the party Mamma had the brocade, which 
 
 was itself a warm old ivory, made up with some 
 
 green velvet and the lace fichu that had belonged 
 
 to a famous belle of my great-grandmother s day 
 
 who had had, so tradition said, forty proposals. I 
 
 ^jiave the lace now, and I wish it might whisper to 
 
 me some of the secrets it must know. It is such 
 
 beautiful lace she would have worn it on many 
 
 "of the occasions when she proved invincible! 
 
 I thought Mamma looked simply regal when 
 she was dressed and for the first time was ab 
 solutely satisfied with her personal appearance. 
 Even Una Mary was satisfied, and the Imp was 
 abashed into silence. At last her clothes did her 
 credit, and for her, at least, the family curse seemed 
 lifted and about to stay lifted, for there was an 
 x awe-inspiring dressmaker in Washington who gave 
 me fashion-plates to cut out for paper dolls which 
 were the supreme of elegance, and Mamma could 
 be dressed in copies of any of them. 
 
MAMMY 169 
 
 I had to go to bed before the party began, so 
 I tucked Elizabeth behind a portiere with just one 
 eye peeping out, that she, at least, might see it all. 
 But Mammy, who helped pass the ice-cream, 
 stumbled over her and kicked her under the sofa, 
 so she never saw another thing, and from the 
 upper landing where, wrapped in a blanket, I was 
 listening, I heard Mammy say: "Dis house am 
 certain hanted wid dolls. I done swept dis room 
 myself!" 
 
 To the colored servants we owed a great many 
 thrills. Mamma was ill most of the time, and my < 
 father was busy writing during his spare moments, 
 so in order not to disturb either of them we had 
 to be very quiet when we were in the house, except 
 in our play room, which was off in a wing directly 
 above the kitchen, and, as Mammy was eminently 
 sociable, we were quite as apt to stay in the kitchen 
 itself. The best time there was just after dinner 
 while the dishes were being washed. Then Mammy 
 would sit beside the stove "Pattin Juba" and 
 singing a sort of wailing dance while I double- 
 shuffled, flapping my feet in time to her song, as 
 loose-jointed as any pickaninny, and Aunt Louisa 
 and the cook jerked their shoulders and swayed 
 their whole bodies to the rhythm as they kept on 
 washing dishes. Their work over, Aunt Louisa 
 would take out her pipe and begin to smoke while 
 
170 UNA MARY 
 
 Mammy cracked chincapins or butternuts that had 
 been sent to some of them from the country, and 
 the real business of the evening began for me. 
 Stories! Often I read fairy-tales aloud to them, or, 
 better still, they took turns telling stories of "hants" 
 and " Night Doctors." 
 
 Of course I always wore a proper graveyard 
 rabbit s foot around my neck. Mammy had pro 
 vided me with that when she had only been with 
 us for a week. I also wore, strung on the same 
 string with it, a horse-chestnut to keep off rheu 
 matism. The ideas of servants seemed more like 
 Una Mary s world than any other grown-ups point 
 of view I knew, for no one else seemed to believe 
 in talismans and spirits. Mammy had ghosts 
 while I had Goddesses and Fairies, which simply 
 meant that we moved in different social circles of 
 the invisible world as we did in this, but it was all 
 quite understandable. Even now I cannot bear to 
 walk under a ladder. 
 
 Aunt Louisa had one ghost who particularly 
 shadowed my imagination. He caught hold of 
 your heels if you went up-stairs in the dark. I 
 have felt him reaching for me again and again, 
 and have only just jerked my foot away in time, 
 saying, as Mammy did when she "felt" a ghost, 
 
 "Debbil, Debbil, hole him back, 
 I s a Christian ef I s black," 
 
MAMMY 171 
 
 a charm that so far has always worked, for neither 
 Mammy nor I ever actually saw a ghost, though 
 often we had the "ghost feel" to our skins. Sud 
 denly, without the slightest warning, cold shivers 
 would run all over me and my hands would get 
 damp and clammy, and Mammy said I had walked 
 through a ghost. She often did in the dark, and 
 she was sure a murder must once have been com 
 mitted at the head of the back stairs, for she always 
 felt that way when she passed there at dusk. She 
 would have died rather than go down the back 
 stairs in the dark, and the cook had heard moans 
 coming from that direction. Aunt Louisa was a 
 person who saw ghosts, and it was only, we felt, 
 because she slept at her own house that the back 
 stairs ghost was never seen. But always in the 
 dark the Imp would remind me that It was there. 
 
 Night Doctors were even worse than ghosts; 
 They stole the bodies from cemeteries and cut them 
 up at the medical schools. They were responsible, 
 really, for most of the ghosts in Washington, for 
 a body that was cut up and destroyed left no rest 
 ing-place for the soul when it came down from 
 Purgatory, as most souls had to now and then to 
 finish up their neglected Earth affairs. So it sim 
 ply had to wander about a homeless "hant." 
 Even better than dissecting dead bodies, the Night 
 Doctors liked to kidnap living people and cut 
 them up while still alive. 
 
 i 
 
172 UNA MARY 
 
 Aunt Louisa would never go into a Department 
 Store because she said behind the counters there 
 were trap-doors, arranged by the Night Doctors, 
 that flew open if you stepped on them, especially 
 if you were a " Colored Pusson," and let you down 
 into one of a series of underground passages that 
 honeycombed the whole city, all leading to Ford s 
 Theatre, where Lincoln had been shot, and now 
 the place where the bodies were cut up. Aunt 
 Louisa knew one man who had escaped from there, 
 but only after they had cut off one of his ears. 
 
 They also liked to get live people to pull out their 
 teeth to make them up into sets of false teeth, 
 for if they made up the teeth of dead people into 
 sets the mouths of the people who wore them 
 would always be " hanted." Mammy said, "I ain t 
 gwine run the resk of false teef ef I s bliged to 
 gum my corn pone," and I was thankful, indeed, 
 that all of my family had their own teeth. I care 
 fully buried all of the first teeth I was shedding at 
 this time to prevent their falling into the hands of 
 the Night Doctors. I felt it might somehow react 
 on me if they got hold of them. 
 
 We always went to as many funerals as we could. 
 Mammy got me to look up the death notices each 
 day in the paper, so whenever there was a really 
 big funeral or any sort of masonic or military one 
 Mammy would have walked her feet to the bone 
 to follow a band we might have been seen, with- 
 
MAMMY 173 
 
 out Mamma s knowledge, of course, standing in 
 front of the crowd opposite the house, my sister, 
 Mammy, and I, holding tightly to the baby s car 
 riage, watching each detail, from the arrival of the 
 undertaker to the departure of the hearse, and 
 almost always at the end of the long procession of 
 hacks there would be a buggy in which sat two 
 men. These, Mammy said, were the Night Doc 
 tors, who always came to funerals in order to fol 
 low and see where the grave was dug. Then in 
 the nignt they could come and dig up the body. 
 Sometimes, when the cemetery was not too far, we 
 followed, too, and saw the group of people, the two 
 men a little on the outskirts, standing about the 
 grave while the casket was lowered into the ground. 
 Tears of sympathy rolled down Mammy s cheeks 
 as she watched, and if by any chance the body 
 was put in a vault instead of a grave we rejoiced 
 greatly, for then it would be safe from the Night 
 Doctors. 
 
 Curiously enough, I got very little association 
 with Death and none of the horror the thought of 
 Death had given me, as a small child, from these 
 funerals. They were simply a pageant, the ser 
 vice of a strange cult. They were the beginning of 
 art for my youngest sister, for as soon as she could 
 hold a pencil she began to draw cemeteries, and 
 when she was three she made complete graveyards 
 
i 7 4 UNA MARY 
 
 with stones cut out of paper so they stood up on 
 the lid of a box, with holes behind them in which 
 she could bury dead flies. 
 
 Death, to me, was quite different, something very 
 vivid and terrible. A pet white rabbit had died. 
 In the morning he was perfectly well, scampering 
 about the yard when I let him out and eating from 
 my hand. A few hours later I had come home from 
 school and found him lying stiff and cold in the cor 
 ner of his box, a leaf of untouched lettuce beside 
 him. The full pathos of Death clutched my heart 
 at the sight of the lettuce leaf, the poor little rab 
 bit aloof and indifferent beside it, little rabbit as 
 strange and remote from his real self as I should 
 be if Una Mary ran away and left me only Una. I 
 wondered if that was what had happened to him. 
 Had his Una Mary gone and left him so broken- 
 h^arted that he had died? 
 
 /We never missed any sort of public spectacle, 
 Mammy, the baby carriage, my sister, and I. 
 Mammy had an instinct for them that almost 
 amounted to second sight, so even when they were 
 things we could not possibly know about before 
 hand, like fires, there we always were, arriving usu 
 ally with the fire-engines. We also saw a number 
 of negro fights in back alleys, Mammy first shout 
 ing to some one: "Is dey razors or pistils?" If it 
 Was pistols we stayed away, but razors we never 
 
MAMMY 175 
 
 missed. Fortunately, we three children were too 
 small to see much through the packed ring of spec 
 tators, but Mammy stood on the hubs of two wheels 
 of the baby carriage and got a specially fine view, 
 and I was thrilled by the contagion of the excite 
 ment of the crowd and the wild rush at the end to 
 "get away before the Cops come." 
 
 Strange were the places to which that baby 
 carriage penetrated with Mildred and me on either 
 side of it, and, thanks to Mammy, our horizon was 
 certainly broadened in many ways unplanned by 
 our parents, and from her we all caught a great 
 gusto for events. 
 
 It was on one of these walks that we went to 
 Rock Creek to see a great Baptist Revival. The 
 preacher stood on the bank dressed in a silk hat, 
 black trousers, and shirt-sleeves, though it was 
 November, and kept calling to the people behind 
 him: "Come erlong breddren and sisteren, jest one 
 drap under and yo gwine find yo Saviour here in 
 de bottom ob de Creek." And then we saw them 
 dipped, all dressed in very premeditated-looking 
 white-ruffled muslins, and I decided never to be 
 come a Baptist when I saw the sopping, gasping 
 creatures come out again. But Mammy admired it 
 greatly and said she hadn t anything against being 
 a Catholic, only she had once been "baptized by 
 the Baptists fo to be on de safe side and not go 
 
x 176 UNA MARY 
 
 Y down to Hell becase I d only jes hed my kinks 
 sopped." This made me a little nervous as I 
 knew I had never been baptized in any way, but 
 Papa, when I asked him about it, said it was not 
 at all necessary. So I told Mammy white people 
 didn t have to have it done they went to Heaven, 
 anyhow only colored people had to be baptized, 
 x and if they were very black I guessed it was best 
 to be on the safe side and to be put in all over. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 MY ALTAR TO THE VIRGIN 
 
 I A HE profound sensation of those first few 
 -* months in Washington was the city itself 
 with its wide, tree-bordered streets of smooth 
 asphalt, numerous parks, and staggering, dream 
 like public buildings. 
 
 I had never seen any architecture more preten 
 tious than the big hotel in Cincinnati and the 
 Square with the fountain between it and the rail 
 way station and the Boston State House, which up 
 to this time had been my ideal of grandeur; so my 
 first sight of the White House, flanked by the 
 Treasury and the War Department, quite took my 
 breath away, and I succumbed utterly to the 
 Capitol, supreme above the city, with the great 
 flight of steps and terraces as a pedestal for the 
 splendid proportions leading to the shining dome 
 above. Never had I dreamed of such magnifi 
 cence. All I had imagined the Alhambra to be 
 sank into insignificance before this serene reality. 
 
 It became to me the symbol of patriotism what 
 177 
 
1 78 UNA MARY 
 
 government really meant for to me it was less a 
 building than a monument; like a vast statue of 
 some modern Sphinx, its paws spread out at ease 
 upon its pedestal broad, generous, capable paws 
 and welcoming the world to come and question 
 above them the noble, clear-cut flanks, and the 
 joyous, inscrutable, argus-eyed head. I felt the 
 words used about Washington really described this 
 new Sphinx of Liberty: " First in War, First in 
 Peace." It was, above all, peaceful, but, once 
 roused, unconquerable. Those paws would strike 
 to kill. 
 
 The Washington Monument I could not under 
 stand. It looked larger then than it has since. It 
 was .unfinished, but the workmen had already 
 nearly reached the top, and each day the great 
 nets, hung on all sides to catch them if they fell, 
 grew smaller as they drew in toward the point. 
 The nets, making the top clumsy instead of deli 
 cate, gave it all a larger scale, so that the day it 
 was finished we saw through opera-glasses when 
 they put the capstone on and the nets were taken 
 down I felt terribly disappointed in it. It seemed 
 suddenly slender to insignificance. I was sure no 
 foreigner would ever notice it and certainly would 
 not believe it was the tallest building in the world. 
 I could not believe it myself. It was some weeks 
 before I got over my feeling and at all grasped its 
 
MY ALTAR TO THE VIRGIN 179 
 
 true beauty, but when I did I knew it was more 
 beautiful even than the Capitol. That was a 
 statue; the Monument was pure spirit and became 
 for me a symbol of all perfection. 
 
 The stretch of Park from the Capitol grounds 
 below the Avenue to the White Lot behind the 7 
 White House, ragged and unkempt as much of 
 it was in those days, and fronting on the market, 
 the Pennsylvania Station, and general dilapidation 
 of semi-slums, was still most impressive to me. 
 It seemed such a big stretch of trees to be in the 
 heart of a city, like the park of some castle, and in 
 it there was what seemed like a transformed castle 
 built of stone with real towers, the Smithsonian < 
 Institution, now used as a Museum, and beside it 
 was the National Museum, where my father had 
 his laboratories, and there I always spent my Sat 
 urdays. 
 
 I used to take an umbrella with me less for fear 
 of rain than for the pride it was to carry it past 
 the doorkeeper instead of having to check it like 
 .the general public, showing I really belonged at the 
 Museum. That proud moment over, I walked 
 past the cases of George Washington s clothes and 
 household effects, turned to the left, and went 
 under the models of the giant squid and huge octo 
 pus, so large they filled up the ceiling of a whole 
 room, and yet they were only life-sized, a "fact I 
 
i8o UNA MARY 
 
 deeply resented; then up-stairs, the chemical smell 
 meeting me half-way up, to the tower where the 
 laboratories were. There I deposited my umbrella 
 in Papa s office, and then the whole Museum was 
 mine to wander in at will. I was always torn be 
 tween the Indian collection, the stuffed animals, or 
 the minerals, but, whatever I did, I always went 
 first to see the Japanese lady and gentleman who 
 have for so many years carried on a flirtation from 
 separate cases across the main aisle. The man 
 seems to take the whole affair as rather a joke; so, 
 perhaps, it is as well that they are so far apart. 
 Her heart might have been broken if they had 
 been allowed to meet, or perhaps, after all, she 
 has only been leading him on all these years since 
 they were "Presented by the Emperor of Japan 
 in 1876." 
 
 At noon I lunched with Papa in the private 
 dining-room with the other scientists of the Mu 
 seum and the Smithsonian. How kind to me they 
 were, those dreamy transcendentalists, for that, I 
 am sure as I look back, is what many of the scien 
 tists of that generation primarily were dreamers, 
 philosophers, poets, and mystics in their passion 
 ate loyalty to truth manifest in the facts of nature, 
 soaring on sure wings of new-found hypotheses 
 fearless through limitless space to greet the rising 
 sun! Theirs was the Vision of the Future, theirs 
 
MY ALTAR TO THE VIRGIN 181 
 
 to find the secret of the Cosmos and at its centre 
 the all-searching mind of man. Incarnate Reason, 
 only lower than "The One" or, some even thought, 
 itself omnipotent. No mystic in the cloister, his 
 hours occupied with the daily round of service, his 
 soul suffused with raptures of the Infinite, lived a 
 less worldly life than these busy men, each small 
 est detail of their work a forging of fresh links to 
 bind the earth and sky, a gathering together of 
 bewildering miscellanies into some new and shin 
 ing whole. 
 
 Life, the great World Secret! Eager visionaries, 
 careful analysts, large-brained and skilful-fingered, 
 on they pressed, no atom too small, no sweep of 
 space too vast to be stepping-stones on their tri 
 umphant upward way; and far behind them, the 
 noise of their coming but a murmur in the distance, 
 followed the onward surging multitudes of men. 
 
 That is what science meant at the height of this 
 scientific era. It was knowledge, it was beauty, 
 it was service of God and man. Brave, reasonable, 
 definite, and yet singularly confused, blinded by 
 its own clear light to half the meanings of the 
 Universe! As a child I saw it at its very best, the 
 noblest attitude of mind that I have ever known, 
 the most spiritual in that the whole life was one 
 unwavering. sacrifice and devotion to a deep, unseen 
 ideal. Their heads were among the clouds, but 
 
i$ 2 UNA MARY 
 
 their hands and feet were carefully occupied with 
 earth, for there must be no stumbling along that 
 eternal path. 
 
 I went as I pleased among the workrooms and 
 laboratories, and no question of mine was too fool 
 ish for a painstaking answer and no occupation of 
 theirs too profound to be interrupted in order to 
 give me help. Half of my education and half of 
 what I am I owe to those Saturdays with their des 
 ultory wanderings among the collections, all vital 
 ized and vivified by long talks with these men, who 
 were easy to understand, as really great men are. 
 
 Science so personified touched the depths of Una 
 Mary s imagination, and those Museum days stand 
 out in my memory luminous with the glamour 
 of My Country in an encircling mystery of dumb 
 immensities of vision, faith, and aspiration. All 
 my mind and my imagination were wholly satis 
 fied, but the inmost being of my soul cried out, 
 lonelier than before. I needed something more 
 tangible. I could not love a Primal Cause! My 
 ideas were too confused and fragmentary to ena 
 ble me to build up any sort of Pantheistic theory. 
 Nature to me still breathed of the Gods and 
 Goddesses but was swept by a breadth of vision 
 that was given me by science. 
 
 By the time I was ten years old, God had grown 
 to mean to me a vague something behind and 
 
MY ALTAR TO THE VIRGIN 183 
 
 through everything. Above all, He was the feeling 
 of " Beyond" I so often had; the feeling of some 
 thing I could almost but not quite grasp; the 
 source of all the intangible feelings, those strange, 
 unutterable waves of emotion that almost choked 
 Una Mary. Ideas must come from somewhere, 
 so of course He sent them and He must also send 
 the lights we know on earth. 
 
 It was He who made the sun and moon to shine, 
 who lit the stars at night and gave the fireflies 
 their lights; and He sent the flame when one 
 started a fire. To strike a match became for me 
 a religious act, and if matches had been allowed 
 me I might have become a fire-worshipper, for it 
 seemed a veritable " coming of the Light of God 
 on Earth," and if I struck the match I brought 
 Him, I, Una Mary, had this power to bring Him 
 out of the Unknown here into my very hand ! And, 
 most marvellous of all, on certain cold days, by 
 scuffling over the carpet and then touching some 
 one, I made a spark of light spring out of me, from 
 my very finger itself, and I knew for a fleeting 
 instant that I was a part of God, a knowledge that 
 passed as quickly and became as vague as the 
 unreal feeling I used to have. 
 
 At this time an Indian Priestess named Waiwa 
 was staying with some ethnological friends of ours 
 who had brought her on from the West in order 
 
i8 4 UNA MARY 
 
 to study her religion. She was a Priestess of the 
 Sun in the Zuni Tribe. I saw her often and felt 
 there was a peculiar bond between us, as I always 
 wore a silver bracelet her father had made for me 
 with the signs of all the Rain Gods carved upon it 
 a bracelet so sacred her father s house had been 
 struck by lightning as soon as I began to wear it, 
 because, so the tribe said, the Gods were angry 
 that a " White Face" should know their symbols. 
 I offered to give the bracelet back, but Waiwa said 
 I might keep it because I, too, believed in the God 
 of Light, who was the great God above all the 
 little Gods of Cloud and Rain. She would explain 
 it to all of them when she returned to Zuni, but 
 here in Washington, when she prayed to him at 
 dawn, she could tell the Sun- God Himself that I 
 believed. Each morning, until the police objected 
 because so many people collected to watch her, she 
 went dressed in her priestess s robe to a park near 
 where she was staying and, with arms uplifted, said 
 her prayers to the rising sun, utterly unconscious 
 of the crowd, absolutely wrapped in the coming 
 of the God. After the police had complained, she 
 prayed each day from the roof instead, a place 
 nearer to the sunrise, it seemed to me, and, as she 
 said, more like Zuni. How well I understood her 
 prayers ! 
 
 Mixed with this very concrete theory of light 
 
MY ALTAR TO THE VIRGIN 185 
 
 there was the other confused idea of God, vague, 
 vast, and unapproachable, the Primal Cause my 
 father s scientific friends so often discussed, the 
 unknowable, secret cause of all. Even evolution, 
 that endless sequence, could not start without Him. 
 
 I had casually heard of Christ several years be 
 fore, when I had renamed Edward as Edward- 
 Christ, but at the Sunday-school where I now went 
 he was never mentioned. I had not yet advanced 
 to the class where they studied about him, but in 
 one class, after we had finished our Old Testament 
 lesson, our teacher used to talk to us about a person 
 who had lived a long time ago named Jesus. She 
 taught us several sayings of his, and I was greatly 
 surprised to find that he was the original Dooun 
 Tothers judging from these sayings, his point of 
 view seemed extraordinary. When he advised you 
 to turn the other cheek and let some one hit you 
 again, it was against all common sense, the only 
 sense I valued. I tried "Blessed are the peace 
 makers" when two boys were fighting, but the only 
 sense in which I " inherited the earth" was that 
 both boys turned upon me and rolled me in the 
 snow. 
 
 That Jesus might be the same person as my 
 beloved Christ never dawned upon me until 
 Mammy told me about Jesus Christ the son of the 
 Virgin. Then I began to think about him a great 
 
i86 UNA MARY 
 
 deal and felt sure he and Edward were the same. 
 There could not be more than one " In visible 
 Friend" for me, and he might easily have several 
 names, as I was Una and Una Mary, so I began to 
 try and understand his sayings, and I loved the 
 Virgin, his mother. 
 
 Mammy was a most zealous Roman Catholic and 
 it is to her influence that I owed my next religious 
 phase. Always when she and I were out walking 
 alone she would take me for a moment into some 
 church to pray, or if we were near Saint Augustine s 
 when we were out with the baby she got the sexton 
 to come out and "mind the carriage" while she 
 and I went in. 
 
 Saint Augustine s to this day I cannot pro 
 nounce it correctly, because when I went there I 
 said it as Mammy did, with the accent on the first 
 syllable, as if it referred to the month, as I thought 
 it must. It is a much prettier word so, and so all 
 the colored Catholics pronounced it, for it was 
 really their church. Perhaps it was garish and full 
 of tinsel a colored church could hardly fail of be 
 ing that but to Mammy and me it seemed a place 
 of subdued splendor, dim, purple mysteries, and 
 palpitating glamour. As we usually went there be 
 tween services, it was fairly dark, with only tiny 
 lights hanging before the shrines and a vague aroma 
 of incense in the air. Mammy always touched me 
 
MY ALTAR TO THE VIRGIN 187 
 
 with holy water as soon as we were inside the 
 heavy leather curtain that so completely shut 
 away the outer world. The cool touch of water on 
 my forehead made the whole place seem very real, 
 accentuating the fact that I was really there in 
 body and in spirit. 
 
 I have never dared go inside Saint Augustine s 
 since I grew up the memory of what it meant 
 when I was a child is too dear to me, for it all satis 
 fied a sharp inner craving in the depths of Una 
 Mary s being, though to her mind it was unintelligi 
 ble and unexplained, for Mammy was certainly no 
 theologian and no one else ever talked to me about 
 Catholicism. But it became a very real part of 
 those first years in Washington, for, better than 
 anything else, I liked going to church with 
 Mammy. 
 
 She sang in the choir and often took me to mass, 
 depositing me in a pew in charge of one of her 
 friends while she went up to the mysterious loft 
 above, and there I heard all the glorious, rich, emo- 
 tion,al church music sung by a well-trained choir 
 of superb negro voices the first real music I had 
 ever heard, for as no one in our family played we 
 had no piano, and the musical side of me would 
 have starved much longer if it had not been for 
 Saint Augustine s. 
 
 The service that I loved best was Benediction, 
 
i88 UNA MARY 
 
 still the most beautiful service of all in the Roman 
 Church, it seems to me. To my understanding it 
 meant nothing. No Hottentot could have been 
 more unenlightened than I, but in the lights, the 
 sonorous chanting of the Latin, the wonderful vest 
 ments changed so often by the bowing and bobbing 
 little acolytes, the shining rosette of golden rays on 
 a slender, golden pedestal which was taken from the 
 narrow box above the altar and held on high by 
 the priest while a little bell rang and all the people 
 bowed their heads, my own head as low as any 
 there, and the air filled with incense from the far- 
 swinging, silver censers, while the church trembled 
 with soaring bursts of song from the choir, upheld 
 by the fluting and the crashing thunder of the or 
 gan, I thrilled with a tremendous surge of response 
 to the beauty and found a mysterious peace for 
 Una Mary s soul. 
 
 On Christmas we always went to early mass. 
 We got up while it was still dark, dressed quickly, 
 and then went out into the wan, starlit streets. 
 Cold, crisp, and mysterious the whole world 
 seemed, with a pallor of light in the East, and 
 silently we hurried to church, awed by the strange 
 ness of the hour into a dim realization of the tre- 
 mendousness of the occasion, for I knew it was 
 the birthday of my own friend Jesus Christ. 
 
 Then the sharp contrast as we came in out of 
 
MY ALTAR TO THE VIRGIN 189 
 
 the unearthly morning to the flare of lights and 
 crowded, festive church, all a shining glitter ancj 
 glow, like being inside a Christmas tree. For years 
 we used to go to the early Christmas mass in mem 
 ory of all it meant to us as children, my sisters and 
 I. The surges of thankfulness and awe that almost 
 made Una Mary cry were a fitting beginning for 
 that long day of gratitude and joys that were almost 
 too much to believe. 
 
 Then back through the early sunlight, the air 
 full of the blowing of Christmas horns and ringing 
 of distant bells, each colored person we met wish 
 ing us " Crismus gif, ladies," to which we answered, 
 "Same to you, and Merry Christmas," everybody 
 overflowing with friendliness. 
 
 When we got home we rushed up-stairs to Mam 
 ma s room, shouting Merry Christmas, and there, 
 sitting on her bed, we opened the presents in our 
 stockings, one at a time in turn, so that all might 
 see and admire. After that came breakfast with 
 more presents piled at each plate, and often on the 
 floor beside the table, too, and a shining Christmas 
 tree and a statue of Santa Claus in the centre of 
 the table, all of the day inseparably connected 
 with and penetrated by the spirit of the early 
 mass. 
 
 I had given up the altar to Minerva when we 
 came to Washington, and as yet nothing had come 
 
190 UNA MARY 
 
 to take its place. I loved the Roman Catholic 
 Church, but I longed for something more intimate, 
 something I could understand, and that should be 
 my own, and I envied Mammy her religion, for it 
 was the first time I had ever seen any one to whom 
 religion meant the sort of thing it meant to me. 
 When we went away for the summer Mammy 
 always slept in my room, and I saw her sa}^ her 
 rosary and I knew there were mysterious little bags 
 hung around her neck all, she told me, to help 
 her say her prayers and protect her from the Devil. 
 If a thunder-storm came during the night she 
 would get up, light a blessed candle, and tell me a 
 story of the Saints, both of us convinced no house 
 could be struck by lightning in which a blessed 
 candle burned; or if a storm came in the daytime 
 we each took hold of an end of a piece of palm 
 saved for just such occasions from Palm Sunday. 
 To me this all seemed most reasonable and sat 
 isfying. 
 
 The Ave Marias were the prayers I liked best to 
 hear her repeat, and I loved them especially because 
 they were the first prayers I had heard that were 
 anything but a vague horror, so I decided that I, 
 too, would worship and pray to the Virgin. I 
 liked her for herself, the images I saw of her looked 
 so like a transcendent doll I made a blue cloak 
 like hers for my favorite doll Elizabeth so now 
 
MY ALTAR TO THE VIRGIN 191 
 
 she took the place of Minerva, but nearer and 
 dearer because she was the mother of Jesus Christ, 
 my own Edward-Christ, whom I now always called 
 Jesus but thought of still as my own perpetual 
 companion. 
 
 I went to school at the house of some friends near 
 us. Their governess had a class of about a dozen 
 children. How I hated it all dull drudgery of 
 learning by heart ! There were both boys and girls, 
 but we were not allowed to play with the boys 
 during recess, they were considered too rough, and 
 the girls were the fluffy, Real- Girl kind. To escape 
 from them I spent my time during recess where 
 they were afraid to follow near the top of a large 
 weeping- willow tree that stood in the grounds. 
 And there, in a crotch of the main trunk, absolutely 
 hidden by the trailing branches, I used to sit alone. 
 I made it my Church, and it was here that I set 
 up my altar to the Virgin. 
 
 Above my seat was a deep, round hole, where a 
 branch had once grown, like the hole in the old 
 Sacred Apple-Tree, where I had listened for the 
 omens, and as such holes still kept an aroma of 
 sanctity to my mind I knew this was the place where 
 the sacred treasures must be kept like the box above 
 the altar at Saint Augustine s. 
 
 Here I kept the Minerva quartz crystal now 
 transformed into a jewel for the Madonna; a bit of 
 
i 9 2 UNA MARY 
 
 turquoise, because I knew blue was her color; a 
 beautiful lace-paper valentine that I pretended was 
 the service-book from which I had seen the priests 
 read. I used a small cardboard box filled with 
 pink cotton for my altar. Of course, the cotton 
 never showed, but I liked knowing it was there and 
 I felt it must please the Virgin, too. For my altar- 
 cloth I used an old, blue-silk pincushion cover em 
 broidered with pansies and edged with lace. All 
 these I set up each day in the crotch of the tree, 
 with much bowing and absolute inward reverence. 
 It was not a game I played, but something that was 
 fundamentally necessary to Una Mary, and surely 
 the Virgin while she watched me smiled upon me 
 as she did upon my " Lady s Tumbler," and per 
 haps the tears came to her eyes when she heard me 
 tell my beads, for those beads were the greatest 
 treasure that I had, and to her I dedicated them. 
 They had been the fringe of a bead bag made by 
 my great-grandmother, broken in places, so I had 
 been able to persuade my mother to let me cut it 
 off and restring the beads she had supposed for 
 dolls necklaces and I had made them into my 
 rosary with a bead cross at the end. I had no idea 
 what a cross meant, but there was one on Mammy s 
 rosary, so mine ended in one, too. 
 
 It was very difficult to stay safely perched, kneel 
 ing on the limb of a tree while both hands were 
 
MY ALTAR TO THE VIRGIN 193 
 
 occupied with my beads, but there I knelt hero 
 ically, the bark cutting into my shins; and while 
 I prayed I gazed above my altar up to the sky 
 glinting blue, Madonna blue, through the shifting 
 tendrils of the willow twigs with their graceful 
 tracery of leaves, all a fitting background for the 
 picture of Our Lady that my imagination painted 
 there. I understood why the old Florentines 
 painted her so often against a background of foliage 
 and sky. It is a fitting symbol of her, the fairest 
 green of earth, smiling as it lifts itself to touch the 
 sky. A deep, piercing, personal love of her was in 
 my heart as I told my beads. Instead of using 
 Mammy s prayer I made up one of my own. I 
 said one word to each bead, and it exactly went 
 into the rosary twice with Amen at the cross. 
 
 "Virgin Mary, Mother mild, 
 Take me for your other child, 
 And safe with Jesus let me play 
 Through the whole of every day. 
 Bless my family and my friends, 
 And give us love that never ends." 
 
 If some one at this period had gotten hold of me 
 and made the Roman Church as clear to my under 
 standing as it was to my heart and that vague 
 organ of intuition, my soul, I should probably have 
 drifted gradually and happily into its fold. But 
 Una Mary was not to find her salvation there. 
 
194 lJNA MARY 
 
 Mammy, after several years, left us for a time, and 
 with her going there was, nothing left to link me 
 with Saint Augustine s, and, though I occasionally 
 went by myself to Vespers, it was not the same 
 thing. Without Mammy I felt an alien. It was 
 destined to be years before any church had real 
 meaning for me. Years of struggle between my 
 heart and my mind were before me to prepare me 
 for that blinding miracle of conversion. 
 
 When I was nine years old my parents decided 
 I was mature enough to be taught definitely some 
 thing about religion, so I was sent to the Unitarian 
 Sunday-school, but, unfortunately, it was both 
 too early and too late: too early for me to get 
 the least idea of the sort of clarity and philosophic 
 calm I might have found in Unitarianism if I had 
 come to it fully matured; and too late for me as 
 a child to be led gradually and coldly toward it, 
 for all my religious emotional side was already 
 awake and through Una Mary s worship and her 
 love of beauty had been fed and stimulated for 
 .years. 
 
 The religion that ignored beauty, that made 
 reason and the intellect supreme could mean 
 nothing to me, for the highest things I knew were 
 those intuitions, those glimmerings of infinity which 
 came to me through beauty and through love. 
 They were so far beyond the grasp of my intellect. 
 
MY ALTAR TO THE VIRGIN 19.5 
 
 that my mind could only bow itself in humility 
 before them. They were even higher, I knew, 
 than the sweeping, world-embracing theories of 
 science. 
 
 Righteousness, fearlessness, and endurance were 
 the paths of life the Unitarians taught. Perhaps 
 nothing could be better fitted to some tempera 
 ments, perhaps nothing else could make of them 
 as true and earnest men and women, but with my 
 temperament love, obedience, and worship were 
 what I had to give obedience to the intuitions 
 that came through beauty, through the ache of the 
 world, through joy, and from the sense that I was 
 part of the heart of everything; love that bound 
 * me with its filaments to all that came within my 
 range of being; and worship that overflowed un 
 bidden, as joyous as the birds singing with the 
 dawn, or bitter with the pain of tears, or exultant 
 as the wind-swept sea worship that bowed itself 
 before the Great Beyond revealed through nature 
 and the Gods, the Great Unknown who was all 
 in all; whose will was power, that boding of an 
 infinite energy before which the solid world might 
 crumble and vanish into dust, whose heart was 
 love, a pouring of unending comfort as life-giving 
 and unheeded as the air we breathe. 
 
 I had thought when I went to Sunday-School 
 that Una Mary would feel thoroughly at home, 
 
ig6 UNA MARY 
 
 / 
 
 would come to her own at last, but poor Una Mary 
 
 could not find a place to rest the sole of her foot in 
 that building decorated in drab and terra-cotta 
 \ American Gothic, where we were taught the names 
 of books of the Old Testament and lists of Kings 
 and Judges but were never given the Bible itself. 
 
 >w We used lesson books about the Bible instead. 
 
 Everything religious in me rebelled, and Una Mary 
 shrank back further than before. 
 
 Una rather enjoyed herself by falling violently 
 in love with a pretty young Sunday-school teacher 
 who wore a pale-blue feather in her hat. Our 
 teachers were all fine, conscientious men and wo 
 men, actuated, no doubt, by the highest motives. 
 Their only fault to me it was a fundamental one 
 lay in their lack of imagination to see that relig- 
 
 v ion might mean worship even to a child. Surely a 
 
 church can give her children worship ! My colored 
 Mammy gave it to me through her own deep, 
 ^ignorant piety. 
 
 ! No wonder the average child hates Sunday- 
 school, just a dull mass of petty drudgery unillu- 
 mined and unexplained. This one was only typi 
 cal of many in all denominations. It was the Sun 
 day-school of the period rather than primarily that 
 of th6 Unitarian Church, a type that I feel sure 
 must be passing fast, for with all the changes in ed 
 ucation the teaching of religion must change, too, 
 
MY ALTAR TO THE VIRGIN 197 
 
 and there is now some hope that it may become ac 
 tually the teaching of religion rather than a smat 
 tering of dubious facts from Hebrew History poured 
 in helter-skelter. We often had talks from visiting 
 ministers, and a key to the whole difficulty may be 
 found, I think, in the fact that most of them began 
 their talks either with "As I look at the rows of 
 your bright young faces before me" or "My dear 
 little ones," and yet those same men in their home 
 life were probably sensible and understanding 
 fathers. If only they might have applied the same 
 intelligence to their Sunday-schools! 
 
 The church where Mamma occasionally took me 
 when she was well enough was plain but not sim 
 ple ; the ornaments and proportions were all wrong, 
 it seemed to me, both in the decoration of the 
 building and in the arrangement of the service. It 
 was neither severe nor rich, but had the touch of 
 certain home-made clothes. I had once been to a 
 Quaker Meeting where the absolute bareness of the 
 building and the unadorned homely service con 
 ducted by the people themselves, with its long, 
 peaceful silences while each soul listened for the 
 voice of the Spirit, had satisfied me as completely 
 as the beauty of Saint Augustine s. The Quaker 
 service had even seemed to me in its simplicity of a 
 higher type of beauty, like the Washington Mon 
 ument. I felt that either extreme was right. The 
 
1 98 UNA MARY 
 
 Unitarian service seemed to fall to pieces half-way 
 between them. 
 
 The music was given by a quartet who faced 
 the congregation, standing in front of the organ 
 beside the pulpit, and when the tenor sang, "There 
 shall no evil befall thee," it seemed only his pom 
 pous personal opinion and none of his business any 
 way. The two ladies in the choir always wore very 
 sumptuous hats, and those, I remember, I really 
 enjoyed. 
 
 The congregation was made up in large measure 
 of the most intelligent and cultivated people, an 
 intellectual aristocracy. Most of them would have 
 died for a principle, but their worship lacked gen 
 erosity and warmth. I thought the minister and 
 all the people felt they were doing God a favor in 
 being there at all. Una Mary was smothered. It 
 all plunged me in overwhelming depression and 
 made me blind to the restrained spirituality that 
 must have been there, deep in the hearts of many. 
 But it was certainly buried too deep to create an 
 atmosphere of worship. 
 
 It is not a peculiarity of the Unitarians, this 
 complacent, frigid respectability that fills so many 
 churches. It is probably less conspicuous with 
 them than in any other Protestant body. I merely 
 first ran across it there, and the sense of profound 
 discouragement that I felt then must be familiar to 
 
MY ALTAR TO THE VIRGIN 199 
 
 many ministers and priests in all denominations. 
 Most prosperous congregations do not worship; 
 they merely go to church. This has nothing to do 
 with creeds. The most religious man I ever knew 
 was an agnostic scientist. It is a question of -fun 
 damental religious instinct. It makes very little 
 difference what people think about God if they 
 do not know God, and all the creeds in the worlds 
 will never teach it until men will open their hearts 
 and feel. It is pitiful, the number of hearts that 
 must be broken before they open. Una Mary felt 
 the light shining through the casing of her heart, 
 but her heart, too, had to break before she really 
 knew! 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 SCHOOL AND FRIENDSHIP 
 
 i 
 
 OCHOOL, as I have said, was one long drudgery 
 S* for the Una part of me, and Una Mary simply 
 went to sleep or studied in her own way the sub 
 jects that were of her world. 
 
 Geography I rather liked, though it never once 
 occurred to me that the different patches of color 
 on the maps represented actual countries; but their 
 shapes were interesting. I was especially attracted 
 by the pink boot, Italy, and maps were delightful 
 to draw into the wriggly, parallel lines for seacoast 
 and the bands, like chain-stitch in crocheting, sup 
 posed to represent mountain ranges. I felt as if 
 I were drawing My Country and I did make several 
 maps of it. Latitude and longitude were as sim 
 ple as right and left and seemed quite as arbitrary 
 and important. To me they were especially real 
 because we lived just off a meridian ourselves. The 
 street at the corner was built directly over one, and 
 we always coasted down Meridian Hill. Starting 
 at "The Boundary" where the street began, down 
 we flew, lying on our sleds face to the snow, straight 
 
SCHOOL AND FRIENDSHIP 201 
 
 down the Meridian toward the Equator. We in 
 variably bumped and fell off at the foot of the hill, 
 to be sure, and the street itself was blocked by the 
 White House at the other end, but the idea was 
 of a globe-encircling spaciousness. It was always 
 called Meridian Street in the old days of Wash 
 ington, but now is officially named the Avenue of 
 the Presidents, which seems fearfully provincial in 
 comparison. 
 
 I thought of the Torrid Zone as a large sash 
 of pink atmosphere tied about the earth, fastened 
 by the three strings, Cancer, Capricorn, and the 
 Equator. The inventories of exports and imports, 
 again meaning nothing to my mind as facts, were 
 a great pleasure to say, long lists of unending sug 
 gestions of richness and dripping sweetntss if they 
 included, as they often did, "sugar, spices, and 
 hides" hides were, I thought, a kind of tropical 
 fruit the whole series as satisfying to the imag 
 ination as the " Purple-sailed galleys of Tyre laden 
 with rich stuffs, gold, ivory, and myrrh" which I 
 had dreamed of in my mythology days. 
 
 Arithmetic had a certain charm because examples 
 came out as they were supposed to in quite a magi 
 cal way, simply by following what Rule said 
 Rule, the wizard of strange incantations, King of 
 the little figures that seemed so active and alive, 
 the King also of the Logarithm Table Land where 
 
202 UNA MARY 
 
 the magic was carried out on a large and much more 
 lavish scale. In plain arithmetic one or, at most, 
 two or three figures did all the work and gave their 
 orders to the other numbers, but with logarithms 
 whole rows of figures jumped out completely armed, 
 ready for their duty and sure their cause was just, 
 invincible ! 
 
 When I first began to do lessons at home, before 
 I went to school, Papa had given me a table of 
 logarithms and taught me how to use them. He 
 said it was the only scientific way to work, so all 
 my examples were done with their help. I shall 
 never forget the time during my first week at school 
 when I was sent to do an example on the board and 
 raised my hand to ask if I might get my table of 
 logarithms which I had forgotten and left in my 
 desk. The teacher nearly collapsed in surprise 
 when I explained that I always used them and did 
 not know how to do examples without them. She 
 said I must never use them again in school as that 
 would be cheating how, I could not see, and she 
 never explained, but it made me suspicious of 
 logarithms from that day on. There was evi 
 dently an unhallowed quality about their magic. 
 It must be black magic which they practised on 
 the world of innocent little numbers and naughts, 
 the little figures which were almost as full of per 
 sonality as the alphabet not quite. They were on 
 
SCHOOL AND FRIENDSHIP 203 
 
 a lower plane, like animals, while the letters were 
 Real People to me. 
 
 Figures and letters are bound to have pecu 
 liarly personal and concrete associations to chil 
 dren brought up in Washington, as most of the 
 streets are named for one or the other. It is curi 
 ous to have friends living up and down the alpha 
 bet. We lived on Q Street. It had one disad 
 vantage because I, for instance, naturally begin 
 the alphabet at Q. I can go forward from there 
 to the end or backward to A, but when I am 
 looking up words in a dictionary it seems absurd 
 to have to begin in the middle. Q, of course, is a 
 very special letter to me, absolutely my own. The 
 other people who have lived on Q Street have no 
 claim whatever. Mine is the only valid title. I 
 almost feel as if I were in some way responsible 
 for the little tail on it that seems to say I once 
 lived on Q. Purely from association, of course, it 
 was a place, while all the other letters of the alpha 
 bet were people, just the common herd if they were 
 small letters, "po white trash" or old families run 
 to seed, but distinguished personages if they were 
 capital letters, with very marked characteristics. 
 
 Could any one doubt the honest, good intentions 
 of H? Of course he goes to town each morning, 
 a typical commuter. He wears a brown business 
 suit and always does his straightforward, plodding 
 
204 UNA MARY 
 
 duty. He is a person you could invariably rely 
 upon. He would always be there but could never 
 understand anything but the obvious. Art, liter 
 ature, and music did not exist for H and he never 
 had " feelings." S was his exact opposite, all tem 
 perament, sensitive, mercurial, and bubbling with 
 enthusiasms. He was a great friend of Una Mary s, 
 as he was tremendous fun and was always most 
 unexpected and original. 
 
 G was the most conceited of all the letters, a 
 very fashionably dressed lady with a lorgnette, and 
 the sister of N, who was quite a dandy. He was 
 usually dressed in a long, cutaway coat with a light 
 waistcoat, a high hat, and wore a pink carnation 
 in his buttonhole. His neckties were dreams he 
 rarely wore the same one twice and his scarf-pins 
 were as numerous and varied as his ties. He was 
 really very good-looking and had charming man 
 ners, but there was a slightly shifty expression 
 in his eye. You could not quite be sure of him, 
 though you could trust him more than you could 
 either J or I it was impossible to trust either 
 of them out of your sight for a moment. There 
 was no telling what crookedness they might be 
 up to. 
 
 My feeling about I was so strong that I never 
 began my favorite words with him. For instance, 
 it is only with a struggle that to this day I can 
 
SCHOOL AND FRIENDSHIP 205 
 
 begin imagination with an i; for many years I 
 began it with an e instead it was too fine a word 
 to spoil. And that I, myself, should have to be 
 nothing but a capital I was just the sort of knock 
 down blow one had to expect from an inconsider 
 ate world. My only consolation was that it stood 
 only for the outside me, for Una, and in no way was 
 a symbol of Una Mary. 
 
 They all made a world for Una Mary, these al 
 phabet people. I first learned my letters from a set 
 of colored alphabet-blocks, capital letters, and very 
 great people, indeed. I used to group them in all 
 sorts of exciting combinations, and I taught myself 
 to read by first poring over words to see what let 
 ters were playing together and making up stories 
 from their arrangement. At home I had splendid 
 times with them and soon learned to read to myself 
 quite easily and rapidly when the book was one I 
 liked. But at school I was the poorest reader of 
 all, for I could not care whether that reading-book 
 cat ever lapped up her milk or not. 
 
 Some of our lessons at school were given us in 
 French, and that was the crowning insult of all. It 
 made us feel so self-conscious that the one bond 
 we had in common was that it became a point of 
 honor to try and pronounce French as if it were 
 English instead of in the affected, pursed-up way 
 Mademoiselle said it. We scorned the idea that it 
 
206 UNA MARY 
 
 could compare with English as a language. I think 
 the children I pitied most were a family we played 
 with in the Park who had a French nurse, with 
 whom they were obliged to talk French all the 
 time. It was to their credit that they were aw 
 fully ashamed of it themselves. Why I felt so 
 bitter about this one language I cannot see, be 
 cause I already knew and liked German, which 
 had been taught me in Cincinnati by Lizzie and 
 the Wonder Lady, and Harry, who was now at 
 school in Switzerland, spoke French as well as 
 he did English. Even his letters to me were writ 
 ten in French, and I had to answer them in the 
 horrid stuff slush we called it at school. 
 
 Poor Mademoiselle tried everything her inge 
 nuity could invent to overcome our almost British 
 antipathy to what she assured us was the most 
 beautiful language in the world. The softness of 
 the "u" it was ecstasy, she would exclaim, her 
 hands, in their black gloves, raised palms out, then 
 clasped over her heart while her bonnet strings 
 creaked and bobbed from her laugh of delight. 
 She never took off her outside things while she 
 taught us but kept on her long black-silk Dolman 
 and her bonnet that had a fringe of false hair 
 basted inside it along the front. We discovered 
 this at a Christmas party, when she came in eve 
 ning dress without a bonnet, of course and we 
 
SCHOOL AND FRIENDSHIP 207 
 
 saw that she really wore her hair parted and had 
 no bang at all. As I had never been able to de 
 cide whether to give Una Mary a bang or tied-back 
 hair, I could wholly understand and sympathize 
 with Mademoiselle s having a bang for work and 
 a part for dress-up occasions. /r 
 
 Besides our regular lessons, she taught us games 
 and songs. We played "Sur le pont d Avignon" 
 and a kind of " Going to Jerusalem" in French, and 
 even got up a few impromptu plays. One day, 
 when the school yard was all white with bushes of" 
 spiraea in bloom, Mademoiselle cut some of the long 
 sprays and made them into a crown and garlands 
 in which she decked me out for the part of Ophelia. 
 I was fearfully pleased and felt I had almost be 
 come Una Mary and must look perfectly beautiful 
 dressed all in flowers, until my Imp whispered: 
 "Look at yourself in the glass." I looked and saw 
 my thick, tow-colored pigtails braided so tight 
 Mammy always did them up that they stuck 
 straight out behind, the hair above slicked back as 
 smooth as satin, so the wreath of flowers seemed 
 perched on a polished ball, ready at any moment to 
 slide off; and the sprays fastened to my shoulders 
 were cascading over a stiff starched pinafore and a 
 green plaid dress. Poor Una Mary, knowing ex 
 actly how she looked, could not identify herself 
 with the part of Ophelia and was awkward and ago- 
 
208 UNA MARY 
 
 nized until her consolation came in acting Ophelia 
 dead. This I did with great feeling, and, as I was 
 dragged and carried about on my bier, wickedly re 
 joiced as I listened to the struggles of the others, 
 for, being dead, of course I did not have to speak 
 French. It was never a translation that we acted 
 but a version of the play with the scenes carried 
 "out in our own words. Once I remember a war- 
 horse was referred to as "hors de combat." I wish 
 I could see one of those plays now. They must 
 have quite cheered Mademoiselle. I am glad she 
 got some pleasure out of us. 
 
 She was the sister of a famous French socialist 
 and used to tell us during "faisons de la conversa 
 tion" about "la vraie noblesse," who were "les 
 hommes qui travaillent." A few years ago she 
 committed suicide, more heart-broken, I hope, over 
 "la vraie noblesse" than discouraged by the stu 
 pidity of her pupils. 
 
 One day, when French class was worse than 
 usual, the only other worse thing happened we 
 were told some visitors were coming. And then 
 in they came to hear us recite. I am sure the Gods 
 laughed when they sent Madge into my life as a 
 school visitor. She was brought by her mother, 
 a tall, thin, sweet-faced woman with earrings, a 
 blue veil, and clothes that were like Mamma s. 
 Madge was two years older than I. I shall never 
 
SCHOOL AND FRIENDSHIP 209 
 
 forget my sensations on first seeing her. It was 
 the same certainty that I had found something 
 which belonged to me that I had had when I saw 
 Elizabeth lying among the Rea) Dolls, for Madge 
 was as Un-Real Girl as I. 
 
 She was the only child I had ever seen who was 
 dressed as I was. Needless to say, her mother came 
 from Boston. She even wore laced boots, and that 
 first time I saw her she had on a plaid coat with a 
 cape I, too, had a plaid cape, the only other one 
 in Washington and under it she wore a gray 
 homespun dress with an olive-green guimpe, her 
 hair braided in two tight, smooth plaits behind, like 
 mine. Homespun I had always looked upon as 
 the exclusive property of my family, like laced 
 boots. I always had dresses or spring coats made 
 of it "it was so durable" and I felt Madge must 
 be another myself. 
 
 She was as much interested in me as I was in 
 
 her, and as we glanced sideways at each other it 
 
 suddenly came to me that she was more like me 
 
 even than she looked. She was like Una Mary! 
 
 I was sure she could be a friend of Una Mary s, 
 
 that here for the first time was some one who could 
 
 s understand, and I became so excited that I forgot 
 
 myself completely and was disgraced in the eyes 
 
 of the whole school by pronouncing French cor- 1 
 
 rectly. 
 
210 UNA MARY 
 
 As I have said, I had had no friends in Wash 
 ington, as I disliked the other girls in school and 
 was not allowed to know the boys, and the only 
 other boys I knew wore velvet suits and Faunt- 
 leroy collars! In our neighborhood there were 
 very few "nice" children, though there were plenty 
 of children, for just around the corner was one of 
 those curious settlements of small wooden houses 
 squatted casually down in the midst of the best 
 residential sections which used to be so character 
 istic of Washington, shiftless, untidy, and genial, 
 with fences and yards and often the houses them 
 selves a tumbled mass of honeysuckle and roses, 
 and in those houses abounded the joyous genera 
 tions of Mammy s hated "White Trash." They 
 used to play during the afternoon on Our Street, 
 which was wide and shady, and I, standing abne 
 and holding my doll in my arms inside the iron 
 fence of our front yard, envied them with all my 
 heart as I watched them swoop along hand in 
 hand on roller-skates, triumphantly "snap the 
 whip," or dash across the street playing "Prisoners 
 Base"; or sometimes a quiet mood would be upon 
 them, and they would mark out mysterious dia 
 grams for "Hop-Scotch." These I studied until I 
 could draw one for myself, with "Horses Heaven" 
 at the top and every square correctly numbered. 
 I marked it out at the foot of our front steps, and 
 
SCHOOL AND FRIENDSHIP 211 
 
 there I used to play alone, hopping and kicking my 
 disks, first as Una, then as Una Mary, playing them 
 against each other. The street children had often 
 asked me to come and play with them and I had 
 sorrowfully said I was not allowed; but when Lily, 
 a tall, handsome girl of sixteen, the leader of "the 
 gang," as they were called in the neighborhood, 
 saw me playing Hop-Scotch all alone she said: "I 
 declare it s a shame. I m going to ask her mother." 
 And up our path she boldly marched, rang the bell, 
 and demanded "the little girl s mother." I could 
 not see how any one could refuse anything to that 
 splendid, almost grown-up creature. I was palpi 
 tating with pride that she had cared to have me 
 play with her, and breathlessly waited, hoping 
 with all my being that I might be allowed to do so. 
 But it was another of those familiar will-o -the- 
 wisp hopes and disappeared at the first sound of 
 Mamma s voice, pitched in the kind, definite tone 
 that I knew was final. She was sorry to say no, 
 but was afraid, she said, that I might be hurt, some 
 of the games they played were so rough. I was 
 utterly discouraged. I wanted to get hurt and 
 tumble about again as I used to with the boys in 
 Cincinnati, but I felt duty bound, in order to back 
 Mamma up, as Lily came down the steps discom 
 fited, to say: "I wouldn t of played with you, any 
 how. You re not quality." But that night I nearly 
 
212 UNA MARY 
 
 cried my eyes out because I had insulted such a 
 glowing and exalted being. My one consolation 
 was that it was Una who had done it. The words 
 had slipped out, as they so often did, before Una 
 Mary could stop her. The unfair part was it was 
 always Una Mary who suffered for them afterward. 
 Una didn t care. Her attitude was: "What s the 
 difference? " 
 
 She was one of the most beautiful creatures I 
 had ever seen, this warm-hearted leader of "the 
 gang," and was destined a few years later to be the 
 heroine of an "affair" that shook Washington to 
 its foundations and led to the murder of two people 
 by a man who was almost crazed by love of her. 
 I have never heard of her since the trial she was 
 quite innocent of any part in the tragedy and 
 have often wondered what has become of her. She 
 had in her the making of a really great woman. I 
 know that I, at the age of ten, would gladly have 
 laid down my life for her, and could perfectly under 
 stand even committing murder for her sake, and so, 
 apparently, could the jury, for her lover was ac 
 quitted. 
 
 This shows how badly I needed a friend, some 
 one to play with, and here was Madge dropped 
 from the sky. She came to school next day as a 
 pupil, and from that first day on she was my friend, 
 "a nintimate friend," the first I had ever had. 
 
SCHOOL AND FRIENDSHIP 213 
 
 She did understand as I had hoped in that first 
 wild moment of seeing her could understand Una 
 Mary s world, and she, too, had "feelings," those 
 strange sensations and perceptions that had no 
 worcls to express them in English. 
 
 The alphabet people were as real to her as they 
 were to me, and we both adored the magic pictures 
 in the window-panes at school. The windows there 
 Were of the small-paned, old-fashioned kind, made 
 often of very imperfect pieces of glass, full of refrac 
 tions, bubbles, and wavy places. In fact, it was 
 over these that Madge and I really found each 
 other out. With fear and trembling I showed them 
 to her, and when she saw not merely broken colors 
 and distorted reflections in the glass but a whole 
 new country, as I saw it a place of fairy-tale 
 glamour and when she said at once, "What a 
 splendid castle on a rock that is!" it was Una Mary 
 who hugged her and Una Mary whom she always 
 played with afterward. 
 
 How I basked in this being understood, and how 
 I adored Madge, wonderful Madge, who knew all 
 Una Mary knew and more, two whole years worth 
 more, besides! I shared My Country and all my 
 Inner Life with her, except Edward and my Relig 
 ions; those I could not speak of even to her. 
 With her coming I gave up the Altar to the Virgin, 
 for I could not show it to her and neither, of course, 
 
214 UNA MARY 
 
 could I have a secret from her. So I took all my 
 treasures out of the crotch in the tree and packed 
 them away in a beautiful little basket with a cover, 
 very precious to me as it was another of the things 
 that had come back with the piria dress in Perry s 
 Expedition from Japan, and I put them away in the 
 bottom of my chest, my own treasure chest, where 
 I kept all my most cherished possessions and the 
 one place no one else was allowed to explore; even 
 Mamma would never have dreamed of opening it. 
 .There they still are, the Virgin relics, with a lot of 
 old letters, the paper dolls I painted, a frog s skele 
 ton that I mounted myself down at the Museum, 
 my mineral collection, Elizabeth, whose hair is 
 now moth-eaten, and a few of the East Gloucester 
 stones. I have never had the heart to "go through 
 the chest" and destroy them. 
 
 All through recess at school, after I had taken 
 away my Altar, Madge and I used to sit in the 
 willow-tree and "pretend," and during school 
 hours we escaped to Window-Pane Land, that ex 
 quisite, opalescent place of rocky summits, sunny 
 planes, shining, sunrise skies, and high adventure. 
 
 Madge felt as I did about the other girls at school. 
 They were not of our world, and we could not un 
 derstand each other. One of them called Fairy 
 by her family was of the most advanced and com 
 plete Real- Girl type. She owned three rings and 
 
SCHOOL AND FRIENDSHIP 215 
 
 a heart-shaped locket and had twenty-five cents a 
 week " allowance." Madge and I each had five 
 cents to spend as we pleased each week, which to 
 me had seemed unlimited in its purchasing power, 
 as I had only recently been advanced from two 
 cents, until Fairy pointed out that I could only 
 get one box of candy a week, while she could buy 
 one for every school day, and Saturdays and Sun 
 days her father brought candy home from down 
 town. So Madge and I took to one-cent delicacies 
 instead of boxes of candy, each of us getting a pep 
 permint stick or a cucumber pickle every day at 
 recess and sucking it before Fairy with quite five 
 cents worth of ostentation and gusto until we were 
 discovered by our families. Then pickles were for 
 bidden and candy was cut down to one cent s worth 
 a week, rather to our relief, for this saved our 
 pride, and even our candyless Saturdays and Sun 
 days were buried in the oblivion of "Our parents 
 don t allow us to eat it," and we were free to spend 
 our money, as we really preferred, for our dolls, or 
 we could save up and buy plants for our gardens, 
 or a supply of colored paper and crayons. 
 
 Fairy had long brown hair that was done up each 
 night on curl papers. When she first got to school 
 in the mornings the curls were very fat and lumpy, 
 but soon they shook out into beautiful, bobbing 
 spirals, which were the height of my admiration, 
 
216 UNA MARY 
 
 ^ 
 
 except on rainy days, when they grew limp and 
 
 limper as the day wore on until they were long, 
 
 , lank straggles down her back, a deep mortification 
 
 to poor Fairy, as I discovered one day to my cost. 
 
 It was a very rainy day and I had gone to school 
 with my hair hanging loose, Mammy hadn t had 
 time to braid it, a thing which had rarely hap 
 pened before. It hung half-way to my waist now 
 and in the dampness the ends began to curl and, 
 as the air grew damper, curled tighter and tighter 
 until at recess it was a mass of real ringlets. I was 
 delighted and showed them to Fairy, saying, "I ve 
 got curls like yours," quite forgetting at the moment 
 that her own hair was out of curl. She turned 
 upon me like a fury, grabbed my hair in both 
 hands, and pulled with all her might until I was 
 rescued by her big brother, who had been standing 
 near, and as Fairy struggled in his grasp, her fin 
 gers full of hair, she screamed: "You have no right 
 to have curls. They belong to me. I hate you! 
 I hate you! I hate you!" Then she went off 
 into almost hysterics of rage. 
 
 The tears were rolling down my cheeks from 
 pain at the hair pulling, but I was unconscious of 
 them as I held Madge s hand, and we both stared 
 aghast at the spectacle of Fairy beside herself with 
 jealousy. Why she should be jealous we could not 
 see. Why she, who was given everything she 
 
SCHOOL AND FRIENDSHIP 217 
 
 i 
 
 wanted and was so pretty and had curls all the rest 
 of the time, should grudge my one day of curls to 
 me to me, who, she always said, "looked queer" 
 was even more than my Imp could fathom. ^ 
 
 Again the horror came over me that I had felt^ 
 when I saw the drunken man. Which was her 
 real self? Was it that kicking, screaming creature 
 and the pretty, doll-like Fairy just an outside shell, 
 a shell that really ought to have some other kind 
 of self inside it? Then I remembered about her 
 mit-crabs and wondered if, when baby outsides were 
 born, inner selves who up to that time had been 
 wandering around homeless, perhaps as ghosts, 
 crept into them and took them for their own 
 bodies; and, of course, a homeless self would be apt 
 to take the first outside it came to and be in a 
 hurry about it for fear some other lost self would 
 get in first, without taking time really to investi 
 gate. This would explain a great deal if it were 
 true would really explain Una and Una Mary. 
 
 I propounded this theory to Madge, but she said : 
 " Fiddlesticks! There s nothing the matter with 
 Fairy s insides but just plain temper. She ought 
 to be spanked!" After that I never mentioned 
 Una Mary even to Madge. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 THE GAMES WE PLAYED 
 
 same winter, when I was ten years old, 
 we met Hannah and all three of us became 
 fast friends. She, too, was like us; wore the same 
 strange clothes and understood. It almost recon 
 ciled me to my own clothes, for they began to seem 
 a necessary part of " feelings." 
 
 She was a very exciting addition to our life, for 
 she came from the Tropics, had been born and 
 always lived inside the Tropic of Cancer until her 
 father was made "Minister to the United States" 
 and they came to Washington. She was highly in 
 dignant when I asked her if the air was pink in the 
 Tropics and said she " guessed they could have 
 white air as well as anybody even if they did have 
 palm-trees." She went on to say, when mollified 
 by my explanation, that I had thought so from 
 the color of the Torrid Zone on the globe at school, 
 that they did have pink rocks, and some of the 
 mountains were pink, too, while the rest of Every 
 Where was brighter-colored than anything either 
 
 218 
 
THE GAMES WE PLAYED 219 
 
 Madge or I had ever seen, bluer, greener, and 
 purpler, all so iridescent it was like living inside 
 an opal set round with sapphires, the sea and the 
 sky were such a deep, vivid blue. 
 
 Hannah was transformed in our eyes. We no 
 longer saw her as a little girl dressed in blue ging 
 ham but stared at her as we would have at a bird 
 of paradise, its plumage reminiscent of the gaudy, 
 evanescent splendors of the jungle, for Hannah had 
 actually lived in this Aladdin s Palace of a country 
 where story-book birds, plants, and animals came 
 true; where there were forests of giant tree-ferns; 
 coral reefs, sharks, wild peacocks, mongoose; where 
 goldfishes filled the streams; where rubber plants 
 were trees higher than a house; and in her own 
 front yard grew a breadfruit tree shading a foun 
 tain where lotuses bloomed just like the one in 
 Franklin Park. Fancy having a fountain of one s 
 own! It was like living in a Castle or being the 
 President s daughter, and these were all every-day 
 affairs to her. She actually had played dolls 
 among them! Nothing that had ever come within 
 the range of our experience could vie with the 
 strangeness of Hannah s every-day life when at 
 home even my once having been " drowned so I 
 was unconscious" or Madge s owning a cocker 
 spaniel and a silver watch were as nothing beside 
 having a breadfruit tree in your own front yard. 
 
220 UNA MARY 
 
 The glittering color impression was what fas- 
 cinated me most in her descriptions. It appealed 
 to Una Mary and seemed as splendid as My Coun- 
 try. I still felt that My Country was the one 
 place that could hold up its head in comparison, 
 but I could not speak of it to Hannah, who got the 
 horrors at the slightest touch of the Fairy-Tale 
 World, and Madge now felt she had outgrown 
 "magics." She only cared to hear about real 
 places. But some of the places Hannah assured 
 us were real had so the sound of magic that Madge 
 was only convinced after Hannah had " crossed 
 her heart" they were true. And no wonder she 
 doubted such things as a lake of perpetual fire 
 on top of a mountain, and a waterfall that fell from 
 so great a height it never reached the ground at all 
 but blew off in a veil of mist; and, least convinc 
 ing of all, was Hannah s casual remark that she 
 could "see a King and Queen any day. That was 
 nothing!" I always felt a queer excitement and 
 glamour about Hannah, who knew as experience 
 so much that Una Mary just imagined it made 
 her seem a sort of "real-life" Una Mary, and the 
 feeling never wore off, though she soon got tired of 
 telling us about her home, and our life together 
 settled down into the commonplace ruts of school 
 and playing dolls. 
 
 Hannah was even gloomier about her outside 
 
THE GAMES WE PLAYED 221 
 
 self than I was about Una, which surprised me as 
 every other child I knew liked herself. She was 
 then one of those unfortunate overgrown children, 
 towering head and shoulders above every one her 
 own age; and, as she was naturally shy, she felt 
 she was practically an elephant, and she hated her 
 clothes as we hated ours, though she was luckier 
 than we were, for she had a best dress which we all 
 really liked. It was made of pale-green cashmere 
 trimmed with narrow brown velvet ribbon. This, 
 greatly to my delight, I inherited when she had 
 outgrown it. I fell heir to many of her clothes, 
 for Hannah kept on growing so fast that, in spite 
 of tucks and let-down hems, she shot through her 
 dresses long before they were worn out. 
 
 With Madge and Hannah for friends, my life 
 became very happy and less tinged by a feeling of 
 difference from other people. At last I could snub 
 my Imp, when he made hateful remarks, by saying 
 that Madge and Hannah were like that, too, though 
 we felt, all three of us, that there was something 
 radically wrong about us which prevented our 
 being of the Real- Girl kind, that species of child 
 we pretended to scorn but would have given our 
 life s blood to become. We hoped the trouble lay 
 mainly with our clothes, for no other children 
 looked as queer as we did except the daughters of 
 the British Ambassador. 
 
222 UNA MARY 
 
 I remember one year we all suffered from leg 
 horn hats with striped Italian-silk caps ending in 
 tassels for crowns. Hannah s sister brought ours 
 to us from Europe, and the English girls, who 
 rather admired them, had theirs when they arrived. 
 We despised ours. The little street boys used to 
 call after me, "Towhead, Tassel Top," which so 
 wore upon me, after the Imp adopted it as his 
 favorite refrain, that I finally bit a piece out of the 
 rim of my hat so that it could no longer be worn 
 in the city but only in the country, a heaven too 
 exclusive for street boys and where the Imp was 
 almost negligible. 
 
 The height of fashion was as far from our ideal 
 as the sensible. We simply longed to be of the 
 vast majority. The next winter as we passed 
 through Boston the only stores Mamma felt she 
 could rely upon were there I was allowed to select 
 my own winter coat, and my aunt, who was with 
 me, told Mamma with disgust that I had picked out 
 the commonest one we saw. How I wished all my 
 clothes could be common! 
 
 We played in the parks every afternoon. There 
 are so many and such varied parks in Washington 
 that we could select a park to suit the mood of 
 almost any day. We were allowed to roam about 
 alone now, Madge and I, and could always "pick 
 up" Hannah. I had even gone to the dentist s 
 
THE GAMES WE PLAYED 223 
 
 and down-town shopping alone, but that was con 
 sidered rather adventurous. When a social, dem 
 ocratic mood was upon us we went to Franklin 
 Park, where we could talk to the public-school 
 children as they came out of the near-by Franklin 
 School at three o clock our school was out at 
 one for when alone and unhampered I threw 
 Mammy s "quality" standard to the wind, and we 
 had very satisfactory times playing jackstraws and 
 " swopping alleys" with them. I occasionally see 
 one of them in Market now, a placid, round-faced 
 matron with a basket on her arm, and much 
 happier she looks than most of the Quality I 
 know. 
 
 Then there were other reasons why Franklin 
 Park was desirable. First and foremost, it had a 
 fountain, and in warm weather the fountain played, 
 tossed, and caught and laughed over the glittering, 
 bubbling spray that fell splashing to the basin 
 where wise old goldfish, fantails, hid under the 
 shade of the lotus leaves. The lotus flowers, when 
 there were any, drowsed away the hours wrapped 
 in Oriental calm caught off into a timeless space, 
 unconscious alike of us and of the fountain. We 
 never talked about the lotus flowers. They affected 
 us too deeply, and even Hannah, who had seen them 
 all her life, had a far-away dream quality in her 
 gaze as she looked at them; and Una Mary knew 
 
224 UNA MARY 
 
 they were not flowers but incarnations of what, 
 I did not know; but I felt the knowledge hovering 
 on the border of my consciousness. 
 
 In this park, too, there were the finest flowering 
 cherry and peach trees in the city the double- 
 flowered Japanese kind, pink-crested billows foam 
 ing with petals, rather than trees. We always 
 went there on Peach-Tree Saturday. It is a secret 
 which Saturday that was. 
 
 ^ Lafayette Park was, of course, pre-eminent for 
 its magnolia-trees, large, old ones with flowers late 
 in the spring that were over a foot in diameter 
 Empresses of flowers, holding court among the rich, 
 green, shining leaves. All the trees in Lafayette 
 Park seemed older and more established than in 
 the other parks, seemed to have the feel of old 
 parts of the city, grew with more dignity and a 
 sort of high-bred air of reserve that ignored un- 
 swept paths and trifling dilapidations. They even 
 seemed to like the green corroding the bronze of 
 the statue in their midst. I think they felt really 
 proud of it as showing that he, too, was of the old 
 regime and no upstart, newly " Erected by order 
 of Congress." There was moss instead of grass 
 under some of the trees, their shade was so dense. 
 This is the park we went to when there were 
 weighty matters on hand, secrets; or when "pre 
 tending" must be done in a serious, dignified way. 
 
THE GAMES WE PLAYED 225 
 
 It was always Una Mary, flitting and elusive, who 
 played in Lafayette Park. 
 
 Dupont Circle was the park where we played 
 most. It was the nearest, and then one did not 
 have to be in any special mood to go there. It 
 took you in feeling anyhow, and, needless to say, 
 had no very marked characteristics, except that 
 its flower-beds were always attractive. They kept 
 pansies in them all winter and not a week passed, 
 no matter how cold it was, that we could not find 
 at least one pansy in bloom; and the forsythia and 
 pink magnolias came out there before they did in 
 any other place, except in our own back yard. 
 
 How we loved those flower-filled, beautifully 
 arranged Washington parks with their luxuriant, 
 dense-leaved trees! As I walk through them now 
 each tree rustles to me of " secrets" quivering with 
 Una Mary s "Long Ago," and the shade under 
 them is saturated with mysterious excitements. 
 
 Madge s father, like mine, was a scientist, so she, 
 too, knew more or less about plants and animals, 
 and in return for what Hannah told us of the 
 almost unbelievable wonders of her country we 
 taught her all we knew about our own flowers, less 
 showy than hers, perhaps, but infinitely lovable, 
 and she soon cared for them with a depth of feeling 
 that only Una Mary could understand. 
 
 We had almost a flower cult, we were all so 
 
226 UNA MARY 
 
 devoted to them, a worship of the seasons in terms 
 of the plants they brought, and even the changes 
 of color the bare twigs went through in the early 
 spring, long before there was the slightest indica 
 tion of leaves, were absorbingly important to us. 
 
 With Madge and Hannah to share all my outer 
 and part of my inner life, I became much more 
 Una and less Una Mary. Not that I was then 
 conscious of it in those terms; on the contrary, I 
 thought I was more Una Mary because they were 
 her friends and she at last had a chance to come 
 outside and play. They were her friends, that is 
 true, and it was this fact that made them the first 
 real friends I had ever had; but, having them to 
 play with life was very active and happy, full of out 
 ward concrete events, leaving very little time when 
 I could dream or pretend as Una Mary except 
 at night. The before-going-to-sleep time was still 
 wholly hers to spend with Edward in My Country. 
 
 Dolls and a Paper Dolls House were Hannah s 
 absorbing passion, and, of course, Madge and I at 
 once started Paper Dolls Houses of our own. 
 They were large scrap-books in which we pasted 
 mantels, doorways, windows, furniture, and bric-a- 
 brac cut from the advertisements in the backs of 
 magazines. Each double page was, of course, a 
 room, and our great difficulty was to find all the 
 things we needed to furnish it of the same scale. 
 
THE GAMES WE PLAYED 227 
 
 Often in advertisements it said: "On receipt of 
 five cents for postage we will mail you our splen 
 didly illustrated catalogue." In catalogues the 
 illustrations were apt to be of the same size and so 
 seemed absolutely made to use in furnishing our 
 houses. We got Madge s maid to write for them 
 for us, supplying the five cents in turn as it could 
 not be divided into thirds. The Wakefield Rattan 
 Company issued the catalogues we prized most. 
 
 Our paper dolls would soon have lived in veri 
 table palaces of wickerwork, plush upholstery, and 
 potted plants on flower stands if Mamma had not 
 discovered through the sudden bulkiness of my 
 mail that we were sending for the catalogues and 
 put a stop to it on the ground that it was not fair 
 to the people who published them, as, she explained, 
 we were not the buying public and so we were 
 really getting the catalogues under false pretences. 
 I asked if I might send for them if I wrote myself 
 and said we were just little girls, and Mamma said 
 I might, that that would make it quite fair. 
 
 Mantelpieces were what we needed most, and a 
 catalogue containing twenty-five plates was adver 
 tised; so I wrote to the mantel firm myself. I 
 copied the letter four times before it was all spelled 
 correctly, and then the Imp dabbed on a blot. In 
 it I explained that we did not expect to order any 
 mantelpieces ourselves, but we could use all those 
 
228 UNA MARY 
 
 they illustrated in our paper dolls houses, where, 
 of course, they would be seen by our friends, many 
 of whom were building, and so I felt it might really 
 pay them in the end as an advertisement. I added 
 that in case they did not care to send me their 
 catalogue I hoped they would return the enclosed 
 five-cent stamp, as it had cost me a whole week s 
 allowance. 
 
 By return mail I received a bundle of catalogues 
 and additional plates that had cost the mantel firm 
 thirty-five cents for postage! Their generosity 
 downed Mamma s arguments forever. It proved 
 to our minds that the firms felt it paid them, 
 from a business point of view, to send us the cata 
 logues. And I really think it did, for the spell cast 
 over me by some of those paper dolls chairs and 
 tables has made me buy some exactly like them for 
 my grown-up house. There were two rattan chairs 
 in particular I simply had to have as soon as I went 
 to housekeeping, and it was a terrible wrench to 
 deny myself a sofa shaped like a shell it was my 
 great pride, on pages 3-4, The Parlor and I long 
 for it still for sentiment s sake. That particular 
 mantel firm I have recommended to all the archi 
 tects I know. They were delightful mantels for 
 slim young-men paper dolls to lean against as they 
 smiled down at lovely ladies, sitting on "Nan- 
 tasket sofa, No. 17." 
 
THE GAMES WE PLAYED 229 
 
 We started a magazine called The Ghosts 1 Com 
 panion, illustrated with labyrinths it was sup 
 posed to be the ghosts pleasure to explore at 
 night. I always left my copy at the bottom of 
 the back stairs, and it so pacified the ghost there 
 that I never once had the "ghost feel" at my skin; 
 and Aunt Louisa couldn t scent him even on Hal 
 lowe en. 
 
 I gave a Hallowe en party that year, with the 
 delighted assistance of Aunt Louisa, Mammy, and 
 the cook we had then, Abbie, who was as great an 
 authority on ghosts as Aunt Louisa. It was even 
 whispered darkly in the kitchen "dat she cud make 
 hoodoo powders," in consequence of which we all 
 treated her with great respect. I wondered if 
 she could give me a powder that would make me 
 really into Una Mary, but I did not dare try, for it 
 might kill Una instead. A powder had killed a 
 girl Mammy knew she took one she thought was 
 going to make her grow beautiful and then found 
 she had taken by mistake the grow-ugly kind she 
 had bought to give to some one else, so she just 
 went to bed and died, in spite of the doctor, who 
 examined the powder and said there was nothing 
 in it to make her sick, as it was only made of plain 
 white flour which simply proved to our minds 
 how little doctors knew. As Aunt Louisa said: 
 "No doctor kahn t cure yo when he got no more 
 
230 UNA MARY 
 
 respec for hants en debbils den er body-snatcher. 
 Dere s hoodoos mixed wid ebery ailin . De onliest 
 t ing is er black cat to suck yo bref and suck out 
 de hoodoo." I really pitied the poor doctors for 
 their ignorance. Our cat had three white hairs in 
 -nis tail, but I hoped he would still do in an emer 
 gency. 
 
 Abbie must have called in all the ghosts at her 
 command to come to my party, such strange things 
 happened that Hallowe en. They made melted 
 lead, when it was poured into cold water, take fan 
 tastic shapes by which Aunt Louisa could tell our 
 fortunes. Even good, sturdy, common-sense ap 
 ples were visibly bewitched and absolutely sprang 
 away from us when we tried to bite them hanging 
 at the ends of long strings from the kitchen ceiling; 
 and as for the apples we bobbed for in the laundry 
 tubs, they splashed us from head to foot as we 
 came up empty-mouthed and sputtering; and ap 
 ple parings, after we had whirled them three times 
 around our heads, fell in letters that were the ini 
 tials of the men we were to marry. Mine fell in the 
 shape of the letter G, which was a blow, as the only 
 man I knew whose name began with G was an 
 elderly inventor whom I hated because he always 
 kissed me when he came to the house and gave me 
 handkerchiefs each Christmas. There was also a 
 lady who always gave us handkerchiefs, and to this 
 
THE GAMES WE PLAYED 231 
 
 day I do not know her whole name, as we never 
 called her anything but Mrs. Handkerchief-Smith. 
 
 It was a very gay party, indeed. I think they 
 must have been visiting ghosts that night 
 " Kinder tramp ghosteses" Mammy called them, 
 not "so spectable ez er house ghost dats boun ter 
 hant regular." I think she looked upon them with 
 the same sort of scorn she felt for "dem no-count 
 yaller gals dats allus er changin places" stray 
 ghosts, perhaps, that had not as yet found "out- 
 sides" to slip into, allowed for this one night in 
 the year to come from the outer darkness into our 
 houses, so glad of the warmth and jollity that they 
 were on their best company behavior, not terri 
 fying at all but full of rollicking fun. 
 
 They even protected us for that one night from 
 our "Regular Hant," the back-stairs ghost, for I 
 came down those stairs backward holding a mirror 
 and did not see a single thing reflected in it, which 
 was secretly a disappointment, as I had hoped for 
 a shuddering glimpse of the "Back-stairs It." 
 
 The magazine, too, naturally gave the ghosts a 
 friendly feeling toward us, and we were no longer 
 afraid of them; even the one who grabbed your 
 heels in the dark would respect the artist of such 
 fascinating and difficult labyrinths. I dedicated 
 several of them to him and arranged various treats 
 and surprises to lure him along the way. For in- 
 
232 UNA MARY 
 
 stance, when he had wandered only a few miles 
 along the wiggly line that was the path he came to 
 a cat adorned with a blue-crayon bow, his to keep 
 if he wanted her; and a little farther along he might 
 come to an enclosure where he could rest on a 
 bench and listen to the songs of four caged canaries; 
 then, if he was clever enough to get out of there, 
 he discovered a diamond ring lying at his feet 
 you knew it was a diamond because it was drawn 
 with innumerable pencilled rays coming from the 
 stone and so on; one present after another 
 tempted him along until he found himself at the 
 centre, living in a delightful outlined house with 
 green-chalk blinds, surrounded by a garden with a 
 white-crayon picket fence every one knows the 
 charm of using white crayon and a padlocked 
 gate. 
 
 I am sure there are many ghosts still prisoned in 
 those pictured labyrinths, for it was most difficult 
 when once inside to get out again. That gate in 
 the picket fence may have closed forever on the 
 heel-grabbing ghost. I have never felt him since 
 then. At any rate, I drew a very formidable pad 
 lock on the gate! 
 
 Madge made the best labyrinths of all they were 
 her idea originally and some of hers were so com 
 plicated that after they were finished she could 
 not find the way out herself. She gave names in 
 
THE GAMES WE PLAYED 233 
 
 printed letters to the resting-places along the paths. 
 Qne, I remember, which sounded irresistible was 
 "Spaniel s Delight." 
 
 We were all of us full of superstitions. Hannah 
 had a strange, miscellaneous collection of fears and 
 prejudices handed on to her by their native and 
 Chinese and Japanese servants, plus the good, 
 solid old Calvinistic horrors an aunt had felt it her 
 duty to try and implant, and Madge had had an 
 Irish nurse of an imaginative and picturesque turn 
 of mind; so all these, added to my negro store, gave 
 us a rich and varied assortment, with something to 
 fit every occasion in life. 
 
 Mamma was very fond of a green vine called 
 Wandering- Jew, which grows in water in a dank, 
 unwholesome sort of way. Ever since I could re 
 member there had been vases of it on the mantel 
 piece and in the centre of the dining-table. Madge 
 one day said that there was always illness in a 
 house where Wandering- Jew grew her nurse had 
 told her so and that must be the reason why my 
 mother was an invalid most of the time. 
 
 We were all fearfully shocked, my sisters and I, 
 and felt it was almost our fault that Mamma had 
 been ill so long. If we had only known before! 
 Naturally, the best thing we could do was at once 
 to gather up the pieces of vine from all the vases 
 and destroy them. This we did; tore them to 
 
234 UNA MARY 
 
 shreds and buried the fragments a foot deep in the 
 back yard. Afterward we thought Mamma seemed 
 a little better, and, anyway, as Madge said, we had 
 prevented her growing any worse and probably 
 had saved her life. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 WORDS, NEW AND OLD 
 
 had endless "feelings," Madge, Hannah, 
 and I, for which there seemed to be no 
 words in English and none in the French and Ger 
 man we knew, and certainly not in the few stray 
 words and phrases Hannah knew from the language 
 spoken by their natives at home and which she 
 had taught us for "secrets." 
 
 Words before had seemed a negligible quantity, 
 merely our slaves and puppets. Now suddenly 
 they seemed powerful, assertive, in a measure our 
 masters, for our thoughts could express themselves 
 only within the limits words had fixed for them; if 
 they tried to soar beyond, our thoughts were lost 
 as far as others were concerned. Una Mary might 
 hover free as air through far-reaching realms of in 
 tuition and feeling, but if she tried to share those 
 realms, tried to give them to Una to express, words 
 were the tyrants who decreed "just so far and no 
 farther may you go. If you break beyond our 
 walls, oblivion is your fate, the outer nothingness 
 
 235 
 
236 UNA MARY 
 
 of other people s minds." I was as surprised when 
 I realized this as Marie Antoinette when the Pop 
 ulace threw her into the B as tile. 
 
 Some of our "feelings" were too vague for us to 
 define in any way, but others were quite concrete 
 and to be explained if only the words for them 
 existed, so we decided with some other children to 
 help out the language by making up the missing 
 words ourselves. I think it was Madge who in 
 vented our method. 
 
 When there was an idea to be expressed, after we 
 had all discussed it, each one contributing her 
 exact shade of feeling, we decided on the meaning 
 that seemed best to average up our variations. 
 Then we drew lots for first, second, and sometimes 
 third syllables, though most of the words were of 
 two syllables only. Those of us who drew the 
 syllable slips concentrated our minds on finding, 
 each one of us, some sound of not more than three 
 letters that suggested to her the feeling to be ex 
 pressed; and then when all were ready these syl 
 lables were combined in the order of the numbers 
 on the slips we had drawn. 
 
 For instance, we wanted a word for the free, wild 
 feeling it gave us to be out on a dark night when 
 the wind from far away was tossing the tree tops, 
 and the shadows cast by our lanterns were dancing 
 fantastically over the blown grass. We used often 
 
WORDS, NEW AND OLD 237 
 
 to go out with lanterns in the grounds of Madge s 
 house in the country just to revel in this feeling on 
 autumn nights when the moon blinked and crackled 
 in the cold. We chose the three syllables pli di 
 trants, making when put together " Pliditrants," 
 We used to shout the word out into the night and 
 it seemed to sum up in its sound all the aerie exhil- 
 aration that we felt, like the cat that, 
 
 "Whisked her tail to the twittering moon." 
 
 The definition we gave it in the dictionary of our 
 words was: " Children alone in the night." I have 
 that dictionary still, denning sixty-three of our 
 words, arranged as a rhyme. 
 
 Our words were all " secrets" at first, only to be 
 revealed to the very understanding few and only 
 to be made up under the most secret circumstances, 
 in some very private place like the top of a tree or 
 in a cave dug into the side of a sand-dune or under 
 a drooping umbrella-tree in the Park, and, of course, 
 my suspended closet was a perfect place to make 
 them. They soon, however, became so essential a 
 part of our speech that we used all but two of 
 them with everybody, and some of them are still 
 in common use among our friends and relations. 
 They were all nouns or adjectives. 
 
 "Thuka" was a quality of color found either in 
 green or blue of farmhouse shutters, old pumps, 
 
238 UNA MARY 
 
 and dump-carts. It is that peculiarly comfortable 
 blue green or faded cobalt blue that one only finds 
 in the country and associates with such joys as 
 trips after loads of wood, bumping along "sitting 
 on behind" the cart, ready to jump out at any 
 moment, or helping harvest the corn and apples in 
 the fall, riding home on the full, rich-smelling loads. 
 I associate it also with delicious deep drinks out 
 of a tin dipper at some friendly blue pump where 
 we stopped in the course of a walk and gossiped 
 with the farmer s wife, who usually in the end gave 
 us cookies or doughnuts to eat, and there were cer 
 tain old-fashioned doors we particularly loved that 
 were painted a thuka color. Pink hollyhocks were 
 wonderful with it, and they often grew beside such 
 doorways. 
 
 " Mingy" was the half-exhilarated, half-giddy 
 feeling one had when, after whirling through space 
 on the swing in the barn until one had " tipped the 
 beam," there came a moment of absolute poise just 
 before the back swing, a moment when the heart 
 almost stopped beating that queer sensation at 
 the climax of motion was mingy, and one had it 
 spiritually as well as physically. It was the calm 
 in the centre of storm of any kind. It always came 
 in the midst of rages and panics, and then, if one 
 had the sense to recognize that it was mingy, 
 one might seize hold of one s self and keep calm, 
 
WORDS, NEW AND OLD 239 
 
 just as we sometimes at that moment of poise 
 jumped from the swing to the beam above the 
 barn-door. One often felt it in the top of a tree 
 when the wind blew. It was the moment to let 
 go when "bending a birch" and drop lightly to the 
 ground, and it was most dramatic of all in a canoe, 
 still for a breathless instant before the plunge 
 through a stretch of rapids. 
 
 "Dowyow" was the sort of calf-love we used 
 to see overtaking girls and boys in their teens 
 it would now be called a "crush" to us per 
 fectly sickening as a spectacle and yet rather in 
 teresting, it took such strange forms. There were 
 frequent opportunities for watching it when we 
 visited Madge in the summer, for she went always 
 to a real Summer Resort, and the beach simply 
 swarmed with "affairs." The boys were always 
 stealing the girls hair ribbons to carry about as 
 mementos, which reminded me of Mammy s story 
 of the little girls who lived next a cemetery and al 
 ways wore such splendid hair ribbons that every 
 body wondered how their mother could afford it, 
 until a day when one of them appeared in a rib 
 bon with some gilt letters on it which proved to be 
 "Rest in peace." For some reason I felt the same 
 element of sacrilege here. 
 
 There was another form of love we could not 
 explain what the difference was, but it gave us a 
 
240 UNA MARY 
 
 very distinct sensation when we saw it; and it was 
 again quite different from the love of people who 
 were married. This kind of love was very silent. 
 It had a hot, intense glance and made the hands 
 tremble. We had only seen it a few times. I knew 
 most about it, for I had once gone into a room think 
 ing it was empty and had been utterly startled to 
 find a man holding a girl by both hands and looking 
 into her eyes in a way that made shivers run all 
 through me. It was terrible and wonderful, and 
 they were so absorbed in each other they never 
 heard me at all and never knew I saw. This love 
 we named "Predalis," and it was only to be spoken 
 of with bated breath. Predalis was our greatest 
 " secret " and was only told to a very few after 
 they had promised, " cross my heart and hope to 
 die," never to tell any one. 
 
 One of our favorite words was "Stowish." The 
 definition was "middlish un thought of." In most 
 families there is one stowish member, some one 
 who comes near the middle and is very useful and 
 fine, the one who is apt to do all the (5frd or dis 
 agreeable jobs, but somehow is always being over 
 looked by people outside and taken for granted by 
 the family. Among the days of the week, it is 
 Thursday, of course good, conscientious Thurs 
 day. It would never come first into any one s 
 mind if asked suddenly to mention a day of the 
 
WORDS, NEW AND OLD 241 
 
 week. Six and four are both stowish numbers. I 
 wonder if every one gets an impression of good 
 ness from them? I always do. All stowish things 
 seem to have an inherent goodness, a Martha 
 quality, and to seem a dull drab in color. 
 
 Nearly everything had color to us, and to me 
 most people have always been very distinctive 
 colors that I feel at once as soon as I see them. 
 Madge was an amber yellow; Hannah was gray- 
 blue; and they all thought I was blue-green. I felt 
 sure Una Mary was vivid emerald green. Half 
 
 / the population of the world seemed to be in shades 
 of brown. We none of us ever wore brown if we 
 could help it, for we could not bear to look the way 
 those people made us feel. Real Girls were either 
 a mild pale blue, "baby blue," or a rather acrid 
 
 - pink. The nicest boy we knew was gray, and 
 the next nicest was a dark red. 
 
 We all three had a very keen sense of resem 
 blances, not outward but emotional resemblances. 
 It was really a form of symbolism. We could de 
 scribe people in terms of objects. I came across 
 an old letter the other day in which I spoke of 
 some one as being like a dump-cart driven by a 
 canary; and another person I knew was made up 
 of a sunset and a market-basket. We spent many 
 odd hours playing the game of what colors peo 
 ple were we almost always agreed on them and 
 
242 UNA MARY 
 
 the things of which they reminded us. Una Mary 
 was made of a crystal ball and a gold ring, while 
 Una was a sailboat, a pair of forceps, and a pic^ 
 ture-book. 
 
 To return to our words. My favorite one was 
 "Trando." I had always felt the need of it, and 
 the first syllable, tran, was mine. It meant the 
 feeling of an unseen beyond. In our dictionary we 
 called it "The look into feeling," and the best illus 
 tration we could give was that of a road winding 
 up a hillside to a pair of bars on the crest of the 
 hill against the sky. The road must lead some 
 where, and the bars in themselves showed there 
 must be something special beyond. But what? 
 That certainty of an unknown what was trando. 
 
 One also felt it in looking down a dark passage 
 way between houses or down a narrow, crooked 
 street. Venice is the most trando city in the world ; 
 that is half its charm for every one, only most peo 
 ple lack the word to express what it is they feel 
 when they wander on foot along the tortuous side 
 walks and courtyards that honeycomb the build 
 ings between the canals. Mystery, romance, ad 
 venture lurk beyond each corner, where one catches 
 glimpses of silent water sombre and rich as an old 
 brocade with glints of gold and rose and azure in 
 the sunlight Venice, when I first saw it at sun 
 set, a Dream City of Una Mary s! It seemed of 
 
WORDS, NEW AND OLD 243 
 
 her world and like the palaces she wove, of tjie iri 
 descent substance of bubbles to vanish at a touch. 
 Most of all to me, trando was the beyond feeling 
 mountains always gave me. It was the place 
 where View lived. To Madge it was most vividly 
 that sense some rolling hills give one, that the sea 
 is just on the other side. Trando is still a very 
 real and necessary word to us and to our friends. 
 
 " The look into feeling is called trando. 
 Bomattle is the place where the lost things go." 
 
 So they are written in our rhymed dictionary. Bo 
 mattle was the heaven of lost pins, the place where 
 the knees and toes of stockings and elbows of dresses 
 went when they wore out, and Madge and Hannah 
 thought the flames of blown-out matches went 
 there, too. It was useful but crowded, rather like, 
 a neglected attic. 
 
 Another word we used, which has almost become 
 English so many people know it, is "Beadle." That 
 we did not make up ourselves but borrowed from 
 some friends of Hannah s and took it over to 
 become an associate member of our language. I 
 have even seen it used in a book. It meant the 
 kind of commonness that is not pronounced enough 
 to be called vulgarity but still is the type of 
 unconscious bad taste that makes one all crinkle 
 up inside. Beadle people are the only ones it is 
 
244 UNA MARY 
 
 quite impossible to know and beadle houses sim 
 ply smother one. We certainly were not snobs, as 
 some of our most intimate friends were servants 
 and farm-hands, but a touch of beadle we simply 
 would not and could not stand. Real Girls were 
 often beadle. The most perfect example of a 
 typical beadle person is the wife of the hero in 
 William de Morgan s book, "It Never Can Happen 
 Again." I know just how he felt about her. At 
 the end of an invitation to a church party I once 
 saw this sentence, "Acquaintance making will com 
 mence at nine o clock," and it struck me as the 
 most luminous example of beadle I had ever heard. 
 "Spaily" was the exact opposite of beadle, but 
 almost as unattractive, as it had a quality of pathos 
 that was deadly. It is total lack of charm com 
 bined with a long-backed, narrow-shouldered effect 
 beloved of English dressmakers, with lanky skirts 
 riding up in front at the time when it was un 
 fashionable to ride up in front not shabby clothes 
 at all or outgrown, but deliberately and compla 
 cently made so. It is a certain kind of old-maid- 
 ishness that has in it an attempt at fashion. The 
 same effect could be given by combining the wrong 
 colors brown and a shade of bright pink put to 
 gether give it, or gray with light blue. Rooms can 
 be as spaily as people. Country parlors always 
 are if the people who own them are prosperous 
 
WORDS, NEW AND OLD 245 
 
 enough to make them so. We had another word, 
 " Faxy, " to describe stuffy parlors with wax flowers 
 under glass cases. 
 
 The humiliation of my life was that my back, 
 Una s back, do what I would to it, was always 
 spaily. There was something about the way my 
 neck, with its braids of hair, grew out of my collar 
 that had the fatal look. Madge s mother tried to 
 console me about it by saying that at least it looked 
 like the back of a lady, which was only more con 
 vincing still, for the worst form of spaily only 
 exists among gentlefolk! Neither Madge nor 
 Hannah had a trace of it, so I decided it must be 
 because of my Boston ancestors and, along with 
 my clothes, was just another burden they had put 
 upon my shoulders. It was really a fear of spail- 
 ness that was the horror of their lives in Miss Al- 
 cott s family of " Little Women," only they lacked 
 the consolation of knowing what the word for it 
 was. I really found that quite a help. 
 
 "Loo" was a jolly word and meant a state which 
 our own possessions never reached. We could 
 achieve it only for our dolls. It meant having just 
 what you need to use and to wear and having it all 
 in perfect order, like a soldier s uniform and kit. 
 With us it would have meant a best dress and 
 hat, an every-day dress and hat, one coat, one 
 pair of rubbers, two pairs of gloves and shoes, and 
 
246 UNA MARY 
 
 brand-new hair ribbons all the things in perfect 
 s condition, no half worn outs or made overs or 
 hand-me-downs about it a state of things as re 
 mote as Heaven and, like Heaven, only theoreti 
 cally longed for, because hand-me-downs had a real 
 charm. One wondered so what experiences they 
 had gone through before. I was sure I could tell 
 if they had been sad or happy clothes. And made 
 overs were almost always prettier than in their orig 
 inal state. They seemed really to find themselves 
 and develop all their possibilities, though I must 
 say the Imp was most scornful of them and abso 
 lutely frank about it. 
 
 These are enough to give an idea of what our 
 words were like, and, except for the few very secret 
 ones, we used them with everybody, even with our 
 parents. 
 
 Words in themselves always affected me strongly, 
 and I remember one day when the realization of 
 a word almost overwhelmed me. I was walking 
 home from Noah s Toy Shop, that emporium of 
 joys "from a penny up," on Fourteenth Street, 
 sucking an " all-day sucker" and admiring a new 
 doll I had just bought for a quarter. I was saying 
 to her, "I hope I shall like you very much," when 
 abruptly the word hope popped out of the sentence 
 and looked at me as surprisingly as a Jack-in-a- 
 box. Then, as I thought about it, it seemed like 
 
WORDS, NEW AND OLD 247 
 
 an old and taken-for-granted friend suddenly be 
 come a new and extraordinary being. I said it over 
 and over to myself, Hope, Hope, Hope, and each 
 time, like a stone flung into a pond, the sound went 
 off into the outer margin of my mind in ever-widen 
 ing circles of significance until I lost all sense of its 
 literalness and could not discover what the great 
 something was that I felt about it, whether it really 
 had anything to do with its meaning or was some 
 thing in the sound and make of the word. 
 
 When I got home I wrote it down to see how 
 it looked, and still it gave me the same sensation. . 
 For days it was there nearly all the time, in the 
 background of my mind and led me to wonder 
 about other words until language became the me 
 dium of a vast symphony of sound and I began 
 to make up combinations of words solely for 
 their sounds. I took passionately to the verses of 
 " Alice in Wonderland" I had thought them 
 rather silly before and learned the whole of the 
 Jabberwock by heart to recite aloud, glorying in 
 its richness. 
 
 Rhymes and rhythm became a necessity to me, 
 and one night I woke up, broad awake in the mid 
 dle of the night, with the conviction that I had to 
 write a poem. So I got up then and there and- 
 wrote it down a poem of the sea. It was eight 
 verses long, although only one of them has sur- 
 
248 INA MARY 
 
 vived. I found it the other day in the note-book 
 I began to keep when I was ten of Una Mary s 
 " Feelings." The night I wrote the poem I felt it 
 was magnificent. This is the first verse: 
 
 THE SEA 
 
 " The waves have risen wild and free 
 Like the Klu Klux bands 
 On the terrified sands, 
 The White Riders of the sea. 
 With a crash and a rush 
 Their wild manes brush 
 And blot the sky from me." 
 
 Soon after this we were given Scott s novels for 
 Christmas, and from the day when I first opened 
 "Ivanhoe" I knew I had come into a world that 
 was my own. Scott knew Una Mary, and his 
 books seemed almost accounts of what her life in 
 My Country would be when she and Edward had 
 grown up. 
 
 How I lived in those books! By the time I was 
 thirteen I had read them all, and some of them for 
 the third time. "Quentin Durward" I could 
 almost repeat by heart. My father loved them as 
 I did and we used to read them aloud together. It 
 was really a family inheritance, one of the good 
 things that came down in my Boston blood, for 
 my grandfather all his life read Scott over and 
 over again, and the last book I saw him reading 
 
WORDS, NEW AND OLD 249 
 
 before his death, at the age of eighty-four, was 
 "Guy Mannering"; and there are very amusing 
 stories about his father, my great-grandfather, who 
 was a Unitarian minister and not quite sure about 
 the ethics of novel reading in a minister s family. 
 They had started a small lending library in the 
 town where he was settled. It was my great- 
 grandmother s idea, and all the books were given 
 out by her at the Parsonage, and, of course, among 
 their number were copies of the new fiction then 
 coming out, and "Waverley" was one of them. 
 Everybody went wild over it, and the minister felt 
 it his duty to read the first number to be sure it 
 was a proper book for his parishioners. That 
 sealed his doom as far as Scott s novels were con 
 cerned. Each number that appeared after that, as 
 soon as it reached the Parsonage, was seized by him 
 and secreted until he had finished reading it. He 
 never spoke of it and no one in the family made 
 any remarks. The book simply vanished for a time 
 and then reappeared on the library shelf, though 
 his attitude about other fiction remained un 
 changed, and the light literature belonging to the 
 family was still kept in a box in the attic, where it 
 was read surreptitiously by the children. 
 , I still have so strongly the family affection for 
 Scott that I had a feeling of sacrilege when I over 
 heard, not long ago, a conversation between a Har- 
 
250 UNA MARY 
 
 vard student and a very pretty girl who were having 
 tea at the Country Club. He had just told her he 
 came from Cooperstown, where Cooper, the novel 
 ist, lived. She replied that she had never heard of 
 Cooper, and he, scandalized at her ignorance, had 
 gone on to give her a list of his books, when a light 
 suddenly broke over her face and she said: "Oh, I 
 know now. The same sort of people read them 
 who read Scott s novels. I am thankful, indeed, 
 that I grew up and still am "that same sort of 
 person!" 
 
 At school I had been given drawing lessons, and 
 at home my grandmother, who herself painted 
 exceedingly well, had helped me with suggestions 
 about mixing colors and putting on paint, so I 
 began to draw and paint in earnest, no longer for 
 amusement but for the companionship of express 
 ing myself and putting into visible form this world 
 of Scott s novels. I did illustrations for all of 
 them, reproducing the detail as lovingly as he had 
 described it. 
 
 Then I discovered Shakespeare! I have always 
 been glad I found him for myself just stumbled on 
 him, not knowing he existed, like Columbus run 
 ning into America. I had always seen the little 
 red-leather volumes in the bookcase, and one day 
 I listlessly took down "Hamlet." I began to read, 
 and Una Mary fairly purred with satisfaction. 
 
WORDS, NEW AND OLD 251 
 
 Then, as I went on, she was shaken as she had never 
 . been shaken before by the beauty and the tragedy 
 of it all words, pictures, emotions woven together 
 into one perfect whole, its threads of the warp and 
 woof of her world. That evening I took it with 
 me to the kitchen. I felt I had to read it aloud. 
 I wanted really to hear the lines roll out before an 
 audience. So to Mammy and Aunt Louisa and 
 the cook I read it. They, too, were entranced, and 
 after that when Aunt Louisa had sewing to do she 
 used to ask me to "Come erlong and read dat 
 murder piece." 
 
 I revived my toy theatre, a survival of the Cin 
 cinnati days. Agnes had given it to me as a good- 
 by present. For it I painted new scenery, made 
 actors cut out of cardboard who could be pulled by 
 strings along grooves for their exits and their en 
 trances, and, not satisfied with acting the whole 
 of Shakespeare, wrote plays of my own for the 
 puppets to perform. Madge, Hannah, and I pre 
 sented them together, each of us being responsi 
 ble for the strings and the lines of certain of the 
 characters. 
 
 From this and the plays I had seen in real the 
 atres I was fired, of course, with an ambition to go 
 on the stage as a child actress. I had seen the girl 
 who took the part of Little Lord Fauntleroy, and 
 was certain I could do it quite as well, if not better, 
 
252 UNA MARY 
 
 and at last my opening came. I was asked to take 
 part in some private theatricals in a real hall and 
 was allowed by my family to do so. The rehears 
 als were thrilling. At first the Imp was a great 
 trouble, for he kept whispering to me that it was 
 useless to feel that I was the Lady Jocelyn, that I 
 was just plain Una and no amount of velvet train 
 could change the way my back looked. But I 
 resolutely choked him off. I would be the Lady 
 Jocelyn for that play at least and could keep my 
 back turned away from the audience. 
 
 All went well at the final performance. I wore a 
 green velvet mediaeval gown, a jewelled girdle, and 
 a high, peaked cap with a veil floating from its top 
 just like one of the pictures in the Corcoran Gal 
 lery. I said my lines passably, and the real stage 
 seemed to me my next inevitable step in life until 
 the moment when the play was over and I stood on 
 the stage alone in front of the curtain to give the 
 Epilogue. Then my Imp clutched me and I knew 
 I was just tow-headed Una. Somehow, I said the 
 lines; they really seemed to say themselves, for I 
 heard them going on in the midst of my misery, 
 and then, after what seemed centuries alone with 
 that sea of strange, hateful faces before me, there 
 came the applause and the curtain began to go, up 
 for the final tableau. 
 
 It was the old-fashioned kind of curtain that 
 
WORDS, NEW AND OLD 253 
 
 rolled on a stick at the bottom, and just as it began 
 to go up I felt a slight twitch behind, and before I 
 could free myself my long velvet train had begun 
 slowly and firmly to roll up inside it. One of the 
 actors saw my plight and, rushing forward, picked 
 me up in his arms. Slowly, higher and higher he 
 lifted me, while every one yelled to the curtain man 
 to let the thing down, and the man who held me 
 shouted to him: "You fool, do you think I m a 
 giant, to reach to the ceiling?" How I wished he 
 were! But when I had gotten to his shoulder the 
 curtain dropped, and all the time the audience 
 quaked and roared with laughter. I have never 
 since appeared on any stage. After that night 
 my longing for the footlights was over forever. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE SOLUTION 
 
 winter I was thirteen I was startled out 
 of my happy existence with Madge and Han 
 nah by their both moving away from Washington. 
 Madge went to live near Boston and Hannah went 
 back to her home in the tropics, where I thought 
 of her in much the same way as I thought of Una 
 Mary in My Country, for Hannah always had a 
 glamour about her, in spite of her white pinafores, 
 and her country seemed My Country become real, 
 a permanent version, as it were. The fact that it 
 was real somewhere steadied and stimulated me 
 greatly by connecting my imaginative life with the 
 solid world. 
 
 Once more I was alone with my inner life and 
 Una Mary was lonelier than before except when I 
 was writing long letters to the other two girls. We 
 corresponded once a week, and we all three began 
 to write novels, which we exchanged in instalments, 
 for it had become a necessity to us, perhaps through 
 having made up our own words, to express our 
 selves in words, in writing. Madge and Hannah 
 254 
 
THE SOLUTION 255 
 
 wrote long, sustained narratives, a revel of romantic 
 situations, for Madge was now sixteen, so really 
 grown up that long skirts, put-up hair, and matri 
 mony seemed to loom on her near horizon; and 
 Hannah had caught very realistic glimpses of the 
 world of emotion through the recent marriages of 
 her brothers and sisters. 
 
 Soon after she went home Hannah s country was 
 torn by a revolution and her brother returned to 
 Washington on a very important diplomatic mis 
 sion. He came to justify his people for having 
 dethroned their ruler and to secure the approval 
 and support of our government. In his trunk, 
 scattered among his diplomatic papers, were pages 
 and pages of Hannah s last novel, which he was 
 bringing to me, all so mixed together that when he 
 saw the President and was reading him the draught 
 for their new constitution, in the middle of it, so 
 he said, came to a page beginning : "She threw her 
 arms about his neck." I am sure if he had gone 
 on the President would have been appreciative. 
 
 There was no doubt Madge and Hannah were 
 real novelists and I was very proud of their work 
 and much honored by being the only person who 
 saw their manuscripts. My own stories were not 
 romantic at all in the real-world sense. They kept 
 a half-fairy, magical quality, for Una Mary still 
 preferred the world of High Adventure where the 
 
256 UNA MARY 
 
 loves of Knights and Ladies were aided or thwarted 
 by fay and demon. Theirs were real books, fifteen 
 chapters long, while mine were all short stories, 
 some only a single paragraph, and all written in a 
 metre that was half prose, half poetry, a linking 
 together of words for their meanings in sound as 
 well as in sense. 
 
 Una Mary drew back once more into her old life 
 with Edward in My Country, or rather into a done- 
 over version of My Country and hardly recogniz 
 able as the same place, enriched as it now was 
 by material and personages from Shakespeare and 
 the procession of Kings, Queens, Knights, Ladies, 
 Squires, Churls, and Minions I had known and 
 loved through the pages of Scott s novels; and with 
 this return to My Country I felt again the over 
 whelming need of a religion. 
 
 While Madge and Hannah had been in Washing 
 ton my religious side had been rather in abeyance. 
 I still prayed regularly to the Virgin and told my 
 blue beads, though I had given up my altar to her 
 when I first knew Madge, and the rest of my out 
 ward religious life had been for a time submerged 
 by my excitement in finding friends with whom to 
 share my feelings about life and nature. Religion 
 I did not mention to them it was too personally 
 my own and what their own ideas were I did not 
 know as they never spoke of the subject, either. 
 
THE SOLUTION 257 
 
 Our nearest approach to it came on the day when 
 Madge s aunt died. We had really liked her, 
 though her path in life had crossed ours very little, 
 and when she died we felt very solemn to think we 
 should never see that eager, kindly person again 
 and sat about not knowing what to do with our 
 selves. The zest had gone out of everything and 
 we felt hopeless and forlorn until I remembered 
 that when she was alive she had liked to watch us 
 when we were playing Indian. So out into the 
 yard we whooped, being Indians with all our might, 
 until Madge s mother, utterly scandalized, ran out 
 of the house to stop us, really angry with us for 
 "such lack of respect for the dead"; her attitude as 
 great a surprise to us as ours was to her when we 
 answered: "But we were just playing on purpose 
 to amuse Auntie up in Heaven." 
 
 Our zeal was diverted, I remember, to a large 
 wreath of bay-leaves which we made for Madge to 
 lay on the coffin. She went to the funeral very 
 stiff and important in a white dress with a black 
 sash, and was dressed in black and white all sum 
 mer, greatly to her own pride and satisfaction, 
 though Hannah rather cast a damper over her by 
 remarking, "That s nothing; my father and mother 
 have to mourn a month each time a Royal Family 
 dies anywhere," and I, not to be outdone, con 
 trived to wear retrospective gray with a black 
 
258 UNA MARY 
 
 hair ribbon as half mourning for my great-grand 
 mother, who had died when I was four years old. 
 Once when Madge cut her finger I think she was 
 less distressed by the pain than by the fact that 
 the blood which spurted over her dress was "out 
 of mourning." 
 
 I am sure to all three of us the dead seemed very 
 near and friendly, not ghosts they were different, 
 like ogres and malignant fairies but the souls of 
 the dead who had been our own kind of people and 
 might have been our friends if we had known them. 
 We were sure they were close about us, invisible, 
 the color of the wind, and in the wind we almost 
 felt them brushing past us the eager, rushing, 
 intimate wind trying to make friends. 
 
 God, as the great ruler of these kindly dead, 
 seemed near and friendly, too, and the idea of Him 
 as a Being and a Friend had grown steadily until 
 I felt a shy, wondering love for Him which gradu 
 ally became an absorbing passion as I learned to 
 feel Him more and more through nature; for in the 
 sea, the woods, the mountains, and the sky I felt 
 Him close beside me, waiting, always waiting, until 
 my eyes should open and I, no longer blind to 
 mystery, should see and know Him. It was the 
 strange sense of a Presence that I had always felt in 
 certain places, sometimes sublime and often terri 
 ble, now become wholly good and universal, incar- 
 
THE SOLUTION 259 
 
 nate in all nature. But how incarnate? What 
 quality was He that made the world of nature one? 
 
 At first I thought it must be life, from the blind 
 grouping of the crystal up through the springing 
 tree to man God must be life, and as such I loved 
 and gloried in Him, until one day, as I lay beside 
 a little brook watching the tiny ferns and moss that 
 grew upon the bank, no longer marvelling at their 
 minute perfections, for they were part of God 
 God present in their smallest particle that lived I 
 saw the curled-up wisp of a little dead fern and I 
 wondered what that could mean. It was dead, so 
 it could not be God, and yet I felt in it the same 
 divinity as in the growing plant; and as I lay on 
 my back looking up through the trees at the sky 
 above while I tried to think out this new problem, 
 I saw the clouds float by white and tranquil, most 
 divine of all. Yet the clouds had no life; in a sense 
 they, too, were dead. No, God could not be life; 
 He must be something else inherent in the uni 
 verse. 
 
 More and more it puzzled me to find out what 
 He was and I always thought about it as I painted 
 out-of-doors and lived long working hours alone 
 with the earth and sky, for landscapes were what 
 I cared most to paint landscapes and flowers. 
 
 I had found that paint could do for me what 
 making up our words had done express the inner 
 
260 UNA MARY 
 
 meaning all objects held for me and give some hint 
 of their spirit. I tried to paint not their actual 
 appearance only but to catch the vague additional 
 something which brought the tears to my eyes, to 
 give to my painting a little of the beauty Una Mary 
 saw and felt, for she knew, really knew, exactly 
 how the picture ought to look. She knew trees 
 and the sea and sky as if they were parts of herself, 
 and yet when I drew them they became pictures 
 
 --of total strangers. I remember tearing up a sketch 
 I had just finished of an apple-tree because I could 
 not make it look kindly, and I longed to paint 
 shadows so that they were luminous, as if they were 
 floating lightly on the ground, instead of the 
 smudges of gray paint of the right shape and color 
 which for years had satisfied me. 
 
 It was real agony as well as joy, this effort to 
 
 give birth to the beauty Una Mary felt, and some 
 times by almost shedding life s blood in my efforts 
 I managed to express a slight suggestion of it, but 
 when I did the struggle was so intense it led to my 
 remarking to my astonished aunt, " Power is pain," 
 a saying the family teased me about for years, it 
 sounded so pretentious, though it had actually been 
 wrung from my innermost heart. It was one of 
 those times when I had been so rash as to let Una 
 Mary really speak; only Madge or Hannah could 
 have understood. I wrote the phrase down in the 
 
THE SOLUTION 261 
 
 note-book I kept of "Una Mary s Thoughts and 
 Feelings." 
 
 The root of the trouble with my painting seemed 
 to be Una. Because of her ignorance her hands 
 could not express what I really felt, and the only 
 solution seemed to be to educate Una and try to 
 develop her to Una Mary s level. 
 
 One day in February I found a clover plant com 
 ing up through the snow. One leaf was wide open, 
 daintily marked with crescents of paler green; the 
 other leaves still folded together, half hidden by 
 the pink- veined sheath. In its exquisite dauntless- 
 ness it seemed to sum up the whole of spring, and 
 in the painting I made of it I caught for the first 
 time a little of what I felt, caught enough to fill me ^ 
 with surprise and awe it was so far beyond any 
 thing I had ever done before. 
 
 It was so much better than my other paintings 
 that I felt I could not have done it wholly by 
 myself. It had in it a little of what I called the 
 God quality that quality that puzzled me in all 
 nature and I felt as if it must have come from 
 somewhere outside through me. It seemed as mi 
 raculous as striking a match into a living flame, 
 and as the flame was the light of God, could this 
 spirit of the clover leaf that gazed at me from my 
 own painting be also really of God? 
 
 Was it God who had guided my hand, speaking 
 
262 UNA MARY 
 
 through me of a truth of Beauty that Una Mary 
 had only dimly guessed? I knew it must be so, 
 and I began to feel that I should some day under 
 stand what God was, God grown suddenly near 
 and intimate and to be loved as I had loved Ed 
 ward now Jesus and the Virgin, for He was mine 
 to find everywhere, even in myself, no longer a 
 snatcher of souls or a mysterious vagueness beyond 
 the mountains or the power of the tempest and the 
 sea, but a God who must love us to have given us 
 the gift of Beauty existing in all things and Una 
 Mary selves with which to see and feel it, and then 
 through ourselves to bring it forth again trans 
 formed by the God in us to a beauty higher still. 
 
 Beauty to me became the most vital thing in the 
 world, for Beauty was View, it was trando, real and 
 yet unreal, something that existed not only in the 
 places where one found it but glimmered through 
 them, like the sense of Beyond transcending the 
 mountain barriers, and summed up in itself all the 
 feelings and longings I had ever known; not a pas 
 sive quality but a power which was the force behind 
 all life and behind all nature, a power that could 
 even work through me. These thoughts about 
 God and Beauty gradually accumulated and be 
 came sharper and clearer until on the day when I 
 painted the clover leaf they culminated in the 
 knowledge that at last I had found God, the God 
 
THE SOLUTION 263 
 
 who was to be not only my joy and worship but 
 my pain as well and my whole life for years to come. 
 
 I knew God was beauty. Beauty was not of God ; 
 it was God! To produce beauty was worth all the 
 struggle, all the sacrifice of which humanity was 
 capable once to touch the hem of His garment 
 and then die fulfilled! the expression of beauty a 
 veritable " Coming of God on Earth" and the only 
 way in which men could find and know Him. 
 
 This belief combined all the dreams and aspira 
 tions that had made up my worship from Arcturus 
 to the Altar of the Virgin with the sense of vast- 
 ness and fundamental simplicity I had caught from 
 my father s scientific friends. Here was at last 
 the Primal Cause! 
 
 Heaven became to me the place of perfect beauty, 
 and the angels those who on earth had known and 
 . worshipped it, while Jesus, who seemed as near to 
 me as in the days when I called him Edward, be 
 came the link connecting me with these masters 
 of the past it was Jesus who translated them to 
 me. Hell was eternal ugliness filled with the blind 
 of soul who in this life had refused to see and feel, 
 their torment that, dead, they now knew beauty 
 and were barred from sight of it forever, and in 
 their company the Imp belonged. 
 
 I found my supreme earthly symbol of God in 
 the Washington Monument. To me it was more 
 
264 UNA MARY 
 
 perfectly beautiful than anything I knew, and so 
 high its very size seemed worthier of God. In its 
 severe perfection it was more beautiful than a 
 mountain or the sea. They with their faulty 
 moodiness seemed like human beauty, while this 
 had a quality of the divine as it changed in spirit 
 with each shifting light or shadow, glowing in the 
 sunset or wreathed in mist at sunrise, slender, 
 sombre, and inflexible against the storm, or white, 
 tapering, and aloof against the starry sky on a 
 moonlight night. Serene and strong, springing 
 from the earth and reaching to the sky, pointing 
 upward to the great beyond, a slender shaft of tran 
 quil aspiration, all the elements of pain and strug 
 gle purged in the clear certainty of its perfection! 
 Each morning as soon as I got out of bed I looked 
 at the Monument from my window and it became 
 the pathway of my prayers to God. 
 
 With this discovery that beauty was divine, the 
 universe, that is, the tiny fragment of it which I 
 knew, unfolded itself before me as a stupendous har 
 mony, every element a necessary part of the one 
 perfect whole, and I altered my statement in Una 
 Mary s note-book, " Power is pain," to "Power is 
 oneness." 
 
 Now that my two worlds, the real world and the 
 world of my imagination were welded into one by 
 beauty, which was the spirit of them both, I began 
 
THE SOLUTION 265 
 
 A 
 
 to feel a great restlessness and dissatisfaction with 
 w my divided self. There were pain and discord in 
 being two selves with no real link connecting them. 
 It made me fail in everything I tried to do, for how 
 could I express myself when I could not under 
 stand myself, when my two selves could not under 
 stand each other and yet were forced to depend 
 more and more upon each other? I was miserable 
 and felt pulled in every direction at once and could 
 no longer live an outer and an inner life that fitted 
 comfortably together in distinct layers, wholly 
 separate; for "feelings" which had belonged only 
 to my inner life were becoming more and more a 
 part of all I did. 
 
 My two selves were no longer on friendly terms 
 they began to hate each other, and Una Mary 
 instead of being my only joy and consolation, the 
 self with whom I "pretended" and rejoiced, was 
 now become a turbulent volcano, determined to 
 crush Una and break through my outer shell; and 
 Una was so joyously alive she began to crowd out 
 Una Mary] She was really almost educated, and 
 yet Una Mary liked her less than ever and began 
 to be as disagreeable to her as the Imp, until one 
 1 dreadful day when Una retaliated. She laughed 
 at Una Mary! Laughed with genuine amusement 
 at her serious-mindedness and ended by calling her 
 "high-flown ! " Una Mary was aghast, and even the 
 
266 UNA MARY 
 
 Imp was shocked. What was I to do about my 
 self? This state of anarchy could not last. 
 
 More than ever I seemed a blot on the world, the 
 only thing that was out of harmony. Una Mary 
 fitted into and was a part of the rhythm of beauty, 
 but only God knew that she was there. This world 
 knew me only as Una, a discord. 
 
 Suddenly it came to me as a revelation, the knowl 
 edge that I must weld my selves together until they 
 became one single person and one only before I 
 could be in harmony with life and beauty; that it 
 was because of my divided selves that I was un 
 happy and a discord. I was two notes struck at 
 once and they nullified each other. I must become 
 one clear, distinct sound, and the way to do this 
 seemed to be to express through Una all that Una 
 Mary felt. All my life I had put the accent on 
 Una Mary, had felt she was the real me and that 
 all my failures were Una s fault; but now I saw that 
 the trouble had always been with Una Mary by 
 despising Una she had made me powerless. My 
 whole future lay with Una; she must be generous 
 and forgive Una Mary, must become her guide and 
 help her to come outside. Then I should be a 
 wholly new person. 
 
 This revelation came to me one evening as I 
 stood on a sweeping hilltop watching the sun set 
 behind the distant White Mountains while the 
 
THE SOLUTION 267 
 
 thrushes sang and all creation seemed one throb 
 bing hymn of praise, suddenly stilled as the sun 
 sank below the horizon. Then, as the mountains 
 grew purple and the hushed leaves waited for the 
 night, a great, abiding peace came over me. All 
 my longings, all my aspirations, all my struggles 
 were released, and I felt myself swept into the 
 great, resounding rhythm of all being. 
 
 Then the first star came out clear and hopeful in 
 the West Arcturus and as I saw it I made a 
 wish, reciting it in verse: 
 
 " Star light, star bright, 
 The first star I see at night, 
 I wish I may, I wish I might 
 Have the wish I wish to-night. 
 
 "Let Una Mary always be 
 A living part of the really me. 
 Not Una Mary and Una, too, 
 With Una Mary peeping through, 
 But as Edward into Jesus grew 
 And God is Beauty, ever new, 
 May all the world My Country be 
 And both the Unas a new me. 
 
 "Star light, star bright, 
 Grant the wish I wish to-night." 
 
 The wish came true, and after that evening Una 
 Mary vanished as a being of distinctly separate 
 feelings and imaginations. Her world became the 
 
268 UNA MARY 
 
 deep, encircling background of My World, support 
 ing and sustaining my whole life; a life no longer 
 made up of inner and outer circles that never 
 touched, but one consistent whole with the same 
 depths, reserves, and silences; but they were now 
 depths and silences belonging to the surface and of 
 which the surface strove to speak. 
 
 Life became like a deep woodland pool, tangling 
 the eye with gold-flecked abysses of blue and 
 green, depth on depth of impenetrable color below 
 the sunlit surface where water-lilies float and chil 
 dren sail their mimic boats. 
 
 That evening, like Kipling s "Ship that Found 
 Herself," I was suddenly and for the first time in 
 my life 
 
 MYSELF! 
 
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 324948 
 
 . r 
 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CAUFORNIA LIBRARY