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All human happiness was thus conditioned and circumscribed, and hers, no doubt, must always be of the lonely kind, since material things did not suffice for it, even though it depended on them as Grace Fulmer's, for instance, never had.
The unforeseen complication of Mrs. Fulmer's presence on the journey had evidently tried her nerves, and this new obstacle to her arrangements shook her faith in the divine order of things. "Your plans are not yours only?
However inadequate Grace Fulmer's bringing-up of her increasing tribe had been, they had heard in her company nothing trivial or dull: good music, good books and good talk had been their daily food, and if at times they stamped and roared and crashed about like children unblessed by such privileges, at others they shone with the light of poetry and spoke with the voice of wisdom.
Then, lighting a candle, and shading it, as her habit was, from the sleeping child, she slipped on her dressing-gown and opened the door. On the threshold she paused to look at her watch. Only half-past five! She thought with compunction of the unkindness of breaking in on Junie Fulmer's slumbers; but such scruples did not weigh an ounce in the balance of her purpose.
She had come to her friend to be taught again the lesson of indifference to material things, and instead she was hearing from Grace Fulmer's lips the long-repressed avowal of their tyranny. After all, that battle with poverty on the New Hampshire hillside had not been the easy smiling business that Grace and Nat had made it appear. And yet ... and yet....
Then she remembered Vanderlyn's words about his wife: "There are some of our old times I don't suppose I shall ever forget " and a phrase of Grace Fulmer's that she had but half grasped at the time: "You haven't been married long enough to understand how trifling such things seem in the balance of one's memories."
I have seen striking instances of this curious case of variability in "Fulmer's dwarf forcing-bean," which occasionally produced a single long twining shoot. I placed sticks round several plants, and vertically stretched strings close to others, and the strings alone were ascended by twining. The stem twines indifferently to the right or left.
She was curious to know how the happy-go-lucky companion of Fulmer's evil days was bearing the weight of his prosperity, and she vaguely felt that it would be refreshing to see some one who had never been afraid of poverty. The airless pension sitting-room, where she waited while a reluctant maid-servant screamed about the house for Mrs. Fulmer, did not have the hoped-for effect.
Oh, the blessed moral freedom that wealth conferred! She recalled Mrs. Fulmer's uncontrollable cry: "The most wonderful thing of all is not having to contrive and skimp, and give up something every single minute!" Yes; it was only on such terms that one could call one's soul one's own.
And instantly it occurred to him that these must be the Fulmer children whom she was living with while their parents travelled in Italy. Rumours of Nat Fulmer's sudden ascension had reached him, and he had heard that the couple had lately been seen in Naples and Palermo.
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