Aunt Pen gave me a keen look.
"You think you are a very ill-used woman, Janet?"
"I do, indeed. Paul is so determined, so—so obstinate!" I said, in despair.
"He is very set in his way," returned the old lady, quietly.
"Set in his way! I should think so, indeed! He is as immovable as a rock. I may beat myself to pieces against his will, and not stir him. I do think. Aunt Pen, a will like Paul's is about the worst fault a man can have."
"Most men have faults," said Aunt Pen, with a curious twinkle in her eyes. "I have known a good many men in my day, but never one that I could call perfect. As for Paul—what would you prefer to obstinacy? A lack of principle, dishonesty, meanness?"
"Oh, don't, Aunt Pen," I cried. "Paul is as good as gold. But then he is sometimes hard to get along with."
An absent expression had stolen over her face.
"Yes dear!" she said, slowly. " When I was a girl—"
She paused. A strange audacity took possession of me.
"Tell me all about it. Aunt Pen. When you were a girl you must have had lovers."
She smiled. There was a little flicker of color in the aged cheek.
"Lovers? Yes, child, I had more than most girls. I had two, and one was considered enough in those days. We did not parade our victims as an Indian warrior his scalps, nor con them over in secret as a fine lady does her jewels. There was more true heart-love in those days than now, though you may think that an old woman's fancy. But when the country was thinly settled, and when you were shut up by yourself half the year, the heart had time to grow. It seems to me now, sometimes, that people seldom get at the deepest in themselves. Then, when the country was new, and the terror of the Indians might any day send you flying for your life to your neighbor, it was no time for petty superficial likings. What friendship there was struck its roots deep down. Life was in dead earnest. There was no play in making love, or in anything else.
"I was born in the woods, as I've often told you. Father went to New Hampshire very early, and took up a tract of land. It touched Winnipiseogee on the south, and ran northward to the Conway meadows—big enough almost for a county, and lonelier and wilder than you can imagine. I used to look down in the bright days at the still, smiling waters of the lake, and over the great, dark waves of woodland that ran away to the horizon, and up to the shining mountains, so awful, and desolate, and inaccessible, and I grew sick and afraid—sick for the sight of human faces and pleasant, homely sounds, and afraid of the solemn majesty before which we were so insignificant and mean. Yet the mountains had a fascination for me. Sometimes, in the still, moonlight nights, I used to wake and creep softly to my window. The room looked to the north, and I used to fancy that I saw the great hills parting, and parting before me, letting me into the awful, secret, solitary places where no human eye had seen or foot trodden. Father had a fancy that smiling valleys and a fertile, hospitable country lay beyond the mountains, and he said he should not wonder if the day came when one could cross them easily. Then, in summer days, the mountains were great company for me. They put aside their majesty, and the great domes shone fair and tempting like heavenly islands in the sky, angel homes that just touched earth on one side. I had all the wild fancies that a lonely, imaginative child would be apt to have.
