The Heart's Kingdom

It seems a strange, almost savage thing that the few months before a

woman's marriage are always filled so full of the doing of thousands and

tens of thousands of small things that she has no time to think of the

hugeness of the responsibilities she is assuming. Perhaps if she were

given time to realize them she would never assume them. Once or twice in

the long two, nearly three months that I had given myself to get ready

to marry Nickols, I paused and found myself thinking of the weighty

things of life, but I soon was able to shake off the thought of the

future. The time I felt it press most heavily was one morning that

Jessie Litton and I sat quietly sewing on some sort of fluff she and

Harriet had planned for my adornment, and very suddenly Jessie laid down

her ruffle and looked at me as she said: "Charlotte, I would be frightened, positively frightened, at the

prospect of marrying Nickols Powers."

"I am; but why would you be?" I asked her directly.

"I read that long résumé of his work in the Review last night and for

the first time I really realized what an important person he is to the

development of American art. He really is a huge national machine and

you'll be one of the important cogs on which the whole thing runs.

You'll be ground and ground by his life and you'll have to make good or

be responsible for some sort of a crash."

"No," I answered, slowly drawing my thread through the sheer cloth. "No,

Nickols will live his own way regardless of the cogs on which it grinds.

I shall have an enormous task in keeping up with the social side of his

life, but Nickols is not the kind of a man who takes a woman into his

work."

As I made my answer I was stabbed by the memory of the words that

Gregory Goodloe had said to me on that day in the garden: "Separated

from you, you going one way and I another, I can do nothing. You

short-circuit my force--I am helpless without you." And he had been

inviting me into the work for which he had been ordained into the holy

Church of Christ. I felt myself groping blindly into the futility of my

own life, and I was sick at heart.

"And if that is so, I would be still more frightened," Jessie said,

gazing at me with dismayed and honest affection.

"Don't let's talk about it," I answered her and took up my sewing. At

that moment and from that moment I cast myself into the whole whirl of

activities in Goodloets and gave myself no more time or strength for

self-communion. I was fleeing, and from what I dared not know.