The Brimming Cup. Dorothy Canfield Fisher
overballasted; with brains and sensitiveness and under-ballasted with experience, that's all. But you haven't had much chance to take on any other cargo, as yet."
She was nettled at this, and leaving her slow, wide-winged poise in the upper airs, she veered and with swallow-like swiftness darted down on him. "That sounds patronizing and elder-brotherish," she told him. "I've taken on all sorts of cargo that you don't know anything about. In ever so many ways you seem positively … naïve! You needn't go thinking that I'm always highstrung and fanciful. I never showed that side to anybody before, never! Always kept it shut up and locked down and danced and whooped it up before the door. You know how everybody always thinks of me as laughing all the time. I do wish everything hadn't been said already so many times. If it weren't that it's been said so often, I'd like to say that I have always been laughing to keep from crying."
"Why don't you say it, if that is what you mean?" he proposed.
She looked at him marveling. "I'm so fatuous about you!" she exclaimed; "the least little thing you say, I see the most wonderful possibilities in it. I know you'd say what you meant, no matter how many thousands had said it before. And since I know it's not stupidness in you, why, it seems to me just splendidly and simply courageous, a kind of courage I'd never thought of before. I see now, how, after all, those stupid people had me beaten, because I'd always thought that a person either had to be stupid so that he didn't know he was saying something everybody else had said, or else not say it, even if he wanted to, ever so much, and it was just what he meant."
"Don't you think maybe you're too much bothered about other people, anyhow?" he suggested, mildly; "whether they're stupid or have said things or not? What difference does it make, if it's a question of what you yourself feel? I'd be just as satisfied if you gave all your time to discovering the wonderful possibilities in what I say. It would give me a chance to conceal the fact that I get all out of breath trying to follow what you mean."
This surprised her into a sudden laugh, outright and ringing. He looked down at her sparkling face, brilliant in its mirth as a child's, and said seriously, "You must instantly think of something perfectly prosaic and commonplace to say, or I shall be forced to take you in my arms and kiss you a great many times, which might have Lord knows what effect on that gloomy-minded ticket-seller back of us who already has his suspicions."
She rose instantly to the possibilities and said smoothly, swiftly, whimsically, with the accent of drollery, "I'm very particular about what sort of frying-pan I use. I insist on having a separate one for the fritures of fish, and another for the omelets, used only for that: I'm a very fine and conscientious housekeeper, I'd have you know, and all the while we lived in Bayonne I ran the house because Mother never got used to French housekeeping ways. I was the one who went to market … oh, the gorgeous things you get in the Bayonne market, near enough Spain, you know, for real Malaga grapes with the aroma still on them, and for Spanish quince-paste. I bossed the old Basque woman we had for cook and learned how to cook from her, using a great many onions for everything. And I learned how to keep house by the light of nature, since it had to be done. And I'm awfully excited about having a house of my own, just as though I weren't the extremely clever, cynical, disillusioned, fascinating musical genius everybody knows me to be: only let me warn you that the old house we are going to live in will need lots done to it. Your uncle never opened the dreadful room he called the parlor, and never used the south wing at all, where all the sunshine comes in. And the pantry arrangements are simply humorous, they're so inadequate. I don't know how much of that four thousand dollars you are going to want to spare for remodeling the mill, but I will tell you now, that I will go on strike if you don't give me a better cook-stove than your Uncle's Touclé had to work with."
He had been listening with an appreciative grin to her nimble-witted chatter, but at this he brought her up short by an astonished, "Who had? What had? What's that … Touclé?"
She laughed aloud again, delighted at having startled him into curiosity. "Touclé. Touclé. Don't you think it a pretty name? Will you believe me when I say I know all about Ashley?"
"Oh, go on, tell me!" he begged. "You don't mean to say that my Uncle Benton had pep enough to have a scandal in his life?"
"What do you know about your uncle?"
"Oh, I'd seen him a few times, though I'd never been up to Ashley. As long as Grandfather was alive and the mill at Adams Center was running, Uncle Burton used to go there to see his father, and I always used to be hanging around Grandfather and the mill, and the woods. I was crazy about it all, as a boy, used to work right along with the mill-hands, and out chopping with the lumbermen. Maybe Uncle Burton noticed that." He was struck with a sudden idea, "By George, maybe that was why he left me the mill!" He cast his eye retrospectively on this idea and was silent for a moment, emerging from his meditation to say, wonderingly, "Well, it certainly is queer, how things come out, how one thing hangs on another. It's enough to addle your brains, to try to start to follow back all the ways things happen … ways you'd never thought of as of the least importance."
"Your Uncle Burton was of some importance to us," she told him. "Miss Oldham at the pension said that she had just met a new American, down from Genoa, and when I heard your name I said, 'Oh, I used to know an old Mr. Crittenden who ran a wood-working factory up in Vermont, where I used to visit an old cousin of mine,' and that was why Miss Oldham introduced us, that silly way, as cousins."
He said, pouncingly, "You're running on, inconsequently, just to divert my mind from asking you again who or what Touclé is."
"You can ask and ask all you like," she defied him, laughing. "I'm not going to tell you. I've got to have some secrets from you, to keep up the traditions of self-respecting womanhood. And anyhow I couldn't tell you, because she is different from everything else. You'll see for yourself, when we get there. If she's still alive." She offered a compromise, "I'll tell you what. If she's dead, I'll sit down and tell you about her. If she's still alive, you'll find out. She's an Ashley institution, Touclé is. As symbolic as the Cumean Sybil. I don't believe she'll be dead. I don't believe she'll ever be dead."
"You've let the cat out of the bag enough so I've lost my interest in her," he professed. "I can make a guess that she's some old woman, and I bet you I won't see anything remarkable in her. Except that wild name. Is it Miss Touclé, or Mrs. Touclé?"
The girl burst into laughter at this, foolish, light-hearted mirth which drenched the air all about her with the perfume of young gaiety. "Is it Miss Druid, or Mrs. Druid?" was all she would say.
She looked up at him, her eyes shining, and cried between her gusts of laughter, as if astonished, "Why, I do believe we are going to be happy together. I do believe it's going to be fun to live with you."
His appalled surprise that she had again fallen into the pit of incredulity was, this time, only half humorous. "For God's sake, what did you think!"
She answered, reasonably, "Well, nobody ever is happy together, either in books or out of them. Of all the million, million love-affairs that have happened, does anybody ever claim any one to have been happy?"
His breath was taken away. He asked helplessly, "Well, why are you marrying me?"
She replied very seriously, "Because I can't help myself, dear Neale. Isn't that the only reason you're marrying me?"
He looked at her long, his nostrils quivering a little, gave a short exclamation which seemed to carry away all his impatience, and finally said, quietly enough, "Why, yes, of course, if that's the way you want to put it. You can say it in a thousand thousand different ways."
He added with a sudden fury, "And never one of them will come anywhere near expressing it. Look here, Marise, I don't believe you have the faintest, faintest idea how big this thing is. All these fool clever ways of talking about it … they're just a screen set up in front of it, to my mind. It's enough sight bigger than just you or me, or happiness or unhappiness. It's the meaning of everything!"
She considered this thoughtfully. "I don't believe I really know what you mean," she said, "or anyhow that I feel what you mean. I have had