The Vehement Flame. Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
on, running—running in the dusk. When she reached the house, and found her father and mother on the east porch, she was breathless, which accounted for her brevity in saying that Maurice and Eleanor were coming—and she was just starved! In the dining room, eating a very large supper, she listened for the wheels of the wagon and reflected: "Why was Eleanor mad at me? She was mad at Maurice, too. But most at me. Why?" She took an enormous spoonful of sliced peaches, and stared blankly ahead of her.
Ten minutes later, hearing wheels grating on the gravel at the front door, and Maurice's voice, subdued and apologetic, she pushed her chair away from the table, rushed through the pantry and up the back stairs. She didn't know why she fled. She only knew that she couldn't face Eleanor, who would sit with Maurice while he bolted a supper for which—though Edith didn't know it!—all appetite had gone. In her room in the ell, Edith shut the door, and, standing with her back against it, tried to answer her own question:
"Why was Eleanor mad?" But she couldn't answer it. Jealousy, as an emotion, in herself or anybody else, was absolutely unknown to her. She had probably never even heard the word—except in the Second Commandment, or as a laughing reproach to old Rover—so she really did not know enough to use it now to describe Eleanor's behavior. She only said, "Maybe it's the nervous prostration? Well, I don't like her very much. I'm glad she won't be at Fern Hill when I go there." To be a Bride—and yet to cry before people! "Crying before people," Edith said, "is just like taking off all your clothes before people—I don't care how bad her nervous prostration is; it isn't nice! But why is she mad at me? That isn't sense."
You can't run other people's feelings to cover, and try to find their cause, without mental and moral development; all this analysis lessened very visibly Edith's childishness; also, it made her rather rudely cold to Eleanor, whose effort to reinstate herself in the glories of the little girl's imagination only resulted in still another and entirely new feeling in Edith's mind—contempt.
"If she had a right to be mad at me yesterday—why isn't she mad to-day?" Edith reasoned.
Eleanor was quick to feel the contempt. "I don't care for Edith," she told Maurice, who looked surprised.
"She's only a child," he said.
Edith seemed especially a child now to Maurice, since he had embarked on his job at Mercer. Not only was she unimportant to him, but, in spite of his mortification at that scene on the road, his Saturday-night returns to his wife were blowing the fires of his love into such a glory of devotion, that Edith was practically nonexistent! His one thought was to take Eleanor to Mercer. He wanted her all to himself! Also, he had a vague purpose of being on his dignity with a lot of those Mercer people: Eleanor's aunt, just back from Europe; Brown and Hastings—cubs! But below this was the inarticulate feeling that, away from the Houghtons, especially away from Edith, he might forget his impulse to use—for a second time—that dreadful word "silly."
So, as the 20th of October approached—the day when they were to go back to town—he felt a distinct relief in getting away from Green Hill. The relief was general. Edith felt it, which was very unlike Edith, who had always sniffled (in private) at Maurice's departure! And her father and mother felt it:
"Eleanor's mind," Henry Houghton said, "is exactly like a drum—sound comes out of emptiness!"
"But Maurice seems to like the sound," Mrs. Houghton reminded him; "and she loves him."
"She wants to monopolize him," her husband said; "I don't call that love; I call it jealousy. It must be uncomfortable to be jealous," he ruminated; "but the really serious thing about it is that it will bore any man to death. Point that out to her, Mary! Tell her that jealousy is self-love, plus the consciousness of your own inferiority to the person of whom you are jealous. And it has the same effect on love that water has on fire. My definition ought to be in a dictionary!" he added, complacently.
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