Kitabı oku: «The Reclaimers», sayfa 11
XI
AN INTERLUDE IN "EDEN"
An interlude should be brief. This one ran through a few midsummer days with amazing rapidity, considering that in its duration the current of a life was changed from one channel, whither it had been tending for almost a quarter of a century, to another and widely different course that ran away from the very goal-mark of all its years of inspiring ambition.
It was late afternoon of a July day. Jerusha Darby sat in the rose-arbor, fanning and rocking in rhythmic motion. The rose-vines had ceased to bloom. Their thinning foliage was augmented now by the heavier shade of thrifty moon-vines.
Midsummer found "Eden" no less restful and luxuriant in its July setting than it was in the freshness of June.
The afternoon train had crawled lazily up the Winnowoc Valley on schedule time, permitting Eugene Wellington, in white flannels, white oxfords, and pink-pin-striped white silk shirt, fresh from shave and shower-bath, to come on schedule time to the rose-arbor for a conference with Mrs. Darby.
The swift flow of events had not outwardly affected the handsome young man. The time of the early June roses had found him poor in worldly goods, but rich in a trained mind, a developed genius, a yearning after all things beautiful, a faith in divine Providence, abounding confidence in his own power to win to the mastery in his beloved art, and glorying in his freedom to do the thing he chose to do. It found him in love, and the almost accepted lover of a beautiful, wilful, magnetic girl – a girl with a sturdy courage in things wherein he was lacking; a frivolous, untrained girl, yet with surprising dependableness in any crisis. It found him the favorite nephew of a quiet, uninteresting, rich old money-grubbing uncle and his dominant, but highly approving wife, whose elegant home was always open to him the while he felt himself a pensioner on its hospitality.
Mid-July found him, in effect, the master where he had been the poor relation; the rich uncle gone forever from earthly affairs; a dominant aunt still ruling – so she fancied – as she had always ruled, but with the consciousness of her first defeated purpose rankling bitterly within her. It found Eugene still in love with the same beautiful, wilful girl, but far from any assurance of being a really accepted lover. It found him insensibly forgetting the aspirations of a lifetime and beginning, little by little, to grasp after the Egyptian flesh-pots. Life was fast becoming a round of easy days, whose routine duties were more than compensated by its charming domestic settings. The one unsatisfied desire was for the presence of the bright, inspiring girl who had left a void when she went away, for whose return all "Eden" was waiting.
The swift course of events had created other changes. Some growths are slow, and some amazingly swift, depending upon the nature of the life-germ in the seed and the soil of the planting. In Eugene Wellington the love of beauty found its comfort in his present planting. It was easier to stay where beauty was ready-made than to go out and create it in some less lovely surroundings. Combine with this artistic temperament an inherent lack of initiative and courage, a less resistant force, and the product is sure. Moreover, this very falling away from the incentive to artistic endeavor exacted its penalty in a dulled spirituality. Whoever denies the allegiance due, in however small a measure, to the call of art within him pays always the same price – a pound of tender bleeding flesh nearest his heart. For Eugene Wellington the Shylock knife was sharpening itself.
This July afternoon there were no misgivings in his soul, however – no black shadows of failure ahead. All the serpents of "Eden" were very good little snakes indeed. After a while he would paint again, leisurely, exquisitely; especially would he paint when Jerry came home.
As he lighted a cigarette, a recent custom of his, and strolled down the shady way to the rose-arbor to meet Mrs. Darby, he drew deep draughts of satisfaction. It had been an unusually good day for him. Unusually good. Business had made it necessary to open some closed records in the late Cornelius Darby's affairs, records that Mrs. Jerusha Darby herself had not yet examined. They put a new light on the whole Darby situation. They went further and threw some side-lights on the late Jim Swaim's transactions. Altogether they were worth knowing. And Eugene, wielding a high hand with himself, had, once for all, stilled his finer sense of fitness in his right to know these things. He had also made rapid strides in this brief time toward comprehending business ethics as differing from church ethics and artistic ethics. Face to face in a conflict with Jerry Swaim, with Aunt Jerry Darby, with his conscience, his God, he was never sure of himself. But as to managing things, once he had shut his doors and barred them, he was confident. It was a truly confident Gene who stepped promptly into the rose-arbor on the moment expected. To the old woman waiting for him there he was good to look upon.
"I'm glad you are on time, Gene," Mrs. Darby began, rocking and fanning more deliberately. "I'm ready now to settle matters once for all."
"Yes, Aunt Jerry," Eugene responded, fitting himself gracefully into the settings of this summer retreat, with a look of steady penetration coming into his eyes as he took in the face before him.
"Any news from the Argonaut to-day?" he asked, at length, as Mrs. Darby sat silently rocking.
"Not a line. I guess Jerry is waiting for me to ask her to come back. She must be through with her romantic fling by this time, and about out of money, too. So now's the time to act and settle matters, as I say, once for all. Jerry must come home."
"Amen, and amen," Eugene agreed, fervently.
"And if she won't come home herself, she must be brought – to see things as we do. Must, I say, Eugene."
"I'm glad she didn't say 'brought home' if she's going to send me after her," the young man thought. The memory of having been sent after Jerry in years gone by, and of coming back empty-handed, but full-hearted and sore-headed, were still strong within him. "How shall we make her see?" he inquired.
Mrs. Darby rocked vigorously for a few minutes. Then she brought her chair to a dead stop and laid down the law without further shifting of anchors.
"All my property, my real estate, country and city, my bank stocks, my government bonds, my business investments – everything – is mine to keep for my lifetime, and to pass by will to whomsoever I choose. Of course it's only natural I should choose the only member of my family now living to succeed to my possessions."
How the "my" sounded out as the woman talked of her god, to whose service she was bound, but of whose blessings she understood so little!
Eugene sat waiting and thinking.
"Of course, whoever marries Jerry with my approval will come into a fortune worth having."
"He certainly will," Eugene declared, fervently.
A clear vision of Jerry and June roses swept his soul with refreshing sweetness, followed by the no less clear imagery of Uncle Cornie stepping slowly but persistently at the wrong moment after his wabbling discus. He looked away down the lilac-walk, unconsciously expecting the familiar, silent, uninteresting face and figure to come again to view. To the artist spirit in him the old man was there as real to vision as he had been on that last – lost – June day.
"You are thinking of Jerry herself. I am thinking of her inheritance, which is a deal more sensible, although Jerry is an unusually interesting and surprising girl," the old woman was saying.
"Unusually," Eugene echoed. "And in case you do not make a will?"
The young man was still looking down the lilac-walk as he asked the question, seemingly oblivious to the narrow eyes of Mrs. Darby scrutinizing his face.
"I have already made it. If things do not please me I shall change it. I may do that half a dozen times if I choose before I'm through with it. Now listen to me." The woman spoke sharply.
Eugene listened, wondering the while what sort of lightning-rod she carried, to speak with such assurance of all she meant to do before she was through with the transactions of this life. Uncle Cornie had not been so well defended.
"I want you to write to Jerry to come home. You can pay her expenses. She will take the money quicker from you than from me. She's as proud as Lucifer in some things, once she's set. But she's in love with you, and where a girl's in love she listens."
Eugene looked up quickly. "Are you sure?" he asked, eagerly.
"Of course I am! Why shouldn't I know love when I see it?" Mrs. Darby inquired.
Yes, why?
"But you mustn't give in, nor plead with her. Just tell her how well fixed you are, and how much she is missing here, and that you will wait her time, only she must come back, and promise to stay here, or I'll cut my will to bits, I certainly shall. I'll write myself to York Macpherson. He's level-headed and honorable as truth. If he was dead in love with Jerry himself – as he no doubt is by this time – he'd just put it all away if he found out he was denying me my rights. I'll put it up to his honor. And so with him at that end of the line, and you here, and me really moving the chessmen, it can't be a losing game, Eugene. It simply can't. Jerry may not get tired of her new playthings right away, but she will after a while. It isn't natural for her to take to a life so awfully different from her bringing up. When the new wears off she'll come home, even if necessity didn't drive her, as it's bound to sooner or later. She's nearly out of money right now, and she can't sponge off the Macphersons forever and be Jim Swaim's child. Is everything clear to you now?"
Eugene threw away his cigarette and lighted a fresh one, his face the while as expressionless as ever the dry, dull face of Cornelius Darby had been. At last he answered:
"Mrs. Darby has made a will, presumably in favor of her niece, Geraldine Swaim – a will subject to replacement by any number of wills creating other beneficiaries. In any event, Mrs. Darby proposes to have a voice in the final disposition of her property."
Mrs. Darby nodded emphatically. "I certainly do."
Eugene smiled approval of such good judgment. "You are right, Mrs. Darby. What is your own you should control, always. But, frankly, Aunt Jerry, it is Geraldine Swaim herself who is my fortune – if I can ever acquire it."
"You don't object to her prospects, I hope," Mrs. Darby interrupted, with a twinkle in her eye.
"I couldn't, for her sake. And I am artistic enough to love the charm of an estate like this; and sensible enough, maybe, to appreciate the influence and opportunity that are afforded by the other financial assets of the Darby possessions. I'll do all in my power to bring Jerry back to a life of ease and absence of all anxiety and responsibility. Shall I go out to Kansas after her?"
An uncomfortable feeling about that York Macpherson had begun now to pull hard upon Eugene's complacent assurance, although he had rebelled a few minutes ago at the thought of going anywhere after Jerry.
"Never," Mrs. Darby responded. "It would just give her another chance for adventure and seem to acknowledge that we couldn't do without her."
In truth, Mrs. Darby was shrewd enough to know that with Eugene on the ground she could not count on York Macpherson as her ally. York would naturally champion Jerry's cause, and she knew that Eugene Wellington would be no match for the diplomatic man of affairs whom she had known intimately from his childhood.
"Aunt Jerry, how much do you know of the value of this Swaim estate?" Eugene asked, suddenly.
"Very little. Cornelius told me that he had a full account of it. That was on the very day he was – he passed away. The papers, except the one Jerry found here the day after the funeral, have all been mislaid."
"Then I'd advise you to write to this Macpherson person and find out exactly what we have to fight against," the young man suggested. "Meantime I'll write to Jerry. I'm sure she should be ready to listen now. All I claim to know of that beastly region out West I learned from my father, but that is enough for me. If there were really a bit of landscape worth the cost of the canvas I might go out there and paint it. But who cares to paint in only two colors, blue one half – that's sky, unclouded, monotonous; and chrome yellow, the other half – that's land. I could paint the side of the cattle-barn over yonder half yellow, half blue, and put as much expression into it."
Mrs. Darby listened approvingly. "I'm very thankful that you see things so sensibly. The sooner you replace what isn't worth while with what is the sooner you will know you are a success in your business. We will write those letters to-night. I'm having your favorite dishes for dinner now, and we'll be served here. It is so pleasant here at this time of day. I'll go and see to things right away, and we'll have everything brought out pretty soon."
The owner of all this dainty comfort and restfulness and beauty hurried away, leaving Eugene Wellington alone in the rose-arbor – alone with memories of Jerry Swaim, and Uncle Cornie, and life, and love, and hope and high ambition, and himself – the self that a man must go right with, if he goes with him at all.
For a long half-hour he sat there in the rose-arbor, the appealing call of his divine gift filling his artist soul. Then his judgment prevailed. What he most wanted to have was here, ready to have now – and to hold later with only a little patient waiting. A few weeks, or months, or maybe even a year, a run of four swift seasons, and the girl of his heart's heart would come back into her own, and find him ready for her coming. That impossible York was not to be considered. Jerry was no fool, if she was sometimes a bit foolish in her pranks. And he, Eugene Wellington, had only this day learned of the whole Swaim situation, what was vastly valuable to know. Meantime, his the task to keep that precious Jerusha Darby will intact; or, failing in that, came the more difficult and delicate task of controlling or holding back the pen that would write another will. And in the end Jerry would love him forever for what he would save for her – for her —
The memory of what he had learned that day in the business house in the city came with its testimony that he was shaping his life course well. Only one little foxy fear dodged about in his mind – the fear that Jerry – the Jerry he knew, lovable in spite of all her little failings, beautiful, picturesque, and surprising – that this Jerry, whom he thought he knew so well, might prove to be an unknowable, unguessable Jerry whose course would baffle all his plans, his efforts, his heart longings. It must not be. He would prevent that. But could he?
The coming of dainty viands with exquisite appointments gave nourishment to his ready appetite, and dulled for a time the thing within him that sometime must cry out to power or be sleeked down into fat and unfeeling subjection.
That night two letters were written to New Eden, Kansas, but neither writer really knew the reader to whom the letter was written, nor measured life purposes by the same gauge, so setting anew the world-old stage for a drama in human affairs whose crowning act shapes human destinies.
XII
THIS SIDE OF THE RUBICON
In the late afternoon of a July Sabbath Jerry Swaim had gone for a stroll along the quiet outskirts of New Eden. Laura was napping in the porch swing, and York had gone to his office in answer to a telephone call. Jerry was rarely lonely with herself and she was a good walker. She was learning, too, the need for being alone with herself, for there were many things crowding into her mind that demanded recognition.
Jerry attended church with the Macphersons every Sunday, but it was a mere perfunctory act on her part. To-day the minister was away. He had gone to the upper Sage Brush to officiate at the funeral of Mrs. Nell Belkap that had been Nell Poser, she of the tow hair and big-lunging baby. She had died of congestion, following over-heating in cooking for threshing-hands for her mother, her father being the kind of man that objected to hired help for "wimmin folks." All that was nothing to Jerry, who found herself wondering, in a vague sort of way, just where that baby would sprawl itself, unattached to its mother's anchorage. Babies were not in Jerry's scheme of things at all.
The substitute minister was more interesting to think about. He had a three-piece country charge over which to spread the Gospel, "Summit School-House," "Slack Crick Church," and "Locust Grove Grange." He said "have went" and he called the members of one of Saint Paul's churches "The Thessalonnykins." And he really didn't know the Lord's Prayer correctly, for he said "forgive us our trespasses," instead of "our debts," as dear accurate Saint Matthew has written it.
Jerry's mind was on him as an aside, on him, and that Paul Ekblad whom she caught sight of in the Ekblad car with Thelma. They had stopped a minute to speak with York Macpherson as they were on their way to that up-country Poser funeral. Why should Paul Ekblad go so far to a funeral?
Jerry strolled aimlessly along the smooth road leading out to the New Eden cemetery, her bead-trimmed parasol shading her bare head, and her pale-green organdie gown making her appear very summery. Jerry had the trick of fitting all weather except the heated, sand-filled days of mid-June on a freight-train, which condition Junius Brutus Ponk declared "was enough to muss a angel's wings an' make them divine partial-eclipse angel draperies look dingier than dish-rags."
There were half a dozen well-grown cottonwood-trees in the cemetery, with rows of promising little elms, catalpas, and box-elders all symmetrically set. The grass was brown, but free from weeds; the walks were only smooth paths. But the shade of the cottonwood group, and the quiet of the place, seemed inviting. Every foot of the wind-swept elevation was visible to the whole town, but the distance was guarantee for undisturbed meditation. Jerry had no interest in cemeteries. She had rarely visited the corner of "Eden" where the few elect by family ties had their last resting-place. She walked down the grassy paths toward the largest cottonwoods, now, indifferent alike to the humble headstone and the expensive and sometimes grotesque granite memorial. By the tallest shaft in the place, designated by Stellar Bahrr as "Granddad Poser's monniment," she sat down in the shade of the biggest trees, and looked out at New Eden in its Sabbath-afternoon nap; at the winding Sage Brush and the green and yellow fields, and black hedgerows, and rolling prairies, with purple-shadowed draws and pale-brown swells, and groves about distant farmhouses. She sat still for a long time, and she was so lost in this view that she did not hear steps approaching until Mr. Ponk was almost beside her.
"Good afternoon, Miss Swaim. Takin' a constitutional? They ain't no Swaims laid away out here I reckon."
"Oh no," Jerry replied. "I shouldn't come here for that if there were."
Something about Ponk always made her good-natured. He was so grotesquely impossible to her – a caricature cut from some comic magazine, rounded out and animated.
"Say you wouldn't? Now that's real queer." The short man opened his little eyes wide with surprise. "Now I soar down here regular every Sunday evenin' of the world, summer and winter."
"What for?" Jerry asked, looking up at the speaker with curiosity.
New Eden was still in that stage when a funeral was a public event. And the belief was still maintained that the dead out in the cemetery must be conscious of every attention or lack of it shown to their memory by visits and flowers, and the price of tombstones. In a word, to the New Eden living, the New Eden dead were not really in the Great Hereafter, but here, demanding consideration in the social economy of the community.
Ponk was more shocked at Jerry's query than she could begin to comprehend, and his interest in her and pity for her took a still stronger grip on life.
"Why, Miss Swaim, I come out here to see my mother. I 'ain't never failed to bring her a flower in summer, or a green leaf in winter, one single Sunday since she was laid out there on the south slope one Easter day eight Aprils ago."
"But she isn't there." Jerry spoke gently now, realizing that she had hurt him unintentionally.
"She is to me, an' I'd ruther think it thataway an' feel like I was callin' every Sunday, never forgettin'," Ponk said, sadly.
"Where's your dead to you, Miss Swaim?" he asked, after a pause.
Jerry, who was gazing down the Sage Brush Valley, turned slowly at his words, her big eyes luminous with tears.
"They are not." She waved a hand against viewless air.
"Oh yes, they are, walkin' beside you every day, lovin' you and proud of you! A good mother just lives on an' keeps doin' good, and so does a father, if you let 'em." Ponk hesitated, and his moon-round face was flushed. "I ain't tryin' to preach," he added, hastily. "They's some things, though, we all got to cling to or else get hustled off our feet into a big black void where we just sink and die. It ain't just Sage-Brushers, but it's all Christians – Baptists and Cammylites and High Church and everybody. It's safer to stand in the light than sink in the bottomless night. But, say, look who's comin' an' see what's trailin' him. I guess I'll be soarin' back to the hotel now. Pleased to meet you – always am pleased." Ponk lifted his hat and bowed uncovered, and uncovered walked away.
What he had said in the sincerity of his spiritual belief fell on fertile soil in the mind of his listener. He had preached a sermon to her that was good for her to hear.
Jerry looked out in the direction he had indicated and saw York Macpherson, walking a bit briskly for him and the place and the afternoon.
It was no wonder that Jerusha Darby should expect York to be caught by the charms of his guest. As she sat there in the shade of the cottonwoods, where, in all the cemetery, the blue grass grew rankest, with her pale-green gown, her smooth pink cheeks, and the wavy masses of golden-brown hair coiled low at the back of her head, York wondered if the spirit of the wild rose in bloom and the spirit of some Greek nymph had not combined in the personification before him.
At the gateway he met Ponk.
"Why do you run away? I have a special-delivery letter for Miss Swaim. I thought I'd better come and find her, but that needn't interfere with you."
"Oh, you smooth-bore! But I have to go, anyhow. I'm headin' off what's trailin' you. Don't look back. It's Stellar Bahrr, comin' out to see who's been to see their folks to-day and who's neglectin' 'em, 'specially late arrivals. She's seen my game, though, now, an' she's shabbin' off to the side gate, knowin' I'd head her back to town. Say, York, she's after Miss Swaim now. You watch out. Them that's the worthlessest and has the least influence in a community can start the biggest fires burnin'. Everybody in New Eden's been buffaloed by her – just scared blue – except maybe us two. You ain't, I know, and I'm right sure I ain't."
"Ponk, you are as good as you are good-looking," York said, heartily. "The Big Dipper could start a tale of our guest meeting gentlemen friends in the cemetery. And yet for privacy it's about like meeting them on the sidewalk before the Commercial Hotel. However, she's started scandal with less material. I have business with Miss Swaim, so I'll walk home with her."
Jerry waited for her host under the flickering, murmuring leaves of the cottonwood. She had seen some woman wandering diagonally from the cemetery road toward the corner of the inclosure, but she had no interest in strangers and might never have thought of her again but for a word of York's that day.
He had seen the girl looking after Stellar as she made a wide flank movement. A sense of duty coupled with a strange interest in Jerry, for which he had as yet given no account to himself, was urging him to tell her, as he had told his sister, to have no traffic with the town's greatest liability, but with all of Ponk's warning he could not bring himself to speak now.
"May I sit here with you awhile?" he asked, lifting his hat as he spoke.
"Certainly. It is so quiet and peaceful out here, and, as I have no associations with this place, I can sit here without being unhappy or irreverent," Jerry replied.
"I came out to find you. There are callers at home now, so I'll give you my message here, unless you want to follow Mr. Ponk's example and 'soar' off home."
"That man interests me," Jerry declared. "He said some good things about his mother just now. And yet he's so – so funny."
"Oh, Ponk's outside is against him. If he could be husked out of himself and let the community get down to the kernel of him he is really fine wheat," York said, conscious the while that he had not meant, for some reason, to praise the strutting fellow. Yet he had never felt so toward the little man before.
"I have a special-delivery letter for you which came this afternoon. While you read it I'll go out to the gate and speak to the Ekblads, coming yonder."
Jerry read her letter – the one Eugene had written after his conference with Jerusha Darby in the rose-arbor. In it he had been faithful to the old woman's smallest demands, but the message itself was a masterpiece. It was gracefully written, for Eugene Wellington's penmanship was art itself; and gracefully worded, and it breathed the perfumes of that lovely "Eden" on every page.
Jerry closed her eyes for a moment in the midst of the reading, and the wind-swept cemetery and all the summer-seared valley of the Sage Brush vanished. The Macphersons; Ponk; Thelma Ekblad in the automobile by the cemetery gate, holding something in her arms, and her fair-haired brother, Paul; Joe Thomson (why Joe?) – all were nothing. Before her eyes all was Eugene – Eugene and "Eden." Then she read on to the end. One reading was enough. When York came back she was sitting with the letter neatly folded into its envelope again, lying in her lap.
York had a shrewd notion of what that letter contained, but there was nothing in Jerry's face by which to judge of its effect on her. Two things he was learning about her – one, that she didn't tell all she knew, after the manner of most frivolous-minded girls; the other, that she didn't tell anything until she was fully ready to do so. He admired both traits, even though they baffled him. In his own pocket was Jerusha Darby's letter, also specially delivered. He sat down by Jerry and waited for her to speak.
"Were those the people we saw on the south border of 'Kingussie'?" she asked.
"Yes," York replied.
"Do they interest you?" she questioned.
"Very much."
"Why?" Jerry was killing something – time, or thought.
"Because, as I told you the other day, the same life problems come to all grades. And life problems are always interesting," York declared.
"Has Thelma Ekblad a blowout farm, too?" Jerry's face was serious, but her eyes betrayed her mood.
"Better a blowout farm than a blowout soul," York thought. "No. I wonder what she would do with it if she had," he said, aloud.
"Just what I am doing, no doubt, since all of us, 'Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady,' are alike. Tell me more about her," Jerry demanded.
"She's talking against time now, I know, but I'll tell her a few things," York concluded.
"Jerry, there are not many women like this Norwegian farmer girl who is working her way through the State University down at Lawrence. A few years ago her brother Paul was in love with a girl up the Sage Brush, the daughter of a prosperous, stupid, stingy old ranchman. Paul was chewed up in a mowing-machine one day when the horses got scared and ran away, but his girl was true to him in spite of her father's objections to him. Then came a woman – a sharp-tongued gossip (she's over yonder now by the side gate) – who managed to stir up trouble purely for the infernal joy of gossip, I suppose, between this girl and Thelma. I needn't go into detail; you probably do not care much for the general outline."
"Go on," Jerry commanded.
"Well, it was the rough course of true love over again. Between the father and the sister the match was broken off, and before things could be reconciled the girl's father forced the marriage of his daughter to a worthless scamp who posed as a rich man, or an heir expectant to riches. The Ekblads are hard-working farmer folk. When it was too late the misunderstanding was cleared up. The rich fellow soon proved a fraud and a rascal and a wife-deserter. And the girl came home with her baby. Her father, as I said, was too stingy to hire help. So this girl-mother overworked in threshing-time, and – was buried this afternoon up the Sage Brush – old man Poser's daughter, Nell Belkap. The Ekblads have just come from the funeral. Old Poser has refused to care for Nell's baby and intended to put it in an orphan asylum. Thelma Ekblad brought it home with her. It was in her arms just now, and she's going to keep it and adopt it. When she's away at school – she has a year yet before she graduates – that crippled brother, Paul, will take care of it. All of which is out of your line, Jerry, but interesting to us in the valley here."
As York paused and looked at Jerry, all that Stellar Bahrr had said of him and the Poser girl swept through her mind. Not the least meanness of a lie is in its infectious poisoning power.
"It is very interesting. I wonder how she can take care of that baby. Babies are so impossible," Jerry said, musingly.
"We were all impossibles once. Some of us are still improbables," York replied.
Jerry looked up at him quickly. "Not altogether hopeless, maybe. Thelma is doing this for her brother's sake, I can see that. And the story has a sweeter side than if she were doing it just for herself. It makes it more worth while."
