and stole the rest: she came, therefore, to Bascom without much dowry, but she was pretty, bright, intelligent, and had a good figure. Bascom smote the walls of his room with bloody knuckles, and fell down before God.
When Bascom met her she was a music student in Boston: she had a deep full-toned contralto voice which was wrung from her somewhat tremulously when she sang. She was a small woman, birdlike and earnest, delicately fleshed and boned, quick and active in her movements and with a crisp tart speech which still bore, curiously, traces of a Southern accent. She was a brisk, serious, ladylike little person, without much humour, and she was very much in love with her gaunt suitor. They saw each other for two years: they went to concerts, lectures, sermons; they talked of music, poetry, philosophy and of God, but they never spoke of love. But one night Bascom met her in the parlour of her boarding-house on Huntington Avenue, and with a voice vibrant and portentous with the importance of the words he had to utter, began as follows: “Miss Louise!” he said carefully, gazing thoughtfully over the apex of his hands, “there comes a time when a man, having reached an age of discretion and mature judgment, must begin to consider one of the gravest—yes! by all means one of the most important events in human life. The event I refer to is—matrimony.” He paused, a clock was beating out its punctual measured tock upon the mantel, and a horse went by with ringing hoofs upon the street. As for Louise, she sat quietly erect, with dignified and ladylike composure, but it seemed to her that the clock was beating in her own breast, and that it might cease to beat at any moment.
“For a minister of the Gospel,” Bascom continued, “the decision is particularly grave, because, for him—once made, it is irrevocable, once determined upon, it must be followed inexorably, relentlessly—aye! to the edge of the grave, to the uttermost gates of death, so that the possibility of an error in judgment is fraught”—his voice sinking to a boding whisper—“is fraught with the most terrible consequences. Accordingly,” Uncle Bascom said in a deliberate tone, “having decided to take this step, realizing to the full—to the full, mind you—its gravity, I have searched my soul, I have questioned my heart. I have gone up into the mount-ings and out into the desert and communed with my Maker until”—his voice rose like a demon’s howl—“there no longer remains an atom of doubt, a particle of uncertainty, a vestige of disbelief! Miss Louise, I have decided that the young lady best fitted in every way to be
