Power by Howard Fast Page B

before the weekend, I will be happy to fix the picnic basket.
    Or in much the same sense, if perhaps even more restrained. Still, then, in 1914, it was a piece of impropriety, and shattering in that I addressed myself to a coal miner, a person of no family, figuratively and literally. It explains my state of mind better than anything else might, and when I had mailed it to Mrs. Tarragon’s boardinghouse, I felt that I had indulged in an action little short of criminal. Don’t smile at the desperateness of my situation, for that would only be evidence of the poverty of your own later years. A girl of seventeen, truly in love for the first time, experiences something as rash and wonderful as anything that will ever happen to her again—and more so, believe me. So if I could not eat and could not sleep and breathed air as sweet as honey and walked in a world of music wherever I went, this was not unmixed with guilt and remorse. My advances were improper and reckless, and whatever Ben Holt had thought of me before, surely he would think only less of me now.
    I had planned not to tell my father of my action until I received some reply from Ben, but on Wednesday, at dinner, he said to me,
    â€œDorothy, even if you have fallen in love with that young miner, you’ll prove nothing by a death of starvation.”
    I stared at him in amazement and mumbled denials, but he had lived with me too long not to recognize the first substantial break in an appetite that had been healthy, to put it mildly. So I blurted out what I had done, indulged a few tears, and surprisingly was able to eat a proper dinner. Father was responsible for that. He shrugged and pointed out that at worst, Ben Holt could only say no.
    â€œThen you’re not angry at me?”
    â€œWhen you decide to marry Ben Holt or John Doe or anyone else, we’ll get down to basic things. Meanwhile, you’ve only invited a boy to a picnic. If your mother were alive, she might sensibly insist on a chaperon—”
    â€œBut you won’t—please, Daddy?”
    â€œHe hasn’t accepted yet, has he?”
    â€œBut I’m going off to school. What harm—”
    â€œI am not worried about your safety or your honor, Dorothy. We’ll talk about it when you hear from him.”
    I received my reply from Ben the following morning. “Dear Miss Aimesley,” he wrote, “Thank you for your kind invitation. I will be at your home at eleven o’clock in the forenoon on Sunday.” And he signed it “Benjamin R. Holt.” How I scrutinized it and analyzed it! In time, Ben told me that he had rewritten it three times, but I never knew whether to believe that; although it may have been. I never fully understood why Ben wanted so desperately to make a proper impression upon us. Certainly, he wanted nothing from my father. Was he in love with me? Not then, I don’t think; yet all of his actions were formal and thoughtful, unlike himself. Or am I being unfair to him? It is so easy to worship Ben, as so many did, that perhaps I am bending over backwards to form a fair picture. I do know that we, myself, my father, and our whole way of life were of a special significance to Ben. I do believe that during the whole course of Ben’s life, Father was the only man of close relationship with whom he never quarreled and never broke. In later years, when Ben would rant about the iniquity and hypocrisy of the rich, all the rich, I would remind him of Father. “That’s another category,” he would bark at me. “Joe Aimesley’s a civilized man!”
    Anyway, I showed Father the note. “Do you want to go?” he asked me.
    â€œOf course I do. I wouldn’t have written him otherwise, and I’m so ashamed of it.”
    â€œOf letting him know that you like him?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œIf he couldn’t see it for himself, he has no sense.”
    â€œAnd you won’t make me have Aunt