SOPHRONISBA I should scarcely have understood Sophronisba unless I had imagined her against the background of that impeccable New England town from which she says she escaped. It is a setting of elm-shaded streets, with houses that can fairly be called mansions, and broad lawns stretching away from the green and beautiful white church. In this large princeliness of aspect the naïve stranger, like myself, would imagine nothing but what was grave and sweet and frank. Yet behind those pillared porticos Sophronisba tells me sit little and petrified people. This spacious beauty exists for people who are mostly afraid; afraid of each other, afraid of candor, afraid of sex, afraid of radicals. Underneath the large-hearted exterior she says they are stifled within. Women go queer from repression, spinsters multiply on families’ hands, while the young men drift away to Boston. Dark tales are heard of sexual insanity, and Sophronisba seems to think that the chastest wife never conceives without a secret haunting in her heart of guilt. I think there are other things in Sophronisba’s town, but these are the things she has seen, and these are the things she has fled from. Sophronisba is perhaps forty, but she is probably much younger than she was at eleven. At that age the devilish conviction that she hated her mother strove incessantly with the heavenly conviction that it was her duty to love her. And there were unpleasing aunts and cousins who exhaustingly had to be loved when she wished only spitefully to slap them. Her conscience thus played her unhappy tricks through a submerged childhood, until college came as an emancipation from that deadly homesickness that is sickness not for your home but intolerance at it. No more blessed relief comes to the conscience-burdened than the chance to exchange their duties for their tastes, when what you should unselfishly do to others is transformed into what books and pictures you ought to like. Your conscience gets its daily exercise, but without the moral pain. I imagine Sophronisba was not unhappy at college, where she could give up her weary efforts to get her emotions correct towards everybody in the world and the Three Persons in the heaven above it, in favor of acquiring a sound and authorized cultural taste. She seems to have very dutifully taken her master’s degree in English literature, and for her industrious conscience is recorded somewhere an unreadable but scholarly thesis, the very name of which she has probably forgotten herself.