The other woman was openly crying now, clinging to her benefactress' hand and holding it against her cheek as she sobbed.
My heroic old cousin patted her hair awkwardly, but kept on talking in her matter-of-fact manner, looking at me sternly as though defying me to show, by look or word, any consciousness of anything unusual in the situation; and we fell at once, she and I, into a commonplace conversation about the incidents of the trip up.
When I came away, half an hour later, Cousin Tryphena slipped a shawl over her head and came down the walk with me to the gate. I was much affected by what seemed to me the dramatically fitting outcome of my old kinswoman's Quixotism. I saw Cousin Tryphena picturesquely as the Happy Fool of old folk-lore, the character who, through his very lack of worldly wisdom, attains without effort all that self-seeking folks try for in vain. The happy ending of her adventure filled me with a cheerful wonder at the ways of Providence, which I tried to pass on to her in the exclamation, "Why, Cousin Tryphena, it's like a story-book? You're going to _enjoy_ having those people. The woman is as nice as she can be, and that's the brightest little boy! He's as smart as a whip!"
I was aware that the oddness of Cousin Tryphena's manner still persisted even now that we were alone. She sighed heavily and said, "I don't sleep much better nights now I've done it!" Then facing me, "I hadn't ought to have brought them up here! I just did it to please myself! Once I saw 'em ... I wanted 'em!"
This seemed to me the wildest possible perversion of the Puritan instinct for self-condemnation and, half-vexed, I attempted some expostulation.
She stopped me with a look and gesture Dante might have had, "You ain't seen what I've seen."
I was half-frightened by her expression but tried to speak coolly. "Why, was it as bad as that paper said?" I asked.
She laid her hand on my arm, "Child, it was nothing like what the paper said...it was so much worse!"
"I was five days looking for her...they'd moved from the address the paper give. And, in those five days, I saw so many others..._so many others_..." her face twitched. She put one lean old hand before her eyes. Then, quite unexpectedly, she cast out at me an exclamation which made my notion of the pretty picturesqueness of her adventure seem cheap and trivial and superficial. "Jombatiste is right!" she cried to me with a bitter fierceness: "Everything is wrong! Everything is wrong! If I can do anything, I'd ought to do it to help them as want to smash everything up and start over! What good does it do for me to bring up here just these three out of all I saw ..." Her voice broke into pitiful, self-excusing quavers, "but when I saw them ...the baby was so sick ... and little Sigurd is so cunning ... he took to me right away, came to me the first thing ... this morning he wouldn't pick up his new rubbers off the floor for his mother, but, when I asked him, he did, right off ... you ought to have seen what he had on ... such rags ... such dirt ... and 'twan't her fault either! She's ... why she's like anybody ... like a person's cousin they never happened to see before ...why, they were all _folks_!" she cried out, her tired old mind wandering fitfully from one thing to another.