Catherine Helen Spence

“ I have lived through the period of repressed childhood, and witnessed the dawn of a new era which has made the dwellers in youth's "golden age" the most important factor in human development. I have watched the growth of Adelaide from the condition of a scattered hamlet to that of one of the finest cities in the southern hemisphere; I have seen the evolution of South Australia from a province to an important State in a great Commonwealth. ”

“ Besides I was ashamed of my writing, though it is better now, thanks to Amy. But I was ashamed whenever I thought of my mistake and your surprise; and besides I wanted you to right yourself because you felt you ought to do it, and not for my sake, for that would show you deserved my love. It is only when a man is unworthy that love can be a misery. Even if you had not told me that you feel that love, for me that makes me so happy I can scarce see you through my tears, I would never have mourned if you had proved yourself good and I had won you to your father and mother. ”

“ Since you say that you cannot bring yourself to love the poor Francis, whom, nevertheless, my heart yearns after, and of whom I love to hear even the meagre details you give to me, I rejoice, my friend, that you have made a home for your sister's sweet little girls. You must have something to love. Ah! to me my Arnauld and my Clemence brought unspeakable comfort. I do not think of them as Philippe de Vericourt's children; they are the children whom God have given to me. I do not watch fearfully, lest his ungovernable temper and his selfish soul should be reproduced in them. ”

“ My interests have always been in people and in the things that make for human happiness or misery rather than in the beauties of Nature, art, or architecture. I want to know how the people live, what wages are, what the amount of comfort they can buy; how the people are fed, taught, and amused; how the burden of taxation falls; how justice is executed; how much or how little liberty the people enjoy. And these things I learned to a great extent from my social intercourse with those cultured reformers of America. ”

“ Even at the season of the year when Australian scenery looks its worst, when the grass is burnt almost to the colour of the earth it covers, an experienced eye could tell, by the length and closeness of the herbage, by the lay of the country and the look of the soil, and more especially by the numbers of fine gum-trees that enlivened the sombre colouring of the landscape with their great white stems and luxuriance of green foliage, that it was a well-watered region, and land that in ordinary seasons would grow anything. ”

“ Brandon, it is a lovely song."
"And all made up after our talk of old times the other night; for I thought it was just the thing for a ballad, and Alice will do anything I ask her. You see that we will make a hero of you, and we will sing this song in your praise when you are far away," said Emily.
"Then I am not be forgotten," said Brandon, speaking to Emily, but looking very hard at Elsie. "I do not wish to be forgotten by any one here; but I do not care for being remembered as a hero, which I do not deserve to be—but as a—a friend." ”

“ Bayard Holmes of Chigago, whose acquaintance I made through missing a suburban train, expressed a common feeling when he said he could weep at the thought that it was all to be destroyed—that the creation evolved from the best brains of America should be dissolved. Much of our human toil is lost and wasted, and much of our work is more ephemeral than we think; but this was a conscious creation of hundreds of beautiful buildings for a six months' existence. Nowhere else except in America could the thing have been done, and nowhere else in America but in Chicago. ”

“ Vivian Phillips had a great respect for her, and enjoyed her society now and then as a pleasant change from the more insipid company of his sisters or their female acquaintances, but to spend a life with her would be too fatiguing. She seemed always to require him to think his best, to say his best, and to do his best in her company. Now a wife just intelligent enough to appreciate his own abilities, but willing in all things to be guided by him, was a desirable thing; but one so thoroughly his equal as Jane Melville would allow him no repose. ”

“ How terribly quickly the weeks and months flew past for both Lady Eveline and Miss Hope. It seemed as if nothing could break the charmed net that entangled them, but Miss Hope once made the attempt.
"How very happy you must be, Lady Eveline," said she to her one day.
"Happy!" echoed the girl with a sigh and a start.
"It is so seldom when young people make a marriage of affection that the parents on both sides are so reasonable as they have been in your case," said Miss Hope with a slight accent on the word affection. ”

“ By my interests and work in so many other directions—in literature, journalism, education, philanthropy, and religion—which had been testified to by so many notable people on that occasion, I hoped to prove that I was not a mere faddist, who could be led away by a chimerical fantasy. I wanted the world to understand that I was a clear-brained, commonsense woman of the world, whose views on effective voting and other political questions were as worthy of credence as her work in other directions had been worthy of acceptance. ”

“ I determined to do it on the occasion when I parted with you in the nursery."
"Shall I say, like Miss Harriett Phillips, that I conquered you by making a ballad in your praise? for these men can be led by nothing so well as by vanity and selfishness. No, I will not say it, for I do not think you are either vain or selfish. I should not like you if you were," said Elsie.
"Say LOVE, Alice, it sounds much sweeter, and goes more to my heart. You like your cousin, or no-cousin Francis, but you must LOVE me." ”

“ Now you'll have to speak to my father, and I doubt you will have some rouble here, for he is set on my marrying McCallum, and to me he is he most wearisome company I ever was in. So that I'll never do, George; whatever my father may wish or may command I can obey him so far as to give you up, but not to marry another man."
"You'll not give me up, Jessie," said George earnestly, for he now felt as much like a lover as a girl could wish. ”

“ The higher education is still a sort of preserve of the well-to-do, and when one thinks of how greatly this is valued it seems a pity that it is not open to the talents, to the industry, to the enthusiasm of all the young of both sexes. But one exception I must make to the aloofness of people with degrees and professions from the preventible evils of the world, and that is in the profession that is the longest and the most exacting—the medical profession. The women doctors whom I have met in Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney have a keen sense of their responsibility to the less fortunate. ”