Cornelia A. P. Comer

“ Mildred Fabian, alone with her patients and the one servant who had not deserted the house, faced her work and felt her heart rise with exultation—a singular, sustaining joy that never yet had failed her in the hour of need. The certainty of hard work, the consciousness of danger, the proximity of death—these acted always upon her like some subtle stimulant. If she had tried to explain this, which she did not, she would perhaps have said that at no other time did she have such an overwhelming conviction of the soul’s supremacy as in the hours of human extremity. ”

“ It doesn't help me to bear Desire's falling away. Benjamin, I would have known how to forgive a child who had sinned. I don't know how to forgive one who has failed like this! Desire is throwing away a life, not because it is intolerable, not because it is hard, even; but just because it has ceased to be exciting and amusing enough. But it is her life that she throws away. She cannot make a new one that will be real and her very own. She says she has ceased to love. They always say that. But love comes and goes always. There is no such thing as perpetual joy. Love is the morning vision. ”

“ It was as if a Dresden china shepherdess had been put upon their kitchen mantel-shelf.
Don Jessup stooped and picked a cluster of the pink wild rosebuds, whose bushes were scattered along the road outside the fence, and handed them to her with an admiring look. Why, he scarcely knew; it is [Pg 24] as involuntary and natural a thing for any one to pay passing tribute to a pretty girl as for the summer wind to kiss the clover. Serene read the momentary impulse better than he did himself, and took the buds with deepening color and a beating heart. ”

“ The name connotes honor, ability, character; it does not necessarily imply humor, high spirits, the joy of life.
Desire herself told me of her engagement. I don't, somehow, forget how she looked when she came to tell me about it--shy, excited, radiant. She fluttered into my office and stood at the end of my desk, looking down at me. Desire was very pretty at twenty-one, with her pointed face and big expressive eyes, her white forehead shadowed by a heap of cloudy, curling, dark hair. Palpitating with life, she looked like some kind of a marvelous human hummingbird. ”

“ Ollie thought a man ought to marry the girl he loves, and prejudices be hanged! In the deeps of his soul, he probably knew this to be the magnanimous, manly attitude, but certainly there was no condescension in his outward bearing when he asked Ruth Lannithorne to be his wife. Yet she turned on him fiercely, bristling with pride and tense with overwrought nerves.
"I will never marry any one," she declared, "who does n't respect my father as I do!"
If Oliver's jaw fell, it is hardly surprising. He had expected her to say she would never marry into a family where she was not welcome. ”

“ One does not decide upon the merits of falcons according to the traditions of doves, and it would be quite as unjust to judge Julie Applegate from what came to be the standpoint of her husband and his children. There is no doubt that she made life hideous to them, but this result was accidental rather than intentional. There are those to whom the unbridled speech of natures without discipline is as much a matter of course as the sunshine and the rain. If to Applegate and Dora it was thunder-burst and cyclone, whose was the blame? ”

“ They were such little things this stranger had done—things so slight, so involuntary, so unconscious that they did not deserve the name of courtesies, but they were enough to open the flood-gates of an embittered heart. There was a world where all the men were deferential and all the women’s lives were wrapped about with the fine, small courtesies of life—formal, but not meaningless. ”

“ You are safe only when you can stand everything that can happen to you. Then and then only! Endurance is the measure of a man."
Oliver's heart swelled within him as he listened, and his face shone, for these words found his young soul where it lived. The chasms and abysses in his path suddenly vanished, and the road lay clear again, winding uphill, winding down, but always lit for Ruth and him by the light in each other's eyes. For surely neither Ruth nor he could ever fail in courage! ”

“ Good women know this and do it. That is what it means to be a wife. The vision is the thing we cherish and live for to the end. Desire is no cheated woman. She had young love at its best; she has her children's faces. There is such a thing as perpetual peace; life gives it to the loyally married. She might have had that, too. But she throws it all away--for novelty, for new sensations. My daughter is a wanton!"
"Lucretia!"
The energy of my ejaculation, the sight of my surprise, brought my sister back to her normal self. ”

“ It is no light matter to make one’s self the arbiter of another man’s destiny; and he knew enough of Witherle to feel sure that the man’s future was in his hands. He looked down at him dubiously, his strong hands still clutching the rail tensely. For a minute he felt that he must move on without making his presence known, but even as he resolved, the clocks and whistles clamorously announced the hour.
When the men quitted their work, the man whom Lowndes’s eyes were following came up the stairs that led to the bridge. As he passed, Lowndes laid a hand lightly on his shoulder. ”

“ If they had spoken of his good fortune in being loved by Virginia, that was something a man could understand. The gods might envy Virginia’s lover, but that he, Roderick Le Garde, should be congratulated on becoming John Fenley’s son-in-law was intolerable.
He by no means pretended to scorn money, however, and he felt as strongly as did Fenley that Virginia must have it. Luxury was her natural atmosphere—any woman’s perhaps, but surely hers. Other men sacrificed other things for the women that they loved. ”

“ We Raynies are self-controlled people. Lucretia had always been a silent woman, keeping her emotions to her self. But they say earthquakes, vast convulsion of regions beneath the lowest seas, will sometimes force up to light of day strange flotsam from the ocean-bed. Things that the eyes of men have never seen, nor their busy minds conceived, float up to face the sun. From Lucretia's shaken soul arose such un-imagined things. ”

“ Oliver, red in the face, subdued, but eager to refute her out of the depths and heights of his inexperience, held him self rigidly still and listened.
"Did you ever hear that epigram of Disraeli--that all men should marry, but no women? That is what I believe! At least, if women must marry, let others do it, not my children, not my little girls!--It is curious, but that is how we always think of them. When they are grown they are often uncongenial. My daughter Ruth does not love me deeply, nor am I greatly drawn to her now, as an individual, a personality,--but Ruth was such a dear baby! ”

“ The night passed as even nights in sick-rooms will, and at last it began to grow toward day. The nurse became suddenly conscious of deadly weariness and need of rest. She called the servant and left her in charge, with a few directions and the injunction to call her at need, and then stole down the stairs to snatch, before she rested, the breath of morning air she craved.
As she stood at the veranda’s edge in the twilight coolness and twilight hush watching the whitening sky, there came steps behind her, and turning, she came face to face with Neil Hardesty. ”

“ Lowndes hesitated long before he spoke. He was reflecting that Witherle’s exaltation was pathological—he was drunk with the air of the open road.
“Poor little devil!” he thought. “One might let alone a man who finds ecstasy in being a coal-heaver; but it won’t do.”
“Life is big,” he admitted, slowly; “it’s tremendous, if you like; it’s all you say—but it isn’t for you. Don’t you see it is too late? We’re all of us under bonds to keep the world’s peace and finish the contracts we undertake. ”

“ Marvel, listen to me a moment. I {173} may not be able to make you understand--but I must try. This is the thing I must make you know. The reactions upon the spirit of the ties of the flesh are, simply, the most miraculous things in all this miraculous world. I am not preaching. I am just telling you what I know. This business of being a child, a parent, a husband, a wife,--no creature can escape that net of human relationships wholly. It is there, right there, that we are knotted fast to the whole unseen order of things. What we make of those ties determines what we substantially are. ”

“ Lowndes stared at him curiously, reflecting upon the fastidiousness with which men pick and choose their offenses against righteousness, embracing one joyously and rejecting another with scorn.
“Yes; so it would. But I have offered to do the lying for you, and you are off your head, you know.”
“How?” demanded Witherle, sharply.
“Any man is off his head who can’t take life as it comes, the bad and the good, and bear up under it. Suicide is insanity. You tried to commit suicide in the cowardliest way, by getting rid of your responsibilities and saving your worthless breath. Old man, it won’t do. ”

“ That day she told Paul she would leave him, he had brought her daffodils.--Had Paul felt like this?
Clarissa--Clarissa who had never before either asked or given quarter--heard her own voice, tense with feeling, say, "Marvel, I can't let you go, not yet!"
"Why, mother! I can't stay longer than June. Of all people in the world, you ought to admit that I must do my work! Of course I know you need a home as much as any one, though you never own it. That's why you have liked to have me here this winter because I could help you make one. You none of you know, you reformers! ”

“ She knew how the mind can adjust itself to any phase of experience, and had learned that what woman has undergone, woman can undergo—yes, and be strong about it. She knew how, under the impulse of necessity, the once impossible grows to be the accepted life, and the food that could not be swallowed becomes the daily bread. ”

“ Not His life only, then, but your life and mine, which we know to the bitter-sweet depths, and whose lessons grow clearer and clearer before us, are to guide us. Life is the light of men. I sometimes think that this, and this only, is rejecting Christ—to refuse to find Him in the life He gives us.”
Serene heard no more. ”

“ A Paul who could demand cheerfully as he took his second cup of coffee, "Well, Clarissa, am I the Tyrant Man this morning?" was not unlikely to elicit the answer, "No, not to-day, Paul. You're just own folks to-day." But a Paul who had heard the wolf howling at the door {153} of his heart, who looked at her with eyes in which she saw fear and the shadow of a broken life, repelled her utterly. Women are reputed to be soft-hearted. Paul Charleroy, musing upon his own predicament in those days, remembered this age-long superstition with wonder. ”

“ All around are the great upland swells of the mountains, rising endlessly, ridge beyond ridge, like the waves of the sea. In a hollow beside the glittering track is the one sign of human existence in sight—the sun-scorched, brown railway station. ”

“ In our own life at home, there is comfort, peace, sufficient stimulus, development; this life is exciting, but barren of something that I will call soil to grow in, because I don't know any better word. Of course it is great fun for me to come in contact with so many different kinds of minds and hear them emit their theories. Only, somehow, the theorists lack reality to me. ”

“ If you would see my friend Hayden, commonly called by his friends the connoisseur, figure to yourself a tall gentleman of sixty-five, very erect still and graceful, gray-headed and gray-bearded, with fine gray eyes that have the storm-tossed look of clouds on a windy March day, and a bearing that somehow impresses you with an idea of the gracious and pathetic dignity of his lonely age. ”

“ Something in the words, in the dry, patient manner, in the endurance of the man's face, touched Oliver to the quick and made him feel all manner of new things: such as a sense of the moral poise of the universe, acquiescence in its retributions, and a curious pride, akin to Ruth's own, in a man who could meet him after this fashion, in this place. ”

“ And this conviction, strongest in the teeth of all that would seem most vehemently to deny it, was to her nothing less than intoxicating.
She was not one of the women to whom there still seems much left in life when love is gone. To be sure, she had the consolations of religion and a certain sweet reasonableness of temperament which prompted her to pick up the pieces after a crash, and make the most of what might be left. ”

“ Here is Desire, fiddling with art and literature and civics and economics, and wanting to uplift the masses with Scandinavian dramas and mediaeval art and woman suffrage. If she really wants to enrich life for others, and she says she does, why, in Heaven's name, does n't she hold up Arnold Ackroyd's hands? There is work that is worth while, and it would take more brains and ability than she owns to do it well! It is her work; she chose it; she dedicated herself to it. Now she repudiates it for a whim."
"How do you know it is just a whim, Lucretia?" ”