Kate Langley Bosher

“ There isn't a bird in Twickenham Town that isn't singing to-day, or a flower that isn't blooming, and, owing to the rain last night, the dust is laying. As for the sun—there couldn't be a more shining one, and the sky is a blue so gorgeous that it seems heaven turned inside out, and in the air is the snap of coolness that makes one want to walk and walk and walk, and its crispness means fall is coming. I love the fall. I can't think of anything I do not love to-day except Elizabeth Hamilton Carter and Grandmother Brandon, and I don't exactly abhor them. ”

“ If there is a God, He knows the cursed struggle life is with most of us; and if there isn't, prayer is but a waste of time."
Carmencita lifted her eyes and for a moment looked in the dark, thin face, embittered by the losing battle of life, as if she had not heard aright, then she laughed softly.
"If I didn't know you, dear Mr. Damanarkist, I'd think you really meant it—what you said. And you don't. I don't guess there's anybody in all the world who doesn't pray sometimes. Something in you does it by itself, and you can't keep it back. ”

“ All my life people have looked down on me, passing me by like I was a Juny bug or a caterpillar, and I don't wonder. I'm merely Mary Cary with fifty-eight more just like me. Blue calico, white dots for winter, white calico, blue dots for summer. Black sailor hats and white sailor hats with blue capes for cold weather, and no fire to dress by, and freezing fingers when it's cold, and no ice-water when it's hot.
Yes, dear Mary, you and I are going to marry a rich man. (Martha is writing to-day.) I will try to love him, but if I can't I will be polite to him and travel alone as much as possible. ”

“ She must once have been a pretty woman, but her hair and eyes were now a dusty black, her skin the color of putty, and her mouth a drooping curve that gave to her face the expression of one who was about to cry. Life had apparently for some time been more than she was equal to, and, incapable of battling further with it, she radiated a helplessness that was pitiable and yet irritating. ”

“ Answer me, Dorothy, don’t make me wait.” He had his arms around her, and he drew her face again to his, while his breath came fast and hard, and he could distinctly hear the beating of his heart.
Dorothy looked at him for just a moment, and then she tried to free herself from his arms. “Not until you answer me,” he said, holding her tighter. “What is it?”
“I wonder why men are so stupid,” she said, laughing a little unsteadily, “you take so long to find out what women know so soon. I like the others, but—ah, Bobbie, you know”—and she looked up in his face and touched it shyly with her hand. ”

“ You were wise, little daughter of mine, to choose so quaint and queer and dear a place in which to spend your summer, for there real things still count, and there is more time for the fine courtesies of life, and the hurry and rush of it, the push and scramble for place and power, is out of key with its quiet serenity and the poise that comes from a sense of values that by many of us is to-day forgotten. ”

“ In all this big world sheis the only person who really loves me—the only one I really love. And do you think?"—she nodded fiercely as if to some one before her, then crumpled in a sudden heap in her chair. "Oh, God, don't let her go out of my life! I'm an old woman and she's all I've got! All I've got!"
For some moments she lay still, then reached out for her handkerchief. "What a variety of fools one female can be! Sit up and behave yourself, Gibbie Gault! ”

“ Would the spilling of blood be forever necessary? He ordered Beauregarde to drive to the hotel. There was just time for lunch, and then the boat which would take him down the river to where Claudia would be waiting.
As the boat swung off from the wharf and slowly made its way down the narrow river, curving like a horse-shoe around its ice-bound banks, Laine, standing in the bow, scanned the scene closely, and wondered if it were but yesterday that he had been in the rush and stir of city life. Straight up from the water the bluff rose boldly. ”

“ I had told Selwyn I had come that I might see from its vantage-ground the sort of person I was and what I was doing with life; but it was also in the secret hope that he, too, might see the kindred of all men to men, the need of each for each, that I had come. If together we could stand between those of high and low degree, between the rich and the poor, the strong and the weak, with hands outstretched to both, and so standing bring about, perhaps, a better understanding of each other, then my coming would have been worth while. ”

“ No, he would not go to Hallsboro for Christmas.
Turning off the light in his office and closing the door with unnecessary energy, Van Landing walked down the hall to the elevator, then turned away and toward the steps. Reaching the street, he hesitated as to the car he should take, whether one up-town to his club or one across to his apartment, and as he waited he watched the hurrying crowd with eyes in which were baffled impatience and perplexity. It was incomprehensible, the shopping craze at this season of the year. He wished there was no such season. ”

“ Sometimes Martha is real hard on Mary.
There is no use studying Human Nature. You can't study a thing that changes by day and by night, and is so uncertain you never know what it is going to do. Now, here is Mary Cary, mostly Martha, who would rather get on a train or a boat and go somewhere— she don't care where—than to do any other thing on earth. Who has never seen anything and wants to see everything, and who, if anyone had told her a year ago she could go to New York, and then to Europe, would have slid down every flight of stairs head foremost from pure joy. ”

“ If in Claudia's heart was knowledge of the secret in his, she masked it well. Warmly cordial, coolly impersonal, frankly unconscious, she had never avoided him, and still had so managed that they were never alone together. Hands clasped loosely, he leaned forward and stared into the heart of the blazing logs. Of course she knew. All women know when they are loved. No. The log fell apart, and its burning flame glowed rich and red. She had not known, or she would not have asked him to Elmwood. ”

“ For weeks I had been face to face with cruel conditions of life, had seen hardships and denials and injustices, and dreary monotony of days, and I wanted for a while to get away from it all, to breathe deep of that which would renew and reinforce and revitalize; wanted to be a child again, and, with Selwyn as my playmate, wander along the winding road with faces to the sun, and hearts of hope, and faith that God would not forget, and the world would yet be well. If nobody was going to do anything to us, if we were not needed to play a part, the hours ahead could be ours. ”

“ For two whole days I stayed in my room and thought of nothing but a big, brawny, domineering, dictating girl from the West who was giving Billy no time to write letters; and though I would die before I would let anybody know it, even Jess, I nearly cried my eyes out under the bedclothes the day of the marriage.
Life is a poor thing at times. And it is never so poor as when you think a friend has failed you. There was nothing on earth that could have made me believe Billy would ever fail me when we had known each other since children, and he had saved my life three or four times ”

“ With an indrawing breath of which she was not conscience, Mary Cary leaned back in the chair and her hands dropped in her lap. On her knees Hedwig knelt and drew off the slippers, and with soft, firm movements, learned in her hospital days, began to rub first one foot and then the other.
"Your feet, they tired get, mein Fraulein, because they are not for the body big enough. Look! I can cover it with my hand! Your body is not large, but your feet"—she laughed as if the thought were funny—"your feet is like your heart. They are a child's!" ”

“ It is forever, Winthrop, this life that we are entering. Are we very, very sure there's love enough to last?"
"I am very sure, Claudia." He lifted her hands to his lips and kissed them. "For me your love will make of life a—"
"Land that is not lonely?" Under her breath she laughed, to hide the sob in her throat. "Oh, Winthrop Laine, it is what love is for! And no one's land is lonely when there is love enough!" ”

“ They love you, mein Fraulein. They love you because you have not them forgot, and because you do not forget when you, too, were little and unloved and nobody cared. Love it a great thing is."
Mary Cary sat upright and her clear laughter broke the stillness of the soft night air. "Did you talk to that little Minna Haskins, Hedwig, or hear her talk? Her imagination is worse than mine ever was, but memory is her specialty. There's nothing she doesn't remember. She's only eight, but she goes back to the prehistoric without a blink. ”

“ I know my mother and father are dead, but that's all I do know; and I wouldn't ask Miss Bray if I had to stand alone for ever and ever.
Sometimes I believe Miss Katherine knows something she won't tell me, but since I found out she don't like me to ask her I've stopped. And not being able to ask out what I'd like, I think a lot more, and some nights when I can't go to sleep, it gives me an awful sinking feeling right down in my stomach, to think in all this great big world there isn't a human that's any kin to me. ”

“ I have never told him I loved him, never promised to marry him. To live in his high-walled house with its conventional customs, its age-dimmed portraits, its stiff furnishings, and shut-out sunshine, would stifle every cell in brain and lungs, and to marry him would be to marry his house. I hate his house, hate the aloofness, the lack of sympathy it represents. Its proud past I can appreciate, but not its useless present. Save his brother Harrie, it is the one thing of his old life left Selwyn. At the death of his father he bought Harrie's interest and it is all his now. ”

“ Frances Barbour lifted the excited little face and kissed it. "What's the matter, Carmencita? You look as if you'd seen a ghost, and you're talking as if—"
"I'm crazy—I'm not. And there isn't any time to lose. He said he must find you before Christmas. There isn't a soul to make Christmas for him, and he hasn't anybody to buy things for, and he's as lonely as a—a desert person, and he doesn't want any one but you. Oh, Miss Frances, what is his name?"
Frances Barbour leaned back in the chair in which she had taken her seat, and her face whitened. ”

“ In my secret heart I just wrote that letter to Billy because I was indignant with him for not writing to me for more than two weeks, and I didn't intend to let him think I was sitting on a tombstone waving a willow branch in one hand and wiping tears away with the other. And, besides, I have been in love. Summer love. And it has been exciting. No one could expect me to go through life and not have but one experience in love making and hearing, and because a girl enjoys the different manners of expression it doesn't mean she is not particular about the story not being illustrated. ”

“ The mills and factories have brought new people, some of the old ones have died, the little ones grown up, several have married and gone away to live, but it is the same sunshiny little place, and I love it. In the months spent with Miss Gibbie, waiting for Tree Hill to be made ready to live in, there was the restless feeling that belongs to temporary arrangement, but now I am home; here to live and work, and the only shadow is that the big and little Aldens are not here, too. ”

“ Indecision had ever been unendurable, and uncertainty was not in him to stand. Without her, life would be—again he looked in the fire—without her, life would not be life.
XX CLAUDIA Claudia parted the curtains of her bedroom window and, holding them aside, looked out upon the scene before her with eyes love-filled at its wonder and beauty.
Across the broad, terraced lawn the fresh-fallen snow was unbroken, and every crystal-coated branch and twig of the great trees upon it gleamed in the moonlight as though made of glass. ”

“ Banch, the old shoemaker and his wife, I stood at the open grave and watched the earth piled into a mound that marked a resting-place at last for a broken body and a soul no one had tried to reach that it might save, but I did not hear the beating of the clods of clay, nor the twittering of the birds in the trees, nor the wind in their tops. ”

“ And a thing on your mind is worse than the toothache. One you can tell, the other you can't. A thing you can't tell is like a spook that's always behind you, and right in the bed with you when you wake up sudden, and lies down with you every time you go to sleep. I know, for that letter is on my mind.
When I got out of Miss Bray's room I ran in mine, Miss Katherine being out, and locked the door, and I said:
"Mary Martha Cary, don't ever say again there's no such things as modern miracles. There's been a miracle to-day, and you have seen it. Somebody has been born over." ”

“ Being in love myself, as I had once thought, wasn't a circumstance to it, and the other girls were as bad as I. To help a heart-yearning, backboneless young girl escape from the captivity of a cast-iron grandparent was something no red-blooded person could refuse, and every one of us agreed that the only thing for Amy to do was to walk into the den of lions and tell the head lioness the truth; ask her permission to many the man she loved, and, if she would not give it, to take it, anyhow, and tell her farewell and leave at once for South America. ”

“ Who would believe Gibbie Gault had a tear duct!" She shook her head. "Gibbie Gault has everything every other woman has, and if she chooses to hide a hungry heart under a sharp tongue whose business is it? People may talk about her as much as they please, but they sha'n't feel sorry for her!" She threw her handkerchief on the table. "What idiots we are to go masquerading through life! All playing a part—all! Pretending not to care when we do care. Pretending we do when we don't. What a shabby little sham most of this thing called life is! ”

“ XXII SPRINGTIME Winthrop Laine lifted the tangled vines which overhung the shrub-bordered path leading down the sloping lawn at the back of the house to the rose-garden at its foot, and held them so that Claudia could pass under.
"They ought to be cut." She stopped and unfastened a long tendril of intertwined honeysuckle and bridal-wreath which had caught her hair. "Everything ought to be cut and fixed, only—"
"It would be beyond pardon. If any one should attempt to change this garden, death should be the penalty. One rarely sees such old-fashioned flowers as are here, never in modern places." ”

“ They cannot say, however, even my most protesting friends, that I am not living in a perfectly proper neighborhood. The front of my house faces, beyond the discouraged little park, a strata of streets which unfold from lessening degrees of dreariness and dinginess to ever-increasing expensiveness and unashamed architectural extravaganzas, to the summit of residential striving, called, for impressiveness, the Avenue, but behind it is a section of the city of which I am as ignorant as if it were in the depths of the sea or the wilds of primeval forest. ”

“ And who isn't glad to be living when every single tree is dressed in green and gold, or brown and tan, or yellow and red, and the sun is just laughing at you, and dancing for joy? It's such a nice world, Peggy, this world is, if we'll just keep our eyes open to the pretty things in it, and our hearts to its good things. Of course we have to see the ugly ones; if we didn't we might bump into them, and get hurt or soiled or something. But seeing and keeping on looking are very different things. Wait a minute, Peggy! ”

“ They are in my trunk, the two Christmas presents, and we have had a grand time, Miss Araminta and Miss Susanna and I, buying their party dresses and things, and it is as true as Scripture that at times there is nothing better for the soul than pretty clothes for the body. And nothing so chirps up a woman as to have on becoming ones that fit and are fresh and make her feel she can walk across the floor without wishing she had a shawl on. The way Miss Araminta has bloomed out is as amazing as a moon-plant. ”

“ Drawing a low chair close to the bed, I sat down and leaned toward the woman. There was little time to lose. "What is it, Mrs. Cotter? Look at me. This is Dandridge Heath. You have something you want to say to me. Tell me what it is."
Her head made backward, twisting movement as if for breath, then her eyes held mine, and in them was the cry eternal of all motherhood. "My little girl! My little girl! If only—I could take—her with me! Who's going to—tell her how—not to go—wrong? She won't be safe—on earth. ”

“ Hand in hand they had gone into the dining-room, with its lavishly spread table and mantel-hung stockings, and the chorus of hearty greetings and warm hand-shaking had made his heart beat like a boy's.
The day had passed quickly. The gay breakfast; the unwrapping of bundles; the sleigh-ride to church, where the service was not so long as was the seemingly social meeting afterward; the bountiful dinner with its table laden as in days of old rather than in the modern fashion of elegant emptiness ”

“ No wizard works such enigmatical changes as that master of human destinies called Love. Lives are glorified or ruined by it, and no man or woman experiences it who is not more or less, in the process of experiencing, some sort of a fool. They play with happiness as though it were a toy, and learn too late they've thrown away the only thing worth having in life. By-the-way, speaking of happiness, has this Mr. Horatio Fielding gone yet?"
Mary Cary drew the big wing chair closer to the fire and sat upon its arm, one slippered foot on the fender. ”

“ Nothing is so beautiful as youth, and she had much more than youth. The gods had been good to her up to then, and then they taunted her, made spring in her heart love for one only—love that must be crushed and killed, for the man who alone could inspire it wore the hated blue, was there to fight against her people, and never must she marry him, she told herself. On a visit North she had met him, and it was a whim of fate that he should be captain of one of the companies taking possession of Yorkburg, with headquarters in the Roy house, next to her own. ”

“ Beating the air doesn't interest me. Most people seem to forget the processes of nature; seem to imagine that certain things can be brought to pass quickly which can only be accomplished slowly. From the first struggle of the human race to stand upright, to articulate, to find food, to strike fire, to paddle in water, to wear covering, to forage, explore— What is the matter?"
"Nothing." I leaned back in the corner of the sofa, my hands, palms upward, in my lap, my eyes on them that he might not see their smiling. ”