Marion Harland

“ The meanest hut in the Jersey meadows, the doorway of which frames in the dusk of evening the figure of a woman with a baby in her arms, silhouetted upon the red background of fire and lamp kindled to welcome the returning husband and father, harbors as guest a viewless but "incomparable sweet" angel that never visits the superb club-house where men go from spirit to spirit in the vain attempt to make home of that which is no home. ”

“ Philip sang more than well. Without extraordinary power, his voice had a rich and flexible quality of tone and a delicacy of expression that never failed to fascinate. To the rapt and listening girl it seemed as if time could bring no more delicious fate than thus to glide on ever upon this empurpled, enchanted stream, the summer heavens above her, and, thrilling ear and soul, the witching lullaby that rocked her spirit to dreams of the youth she had never had, the love for which she had longed with all the wild intensity, the fervent yearning, her deep heart could feel. ”

“ If this temper of spirit and heart was habitual to him, what may we not hope?"
"If!" exclaimed Ida, sadly. "Doubt is agonizing. It is not consistent with God's mercy that he should be consigned to never ending misery; he whose faults made us love him better; the soul of honor and integrity! I will not believe that so much that was pure and good is quenched in eternal darkness. This thought is with me night and day. What authority have men, his inferiors by nature—hardly his equals in the practice of virtue, to doom him, and hope a happier fate for the themselves?" ”

“ You have sold yourself for Hester Sanford's millions. You would have me sell myself, soul and body, for expediency and convenience—and to avert Roy Fordham's lasting enmity. That is the case, stripped of sentimental verbiage."
"Jessie!"
"I have no affection for him, or for any one else! No faith! no hope!" she pursued, towering above him like a lost but menacing spirit. "You saved my life this morning. You make of that benefit a wrong to-night, by robbing life of all that it held of sweetness and comfort; by showing me what a coarse bit of gilded clay I—poor fool! have worshipped. ”

“ She had no mercy upon herself. There was an unholy joy in ruthlessly trampling upon the few flowers that grew in her path: the ebullition of a desperate despair, as when one is tortured by a raging tooth, he probes, and grinds and shakes the offending member, self-inflicting yet more exquisite pain, but bearing it better, under the insane impression that he is wreaking revenge upon its cause; saying, with the poor Dutchman, "ache on! ache on! I can stand it as long as you can!" And "ache on! ache on!" said Ida to her heart, "the nerve will be dead by and by!" ”

“ We were a family of mad book-lovers, and the libraries of seminary and college were to my eyes twin Golcondas of illimitable possibilities. Up to now, novel-reading had been a questionable delight in which I hardly dared indulge freely. I was taught to abhor deceit and clandestine practices, and my father had grave scruples as to the wisdom of allowing young people to devour fiction. We might read magazines, as we might have confectionery, in limited supplies. A bound novel would be like a dinner of mince-pie and sweetmeats, breeding mental and moral indigestion. ”

“ Sarah strolling slowly after them. She had seen the ocean surf before, but never aught like this, with its huge swells of water, a mile in length, gathering blackness and height on their landward career; as they struck the invisible barriers that commanded, "Thus far and no farther!" breaking in white fury, with the leap of a baffled fiend, and a roar like thunder, against their resistless opponent, then recoiling, sullenly, to gather new force for another, and as useless an attack. ”

“ Aylett, the chatelaine of Ridgeley, the wife whose serene purity had never been blemished by a doubting breath; chaste and polished matron; the admired copy for younger and less discreet, but not more beautiful women. He surveyed her boldly—if the imagination had not seemed preposterous—Mr. Aylett would have said scornfully, as he might study the face and figure of some abandoned wretch who had accosted him in the public thoroughfare as an acquaintance. ”

“ The man who would view with an amiable smirk the spilling of a glass of Burgundy over his white waistcoat at a dinner, will often exhibit babyish rage at the breaking of a favorite golf-club or the stupidity of a caddie. The girl whose self-control permits her to smile and murmur: “It’s really of no consequence!” when a dance-partner’s foot tears three yards of lace off her train, will seldom show the same calm good-humor when her opponent at tennis serves balls that are too swift and too hard-driven for her to return. ”

“ With the thought of his wan and worried wife in mind, I shocked him by declining for my part to undertake such a big contract as resolutions for a year, a month or a week. If I live to a good old age, I shall owe the blessing in a great measure to the discovery, years ago, that I am hired not by the job, but by the day. If you, dear friend, will receive this truth into a good and honest heart, and believing, abide in and live by it, you will find it the very elixir of life to your spirit. ”

“ A passionate, proud, reticent girl; a trusting, loving, deceived woman; a hopeless, desperate bride—whose heart lay like a pulseless stone in her breast at the most ardent love-words of her husband, and throbbed with wild, uncontrollable emotion at the fraternal tone and kiss of her lost and only love—I have no plea for her, save the words of Infinite compassion and Divine knowledge of human nature and human woe: "Let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone at her!" ”

“ We always thought of the graveyard as an asylum in the event of a rising. No negro would venture to enter it by day or night.
In any ordinary period of danger or distress, I would have trusted my life in the hands of the men and women who had been born on the same plantation with my mother, and the younger generation, to whom she had been a faithful and benignant friend from their cradles. In fire and flood and tempest; in good report and evil report; in sickness and in health; in poverty, as in riches—they would have stood with, and for us to the death. ”

“ Ida was an orphan in her fifteenth year;—the age of all others when a mother's counsels are needed;—when the child stands tremblingly upon the threshold of girlhood, and looks with wondering, wistful eyes into the rosy vista opened to her sight. Babes in knowledge, nine girls out of ten are grown in heart at fifteen. A stroke, whether of extraordinary joy or sorrow, will oftentimes demolish the gew-gaws of the child, and reveal instead, the patient endurance, the steady faith, the all-absorbing love of a woman. ”

“ Does not the opium-eater, in his lucid intervals, prefer thirst and languor and pain to the drug for which his diseased appetite cries out as the dying for breath, and the fever-scorched for water? Prefer it with mind and conscience, if not with flesh and will? Jessie Kirke's will lived yet, and it had borne her beyond the reach of temptation and kept her there. But it did not hinder her from picturing Orrin pacing the portico, or, sitting in the parlor, awaiting her while she hid herself and her wretchedness among the willows. ”

“ It brought him closer to her than anything else—put her secret and reluctant imaginations of evil, and Rosa's daring insinuations, out of sight and recollection. She read slowly, and with frequent pauses, that she might take in the exquisite flavor of this and that phrase of endearment; set before herself in beauty and distinctness the scenes he portrayed as the adornment of the prospect which was theirs. ”

“ The grave seems near and welcome in the ague-fit that shakes the soul from the divine illusion of reciprocal affection. There was not a symptom of sickly sentimentalism in Eunice's nature; but she did feel that she could have said farewell to existence and the few she loved, with less effort than was required to dress her countenance in its wonted serenity, and go back to her sister; to speak and act as if a thunderbolt had not riven the ground at her feet; to consult her rustic and unobservant handmaid about homely details of the morrow's housekeeping. ”

“ As in neglected grave-yards, briars and weeds spring up, and delude the eye with the semblance of a smooth field, but when levelled to the roots, show the mounds they grow upon;—so above buried feelings, may wave memories and affections of later years—until some unforeseen event cuts, like a sickle-blade, through their ranks, and we see, with tears, as of fresh bereavement, the graves there still! Ida's was a brave spirit, but it trembled after the temptation was withdrawn. Richard had, unknowingly, been guilty of great cruelty in breaking the seal of her heart's closed chamber. ”

“ Like a good spirit, our chink-filler glides in and out among the fallen threads in the tangled web of life, picking up dropped stitches, fastening loose strands, and weaving the tissue into a harmonious whole, and yet doing it all so unobtrusively that the great weavers, looking only at the vast pattern they are forming, are unconscious that, but for the unselfish thought and deft fingers of the commonplace woman, their work would be a grand failure. ”

“ Mabel! do you know how solemn a thing it is to be loved and trusted by a man, as I love and confide in you? It terrifies me when I think of the absoluteness of my dependence upon your fidelity—of how rich I am in having you—how poor, wretched, and miserable I should be without you. I shall not draw a free breath until you are mine beyond the chance of recall.”
“Nobody else wants me!” breathed Mabel in his ear, nestling within the arm that enfolded and held her tightly in the corner of the piazza shaded by the creeper. ”

“ The untamed spirit found a fierce pleasure in wrestling with the wind; the hail that ushered in the snow-storm, as it beat in her face, called up lustre to the eye and warm color to the cheek. To a soul sickening of the glare and perfume of the artificial life to which she was confined, the roughest and wildest aspects of nature were a welcome change. ”

“ Aware of this, and that part of her nursely duty was to amuse the patient; ignorant that his heart was leaping with a new-born hope, so sweet and sudden that his head whirled dizzily under its influence, and the world took on rarest robes of beauty, she rambled on, her eyes bent upon the driving fleeces without. She had never been handsomer than now. Every trace of the shock that had prostrated nervous forces and reason, three months before, was gone from figure and countenance, while she thought only of gratifying her companion and her own fancy for a wild, winter day. ”

“ It may be said, I have not acted prudently in forming an engagement, whose consummation is so distant; but I have obeyed the voice of my heart and conscience."
Aye! crumple the sheet in your grasp, and sink to the earth—a crushed thing! struck down from the zenith of your pride and bliss—crushed and mangled—but living and feeling! Grief does not always stun—it seldom kills—you must live, although each lacerated heart-string is crying out for death! ”

“ Rosa was a vocalist of note in her circle, and she had never rendered anything with more effect than she did the song to which even the preoccupied strollers among the garden borders stayed their steps to listen. Through the open casement Mabel and her lover could see the face of the musician, slightly uplifted toward the moonlight; her eyes, dark and dreamy, as under the cloud of many years of weary waiting and final hopelessness. ”

“ It was a gay and shifting scene—a sparkling, murmuring tide, that ebbed and flowed to and from the quartette who formed the attractive power. Silks, laces, velvets, furs, and diamonds; faces young, old, and middle-aged; handsome, fair, and homely; all decked in the same conventional holiday smile; bodies tall and short, executing every variety of bow and courtesy; voices sweet, sharp, and guttural, uttering the senseless formula of congratulation—these were Sarah's impressions of the tedious ceremonial. ”

“ He looked, as he felt, on excellent terms with himself and the rest of the world; like a man who had eaten to satisfaction, but not to repletion, of the sunny side of the peach tendered by Fortune, and who was suitably grateful to the person to whom he considered that he owed his success in life—to wit, Orrin Wyllys. ”

“ Arthur quitted the room; Lynn gazed out of the window, with working features; Carry shaded her eyes with her hand; Ida felt a cold awe creeping over her. 'Death and Eternity!' had she heard the words before? how out of place in the bright warm life they were leading! Here were true friendships, tried and strengthened by years; young love, joying in his flowery course; refined and congenial spirits; the luxuries of wealth and taste;—how unwelcome the hand that lifted the drapery which enveloped the skeleton! 'Death and Eternity!' The spell was upon the scented air ”

“ Had the lungs once heaved with breath, the heart given one throb; the eyes caught one beam of Heaven's light ere they were sealed fast in eternal darkness, she, who travailed with the infant through the inexpressible agony of birth, would have been written a mother among women; have had the right accorded her, without the cavil of formalist or the disputations of science, to claim the precious thing as her own still—a living baby-spirit that had fluttered back to the bosom of the Almighty Father, after alighting, for one painful moment, upon the confines of the lower world. ”

“ Is it, then, an easy lot that you have chosen, Sarah Hunt? You, whose pride and glory it was to be truthful, who spurned whatever assimilated in the least degree to deception, what think you of a life where a lie meets you on the threshold and must be accepted and perpetuated if you would preserve your name and position in his eyes and those of the world. "It is the way two-thirds of the married people live!" ”

“ She could not say "Good-day" to a passing acquaintance without parting her lips in a wide smile over the milk-white treasures, tucking away their natural covering in an incredibly narrow fold above the ivory, and stretching it below into a straight line which lost itself in creases that had once been dimples. She had been renowned in her youth for her vivacity, and had cultivated it into what nobody was kind enough to tell her was frisky affectation. ”

“ They leaned together upon the window-sill, their young faces tinted by the changeful hues of the sky, both thoughtful and mute, until Rosa broke the silence by a heavy sigh.
“O Mabel, you should be a happy, happy girl; blessed among women. You can love—freely and joyously—and have pride and faith in the one beloved.” ”