Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

“ There was a full moon, and great masses of shadows seemed to float and hover and alight on the earth with a gigantic brooding as of birds. The trees seemed redoubled in size from the soft indetermination of the moonlight which confused shadow and light, and deceived the eye as with soft loomings out of false distances. There was a tall pine, grown from a sapling since Ellen's childhood, and that looked more like a column of mist than a tree, but the Norway spruces clove the air sharply like silhouettes in ink, and outlined their dark profiles clearly against the silver radiance. ”

“ Kneeling before a window on the farther side from her old home, she watched with eager eyes the young man open the gate and come up the path between the old-fashioned shrubs. The clove-like fragrance of the pinks in the border came in her face. Annie watched Tom Reed disappear beneath the trellised hood of the door; then the bell tinkled through the house. It seemed to Annie that she heard it as she had never heard anything before. Every nerve in her body seemed urging her to rise and go down-stairs and admit this young man whom she loved. But her will, turned upon itself, kept her back. ”

“ Sylvia sat up straight in the chair. She had on her best bonnet and shawl, and her worked lace veil over her face. Her poor blue eyes stared out between the black silk leaves and roses. If she had been a dead woman and riding to her grave, and it had been possible for her to see as she was borne along the familiar road, she would have regarded everything in much the same fashion that she did now. She looked at everything—every tree, every house and wall—with a pang of parting forever. ”

“ I said to myself that now Mary Cavendish was farther from me than ever before. Some dignity of wretchedness there might be in the fate of a convict condemned unjustly, but none in the fate of a man who sat in the stocks for all the people to gaze and laugh at.
I said to myself that that cruelest fate of any—to be made ridiculous in the eyes of love—was come to me, and love henceforth was over and gone. And thinking so, those grinning and jibing faces multiplied, and the air rang with laughter, and I trow I was in a high fever all night. ”

“ Often Maria felt vaguely as if she were in the grasp of some mighty machine worked by a mighty operator; she felt, as she pasted the linings, as if she herself were also a part of some monstrous scheme of work under greater hands than hers, and there was never any getting back of it. And always with it all there was that ceaseless, helpless, bewildered longing for something, she was afraid to think what, which often saps the strength and life of a young girl. Maria had never had a lover in her life; she had not even good comrades among young men, as her sister had. ”

“ Oh, Alice!”
“How she must love herself,” said Alice firmly. “Annie, you must face it. Margaret is a self-lover; her whole heart turns in love toward her own self, instead of toward those whom she should love and who love her. Annie, Margaret is bad, bad, with a strange degenerate badness. She dates back to the sins of the First Garden. You must turn your back upon her. You must not love her any more.”
“No, I must not love her any more,” agreed Annie, “and that is the pity of it. I must not love her, Alice, but I must pity her until I die. Poor Margaret!” ”

“ Who knows if a rose does not really cease to be, in its own sense, to a soul in an extremity of joy or grief?
Whatever it might be for others, the spring wood was not to-day what it had ever been before to Jerome. All its shining, and sweetening, and growing were so forced into accord with himself that the whole wood took, as it were, the motion of his own soul. Jerome looked at a fine young poplar-tree, and saw not a tree but a maid, revealing with innocent helplessness her white body through her skirts of transparent green. ”

“ Everybody is up and wide awake and doing. The earth and the habitations thereof are rubbed, cleaned, and swept, or skylarked over; the boy plays with his marbles on the sidewalk or whoops over the fields; the housewives fling wide open their house windows, and the dust of the winter flies out like smoke; the tradesmen set out their new wares to public view, the bees make honey, the birds repeat their world-old nesting songs, the cocks crow straight through the day; nothing stops till the sun sets, and even then it is hard for such an ardent clock of life to quite run down. ”

“ There came a blast of northwest wind which buffeted them about their faces and chests like an icy flail, and they scattered before it, some to their duties in the stable, some into the warm tavern for a mug of something hot to do away with the chill. It was too cold a day to gossip in a doorway. It was not long past noon, but the cold had seemed to strengthen as the sun rode higher. The wind blew from the icy northwest more frequently in fiercer gusts. Madelon Hautville sped along before it, her red cloak flying out like a flag, and took no thought of it at all. ”

“ Maria, in the car behind the smoker, sat beside Gladys, and looked out of the window very much as Wollaston was doing. She also was conscious of an exceeding horror and terror, and a vague shame. It was, to Maria, as if she had fallen through the fairy cobweb of romance and struck upon the hard ground of reality with such force that her very soul was bleeding. Wollaston, in the smoker, wished no more devoutly that there were no girls in the world, than Maria wished there were no boys. ”

“ All around us the rank, woody growth was full of murmurs and movements of life, and perfumes from unseen blossoms disturbed one's thoughts with sweet insistence at every gust of wind, and always one heard the lapping of the sea-water through all its countless ways, for well it loves this country of Virginia and steals upon it, like a lover who will not be gainsaid, through meadows and thick woods and coarse swamps, until it is hard sometimes to say, when the tide be in, whether it be land or sea, and we who dwell therein might well account ourselves in a Venice of the New World. ”

“ Anderson lit another cigar. The night seemed to grow more and more oppressive. When a breath of wind came, it was like a hot breath of some fierce sentiency. A disagreeable odor from something was also borne upon it. The odors of the flowers seemed in abeyance. The play of blue-and-rosy light along the northwest horizon continued. Anderson got a certain pleasure from watching it. Nature's spectacularity diverted him, as if he had been a child, from his own affairs, which seemed to give him a dull pain. ”

“ Lucina started when the lavender breath entered the room, and looked up as if at a ghostly herald. She toed out her two small morocco-shod feet more particularly upon the floor, she smoothed down her own and her doll's little petticoats, and she also made herself all ready to rise and courtesy.
After the lavender sweetness came the whisper of silk flounces, growing louder and louder; but there was no sound of footsteps, for Aunt Camilla moved only with the odor and rustle of a flower. No one had ever heard her little slippered feet; even her high heels never tapped the thresholds. ”

“ Evelyn, gazing at the young man, had never been so unconscious of herself, and at the same time she had never been so conscious. She felt a life to which she had been hitherto a stranger tingling through every vein and nerve of her young body, through every emotion of her young soul. She gazed with wide-open eyes like a child, the rose flush deepened on her cheeks, her parted lips became moist and deep crimson, pulses throbbed in her throat. She smiled involuntarily, a smile of purest delight and admiration. Love twofold had awakened within her emotional nature. ”

“ When Madelon Hautville stopped singing not one in the meeting-house had seen Burr Gordon stir, but the soul in him had surely turned and faced about with a great rending as of swathing wills that bound it.
Parson Fair preached that morning. Great had been the speculation as to whether he would or not. When he stood up in his pulpit and faced the crowded pews and the steely glances of curious eyes through the shifting flutter of fans, he was as austerely composed as ever; but a buzzing whisper went through the audience like a veritable bee of gossip. ”

“ Jonathan Leavitt had had a fear lest Sylvia might make a disturbance about going. Many a time had it taken hours for him to induce a poor woman to leave her own door-stone; and when at length they had set forth, it was to an accompaniment of shrill, piteous lamentations, so strained and persistent that they seemed scarcely human, and more like the cries of a scared cat being hauled away from her home. Everybody on the road had turned to look after the sled, and Jonathan Leavitt had driven on, looking straight ahead, his face screwed hard, lashing now and then his old horse, with a gruff shout. ”

“ When Andrew went down to the library, passing along the drenched streets, seeing the lamps through shifting veils of heavy mist, he was as full of enthusiasm over Ellen's book as he had been over the gold-mine. The heart of a man is always ready to admit a ray of sunshine, and it takes only a small one to dispel the shadows when love dwells therein. ”

“ She was as slender as a reed in this marshy country of Virginia, and her voice was a sweet whisper, like the voice of one in a wind, and she had a curious gracefulness of leaning toward one she loved when in his presence, as if, whether she would or no, her heart of affection swayed her body toward him. Always, in thinking of my mother, I see her leaning with that true line of love toward my stepfather or my brother John, her fair hair drooping over her delicate cheeks, her blue eyes wistful with the longing to give more and more for their happiness. ”

“ Every little flower upon which his idle gaze fell was no flower, but an eye of love—a bird called to his mate with the call of his own heart. Every sight, and sound, and sweetness of the wood wooed and tempted him, with the reflex motion of his own new ardor of love and passion. He had not gone to meeting lest he see Lucina Merritt again, and wished to drive her image from his mind, and here he was peopling his solitude with symbols of her which were bolder than she, and made his hunger worse to bear. ”

“ Death seemed merely the going-out into the true open, the essence of the moonlight and the beauty. It seemed the tasting and absorbing the food for his own spiritual hunger, which had been upon him from birth, that which had always been just out of his reach. When Maria returned in her pink gingham school-gown, she found her father seated beside the table as he had been when she left. He looked up at her with a bright smile which somehow chilled her, although she tried to drive the conviction of the chill from her mind. ”

“ She stared wonderingly over the baby's little downy head at her brother. “It can't be Barney,” she said out loud to herself. She stood still in the road, staring after him with parted lips. The baby wailed softly, and she hushed it mechanically, her great, happy, startled eyes fixed upon her brother.
Barnabas went on up the hill to Charlotte Barnard's. The spring was advancing. All the trees were full of that green nebula of life which comes before the blossom. Little wings, bearing birds and songs, cut the air. A bluebird shone on a glistening fence-rail, like a jewel on a turned hand. ”

“ Anderson was a picture of a Sunday, in a rich lavender silk and a magnificent though old-fashioned lace shawl which floated from her shoulder in a fairy net-work of black roses. She would never wear plain black like most women of her age. She was one of the blue-eyed women who looks well in lavender. Her blue eyes, now looking at her son from under the rich purples and lavenders of the velvet pansies on her bonnet, got an indeterminate color like myrtle blossoms. A deeper pink also showed on her cheeks because of the color of her gown. ”

“ All at once she entered a vast room in which eager men were already at the machines with frantic zeal, as if they were driving labor herself. When she felt the vibration of the floor under her feet, when she saw people spring to their stations of toil, as if springing to guns in a battle, she realized the might and grandeur of it all. Suddenly it seemed to her that the greatest thing in the whole world was work and that this was one of the greatest forms of work—to cover the feet of progress of the travellers of the earth from the cradle to the grave. ”