Mary H. Fee

“ If a flying machine should suddenly descend in an American village with no sign of steam gear, electric motor, compressed air, or any other motive power with which we are familiar, can you imagine that eighty per cent of the population of the village would stand around, begging the inventor to make it fly and alight again, exhibiting all the delight of children in a strange toy, but giving it not one close glance, one touch to determine how it is made, and not even wondering anything about it? ”

“ One warm night, when the Maclaughlins, Kingsnorth, and the oyster-agent had given themselves up to the delights of bridge, the other three strolled along the beach till they came to an old banca lying bottom up on the sand. There was no moon, but the stars burned steadily overhead, their reflections rising and falling with each slow wave. A ghostly thread of white fire outlined each breaker that toppled lazily over, and the gentle succession of splashes was like a deep harmonic accompaniment to the shrill chorus of insect life which burst from the grove behind them. ”

“ But the Filipino is like the sinner who says with all sincerity that he desires to be saved, but who, when confronted with the necessity of giving up certain of his pleasures as the price of salvation, feels that salvation comes rather high, and begins to figure on how he can accomplish the desired result without personal inconvenience. The present land-holding aristocracy is jealous to the last degree of its prerogatives, and it has fought every attempt to equalize taxation and to make the rich bear their fair share in the national expense account. ”

“ My God! was ever man before such an imbecile? How can a man conceive such an affection for a woman who has given him one tremulous smile on her wedding day? What does this thing feed on? Am I coming to my dotage?”
In such strain did the Judge berate himself through ten or twelve weary days, and then the obsession left him as suddenly as it had come. Interest and ambition returned, he found his women friends as entertaining as ever, and though he thought often and kindly of Mrs. Collingwood, his meditations were tinged with a strain of that violet usually allotted to the dead. ”

“ Miss Ponsonby’s impassive reserve with men was so wholly a confession, and, at the same time, so proud a disclaimer of the usual meek attitude of unpopular women, that it not only irritated the man who could analyze her, but it provoked his curiosity and led him into attempt after attempt to sting her into speech and unconscious revelations. And whenever he did so and retired, foiled, with the consciousness of having given an unmanly stab to weakness, his man’s desire to think well of himself made him put the blame upon her. ”

“ So long as they find firmness and justice in the teacher, Filipino children are far easier to discipline than are American children. At the first sign of weakness in the teacher or in the Government which is behind him, they are infinitely more unruly and arrogant than are the children of our own race. There is, in even the most truculent American child, a sense of the eternal fitness of things which the Filipino lacks. American children are restless and mischievous. ”

“ That’s quite true, Martin; but it isn’t my only reason for liking our present life. Your ‘great world,’ Judge Barton, means a continual drain upon one’s tact and patience, a continual smoothing over of difficulties, of forcing oneself to adapt oneself to people with whom one has no real sympathy. This life is a sort of moral drifting, with the consciousness that the current moves in the right direction. The other world is full of experiences. One passes from one perception to another, one’s being is wrung with the continual play of warring emotions ”

“ The Filipinos learn that Rome nourished her generals and her emperors upon the spoils of war, but they do not reflect that the predatory age—at least in the Roman sense—is past. Their imaginations seize upon the part played by the little island republic of Venice, and they gloat over the magnificence of the Venetian aristocracy, but they hardly give a thought to the thousands of glass-blowers, to the weavers of silken stuffs, to the shipbuilders and the artisans, and to the army of merchants that piled up the riches to make Venice a power on the Mediterranean. ”

“ Charlotte found that, with a prospect of returning to the world, a variety of interests which she had thought quite extinct revived and grew clamorous. Memory was busy, too, with the days of her courtship. That strange mingling of ecstasy and misery through which she had passed seemed quite remote and, in retrospect, quite unnecessary. A hundred times she asked herself why she had been such a goose, why she had hesitated, why she had permitted the possible opinion of the world at large to influence her. She went about almost uplifted with the sense of new moral independence. ”

“ The church in the provinces is at once the place of worship, the theatre, the dispenser of music and art, the place where rich and poor meet, if not on the plane of equality, in relations that bridge the gulf of material prosperity with the dignity of their common faith.
So far as the provincial Filipino conceives of palaces and architectural triumphs, the conception takes the form of a church. There are no art galleries, no palaces, no magnificent public buildings in the Philippines, but there are hundreds of beautiful churches, of Byzantine and Early Renaissance architecture. ”

“ Yet the young man’s mind, as they steamed past the beautiful wooded heights of Mindoro, and looked up and up at the giant forests or out over the gleaming water, was a tumult of joy and triumph and wonder—the wonder being by no means in the smallest proportion. His wife was not a beautiful woman, but his lover’s eyes endowed her with every beauty as she lay scanning the tree-clad mountains. That fine quality of breeding in her which Collingwood was unable to define, but which pleased him inordinately, was never more apparent. ”

“ The composure with which a Filipino girl enters matrimony is astounding. There are no tears, no self-conscious blushes, none of the charming shyness that encompasses an American girl as a garment. It is a contradictory state of affairs, I must admit, for this same American girl is a self-reliant creature, accustomed to the widest range of action and liberty, while the matter-of-fact, self-possessed Filipina has been reared to find it impossible to step across the street without attendance. ”