Anne O'Hagan

“ Surely I expected to marry some time—I was a perfectly normal girl at twenty-two. And there he was”—her face broke into April tenderness—“kind and gay and modest and manly. And adoring me—for he did, he did! Did I imagine there were going to be dozens like that, I wonder? For that wouldn’t do for Theodosia, Theodosia who was going to run the gamut of human experiences outside love and matrimony before settling down to those humdrum matters! ”

“ And pleased with this happy fancy she went on to her work, which, that day, was instructing the young ladies in Miss Greyerson’s exclusive school in certain details of water-color painting.
It was between four and five of the dismal afternoon that she found herself walking down Fifth Avenue. She was grimly, defiantly conscious that her appearance fitted her rather for Seventh, but it assorted with her dreary mood to flaunt the outward and visible signs of failure in the face of the world. ”

“ The waiter, placing the tea equipage, sundered two shamelessly clasped hands and interposed muffins between two shamelessly clinging pairs of eyes.
“Why can’t the lower classes do their love-makin’ somewhere besides in restaurants?” he demanded later with ponderous indignation of his confrère at the next table. Then more curiously: “What’s he sayin’ to her now?”
“He’s only tellin’ her to drink her tea while it’s hot—if you call that love-makin’,” replied the other, carefully adjusting the knives at the table back of Theodosia’s. ”

“ I begged Araminta to put me next to him at table. ‘Why, I didn’t know you particularly liked John Hazelton,’ she said—the purblind woman—‘he isn’t interested in any of the things the rest of us are.’ How I hate studio dinners! I wish I knew people who had real houses. ”

“ I know that the vast range of human experience I anticipated narrows down to a fairly constant anxiety about the rent, a gloomy foreboding about old age, a heavy loneliness, and a lot of noisy, unsatisfactory companionships. ”

“ Wouldn’t ye be feelin’ yersilf?”
“Oh, I’m well enough, Nora, thank you,” replied Theodosia drearily.
“It’s a nasthy day—enough to mek a body down in the mouth. But sure ye, wid yer beaux an’ yer frien’s an’ yer flowers an’ yer fine doin’s can’t know what it is to be sad nor sorry, miss. Will ye be afther kapin’ these roses anny longer?”
“No, throw them away.” Theodosia blushed a little to recall that she had sent the flowers to herself with the card of one of her old callers on the afternoon John Hazelton had come to tea. ”