Guy Wetmore Carryl

“ For the life of you you cannot tell what thing it is you crave, but more than life you crave it!
Albeit I had started with a definite end in view, this so alluring afternoon had tempted me more than once from the direct way, so that I had taken small notice of my actual progress, until, coming suddenly out upon the road again after my fourth or fifth deflection, I found myself almost opposite the Berrith house. Miss Susie Berrith, in a smart little walking costume, indescribably taking by reason of its brisk masculine note, was coming down the path. ”

“ The most singular little pang I have ever experienced went through me at sight of her strained, blue eyes, even now shining full of tears.
“Oh, dear heart. Miss Berrith,” she began at once, after a little bow to me, “the boy’s that sick! The doctor says — oh, Miss Berrith, dear — ”
Miss Berrith seemed to understand the whole matter from these few words. She went directly to Mrs. Doane, and put her arms around her, and her lips against her cheek, and spoke to her as if the poor creature had been a frightened child. ”

“ You have been doing your best all along to rub the bloom off life for yourself, and turn your back upon the essence of it, and in the attempt it would be strange if you did not rush in to some places where angels fear to tread. That you were all alone, and endeavouring to make a few cut-and-dried opinions on the advantages of celibacy take the place of all the greatest and most beautiful realities of life —wasn’t that pathetic? ”

“ But there comes the day when the fond delusion crumbles about our ears to piteous ruin. We have found, in some long-closed chest, these props to infant imagery, and, with that sudden contraction of heart which is peculiar to unexpected contact with the past, recognize them for what they are — some yards of scarlet cloth, scraps of tinsel and gold embroidery, a pair or two of tarnished epaulets, a sword without a scabbard, a dozen mock orders from some cotillon long since danced and done with — the playthings of the dwarfs we were. ”

“ Larger, though no less timid, creatures sped away at my approach, across this crackling carpet — squirrels, sitting up at a safe distance to survey me, with their forepaws held coquettishly against their breasts: rabbits, pausing for a single glance at the intruder, and then whipping out of sight among the brush: partridges, rushing for a few paces over the leaves, and then whirring upward like rising rockets. ”

“ Oh, you have yet to learn that in all the world there is nothing greater than that — “
“Except,” I interposed, “the love of a woman for a man. That is infinitely greater, so much greater, indeed, that, where the other is only a miracle, this is a worker of miracles. It pardons him his faults and, in pardoning, often cures them.”
Then there was silence between us, until we came to the first houses of the town. Here Miss Berrith paused upon a corner.
“Now I must leave you,” she said. “I am going to see Darius.” ”

“ Now, all the most fanciful of us can do is pay them that trifling tribute. Their usefulness, even their charm, is gone forever. They are such stuff as dreams are made of, invalid, tawdry, and small, small, small, incomparably small! ”

“ Darius, with his shoe-brushes and his rake, Galvin at her wash-tub, the tradesmen who came and went — these were the workers. All I was good for was to eat and buzz complacently over the advantages of celibacy. But, at a certain point in the history of the hive, the exasperated workers fall upon the drones and hustle them unceremoniously out of doors. ”

“ It is only the children of our brains — ideas, ideals, opinions — which change so pitifully in a few short weeks that we may not even regard them with that tender regret wherewith we view the panoply of infancy, but instinctively draw back, and, if conscience did not stand sternly sponsor for them, would deny them for our own. ”