Helen Hunt Jackson

“ I had only a series of pictures of Ally, sometimes with a floating background of clouds, and sky, and silence; some times with an equally misty one of the heads and faces and voices of people; but all this, merely as background, frame-work for the one vivid, gleaming picture of Ally in her marvelous attire. Never before was woman so clothed. Her passionate, artistic sense, spent and wrought itself in the fashioning of every garment she wore. She would not allow Jim to send her any gowns except of plain colors, and made in absolute simplicity of style. ”

“ They said, 'All the summers of the world, all the sun, all the light, all the color, have gone to make up these blossoms; since the beginning of time, the moment has been journeying on at which it should bloom, in the spot where my hand could gather it for thee; my vow is no less than its! Love it for to-day, my love! reverence it, and to-morrow another blossom will bloom either here or in eternity, also for thee!'"
"Oh, Jim," I said, "You ought to have been a woman. I don't believe the dear old mother thought any such thing. She knows that Dominie loves flowers that 's all!" ”

“ Karl was lying at her feet, his head resting on her knees, as he had bowed it when he first knew that she loved him; only that now he dared to gaze steadily into her eyes. He did not reply for some moments, then he said:—
"The good God knows, my Margaret. Perhaps there will come sorrow for you, if it needs for his Heaven that you be more of angel than you are. But for my love, that is only like the daisies. It is enough that it can make a beautiful ground where you walk." ”

“ As Ally drew it slowly along, the tiny shreds of the abutilon petals and the slender filaments of the stamens followed it. On touching it they adhered slightly to the surface, as magnetized objects to a magnet. "Is Stonie eating them?" said Ally. "Is that what he lives on?" This persistent disposition on Ally's part to speak of the stone as a living and sentient thing, childish as it was, and as we all the while knew it to be, heightened our half superstitious sense of mystery in the thing. For the first time Mrs. Allen's face experienced a shade of the same feeling. ”

“ The Dominie laughed heartily at this sally. The one sole discomfort in the parsonage winter life was dear Mrs. Allen's need of a higher temperature than the Dominie's and Ally's more robust blood could endure.
"Nobody learns beauty," Ally went on. "You feel it in one second, if you ever can. If this room is beautiful, there will now and then come into it people who will see what it is, and they will be the better for it. It only hurts and hardens the others to tell them they ought to like it. And, as for explaining why a thing is beautiful, you can't. There is n't any why." ”

“ It is not anything to us, except that we must live. We are Germans; we are not of your blood;" and Wilhelm looked almost fiercely at Margaret.
"All men are of one blood, when the fight is that all men may be free, my friend," said Margaret, still more quietly, with a voice trembling with sympathy, and yet firm with enthusiasm. "Whatever land it had been which first began the fight for freedom to all, I would send my brothers to die under its banners. I would go myself! But I do not believe your Karl is dead. ”

“ Karl Reutner loved Margaret Warren. His love was so entirely without any hope of return, that it partook of the nature of the passion of a spiritual devotee, and was lifted to a plane of almost superhuman unselfishness. To say that he never thought of Margaret as a man thinks of a woman who might be his wife, would not be true. Margaret was a very beautiful woman; and Karl Reutner was a man in whose veins ran blood both strong and pure; he could not hear the rustle of Margaret's gown without a faster beat to his pulse. ”

“ Then he fell on Karl's neck, and was not ashamed of the tears that would come. Not often do two men love as did these twin brothers.
It all seemed to Wilhelm and Annette impossible, incredible. Their eyes followed Karl, followed Margaret with an expression which was half joy and half fear. But to Karl and Margaret the new happiness seemed strangely natural, assured. Like a crystal hidden in stone, it had grown, and now that the store had been broken open, and the crystal set free, every ray of the sun that fell on it was multiplied, and the brilliant light seemed only inevitable. ”

“ Face to face with the fact of it, he sits down and sees no escape. In the idealist, hope is always large and strong, and a certain joy in the great significant, solemn, undercurrent of life is never absent from him, even when the waters seem going over his head. I am quite sure that no possible future could have looked to either Jim or Ally so like a pall as my future life did to me during these days. Nothing but a strong physique, a certain quality of dogged pride, saved me from succumbing to the sense that life had nothing worth living for. ”

“ This is the nearest analysis which words can give of the bond which held me to Ally. As I stood with my eyes dreamily fixed on the scarlet and gold poppies of her scarf, I recalled the wealth of scarlet oak-leaves which she had worn on that autumn morning, and I knew that the two hours were linked together by a bond as enduring as eternity. While I was thinking of the strange coincidence in material color of these two most vivid pictures in my brain, I was suddenly conscious of another sharp, electric thrill; not running as before, up my arm, but seeming to come from the floor beneath my feet. ”

“ I know to-day two women who are base and treacherous as if the very blood of Judas Iscariot filled their veins, and they both have sunny, clear, unflinching, light-blue eyes; and I have known a man who could, on occasion, tell cowardly lies with as steady a gaze into your face as an honest man could give,—and he too had light-blue eyes,—sunny, clear, unflinching.
If anybody had said to Susan Sweetser, that Professor Balloure was not an upright, sincere man, she would have blazed with indignation. His beauty, his brilliancy, his seeming kindliness, impressed her in the outset ”

“ And in that instant something in the look on Molly's face, and in the tone of Molly's voice, smote the inmost citadel of John's heart which had never before opened, and never would have opened to any other or different touch.
There is an evil fashion of speech and of theory, that a man's love for a woman lasts better, is stronger, if he be never wholly assured of hers for him. This is a base and shallow theory; an outrage on true manliness; it has grown out of the pitiful lack of true manliness in some men; out of the pitiful abundance of selfish counterfeit loves and loving. ”

“ Jim's magnetism of nature always stood him instead of authority, and was far more sure of obtaining his ends than any possible authority could be. He simply mesmerized people's wills so that they desired and chose to do the things he wished done. It was perfectly plain already that so far as Ally was concerned, Mrs. Bunker and her whole household were at Jim's command.
As we drew near the parsonage, our hearts sank. Our errand grew more and more formidable in our eyes. Jim's face took on a look more serious than I had ever seen it wear, and he said little. ”

“ No danger but that Ally would be nurtured aright in the house of which Dorothy Allen's sweet soul was the central warmth, and the man she loved was the light and strength. I have seen many households, households of wealth and culture, households of simple and upright living, but I have never seen one which so filled my ideal of a home as this plain and poor little parsonage. The secret of it all lay in the fact that its life was idealized idealized, first, by Dorothy Allen's lovingness and her fine sense of beauty and grace ”

“ My heart was already sorer than I knew how to explain, by reason of this little maiden's exclusive love for her brother Jim.
The dreaded day came swiftly, as only dreaded days can; it was a sunny May morning. To go away by stage from a home one sorrows to leave is infinitely harder than to go in any other way. There is such a mockery of good cheer, of a pleasure drive, in the prancing of the horses eager to be off. There is such a refinement of cruelty in the Composure of the driver, waiting whip in hand for you to decide for yourself when the last words have been said, the last kiss taken. ”

“ The windows of her beautiful home look out on the blue lake; and into the nursery where her golden-haired children sleep, the morning sun sends its first beams, as it used to send them into her tiny room, in Wilhelm Reutner's house.
On the wall of Margaret's own room hangs the picture of Königsee, and the head of the shadowy maiden of Ischl still wreathed with edelweiss blossoms.
"I love her, my Karl. She told me that thou wert not dead. She is glad of thy joy each hour," Margaret often says. ”

“ Poor, lonely, circumscribed, discontented woman! she had but one, yet that one seemed at first as far removed from the possibility of her attaining it as could the wildest dream of the most visionary worldly ambition, Mrs. Bennet wanted a melodeon for Tilly. When she went on Sundays to church in Provincetown and heard the first line of the psalm-tune played over and over on the wheezy melodeon, she thought that if she could only sometimes hear such sounds as that in the light-house, instead of the endless boom and thud and swash of the water, life might become endurable to her. ”

“ Her beaming face and thrilling presence lifted Karl to heights of exaltation, and, placing the daisy-box on the floor at her feet, he said, "They are but daisies, beautiful Miss Margaret; that was the fitting flower, for it is like my love for you. It is low on the ground, but it would bloom for you always, and you will not forbid that they should live always in your room?" And for the second time Margaret saw the blue eyes kindle as they kindled when he had told her her cheeks were like red lilies. ”

“ Tom loved Susan now with a calm, concentrated purpose of making her his wife. There was in his feeling for her none of the impatience of a fiery passion. He would not have rebelled had he been told that she would not be his for years, so that he had been sure of her at last. He had gradually taken his position with her as her constant attendant, protector, adviser. In a myriad of ways he had made himself part of her daily life, and this, too, without once coming on the ordinary lover's ground of gifts, attentions, compliments. He never even sent her flowers ”