Josephine Dodge Daskam

“ To Miss Ellsworth, who came in later, hurried and amazed, she was inexplicable. She had travelled much, this successful, ordinary woman, and she was well educated, as women count such matters to-day; but this quiet spinster, sitting out of the strong currents of life, alone in her quaint, old-time parlor with its rose-leaves and mahogany of another day, had somehow left her behind with all her experiences and acquisitions, and bade her good-by with a manner that obliterated forever from her friend's mind the image of deprecating gentleness she had so long patronized. ”

“ Miss Sabina had learned her Paris well from him long ago. For years in the winter evenings, when they could not enjoy the piazza and the green, they had sat by the Franklin grate in the sitting-room, and she had followed him breathlessly through "Les Misérables"—his rapid and broken translation heightening incalculably the sense of strangeness and intensity—or he had led her about Paris and its outskirts till she had grown to an actual intimacy with that city of his dreams ”

“ The first few notes of the piano carried with them to him who knew the room so well a never-fading picture of the peaceful, old-time parlor: the willow plates in the mother-o'-pearl cabinet, the "Sistine Madonna" and Correggio's "Holy Night," the dim oil-paintings that great-grandmother Endicott had made so long ago, the bronze Chinese idol that squatted near the rose-jar, the dusky, elusive pier-glass with its dull gilding of another generation and its mysterious, haunting reflections—they were all confused with the tune that Miss Sabina's sweet, reedy voice had so often quavered through ”

“ They sighed together, and blushed, and glanced quickly aside, and Miss Sabina rose hastily and slipped through the long French window.
"Shall I sing?" she asked, not waiting for an answer to a question of such long usage. While she felt through the dusk to the old pianoforte, M. Laroche lit his cigarette and waited with gentle expectation. The lilacs from the next yard drifted in and met the faint odor from the old china rose-jar that stood on the polished mahogany table inside. ”

“ No schoolboy was ever more thirsty for the ends of the earth than she; this little stay-at-home knew all the routes by sea and land, and delighted in the customs of the fortunate dwellers in the places of her lifelong desire.
To-night her hand shook as she laid the coffee-cup aside, and the flush in her cheeks did not die with the sunset. ”

“ The woman crouching on the stair bit her lip and pressed her finger-nails into her hands to keep back the sobs that shook her. It seemed to her that he must hear the beating of her heart, that every long, hard breath would surely startle him. So helpless, so poor, so horribly, hopelessly sad! She had read of terrible homesickness—the Swiss for his Alps, the peasant for his farm ”

“ But I must tell you, Miss Ellsworth, that I'm not going to learn, the way you are. I'm just going for pleasure and happiness and comfort, and nothing else. You know how it is with me. All my life I've had to stay right here, and I could only live decently and as father would have wanted me to live—we're Endicotts, you know, if we are the poor branch—by scrimping and saving and being very, very careful, and making things last. Almost the last thing poor father said to me was to keep things up.
" ' "There's just enough, Sabina, if you're careful, to do it," he said. ”

“ The young people strolling by now and then smiled at them for a contented pair of middle-aged friends, and thought their pleasant quiet the placid repose of those who have tacitly done with life and its strong tides of feeling. ”

“ I want you should always have the house neat, and a good, plain, nice little dinner with the silver, and a cup of coffee after, and a bottle of wine kept, in case mother should ever come in. And the engravings and the pianoforte and those mahogany things, and the mother-o'-pearl cabinet— never let em go, Sabina. When they come in to our funerals I don't want anybody to be ashamed of the Endicotts—it's a gentleman's house. ”

“ It is only to-day—I am well to-morrow. Not to sleep, it makes one weary for the day—n'est-ce pas? It is not a good country for sleep, I have found. In France I have always slept, ah, most easily! But here, no. In France—"
He paused a moment, and the room was perfectly still. He looked at her, but he did not see her, and Miss Sabina had a strange, swift memory of her little brother who died at school, and the look in his eyes when he cried to be taken home.
It was over in a moment, and M. Laroche shrugged his shoulders lightly. ”

“ Hard ly a day during that long winter sickness, when she would have died if left alone to her nervous melancholy, that he did not bring home some flower or bit of fruit. She guessed later what meagre lunches had made their purchase possible. One of his pupils would have taken him South for the winter vacation, but he had refused and stayed with her. And the cold tried him so. ”

“ Alden about it last Sunday, after morning service. I said it seemed dreadful to be so perfectly happy, and Cousin Frank just dead! But how can I help it? Frank knew just how I'd feel. It's just as he said: 'When I go to heaven, Sabina shall go to Europe, if she's alive, and I don't know which of us'ill be the happier.' And then to think of Miss Ellsworth and her friends going, and wanting me to go with them—it seemed too good to be true! I asked Mr. Alden if he thought Grandmother Endicott ought to have said the will was blasphemous, and he said no, that it was a nice will and a kind one. ”

“ She was no longer the ignorant, untravelled little spinster: she had flung away all her own hopes and fears to be the life and happiness of one poor soul that had none but her, and at that height the world seems small indeed.
"Mais, mademoiselle, I take your money and go home, I restore myself, I return—how do I pay? I sink till now zat you desire to go more zan to do anysing—I say nossing zen. Now zat you fear to go, you want your home (ah, Mlle. Sabine, vous avez raison: to be home, c'est le paradis!) , now I tell you zat, I, too, I die if I go not back to France! I am too long away.... ”

“ Alden, you don't know what this means to me—you don't know! and then I had to run right away, or I'd have broken down."
M. Laroche nodded sympathetically. "Zat is a good man, M. Aldenne, très aimable—most kind. I sink every one likes heem. It is but yesterday zat he has asked me, 'And where do you go when Mees Sabina is away, monsieur? You will not find anozzer soch landlady, hein? I sink not. He is a kind man."
"Miss Ellsworth wanted me to take some German lessons, and there was a 'Life of Goethe' she wanted me to read. ”