Maria Thompson Daviess

“ Sallie is the most perfectly lovely woman I almost ever saw. She has great violet eyes with black lashes that beg you for a piece of your heart, and her mouth is as sweet as a blush rose with cheeks that almost match it in rosiness. She and the babies always remind me of a cluster rose and roses, flower and buds, and I don't see why every man that sees her is not mad about her. They all used to be before she married, and I suppose they will be again as soon as the crepe gets entirely worn off her clothes. ”

“ If a woman's heart were really like a great big golden chalice, full to the brim with the kind of love she is taught God wants her to have in it for all mankind, both men and women, why shouldn't she offer drafts of it to every one who is thirsty, brothers as well as sisters? I wonder how that would solve Jane's problem of emotional equality! I do love Dicky—and—and I do love Polk—with an inclination to dodge. ”

“ I must be careful about Nell, she is going this new gait too fast for one so young. Women must learn to fletcherize freedom if it is not to give them indigestion of purpose.
"Still Ned provides everything in the world he can think of to help Mamie," said Caroline, who had come up the walk just in time to fan the flame in me by her sweet wistfulness, with a soft judiciousness in her voice and eyes. "And Mamie adores the children and him."
If one man is unattainable to a woman all the other creatures take on the hue of being valuable from the reflection. ”

“ Also when a woman is created, the winds have wooed star-dust, rose-dew, peach-{4} down, and a few flint-shavings into a whirlwind of deviltry, and the world at large looks on in wonder and sore amazement, as well as breathless interest. I know, because I am one, and have just been waked up by the gyrations of the cyclone; and I'm deeply confounded. I don't like it, and wish I could have slept longer, but Fate and Jane Mathers decreed otherwise. At least Jane decreed, and Fate seems so far helpless to controvert the decree. ”

“ A true vine would never want—or be able—to hustle enough to flower sordid dollars instead of curls and blushes.
"A woman would have to be—to be a good deal of a woman, not any less one, to put such a thing across, Jane," I said, with a preflash of some of the things that might happen in such a cruel crusade of reformation and deprivation of rights.
"That is the reason I have chosen you to collect the data, Evelina," answered Jane, with another of those glorious tonic looks, issuing from my backbone in her back. "The ultimate woman must be superb in body, brain, and heart. ”

“ I was becoming slightly snarled with my thread, and I was glad when Sallie and her sweetness seated itself in the best rocker in the softest breeze, which Nell had vacated for her.{138}
"Children are the greatest happiness in life and also the greatest responsibility, girls," she said, in her lovely rich voice that always melts me to a solution of sympathy whenever she uses it pensively on me. "Of course, I should be desolate without mine, but what could I do with them, if I didn't have all of you dear people to help me with them?" ”

“ There are some men who are big enough to take a woman with a wound in her heart and heal both it and her by their love. Richard is one of that kind. What could any woman want more than her work and a man like that?
After Jane had laid her strong-minded head on the hard pillow, that I had had to have concocted out of bats of cotton for her, I laid my face against my own made of the soft breast feathers of a white flock of hovering hen-mothers and wept on their softness.
A light was burning down in the lodge at the gate of Widegables. ”

“ Polk departed in the trail of Nell Kirkland's fluffy muslin skirts, smoldering dangerously, I felt. Nell has grown up into a most lovely individual, and I felt uneasy about her under Folk's ministrations. Her eyes follow him rather persistently. On the whole, I am glad Jane committed me to this woman's cause. I'll have to begin to exercise the biceps of Nell's heart—as soon as I get some strength into my own. ”

“ Yes, women must solidify their love into such a concrete form that men can weigh and measure it, and decide for themselves whether they want to—to climb to Heaven for it, or remain comfortable old bachelors. We mustn't any more lead them into marriage blinded by the overpowering gaseous fragrance called romantic love.
But, suppose I should lose all love for everybody in this queer quest for enlightenment I have undertaken? Please, God, {25} let a good man be in Glendale, Tennessee, who will understand and protect me—no, that's the wrong prayer! ”

“ When Old Harpeth, who has been looking down on a nice, peaceful, man ordained, built, and protected world, woke Glendale up the morning after my arrival and found me defiantly alone in the home of my fathers—also of each of my foremothers, by the courtesy of dower—he muttered and drew a veil of mist across his face. ”

“ And as she built up, achievement by achievement, the domestic woman-history of the valley, Jane showed in the most insidious way possible how the pioneer women had been really the warp on which had been woven the woof of the whole history of their part of the Nation, political, financial, and religious. ”

“ I suppose a great many years of emancipation will have to pass over the heads of women before they lose the gourd kind of feeling at the sight of a particularly broad, strong pair of shoulders. My heart sparkled at the idea of seeing Dickie again and being browbeaten in a good old, methodical, tender way. I suppose the sparkle in my heart showed in my eyes, for Polk sat up quickly and took notice of it very decidedly. ”

“ There is nothing in the world that I ever met that I enjoy any more than one of Uncle Peter's rages, and I always try to be meekly inflammatory.
"They're never satisfied with using them to run church societies and children's internal organs, but they want to use 'em on men and civilization in general. Where'd you get that Yankee school-marm—hey? Why don't she get a husband and a baby and settle down? Ten babies, twenty babies if necessary—hey?"
"You are entirely mistaken as to the plans that Jane and Aunt Augusta have for the League they are forming this morning, Uncle Peter." ”

“ I wonder if men ever melt suddenly into little boys, and try to squirm and run back to hide their heads in their mothers' skirts. It is an open secret that starchy, modern women often long to wilt back into droopy musk roses, that climb over gates and things, but they don't let each other. When I feel myself getting soluble, I write it out to Jane and I get a bracing cold wave of a letter in reply. ”

“ I have always had my opinion of women who spill their souls out of an ink-bottle, but I ought to pardon a nihilist, that in the dead of night, cold with terror, confides some awful appointment he has had made him, to his nearest friend. I am the worst nihilist that ever existed, and the bomb I am throwing may explode and destroy the human race. ”

“ Joshua?" asked Polk, admiringly, but slipping down from his intellectual attitude of mind and body and edging an inch nearer. "Bet she had a strong mind or Joshua never could have pulled off that sun and moon stunt."
"Do you know, Polk, there is one woman in the world who could—could handle you?" I said, as a sudden vision of what Jane would do, if Polk sat on her skirts as he did on mine, flashed across my troubled brain. ”

“ Haley. Hasn't it been a lovely day?" I answered, as I offered him the large rocker Sallie had vacated.
"It has, indeed, and I don't know when I have been as deeply happy. This hour with you will be the very climax of the day's perfections, I feel sure."
I smiled.
To follow you, Jane, I "let a man look freely into my heart and thus encouraged he opened his to mine" and behold, I found Sallie and the twins and Henrietta all squatting in the Dominie's cardiac regions, just as comfortably as they do it at Widegables. ”

“ Without ruffling a hair or changing color Jane stepped out of the Hupp and faced the foe. Henrietta is a tiny scrap of a woman, intense in a wild, beautiful, almost hunted kind of way, and she is so thin that it makes my heart ache. She is being fairly crushed with the beautiful depending weight of her mother and the responsibility of the twins, and somehow she is most pathetic. I made a motion to step between her and Jane, but one look in Jane's face stopped me. ”

“ Mamie's face was pink and high-spirited, but Sallie was in one complete slump of mind and body.
"Mr. Haley has just stopped by to say that he thinks no price is too great to pay for peace, and fellowship, and good-will in a community," she said, as she dropped into a rocker and looked pensively after the retreating figure of the handsome young Dominie, who had accompanied them to the gate but wisely no farther. He didn't know that Jane had gone with Polk.
"And women to pay the price," answered Mamie, spiritedly. ”

“ And it was the thought of the men that was most appealing. It takes a woman who really likes them as I do, and has their good really at heart, to see their side of the question as Jane put it, poor dears. Suddenly, I felt that all the happiness of the whole world was in one big, golden chalice, and that I had to hold it steadily to give drink to all {21} men and all women—with a vision of little unborn kiddies in the future.
Then, before I could stop myself, I decided—and I hope the dear Lord—I say it devoutly—indeed I do!—will help that poor man in Glendale if I pick out the wrong one. ”

“ Jane and Nell and Aunt Augusta took the two axes and one large hammer and tore down my back fence while I and the others loaded the planks on the wagon. Jane appointed Henrietta to sit and hold the slow old horses in case they should have got demoralized by the militant atmosphere pervading Glendale and try to bolt. I never saw any human being enjoy herself as Henrietta did, and it was worth it all just to look into her radiant countenance. ”

“ I—I haven't had a man's protection for so long that I don't need it, as I would if I were like you two blessed sheltered women."
"I know it has been hard, dear," said Cousin Martha gently looking her sympathy at my lorn state, over her glasses.
"I don't see how you have stood it at all," said Sallie, about to dissolve in tears. "The love and protection and sympathy of a man are the only things in life worth anything to a woman. Since my loss I don't know what I would have done without Cousin James. You must come into his kind care, Evelina." ”

“ Uncle Peter Is the most explosive and crusty person that ever happened in Glendale, and it takes all of Aunt Augusta's energy, common-sense and force of character to keep him and the two chips he carries on his shoulders, as a defiance to the world in general, from being in a constant state of combustion. He has been ostensibly the Mayor of Glendale for twenty-five years, and Aunt Augusta has done the work of the office very well indeed, while he has blown up things in general with great energy. ”

“ Then I raised my head and looked him full in the face as I made my declaration calmly but with the perfect conviction that I still have and always will have, world without end.{308} "Yes, but don't you think for one minute I don't know that what Jane and I and all the most advanced women in the world are trying for is the right and just and the only way for men and women to come logically into the kind of heritage you and I have stumbled into. Absolute freedom and equality between all human beings is going to be the price of Kingdom Come. ”

“ I asked perfectly naturally, though a double-bladed pain was twisted around in my solar plexus as the vision of Jane's last night interview in the moonlight with the Crag, and Nell's soon-to-be-one, hit me broadside at the same time.{221} I haven't had one by myself with him for a week.
"Why, of course, women are the breath that men draw into their lungs of life to supply eternal combustion," was what he said when I asked him point-blank what he thought of the League. ”

“ Petunia was already elbow deep in a cedar tub of corn meal for the pones, and another minion was shucking late roasting-ears and washing the sweet potatoes to be packed down with the meat by eight o-clock. A wagon was to collect the baked hams and sandwiches and biscuits and confections of all variety and pedigree from the rest of the League at ten o'clock. ”

“ A woman may shut her eyes, and put a man determinedly out of her heart, and in two minutes she will wake up in an agony of fear that he isn't there. Now, as I have decided that Glendale is to be the scene of this bloodless revolution of mine—it would be awful to carry out such an undertaking anywhere but under the protection of ancestral traditions—I have operated Richard Hall out of my inmost being with the utmost cruelty, on an average of every two hours, for this week Jane and I have been in New York ”

“ Some men's hearts beat with such a strong rhythm that every feminine heart which comes within hearing distance immediately catches step, and goes to waltzing. It has {61} been four years since mine swung around against his, at that dance, but I'm glad Cousin Martha was there, and interrupted, us enough to make me drag my eyes from his, as he looked up and I looked down.
"Please help us to persuade Evelina to come and live with James and me, Polk, dear," she said, glancing at him with the deepest confidence and affection in her eyes. ”

“ I hope no man will beat any woman in the Harpeth Valley for it, and if he does, I hope he will do it so neither Jane nor I will hear of it.
It was Aunt Augusta who thought up the insulting and incendiary plan of having the rally as an offering of hospitality from the League, and I hope if Uncle Peter is going to die over it he will not have the final explosion in my presence. ”