Marie Conway Oemler

“ Youth alone is eternal and immortal. And as for love, it is of God.
"As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, Amen." I had finished the decade. And then as one awakes from a trance I rose softly and as softly crept back to the Parish House, happy and at peace, because I had seen that which makes the morning stars rejoice when they sing together.
"Armand," said my mother, sleepily, "is that you, dear? I must have been nodding in my chair. Mary Virginia's just walked to the gate with Laurence." ”

“ That marvelous world in which the Little People dwell—a world so absolutely different from ours that it might well be upon another planet—began to open, slowly, slowly, one of its many mysterious doors, allowing him just glimpse enough of what magic lay beyond to fire his heart and to whet his appetite. And he couldn't break into that world with a jimmy. It was burglar-proof. That portal was so impervious to even the facile fingers of Slippy McGee, that John Flint must pay the inevitable and appropriate toll to enter! ”

“ Now, Madame is a truly wonderful person when she deals with people like him. Never for a moment lowering her own natural and beautiful dignity, but without a hint of condescension, Madame manages to find the just level upon which both can stand as on common ground; then, without noise, she helps, and she conveys the impression that thus noiselessly to help is the only just, natural and beautiful thing for any decent person to do, unless, perhaps, it might be to receive in the like spirit.
Judge Mayne's son, Laurence, full of a fresh and boyish enthusiasm, was such another instrument. ”

“ Over by the gate the spirea had ventured into showering sprays exhaling a shy and fugitive fragrance, and what had been a blur of gray cables strung upon the oaks had begun to bud with emerald and blossom with amethyst—the wisteria was a-borning. And one knew there was Cherokee rose to follow, that the dogwood was in white, and the year's new mintage of gold dandelions was being coined in the fresh grass.
There wasn't a bird that wasn't caroling April! at the top of his voice from the full of his heart; for wasn't the world alive again, wasn't it love-time and nest-time, wasn't it Spring? ”

“ Mary Virginia dismissed my tiredness with an airy wave of her hand. She smiled.
"Do you know," said she earnestly, "I've had the funniest idea about you, from the very first time I saw you? Well, I have. I've somehow got the notion that you and the Padre belong. I think that's why you came. I think you belong right here, in that darling little house, studying butterflies and mounting them so beautifully they look alive. I think you're never going to go away anywhere any more, but that you're going to stay right here as long as you live!" ”

“ They were always in and out, now with a cocoon, now an imago, now a larva, and then again to see how those they had already brought were getting along.
The lame man was an unrivaled listener—a circumstance which endeared him to youthful Laurence, in whom thoughts and the urge to express these thoughts in words rose like sap. This fresh and untainted confidence, poured out so naïvely, taught John Flint more than any words or prayers of mine could have done. ”

“ I was perfectly willing to commit the affair into John Flint's hands. But Mary Virginia demurred.
"No. I want to stay here! I don't want to go home, Padre."
Flint shook his head. "I'm sorry," he said mildly, "but I'm going to take you home." He looked so inexorable that Mary Virginia shrugged her shoulders.
"Oh, all right, Mr. Flint, I'll go," said she. "What difference does it make? I'll even go to bed—as I'm told." And she added in a tone of indescribable bitterness: "I have read that men lie down and sleep peacefully the night before they are hanged. ”

“ If I was dead at one end of the world and she dead at the other, we couldn't be any farther apart than life has put us two who can see and speak to each other every day!"
"And yet—" he looked at me now and laughed boyishly, "and yet it isn't for Mayne, that she loves, it isn't for you, nor Eustis, nor any man but me alone to help her, by being just what I am and what I have been! Risks? Fail her? I? I couldn't fail her. I'll get those letters for her to-night, if Hunter has hidden them in the beam of his eye!" ”

“ Horrified and fascinated, I saw what might be called the apotheosis of Slippy McGee, so far above him was it, come back and subtly and awfully blend with my scientist. It was as if two strong and powerful individualities had deliberately joined forces to forge a more vital being than either, since the training, knowledge, skill and intellect of both would be his to command. If such a man as this ever stepped over the deadline he would not be merely "the slickest cracksman in America"; he would be one of the master criminals of the earth. ”

“ Laurence went on to High School, Madame had her house to oversee, I had many overdue calls; so we left Pitache and John Flint together, out in the birdhaunted, sweet-scented, sun-dappled garden, in the golden morning hours. No one can be quite heartless in a green garden, quite hopeless in the spring, or quite desolate when there's a dog's friendly nose to be thrust into one's hand. ”

“ Those who loved Mary Virginia had cause for painful reflections.
Blinded by her beauty, were we judging her by the light of affection, instead of the colder light of reason? We couldn't approve of her behavior to Laurence, nor was it easy to refrain from disapproval of what appeared to be a tacit endurance of Inglesby's attention. She couldn't plead ignorance of what was open enough to be town talk—the man's shameless passion for herself, a passion he seemed to take delight in flaunting. ”

“ We wheeled our man out into this divine freshness of renewed life, stopping the chair under a glossy, stately magnolia. My mother and Clélie and Laurence and I bustled about to make him comfortable. Pitache stood stock still, his tail stuck up like a sternly admonishing forefinger, a-bossing everything and everybody. We spread a light shawl over the man's knees, for it is not easy to bear a cruel physical infirmity, to see oneself marred and crippled, in the growing spring. He looked about him, snuffed, and wrinkled his forehead ”

“ I guess I was born grown up." His face darkened.
"That wasn't a bit fair," said she, with instant sympathy.
"There's a lot not fair," he told her, "when you're born and brought up like I was. The worst is not so much what happens to you, though that's pretty bad; it's that you don't know it's happening—and there's nobody to put you wise. Why," his forehead puckered as if a thought new to him had struck him, "why, your very looks get to be different!"
Mary Virginia started. ”

“ Left alone, I was far from sharing Madame's simple faith in our ability to untangle this miserable snarl. I knew now the temper of the men we had to deal with. I also understood that in cases like this the Southern trigger-finger is none too steady. Seen from a certain point of view, if ever men deserved an unconditional and thorough killing, these two did. Yet this homicidal specter turned me cold, for Mary Virginia's sake.
For Eustis himself I could see nothing but ruin ahead, but I wished passionately to help the dear girl who had come to me in her stress. ”

“ Padre, Padre, how more than good to see you again! And I'm sure that's the same cassock I left you wearing. You could wear it a couple of lifetimes without getting a single spot on it—you were always such a delightful old maid, Padre! Where and how is Madame? Who's in the Guest Rooms? How is John Flint since he's come to be a Notable? Has Miss Sally Ruth still got a Figure? How are the judge's cats, and the major's goatee? How is everything and everybody? ”

“ The Butterfly Man had listened without an interruption. He sat leaning slightly forward, knees crossed, the left arm folded to support the elbow of the right, and his chin in his cupped right hand. His eyes had the piercing clear directness of an eagle's; they burned with an unwavering pale flame. Shrewder far than I, he saw the great advantage of knowing the worst, of at last thoroughly understanding Hunter and Inglesby and the motives which moved them. ”

“ Major Cartwright had kept George Inglesby out of two coveted clubs, for all his wealth; he was stiff as the proverbial poker to Howard Hunter, for all that gentleman's impeccable connections; he met John Flint, not as through a glass darkly, but face to face.
My mother, coming out of the house with her cherished manuscript cookbook in her hand, looked after them thoughtfully:
"Yes; it is high time for that man to know his proper place!"
"And does he not?"
"Oh, I suppose so, Armand. In a man's way, though—not a woman's. It's the woman's way that really matters, you see. ”

“ But if under the law of its world, so different from ours and yet so alike because so inevitable, the Insect must move in a fixed circle within which it is safe, a circle whose very limitation preserves it from error and thus from destruction, may not a like fixed circle beyond which we may not penetrate preserve us, too? Are these mountain peaks of the Unknowable, the Impassable, which encompass the skyline of our humanity, these heights so mysterious and so unscalable, not rather bulwarks between man's pride and the abyss? ”

“ If it be true that the boy is father to the man, it is even more tritely true that the girl is mother to the woman, there being here less chance for change. So it was with Mary Virginia. That gracious little girlhood of hers, lived among the birds and bees and blossoms of an old Carolina garden, had sent her into the Church School with a settled and definite idealism as part of her nature. Her creed was simple enough: The world she knew was the best of all possible worlds, its men good, its women better; and to be happy and loved one had only to be good and loving. ”

“ Little dents came about his nose, and his lips puckered as if the devil had pinched them together.
"No?" said he thickly, and his jaw hardened, and his eyes narrowed under his square forehead. "No? You won't, eh? Too fine and proud? My lady, you'll learn to kiss me when I tell you to, and glad enough of the chance, before you and I finish with each other! Why, you—I—Oh, good God! Why do you rouse the devil in me, when I only want to be friends with you?" ”

“ John Flint's face was troubled. "It's all a muddle, anyhow," said he. "You can't blame the bluejay, because he was born so, and it's bluejay nature to act like that when it gets the chance. But there's the other bird—it looks bad. It is bad. For a thief to come into a little nest like that, that she'd been brooding on, and twittering to, and feeling so good and so happy about—Man, I'd have given a month's work and pay to have saved that nest! It's not fair. God! Isn't there some way to save the good ones from the bad ones?" ”

“ You could say to almost any man alive, Come, and he'd come—oh, yes, he'd come quick. You've got the earth to pick and choose from—but I'm asking you to pick and choose me. I haven't got as much to offer you as I shall have some of these days, but I've got me myself, body and brain and heart and soul, sound to the core, and all of me yours, and I think that counts most, if you care as I do. Mary Virginia, will you marry me?"
"Oh, but, Laurence! Why—Laurence—I—indeed, I didn't know—I didn't think—" stammered the girl. ”

“ His long skirted coat is buckled tightly about his waist to form a neat bustle effect in the back, and the solidity of his granite shoes and the fell rigidity of his granite breeches are such as make the esthetic shudder; one has to admit that as a work of art he is almost as bad as the statues cluttering New York City. But in Appleboro folks are not critical; they see him not with the eyes of art but with the deeper vision of the heart. He stands for something that is gone on the wind and the names he guards are our names. ”

“ I went over for my usual last half-hour with John Flint. Very often we have nothing whatever to say, and we are even wise enough not to say it. We sit silently, he with Kerry's noble old head against his foot, each busy with his own thoughts and reflections, but each conscious of the friendly nearness of the other. You have never had a friend, if you have never known one with whom you might sit a silent, easy hour. ”