Mary Hallock Foote

“ The little hand-raised poplars about the ferry-house were shivering and tugging and straining their thin necks in the gale, the windows so loaded with dust that we could barely see if there were lights inside. We hooted and we howled,—the men did,—and the ferry-keeper came out and stared at us in blank amazement that we should be wanting supper and beds. As if we could have wanted anything else at that place except to cross the river, which we don't do. We go up on this side. We came down the hill merely to sleep at the ferry-house, the night being too bad for a road camp. ”

“ Poor Kitty! There is so little here to come for but the man.
Well, my dear, here's a pretty kettle of fish! Kitty has arrived, and one Mr. Harshaw. Where the Mr. Harshaw is, quien sabe! It's awfully late. Poor Kitty has gone to bed, and has cried herself to sleep, I dare say, if sleep she can. I never have heard of a girl being treated so.
Tom and the other Mr. Harshaw are smoking in the dining-room, and Tom is talking endlessly—what about I can't imagine, unless he is giving this young record-breaker his opinion of his extraordinary conduct. ”

“ Now a wind-swayed branch of manzanita rasped the canvas, and cast upon it shadows of its moving leaves.
"It's pretty rough on quiet old folks like us, with no money to get us into trouble," said Mr. Thorne. "The boy is not a beauty, he's not a swell. He is just a plain, honest boy with a good working education. If you judge a woman, as some say you can, by her choice of men, she shouldn't be very far out of the way."
"It is very certain you cannot judge a man by his choice of women."
"You cannot judge a boy by the women that get hold of him. But Willy is not such a babe as you think. ”

“ There is an awfulness about it, too, as if that sheer front of rock were the retaining-wall of a reservoir as deep as the bluffs are high, which had sprung a leak in a thousand places, and might the next instant burst and ingulf the lagoon, and wipe out the pretty island between itself and the river. Winter and summer the volume of water never varies, and the rate of discharge is always the same, and the water is never cold, though I have just said it is. It looks cold until the rocks warm it with their gemlike tints, like a bride's jewels gleaming through her veil. ”

“ You are still very young in some ways, my dear."
"I am old enough," said Daphne, "to have learned one fearful lesson."
"Do I oppress you with my view? Do I insist too much?"
Perhaps nothing could have lowered the girl in her own eyes more than this humility of the gentle old man in the face of his own self-exposed weakness, his pathetic jealousy for that self above self,—-the child one can do no more than grieve for this side the grave. She had come to herself only to face the consciousness of a secret motive which robbed her confession of all moral value. ”

“ Valentin, laughing gently. "I own it, dear. Middle age is suspicious and mean and unspiritual and troubled about many things. A middle-aged mother is like an old hen when hawks are sailing around; she can't see the sky."
"Yes," said Elsie, settling cosily against her mother's shoulder. "I always know when mammy speaks as my official mother, and when she is talking 'straight talk.' I shall be so happy when she believes I am old enough to hear only straight talk." ”

“ Tom said we should have the sweepings of the Snake River valley in there in one second if we opened that door. But we did, and the wind played havoc with our fire, and half the country blew in, as he had said, and with it came Cecil, his head bent low, his arms full of rugs and dust-cloaks.
"You angel!" I cried, "have you been shaking those things?"
"He's given himself the hay-fever," said Tom, heartlessly watching him while he sneezed and sneezed, and wept dust into his handkerchief.
"Doesn't the man do those things?" Miss Kitty whispered. ”

“ Mr. Thorne breathed his astonishment in a low whistle. "You don't like it?" he surmised at once.
"Like it! If it were merely a question of liking! She is impossible. She knows it, her people know it, and they have not told him. It remains"—
"What is the girl's name?"
"Henry, she is not a girl! That is, she is a girl forced into premature womanhood, like all the fruits of this hotbed climate. She is that Miss Benedet whom you helped, whom you saved—how many years ago? When Willy was a schoolboy." ”

“ She wished to conform to her mother's exigent standard, but she could not, all at once, and be a girl too—a girl of sixteen, a little off the key physically, not having come to a woman's repose of movement; a little stridulous mentally, but pulsing with life's dumb music of aspiration; as intense as her mother in feeling, without her mother's power to throw off the strain in words. ”

“ Thorne tried it to see if it were locked.
"Willy used to live, almost, on this hill when he came out for his vacations." She spoke dreamily, as if thinking aloud. "He slept in that tent. It looks like a little ghost to me these nights in the moonlight, the curtains flap in such a lonely way. That gate was his back door through the woods to town. His wheel used to lean against this tree. I miss his fair head in the sun, and his white trousers springing up the hill. But one cannot keep one's boy forever. You have made him a man, my dear." ”

“ Elsie's sentiments, unexpressed, were that she wished they might be rarer. Not that the flower of Eastern culture was not all her mother protested she was; but there are crises of discouragement on the upward climb of trying to realize a mother's ambitions for one's self, when one is only a girl—the only girl, on whom the family experiments are all to be wreaked. Elsie suffered in silence many a pang that her mother never dreamed of—pangs of effort unavailing and unappreciated. ”

“ Miss Benedet rose to her feet with decision.
"You have not answered my question," the unconscionable mother pursued. "Does he know—is it known that you are not the great heiress your name would imply?"
"Everything is known," said the girl. "You do not read your society column, I see. Six weeks ago you might have learned the fate of my father's millions."
She stood by the balustrade and leaned out under the stars, taking a deep breath of the night's growing coolness. A rose-spray touched her face. ”

“ At other times the fall is almost too bright in its foaming whiteness for the eye to endure.
Kitty is painting it with this shadow half across it; but the light shines upon it at its source. Tom is doubtful if she is showing the fall to the best advantage for his purpose, but he is obliging enough to let the artist try it in her own way first. ”

“ But though Thane was silenced as well as answered, there was conscience yet to deal with. Mr. Withers sat and meditated sorely, while the wind buffeted his gray hairs. Conscience demanded that he give up the secret of Daphne's false mourning, which he would have defended with his life. "A silence that can harm no one." "So long as we defraud no living person who might claim a right to know your heart." ”

“ A similarity of judgment on questions of clothes and shops is no doubt a bond between strange women everywhere; but it was the daughter's belt-buckle before which Mrs. Valentin bowed down and humbled herself in silence. The like of that comes only by inheritance or travel. Antique, pale gold—Cellini might have designed it. There was probably not another buckle like that one in existence. An imitation? No more than its wearer, a girl as white as a white camellia, with gray eyes and thin black eyebrows, and thick black lashes that darkened the eyes all round. ”

“ She rather pleadingly assures Kitty that Mr. Harshaw senior has solemnly sworn that this is no unpleasant duty he feels called on to perform; not only his honor, but his affections are profoundly enlisted in this proposal. Kitty has had for years a sacred place in his regard; and from thinking of her as a daughter absolutely after his own heart, it is but a step to think of her in a still nearer—the nearest—relation. He begs her mother to prepare her for no perfunctory offer of marriage, but one that warms with every day's delay till he can take the dear child under his lifelong protection. ”

“ At half past five the night watchman, on his way from town, stopped at the superintendent's gate, ran up the blazing path, and thrust a newspaper between the dark blue canvas curtains that shaded the entrance of the porch. For hours the house had slept behind its heat defenses, every shutter closed, yards of piazza blind and canvas awning fastened down. The sun, a ball of fire, went slowly down the west. Rose-vines drooped against the hanging lattices, printing their watery lines of split bamboo with a shadow-pattern of leaf and flower. ”

“ If nature would only consult the mothers at the proper time, instead of going on in her blindfold fashion!
But, after all, did they want a beauty in the family? On theory, no: the few beauties Mrs. Valentin had known in her life had not been the happiest of women. What they did want was an Elsie—their own Elsie—perfectly trained without losing her naturalness, perfectly educated without losing her health, perfectly dressed without thinking of clothes, perfectly accomplished without wasting her time, and, finally, an Elsie perfectly happy. ”

“ Not the original forest: of that only three stark pines were left, which rose one hundred feet out of a gulch below the house and lent their ancient majesty to the modern uses of electric wires and telephone lines. Their dreaming tops were in the sky; their feet were in the sluicings of the stamp-mill that reared its long brown back in a semi-recumbent posture, resting one elbow on the hill; and beneath the valley smouldered, a pale mirage by day, by night a vision of color transcendent and rich as the gates of the Eternal City. ”

“ Billings is bargaining with Old Man Decker for the "keep" of his team. Kitty and I are enjoying ourselves. There is a rip in one of the back seams of my jacket, Kitty tells me, but even that cannot move me.
I say we are enjoying ourselves; but my young guest has developed a new mood of late which gives poignancy to my growing tenderness for the girl. She has kept up wonderfully, with the aid of her bit of a temper, for which I like her none the less. How she will stand this idleness, monotony, and intimacy, with the accent of beauty pressing home, I cannot say. I rather fear for her. ”

“ The mine whistle blared, and a rattle of miners' carts followed, as the day-shift dispersed to town. The mine did not board its proletariate. At his usual hour the watchman braved the blinding path, and left the evening paper on the piazza floor. There it lay unopened. Mrs. Thorne fanned herself and looked at it. There must be fighting in Cuba; she did not move to see. Other mothers' sons were dying; what was death to such squalor as hers? Sorrow is a queen, as the poet says, and sits enthroned; but Trouble is a slave. Mothers with griefs like hers must suffer in the fetters of silence. ”

“ Not all this, but something else, something more that Daphne could not have put into words, spoke in the look which Thane surprised. It was but a flash between long lashes that fell instantly and put it out; but no woman whose heart was in the grave ever looked at a living man in that way, and the living man could not help but know it. ”

“ I have had a thousand minds lately about Elsie, but this was the original plan, made years ago, when we were young and sure about things. Don't you think young lives need room, Bishop? Oughtn't we to seek to widen their mental horizons?"
"The horizons widen, they widen of themselves, Mrs. Valentin—very suddenly sometimes, and beyond our ken." The bishop's voice had struck a deeper note; he paused and looked at Elsie with eyes so kind and tender that the girl choked and turned away. "This war is rather a widening business, and California is getting her share. ”

“ But for the present an inspiration came to me,—on the strength of something Tom had said,—that he wished I could draw or paint, because he could make an artist useful on this trip, he condescended to say, if he could lay his hand on one. All the photographs of the Springs, it seems, have the disastrous effect of dwarfing their height and magnitude. There is a lagoon and a weedy island directly beneath them, and in the camera pictures taken from in front, the reeds and willows look gigantic in the foreground, and the Springs—out of all proportion—insignificant. ”

“ The men made camp in the slippery darkness, while we sat in the wagon, warm and dry, and thanked our stars there were still a few things left that men could do without our aid or competition. Presently a lantern flashed out, and spots of light shifted over them as they slaved—pounding tent-pegs, and scraping stones away from places where our blankets were to be spread, hacking and hewing among the wet willows, and grappling with stovepipes and tent-poles ”

“ Elsie had her father's sense of humor, and had caught his half-caressing way of indulging it at the "intense" little mother's expense.
"Elsie," she observed, "you know I don't mind your way of speaking to me,—as if I were the girl of sixteen and you the woman of forty,—but I hope you won't use it before the aunts and cousins. I shall be sure to lay myself open, but, dear, be careful. It isn't very good form to be too amused with one's mother. Of course there's as much difference in mothers as in girls," Mrs. Valentin acknowledged. ”

“ Thorne, "we wonder why we stay in such a place, and every evening we are cajoled into thinking there never can be such another day. And the beauty is just as fresh every night as the heat is preposterous by day." ”