Mary Heaton Vorse

“ Then floodingly I understood the longing man has for the immortality of the soul. That had been an abstract thing before, but now I felt that inevitably this soul of me must live forever.
It was when man first became aware of love that the desire for immortality must have been born in him, for when one loves God, or when one truly loves man, eternity is none too long.
I went to bed and slept wonderfully, the marvel of the night enfolding me. ”

“ I have lived many years since then, and, believe it or not, there is no picture in all the gallery of memory that is so vivid to me as Paul coming up the walk. He was straight and clean and manly; round him was an atmosphere of joy and youth. Yes, the picture of Paul striding up our walk will always seem to me a picture of Youth the Conqueror,—Youth with the magic power of the thing unbeaten and unhurt by life, Youth with all its loyalties and its passionate desire to spend itself. ”

“ As I watched the progress of their love the thought of self so died in me that there flowered in my soul one of those white blossoms of self-abnegation, of delight in another's joy even at one's own expense, that usually find place only in the soul of a mother who loses her dear son with joy if only his joy is complete enough.
I knew the affection Paul gave Rose was brother to my love for him ”

“ I'm only Paul Lewis."
I just said, "Oh!" and then was like to die of shame at my own stupidity, for all power of speech was taken from me. I had no idea why no words could come to me and why the blood ebbed to my heart, or why, at his words, a rush of gladness that was almost triumph swept over me as I thought: "He is coming here to live! He is going to stay here with us!" For how could I know that all at once he had unlocked my closed heart, and I, who had started at the top of the stairs a little girl intent on play, at the sight of him had become a woman? ”

“ He was so good! He was so good that my mother never put the slightest bar to our intimacy; and, indeed, why should she? He was all good for me. He opened so many doors to me. He was a home-loving lad, and when his work was over at five, he would come rushing in to take me to walk or to play tennis, and in the evenings we read aloud. We read "Alice," I remember, and the "Bab Ballads," my mother and Paul and I chuckling together like children. We read Matthew Arnold and Keats and Shelley; all sorts of poetry we read in the unselective, omnivorous fashion of the young. ”

“ All children should begin algebra at the average age of so-and-so. As we try to find a common denominator for their various minds, so do we find one of emotions of young people. Young girls, it is evident, should not begin to think of young men "seriously" until they are out of school. Having decided this, we let our daughters go their way with a peaceful heart.
Yet who can be sure that her little girl of thirteen is a hard-hearted, undeveloped being or a woman with a madly beating heart? ”

“ I wished ardently that I had had on my longest dress and my highest heels and a wide, grown-up young-ladyish hat instead of being bareheaded, with sneakers on my feet.
"Why don't you want to be a kid?" he asked me. "It's the bulliest thing in life, I think." All at once I was warmly reconciled to my little-girl clothes. ”

“ You have suffered and died, but it has n't made a story.
So instead of pretending that this is a story at all, I will call it "A Child's Heart"; for, as I listened, it seemed to me that I saw deep into the heart of a very little girl, but a different sort of child from the one I had been. So, after all, this tale without beginning or end had given me a new horizon about childhood, since we are apt to interpret by our own all the psychological happenings in the heads of children. ”

“ When my friend first said that little girls have not changed very much since the days of the Renaissance, when great poets fell in love with slender little things of fourteen, and when fifteen seemed not the moment for nursery tea and bread and butter, but for great romance in the eyes of writers, I smiled ”

“ The breathless feeling which had overwhelmed me when I first saw him again menaced my power of speech, but I managed to reply firmly:
"They have no girls and no dogs over there. Nothing but the most grown-up kind of people." ”

“ We cannot know. They will not tell us. They have no words in which to do it if they would, for the desires of their hearts are shyer than shy birds.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1928.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1966, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 56 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works. ”