Mary Heaton Vorse

“ A flicker of fear passed through Cara's eyes, as though she greatly feared and yet most deeply desired that which was awakening in her heart.
Again a stab of what was like pain went through Mrs. Vossema. She turned her head away, for she noticed they were not aware they were silent. They were not afraid of silence together. They were utterly without the usual restless sense of vacancy that so profoundly disturbs young people when words do not flow readily. This being so, Amy Vossema knew that they had advanced a long distance on the road of life. ”

“ Then, very quietly, Cara opened the door of her room, which led from her mother's, and went into it. One could hear her lock it behind her. Then silence again—and then the storm burst, the molten torrent Amy Vossema had been expecting.
He raged at her. That she could have let this go on under her eyes. That she had perhaps connived at it! That she, who had had the bringing up of Cara, could have let her grow up with such disgraceful possibilities in her heart!
"My God!" he foamed at her, "you soft, white-livered thing! Not fit to bear children for a man! ”

“ She sat with a book in her hands, but Amy Vossema noticed she never turned the pages of it, but sat absorbed and withdrawn.
These were the two things that Mrs. Vossema knew about Cara. Light had ebbed from her spirit until she had sat in some mysterious twilight of the soul—and suddenly light had flooded back again. She had gone to walk in the back country and returned the luminous, shining thing that she had been before.
Mothers are strange beings. They know so little the things which concern their children most. ”

“ It was as if the impact of his still fury, like the rush of a great wind, took all the words from Mrs. Vossema's mouth.
Cara from her shelter answered: "Because I like him, father. We're good friends."
He paid no attention to her, but with gathering rage said, "What makes you let him come, I ask you?" He got up from his chair and walked with his light spring over to his wife, where he stood towering above her. "I'd like you to answer. What made you let him come?" ”

“ There scarcely exists a mother who does not believe touchingly in the things that "my daughter would not do"—as though being one's daughter constituted some strange talisman that taught youth decorum.
Then one day into Amy Vossema's spirit there slid a little sickening question. It began "What if—" and then she wrung its throat. This little chill question had a thousand lives. She might choke it one day, but it came back the next, hauntingly, and got as far as "What if Cara—" before she killed it again with a fatuous "I trust my girl." ”

“ It gives a sense of being unsubdued by man. Its scrubby woods, festooned with impenetrable entanglements of bull-brier, its sudden marshes in which one can sink thigh-deep, make it as unconquerable as the sea or the great dunes beyond. ”

“ They register their emotions, but do not know why these emotions come to them. There are some things they blind themselves to wilfully, their children ever appearing to them the way they wish them to be, not the way they are.
At first it was enough for Amy Vossema that light had come back to Cara, and she sought no answer at all, or gave herself vague assurances that she knew Cara would be what she called "a sensible girl," which meant that she would not do so unreasonable and undesirable a thing as to fall in love with Raphael Manta. ”