Olive Higgins Prouty

“ Reba's hands slipped down into her lap. Her eyes fixed themselves on the glass knob of a door across the room. She stared at it in silence, but it was not the knob she saw. Oh, how it hurt! Just to think of his eyes—how it hurt! She winced slightly.
"It isn't as if I were young," she said outloud, in that strange dull voice of hers. "I'm too old to get over it—to wake up healed from it some day," mystifyingly to those who listened Reba went on. "I shall never feel the same toward life again. ”

“ Aunt Augusta again approached Reba's bed and this time laid her hand upon her forehead. "Why, you're hot!"
A little moan escaped from Reba. Aunt Augusta leaned nearer.
"Tell me if you can. Where do you feel bad?" she asked.
"Here," Reba replied in a whisper, and she placed her hand upon her chest. "It was better for a while this afternoon," she went on; "I hardly felt it. But now it's worse. You wouldn't think it could hurt me, physically, would you?" she asked. "But it does."
Aunt Augusta bent over the bed and shook Reba by the shoulder. ”

“ She'd as soon go without a dining-room, she had once said. "Let me move into the 'girl's room," Syringa urged. "I'll be comfortable enough there. There's that register down into the kitchen, you know, right over the kitchen stove."
"You keep still," briefly Augusta silenced Syringa. "I know what I'm about. 'Tisn't your comfort I'm thinking of. Reba's to have her own room, and she is to have it without feeling she's putting an old woman like you, with rheumatism every damp day, into that 'girl's room,' that ain't fit really for even a servant. ”