Emmy

“ General Tracy gave a long-drawn sigh: and tears—tears of true affection—stood in those most fish-like eyes, as he mournfully said, "Bless him, bless dear Charles, almost as much as you, my own sweet Emmy. Heaven send it be true—for Heaven can work miracles. But without a miracle, Emily, in sober sadness I declare it, you must forget—your brother Charles, my daughter!" ”

“ After dinner I said to mother that I wanted to call on Emmy. She looked a little surprised but was really rather pleased, and I started soon after. It was half-past five in the afternoon. Earlier in the day I had fetched the fairy-tale veil from the attic, and I took it with me in my pocket. I went in the omnibus to Tivoli, walked then to the Boulevard where Emmy lives, paid her a short visit—to prove I had been there—wrapped myself in the veil on the staircase and hastened with beating heart to the rendezvous. ”

“ If I thought our love should have come to wreck,
I'd pull Right Royal and break my neck,
And Monkery's shoe might kick my brains out
That my own heart's blood might wash my stains out.
But even if Emmy, my sweet, forgive,
I'm a ruined man, so I need not live,
For I've backed my horse with my all, by Heaven,
To be first in a field of thirty-seven,
And good as he is, the dream's a lie. ”

“ I had travelled through so many lands and yet had never smelled the perfume of the linden blossoms, so that it was as though the great linden tree had become fragrant through Emmy's wondrous power just as she made the golden summer sun truly to shine.
But then I was restored to health and the lovely, lazy life was ended. And Emmy, mindful of our last rather unsatisfactory conversation on horseback and perhaps also to offer an antidote for Heine, brought me a small New Testament as a parting gift, which I gratefully and reverently pressed to my heart and began to peruse diligently. ”

“ Miss Lizzie was the Ogress, and the lady was the Princess—the captive Princess—waiting at the window for release.
And so one played one’s part. And so Emmy Lou and Rosalie moved and lived and dreamed in the glamour and the world of the Green and Gold Book.
It stayed in one’s desk—sometimes with Alice, or with Amanthus, sometimes with Rosalie. To-day it was with Emmy Lou.
One never read in school. But at recess, on the steps outside the big door, one read aloud in turn while the others ate their apples. And Hattie came, too, when she liked, and Sadie. ”

“ As Emmy's professional disappointments had been many, and as Zora in her heart of hearts did not entirely approve of her sister's musical-comedy career, she tempered her sympathy with philosophic reflections. She had never taken Emmy seriously. All her life long Emmy had been the kitten sister, with a kitten's pretty but unimportant likes, dislikes, habits, occupations, and aspirations. ”

“ Nobody was in fault either time, still it rankled in Emmy's mind that she should never have seen the place about which Bess and Jean were forever raving. And now her time was come; she was actually packing her trunk. No wonder she was pleased.
I must just say one word about Emmy before I start her on her journey. She was very tall of her age, thin, and rather awkward, as overgrown girls are apt to be. A passionate desire to be liked was one of the ruling motives of her nature, but she was very apt to fancy that people did not like her, and to worry and grieve over it in a morbid manner. ”

“ Many men had wished to marry Aunt Emmy; not only sedentary professional men in long frock-coats, full to the brim of the best food, like Uncle Tom; but nice, lean, hungry-looking, open-air men who were majors, or country squires, or something interesting of that kind, whose clothes sat well on them, and who drew up in the Row on little skittish, curveting polo-ponies when Aunt Emmy and I walked there. ”

“ But Emmy was so gay in manner, distinguishing none in particular, that Charters was often in an agony of anxiety to learn whether she would ever love him; and moreover, there was one of ours, a Captain Douglas, recruiting in Perth, who possessed a most annoyingly handsome person, and who hovered more about the beautiful Emmy than our friend of the 77th could have wished. To make the matter worse, Douglas was an old lover, having met Emmy at a ball three years before, and been shot clean through the heart by one of her most seductive glances. ”

“ The reader may imagine the emotions of poor Emmy on finding that her lover lived, and that her heart was thus cruelly wrenched away from all it had treasured and cherished for years. Then, as if to aggravate her sorrow, our battalion marched the next day for foreign service, and Louis again embarked for America, the land of his toil, without relentless fate permitting Emmy to excuse or explain herself.
Douglas left the corps and took his wife to Paris, where he fell in a duel with a Jacobite refugee.
Emmy lived to be a very old woman, but she never smiled again. ”

“ With that merry brown face (the war had left a scar across cheek and temple) , those Celtic grey eyes, that jet-black hair, that "figure for a fencer," and above all that engaging grin of his, the merest Nobody might hope to make his mark as Somebody.
"Breezing in" (as Emmy had put it) , he smiled his nice smile that brought a dimple like a cut line into each thin, tanned cheek. The smile was for Juliet, whose velvet throne was opposite the door, and for her he waved aloft a small, sealed white parcel. Then he saw Lady West, and his expression changed. ”

“ Christmas Eve, the theater brilliant with lights and garlands, evergreens wreathing the box wherein she sat in her new crimson dress with Alice, Rosalie, Amanthus, and Charlotte, and Mrs. Pulteney just behind—fair and lovely Mrs. Pulteney who, like the mother of Charlotte, did not live with her husband, though Emmy Lou is doing her best to forget it. ”

“ How curiously things happen in life. I had not given this man a thought since that romantic Suleima dream; as a matter of fact I had quite forgotten him, and then this morning I meet him in the street, and this afternoon I hear him discussed.
I went to a birthday party at my cousin Emmy Lorentzen. Emmy, who is thirty-seven years of age, and the widow of a wine merchant, is one of the greatest chatterboxes I know. Under a mask of loving sympathy and in the sweetest way she says the most scandalous things about everybody in the town, about the people she knows and those she does not know. ”

“ To those who love me, Emmy, I am frank and free; but with those who love us not, there is a wisdom and a justice in concealment. They do not deserve confidence, who will not extend to us their sympathy. None but yourself must know whither I am bound; and, after some little search for curiosity's sake, when a week is past and gone, no soul will care for me of those at home. With you, I will manage to communicate by post, directing my letters to Mrs. Sainsbury, at Oxton: I will prepare her for it. She knows my love for you, and how they try to thwart us ”

“ Emmy listened to him with rapture. The circumstances, the time, the place, inclined her to the serious and reflective mood. My Uncle Spencer’s discourses were just what she needed at this particular moment. Naturally superstitious, she lived at all times under the protection of a small gold lucky pig and a coral cross which had once belonged to her mother. And when luck was bad, she went to church and consulted crystal gazers. ”

“ Yes, I love you, Emmy Lou, better than all the proud and beauteous heroines in the big grown-up books, because you are so sunshiny and trustful, so sweet and brave—because you have a heart of gold, Emmy Lou. ”

“ They went to the opera often of evenings—to those snug, unassuming, dear old operas in the German towns, where the noblesse sits and cries, and knits stockings on the one side, over against the bourgeoisie on the other; and His Transparency the Duke and his Transparent family, all very fat and good-natured, come and occupy the great box in the middle; and the pit is full of the most elegant slim-waisted officers with straw-coloured mustachios, and twopence a day on full pay. Here it was that Emmy found her delight, and was introduced for the first time to the wonders of Mozart and Cimarosa. ”

“ By this time I worshipped Aunt Emmy, who represented in my somewhat colourless [112] orphaned existence the beautiful and romantic side of life. Aunt Emmy looked romantic, and the contrast between her refined, gentle self-effacement and the commonplace egotism of her two men was of the glaring nature which appeals to a young girl's imagination.
I never forgot Major Stoddart, and when I was eighteen, and had left school and was living in Pembridge Square, I had the good fortune to come in for the remains of a scene between Aunt Emmy and Uncle Tom—the very day after I had turned up my hair. ”

“ This is my trust, Emmy."
"Dear Charles, you are always wiser and better than I am: let it be so then, my best of friends. Seek out good nurse Mackie, I can give you many clues, hear what she has to say; and may the God of your own poor fatherless Emily speed your holy mission! Yet there is one thing, Charles; ought you not to ask your parents for their leave to go? You are better skilled to judge than I can be, though."
"Emmy, whom have I to ask? my father? he cares not whither I go nor what becomes of me ”

“ Aunty, too much agitated to speak, folded Emmy in her arms and gave her a great squeeze which said more than words. Tom, when he understood the whole, said that she was "a brick," and that not one girl in a thousand would have been so plucky or shown so much sense. So poor, awkward Emmy, who had fared so ill up to this time, got up next morning, like Lord Byron, to find herself famous, and the heroine of the house.
To be praised and made much of does some people harm, but to others it does a great deal [230] of good. Emmy did not grow vain when she found herself thus made important. ”

“ And they rushed for the Water where a man's blood might curdle.
Charles entered the race-course and prayed in his mind
That love for the moment might make Emmy blind,
Not see him come past half a distance behind;
For an instant he thought, "I must shove on ahead,
For to pass her like this, Lord, I'd rather be dead."
Then, in crossing the hurdle the Stand arose plain,
All the flags, horns and cheers beat like blows on his brain,
And he thought, "Time to race when I come here again,
If I once lose my head, I'll be lost past appeal."
All the crowd flickered past like a film on a reel. ”

“ That very afternoon Aunt Louise began to help Emmy Lou with her lessons, and Aunt Cordelia went around and asked Hattie’s mother to let Hattie come and get her lessons with Emmy Lou.
And at school Dear Teacher, walking up and down the aisles, would stop, and her fingers would close over and guide the labouring digits of Emmy Lou, striving to copy within certain ruled lines upon her slate the writing on the blackboard:
The pen is the tongue of the mind. ”

“ If you thought about yourself less and about other people more, Miss Emmy, you wouldn't be so shy, as you call it. You'll get better of it as soon as you're old enough to find out that for the most part of the time nobody is noticing what you do or thinking about you at all."
There was a certain tonic in this speech of Eliza's which did Emmy good. She lay meditating upon it that night after the girls had come in to kiss her and say how dreadfully they had missed her at the picnic, and how she must get quite well before next Monday, when they were going to have another. ”

“ The more so if he is not confronted by abysses all too deep, by doors all too closely barred and by deserts all too barren; if in this other soul he can detect feelings somewhat akin to his own. To expect, besides, exalted friendships between those of equal sex is imputing too much power and good will to the Deity in whose hand we live.
For me, then, it was not Alice or Bertha, - but Emmy, and more particularly Emmy Tenders, the daughter of an English-Scotch merchant, who of all human beings seemed to me the most interesting and worth knowing. ”

“ VII Now the crafty devil held me securely in his meshes and could display himself without having the terrified little fish swim away. My body, now strong again and refreshed, wanted Emmy for my wife in the ordinary, human, time-honored way. It made this known with undeniable distinctness, without concerning itself in the least about my exalted scruples. Women can still cherish the illusion that kisses and embraces have no deeper significance; a man is more distinctly warned ”

“ Charles and Emmy—for he called her Emmy still, though Jeanie Mackie would persist in mouthing it to "Aamy,"—wished to have it delayed a year, in respect for the memory of those who, with all their crime and folly, were not the less a mother and a brother: but the general would not hear of such a thing; he was growing very old, he said; although actually he seemed to have taken out a new lease of life, so young again and buoyant was the new-found heart within him; and thus growing old, he was full of fatherly fear that he should not live to see his children's happiness. ”

“ This Aunt Emmy seemed to be an empty-headed creature who thought that the most essential thing for a girl in life was to be fancifully dressed, and to attain a position in society.
Aunt Emmy had evidently filled Rebecca's head with such notions. The girl had come to Ardmore with a totally wrong idea of what it meant to be in college.
"Why! some of these girls act as waitresses," said Rebecca. "I couldn't do that even to obtain the education I want so much. Oh! Aunt Emmy would never hear to it."
"It's a perfectly legitimate way of helping earn one's tuition," Ruth said. ”