English fiction -- 20th century; Short stories, English
She became fifteen and went to school. We saw little of her for three
years. At eighteen she came home, and out. Then we would meet her at
dances, and picnics, skating and playing tennis--always languid, pale,
dark-eyed; still not quite regular in her features, and with angles
not perfectly covered; but, on the whole, like a tall lily with a dark
centre. She was very earnest, too, and beginning to be æsthetic, given
to standing against walls, with her dark-brown eyes immovably fixed on
persons playing violins; given to Russian linen and embroidering book
covers; to poetry and the sermons of preachers just unorthodox enough;
dreamy, too, but puffing and starting at things that came too near. She
was very attractive.
Going to college, one saw little more of Minna till she was twenty-two.
She was working then at a “Settlement,” and looked unhappy and anæmic.
Two months later we were told she had broken down. The work was too
painful; her nerves had gone all wrong. She was taken abroad.
We did not see her again till she was twenty-six. She was then marrying
a Quaker, a handsome, big fellow with reddish hair, ten years older
than herself. More like a swaying lily than ever she looked in her long
white veil. A tall, striking couple! The Quaker had warm eyes, and by
the way he looked at her, one wondered.
Another four years had passed before I, at all events, saw much of
Minna again. She was now thirty, and had three children, two girls and
a boy, and was evidently soon to have another. There was a pathetic
look in her eyes. They said that the Quaker should have been a Turk,
for his physique was powerful and his principles extremely strict.
His wife had grown to have a shrinking, fagged-out air, and worried
terribly over her infants. She was visibly unhappy; had gone off, too,
in looks; grown sallow and thin-cheeked, and seemed not to care to hold
herself up.
I recollect the Quaker coming in one day, full of health and happiness,
and putting his affectionate hand on her shoulder. To me--not to the
Quaker, from whom many things were hidden--it was apparent that she
flinched, and when his back was turned I saw in a mirror that she was
actually trembling all over, and on her face an expression as if she
saw before her suffering from which she could not possibly escape.
It was clear that the quivering, lilylike creature had been brought
almost to her last gasp by the physique and principles of that healthy,
happy Quaker. It was quite painful to see one for whom life seemed so
terribly too much.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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