Interpersonal relations -- Fiction; Spiritualism -- Fiction; United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
Many a night he had climbed to his fourth-story room, humming a
cheery song, while his heart was being gnawed in holes by the monster
Jealousy, all because Miss Hill was chatting and laughing in the parlor
with some of the other moths who circled about her. When chaffed about
his ill-requited devotion, he laughed it off, and said he was happy to
be tolerated at all. To himself, as a matter of graveyard whistling, he
said: “It is a question of waiting. She cares for none of them. When
she tires of them she may think of me. Meanwhile I think of her because
I can’t help it.”
He kept this up for four years. Then a restlessness of spirit came
upon him; the unseen forces of destiny began to work upon his mind and
urge him to go forth, he knew not where. Yet how could he go out of
the sight of her, voluntarily? There was but one thing that would give
him the required courage, and that was to make her bid him go. Then he
could feel that, at least, he was obeying her, hence his little plan of
having her cast the die. It might comfort him in the future.
The four years of their life together under the same roof rolled
through Kendall’s mind in panorama, and filled his heart to bursting.
The daily sight of the girl beside him had sweetened the days--had
been life itself to him, for she radiated light and life, like a
sun. That she did not love him, mattered little in that moment. The
years in which he had lived in her presence could not be taken from
him. Remembering this his spirit was lifted up, and the poor, common,
selfish ambition to possess her vanished, and the joy of having known
and loved her took its place.
He looked at her long, earnestly, adoringly, photographing her on the
fadeless walls of memory that he might carry the picture with him
through all the years to come.
“I want to make a confession to you, Miss Hill,” said Kendall, when he
thought the mental photograph of her was complete. “You have converted
me to broader views, not by words, but by your daily life. I see
you filling a useful place, unaided, in a profession that only men,
heretofore, to my knowledge, have attempted. You not only succeed, but
you excel most of your male co-workers. You make as much money as any
of them, and you have more brains, and you command everybody’s respect.
Thinking over these things, I am ashamed to remember that I thought
I ought to vote, but women must be kept from it at all hazards. Your
example has enlightened me by taking some of the masculine conceit out
of me. I feel small and mean that I in my insignificance should have
thrown a straw in the path of women like you.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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