Manners and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, American
The Young Husband came home from his business trip next day with tales
of snowdrifts and stalled engines. Blanche Devine breathed a sigh of
relief when she saw him from her kitchen window. She watched the house
now with a sort of proprietary eye. She wondered about Snooky; but she
knew better than to ask. So she waited. The Young Wife next door had
told her husband all about that awful night--had told him with tears and
sobs. The Very Young Husband had been very, very angry with her--angry
and hurt, he said, and astonished! Snooky could not have been so sick!
Look at her now! As well as ever. And to have called such a woman! Well,
really he did not want to be harsh; but she must understand that she
must never speak to the woman again. Never!
So the next day the Very Young Wife happened to go by with the Young
Husband. Blanche Devine spied them from her sitting-room window, and she
made the excuse of looking in her mailbox in order to go to the door.
She stood in the doorway and the Very Young Wife went by on the arm of
her husband. She went by--rather white-faced--without a look or a word
or a sign!
And then this happened! There came into Blanche Devine's face a look
that made slits of her eyes, and drew her mouth down into an ugly,
narrow line, and that made the muscles of her jaw tense and hard. It was
the ugliest look you can imagine. Then she smiled--if having one's lips
curl away from one's teeth can be called smiling.
Two days later there was great news of the white cottage on the corner.
The curtains were down; the furniture was packed; the rugs were rolled.
The wagons came and backed up to the house and took those things that
had made a home for Blanche Devine. And when we heard that she had
bought back her interest in the House With the Closed Shutters, near the
freight depot, we sniffed.
"I knew she wouldn't last!" we said.
"They never do!" said we.
VII
THE GIRL WHO WENT RIGHT
There is a story--Kipling, I think--that tells of a spirited horse
galloping in the dark suddenly drawing up tense, hoofs bunched, slim
flanks quivering, nostrils dilated, ears pricked. Urging being of no
avail the rider dismounts, strikes a match, advances a cautious step or
so, and finds himself at the precipitous brink of a newly formed
crevasse.
So it is with your trained editor. A miraculous sixth sense guides him.
A mysterious something warns him of danger lurking within the seemingly
innocent oblong white envelope. Without slitting the flap, without
pausing to adjust his tortoise-rimmed glasses, without clearing his
throat, without lighting his cigarette--he knows.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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