Emerson's Wife and Other Western StoriesKelly, Florence Finch
General
Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories
Kelly, Florence Finch
Western stories
Dr. Black looked out the next morning on the wide, forlorn plains of
western Kansas, with her heart as flooded with happiness as they were
with sunshine. A luxurious sense of power throbbed in her veins as she
smiled a good-morning to Adams across the aisle. He came at once to
ask how she had slept, and if she was beginning to feel the journey
wearisome. Close upon the heels of her thrilling sense of gladness and
mastery came the feminine instinct of concealment, and presently Adams
began to notice in her manner a suggestion of reserve. There was
certainly a difference, he said to himself, a little lessening of the
frank comradeship she had shown toward him the day before. He wondered
if he bored her, if he had shown too much desire for her society. He
went away to the smoking car, where he fidgeted about, began a cigar,
threw it out of the window, and in ten minutes was back again with a
book he had fished out of his travelling-bag, asking if Miss Black had
read it and, if not,--would she like to take it for a while?
It was Lubbock's "Pleasures of Life." No, Elizabeth had not read it,
but she had read Lubbock's book on ants, bees, and wasps, and she began
to tell him about it, forgetting in the pleasure of companionship the
consciousness which a little while before had veiled her manner. He
followed with some stories about the tarantula and tarantula hawk which
he had seen while on a professional trip in the Southwest. And so they
wandered on, through talk about insects and animals, back to the book
which lay on Elizabeth's lap. He took it up and read to her a page
here and there, and soon they were talking earnestly about the varied
ideals that are possible to the young and ambitious.
Adams had not tried again, since their second conversation, to find out
her vocation. His pleasure in her society had driven all thought of it
from his mind. He had even forgotten that he had ever supposed her to
have a profession. Elizabeth had said nothing about her work, at first
from whimsical perversity. But this morning, as they talked, a
definite desire crept into her mind that he should not know.
"I shall not tell him I am a physician," she thought. "It's not much
longer, and for this little while I want to be just a mere woman."
And for the rest of that day it was only at rare intervals, and even
then with a little shock of surprise, like that with which one suddenly
comes upon some old picture of himself, that she remembered she was a
doctor of medicine. The physician was submerged in the woman. And the
woman was alive to her finger-tips with realization of her endowment of
the "eternal feminine."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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