City and town life -- Fiction; Romance fiction, American; Short stories, American
rags, or in hemming linen, or sewing articles for an imminent bazaar,
and this is likely to be denominated "gettin' through little odd jobs,"
and accounted in a measure a self-indulgence. And if evening delight
takes the form of gardening and later a flame of nasturtiums or dahlias
is carried to a friend, nobody dreams that this is not a pleasant
self-indulgence too, and it is so regarded. With these things true is it
not as if a certain hope abroad in the world gave news of itself?
Near the Pump pasture I came on Nicholas Moor--who rings the Catholic
bell and is interested in celluloid--and who my neighbour had told me
would doubtless come to me, bringing his little sheaf of "writin's." I
had not yet met him, though I had seen in the daily paper a vagrant poem
or two over his name--I remember a helpless lyric which made me think of
a gorgeous green and gold beetle lying on its back, unable to recover
its legs, but for all that flashing certain isolated iridescent colours.
My heart ached for Nicholas, and when I saw him now going across the
pasture his loneliness was like a gap in things, one of the places where
two world-edges do not quite meet. There are so many pleasant ways to do
and the boy seemed to know how to do none of them. How can he be lonely
in the village? For myself, if I decide of an afternoon to take my work
and pay a visit, I am in a pleasant quandary as to which way to turn. If
I go to the west end of Daphne Street, there are at least five families
among whom to choose, the other four of whom will wonder why I did not
come to them. Think of knowing five families in two blocks who would
welcome one's coming and even feel a little flattering bitterness if one
chose the other four! If I take a cross street, I am in the same
difficulty. And if I wish to go to the house of one of my neighbours, my
motives clash so seriously that I often sit on my porch and call to
whoever chances to be in sight to come to me. Do you wonder that, in
town, the moment I open my address book I feel smothered? I recover and
enjoy town as much as anybody, but sometimes in a stuffy coupé, hurrying
to get a half-dozen of the pleasantest calls "done," I surprise a
companion by saying: would now that it were undern on Daphne Street!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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