Jerome, A Poor Man: A NovelFreeman, Mary Eleanor Wilkins
General
Jerome, A Poor Man: A Novel
Freeman, Mary Eleanor Wilkins
New England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
However, Abigail's vivacious persistency of common-sense usually
overcame her husband's clumsy headlongs of affection. She carried the
day at last, and the Squire subsided, though with growls of
remonstrance, like a partially tamed animal.
"Have your way, and send her down to Boston, if you want to,
Abigail," said he; "but when she comes back she shall have whatever
she wants, if I move heaven and earth to get it for her."
So that day week Jerome, going one morning to his work, stood aside
to let the stage-coach pass him, and had a glimpse of Lucina's fair
face in the wave of a blue veil at the window. She bowed, but the
stage dashed by in such a fury of dust that Jerome could scarcely
discern the tenor of the salutation. He thought that she smiled, and
not unhappily. "She is going away," he told himself; "she will go to
parties, and see other people, and forget me." He tried to dash the
bitterness of his heart at the thought, with the sweetness of
unselfish love, but it was hard. He plodded on to his work, the young
springiness gone from his back and limbs, his face sternly downcast.
As for Lucina, she was in reality leaving Upham not unhappily. She
was young, and the sniff of change is to the young as the smell of
powder to a war-horse. New fields present always wide ranges of
triumphant pleasure to youth.
Lucina, moreover, loved with girlish fervor the friend, Miss Rose
Soley, whom she was going to visit in Boston. She had not seen her
for some months, and she tasted in advance the sweets of mutual
confidences. That morning Jerome's face was a little confused in
Lucina's mind with that of a rosy-cheeked and dark-ringleted girl,
and young passion somewhat dimmed by gentle affection for one of her
own sex.
Then, too, Lucina had come, during the last few days, to a more
cheerful and hopeful view of the situation. After all, Jerome loved
her, and was not that the principal thing? Perhaps, in time, it would
all come right. Jerome might get rich; in the meantime, she was in no
hurry to be married and leave her parents, and if Jerome would only
come to see her, that would be enough to make her very happy. She
thought that after her return he would very probably come. She
reasoned, as she thought, astutely, that he would not be able to help
it, when he saw her after a long absence. Then she had much faith in
her father's being able to arrange this satisfactorily for her, as he
had arranged all other matters during her life.
"Now don't you fret, Pretty," he had said, when she bade him
good-bye, "father will see to it that you have everything you want."
And Lucina, all blushing with innocent confusion, had believed him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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