City and town life -- Fiction; Foundlings -- Fiction
"So now, as he stood there with her, looking down in her face, touching
her friendly hand, I think that was the first real, overhauling minute
when he was just swept by the understanding that his loss was so many
times what he'd thought it was going to be. For it was her that he
wanted, it was her that he would miss for herself and not for any dear
plans of work-fellowship alone. She understood his dream, but there was
other things she understood about, too. A man can love a woman for a
whole collection of little dear things--and he can lose her and grieve;
he can love her for her big way of looking at things, and he can lose
her and grieve; he can love her because she is his work-fellow, and he
can lose her and grieve. But if, on top of one of these, he loves her
because she is she, the woman that knows about life and is capable of
sharing all of life with him and of being tender about it, why then if
he loses her, his grieving is going to be something that there ain't
rightly no name for. And I think it was that minute there in the road
that it first come to Insley that Robin was Robin, that of all the many
women that she was, first and most she was the woman that was capable
of sharing with him all sides of living.
"'I wanted ...' she says to him, uncertain. 'Oh, I wish very much that
you would accept the invitation to some of the house party. I wanted to
tell you.'
"'I can't do that,' he answers, short and almost gruff. 'Really I can't
do that.'
"But it seemed there was even a sort of nice childishness about her that
you wouldn't have guessed. I always think it's a wonderful moment when a
woman knows a man well enough to show some of her childishness to him.
But a woman that shows right off, close on the heels of an introduction,
how childish she can be, it always sort o' makes me mad--like she'd told
her first name without being asked about it.
"'Please,' Robin says, 'I'm asking it because I wish it very much. I
want those people up there to know you. I want--'
"He shook his head, looking at her, eyes, mouth, and fresh cheeks, like
he wished he was able to look at her face _all at once_.
"'At least, at least,' she says to him rapid, then, 'you must come to
the party at the end. You know I want to keep you for my friend--I want
to make you our friend. That night Aunt Eleanor is going to announce my
engagement, and I want my friends to be there.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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