My Wife and I; Or, Harry Henderson's HistoryStowe, Harriet Beecher
General
My Wife and I; Or, Harry Henderson's History
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
American fiction -- 19th century; Courtship -- Fiction; Marriage -- Fiction; Romance fiction
All which I had arrayed in good set terms as I rode back to my room, and
went up to Bolton to look up in his library the authorities for an
article I was getting out on the Domestic Life of the Ancient Greeks.
Bolton had succeeded in making me feel so thoroughly at home in his
library that it was to all intents and purposes as if it were my own.
As I was tumbling over the books that filled every corner, there fell
out from a little niche a photograph, or rather ambrotype, such as were
in use in the infancy of the art. It fell directly into my hand, so that
taking it up it was impossible not to perceive what it was, and I
recognized in an instant the person. It was the head of my cousin
Caroline, not as I knew her now, but as I remembered her years ago, when
she and I went to the Academy together.
It is almost an involuntary thing, on such occasions, to exclaim, "Who
is this?" But Bolton was so very reticent a being that I found it
extremely difficult to ask him a personal question. There are
individuals who unite a great winning and sympathetic faculty with great
reticence. They make _you_ talk, they win your confidence, they are
interested in you, but they ask nothing from you, and they tell you
nothing. Bolton was all the while doing obliging things for me and for
Jim, but he asked nothing from us; and while we felt safe in saying
anything in the world before him, and while we never felt at the moment
that conversation flagged, or that there was any deficiency in sympathy
and good fellowship on his part, yet upon reflection we could never
recall anything which let us into the interior of his own life-history.
The finding of this little memento impressed me, therefore, oddly,--as
if a door had suddenly been opened into a private cabinet where I had no
right to look, or an open letter which I had no right to read had been
inadvertently put into my hands. I looked round on Bolton, as he sat
quietly bending over a book that he was consulting, with his pen in hand
and his cat at his elbow; but the question I longed to ask stuck fast in
my throat, and I silently put back the picture in its place, keeping the
incident to ponder in my heart. What with the one pertaining to myself,
and with the thoughts suggested by this, I found myself in a disturbed
state that I determined to resist by setting myself a definite task of
so many pages of my article.
In the evening, when Jim came in, I recounted my adventure and showed
him the card.
He surveyed it with a prolonged whistle. "Good now!" he said; "the
ticket sent by the Providence Express. I see--"
"Who are these Van Arsdels, Jim?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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