Short stories, American; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
The wedding came off a month later. Enfield had insisted upon Loramer
standing up with him. "This must make no difference between you and
me, Harry," he had said. Cora looked very pretty, and bore herself
with a demure dignity which Loramer could not but admire. He got
an idea of her then which he found hard to reconcile with his
recollections. Enfield himself discovered an unsuspected capacity
for enjoyment in her.
They came back from the wedding-journey, and she took command of his
house. And as they settled into the routine of home life and
occupations, Enfield began to think of carrying out certain plans
which he had had in mind.
Two or three months before his return to Cora, he had met a young lady
whom he had known slightly for some years, named Stella Grayland. She
was not strikingly beautiful, but of very pleasing appearance, fresh,
rosy, and intelligent. But the charm Enfield found in her was her
manner and what it suggested. Though entirely simple, her walking,
standing, sitting, speaking, were perfectly poised. In all her motions
and attitudes she made you think of some smooth and balanced mechanism
which, however it turned, or went, or stopped, was still in no danger
of going awry. She could stand still and sit still, and to see her do
either was good for the eyes. She was not fluent in speech, but when
she began you might be sure she would get to the end of what she set
out to say and stop when she got to the end. The simplest things took
a rhythmical quality in her mouth, and clung to the memory with an
agreeable tenacity.
Happy, thoughtful, modest, steadfast Stella Grayland had struck
Enfield as the reverse of Cora Brainard, and he found the secret of
the salient difference in the fact that Stella had had a thorough
training in one direction. Her father was a musician, and his daughter
had inherited his faculty and cultivated it by assiduous study at home
and abroad. Coming away from her, Enfield had reflected how any
ennobling pursuit broadens and deepens the whole character, as a
journey up the latitudes on any side of the world gives one the main
features of all, and makes the rest intelligible.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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