The Other GirlsWhitney, A. D. T. (Adeline Dutton Train)
General
The Other Girls
Whitney, A. D. T. (Adeline Dutton Train)
Family life -- Fiction; Women -- Fiction
It is done in life, as to many forms of living--as to religion, as
to art. People are religious, not infrequently because they are in
love with the idea of being so, not because they are simply and
directly devoted to God. They are aesthetic, because "The Beautiful"
is so beautiful, to see and to talk of, and they choose to affect
artistic having and doing; but they have not come even into that
sheepfold by the door, by the honest, inevitable pathway that their
nature took because it must,--by the entrance that it found through
a force of celestial urging and guidance that was behind them all
the while, though they but half knew it or understood.
Women fall in love that way, so often! It is a lovely thing to be
loved; there is new living, which seems to them rare and grand, into
which it offers to lift them up. They fall into a dream about a
dream; they do not lay them down to sleep and give the Lord their
souls to keep, till He shall touch their trustful rest with a divine
fire, and waken them into his apocalypse.
It was this atmosphere in which Morris Hewland lived, and which he
brought about him to transfuse the heavier air of her lowly living,
that bewildered Bel. And she knew that she was bewildered. She knew
that it was the poetic side of her nature that was stirred, excited;
not the real deep, woman's heart of her that found, suddenly, its
satisfying. If women will look, they can see this.
She knew--she had found out--that she was a fair picture in the
artist's eyes; that the perception keen to discover and test and
analyze all harmonies of form and tint,--holding a hallowed,
mysterious kinship in this power to the Power that had made and
spoken by them,--turned its search upon her, and found her lovely in
the study. It was as if a daisy bearing the pure message and meaning
of the heavenly, could thrill with the consciousness of its
transmission; could feel the exaltation of fulfilling to a human
soul, grand in its far up mystery and waiting upon God,--one of his
dear ideas.
There was something holy in the spirit with which she thus realized
her possession of maidenly beauty; her gift of mental charm and
fitness even; it was the countersign by which she entered into this
realm of which Morris Hewland had the freedom; it belonged to her
also,--she to it; she had received her first recognition. It was a
look back into Paradise for this Eve's daughter, born to labor, but
with a reminiscence in her nature out of which she had built all her
sweetest notions of being, doing, abiding; from which came
the-home-picture, so simple in its outlines, but so rich and gentle
in all its significance, that she had drawn to herself as "her
wish"; the thing she would give most, and do most, to have come
true.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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