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
Desire knew that it was one of the minister's chapel nights. She
went away, up Savin Street, disappointed; wishing that she could
have sent instant help to Mary Moxall, who, she thought, could not
withstand the evangel of Hilary Vireo's presence. It is so sure that
nothing so instantly brings the heavenly power to bear upon a soul
as contact with a humanity in which it already abides and rules. She
wanted this girl to touch the hem of a garment of earthly living,
with which it had clothed itself to do a work in the world. For the
Christ still finds and puts such garments on to walk the earth; the
seamless robes of undivided consecration to Himself.
As Desire crossed to Borden Street, and went on up the hill, there
came suddenly to her mind recollection of the Sunday noon, years
since, when she had walked over that same sidewalk with Kenneth
Kincaid; when he had urged her to take up Mission work, and she had
answered him with her girlish bluffness, that "she thought he did
not approve of brokering business; it was all there, why should they
not take it for themselves? Why should she set up to go between?"
She thought how she had learned, since, the beautiful links of
endless ministry; the prismatic law of mediation,--that there is no
tint or shade of spiritual being, no angle at which any soul catches
the Divine beam, that does not join and melt into the next above and
the next below; that the farther apart in the spectrum of humanity
the red of passion and the violet of peace, the more place and need
for every subdivided ray, to help translate the whole story of the
pure, whole whiteness.
She remembered what she had said another time about "seeing blue,
and living red." She was thinking out by the type the mystery of
difference,--the broken refractions that God lets his Spirit fall
into,--when, looking up as she was about to pass some person, she
met the face of Christopher Kirkbright.
He had not been at home of late; he had been busy up at Brickfield
Farms.
For nearly four months past, Cone Hill and the Clay Pits had been
his by purchase and legal transfer. He had lost no time in making
his offer to his brother-in-law. Ten words by the Atlantic cable had
done it, and the instructions had come back by the first mail
steamer. Repairing and building had been at once begun; an odd,
rambling wing, thrown out eastward, slanting off at a wholly
unarchitectural angle from the main house, and climbing the terraced
rock where it found best space and foothold, already made the quaint
structure look more like a great two-story Chinese puzzle than ever,
and covered in space for an ample, airy, sunny work-saloon above a
range of smaller rooms calculated for individual and home occupancy.
But the details of the plan at Brickfields would make a long story
within a story; we may have further glimpses of it, on beyond; we
must not leave our friends now standing in the street.
Mr. Kirkbright held out his hand to Desire, as he stopped to speak
with her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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