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
"'The first last, and the last first.' That is a part of the same
thing. The rich man and Lazarus; knowing as we are known; being
clothed upon; unclothed and not found naked; the wedding garment.
You cannot touch one link of spiritual fact, without drawing a whole
chain after it. Some other time, laying hold somewhere else, the
same sayings will be brought to mind again, to confirm the new
thought. It is all alive, breathing; spirit in atoms, given to move
and crystallize to whatever central magnetism, always showing some
fresh phase of what is one and everlasting."
Miss Euphrasia could no more help talking so--given the right
circumstances to draw her forth--than she could help breathing. Her
whole nature was fluid to the truth, as the atoms she spoke of.
Talking with her, you saw, as in a divine kaleidoscope, the gleams
and shiftings and combinings of heavenly and internal things; shown
in simplest movings and relations of most real and every day
experience and incident.
But she never went on--and "went over," exhorting. She did not
believe in _discourses_, she said, even from the pulpit--very much.
She believed in a _sermon_, and letting it go. And a sermon is just
a word; as the Word gives itself, in some fresh manna-particle, to
any soul.
So when the girls stood silent, as girls will, not knowing how to
break a pause that has come upon such speaking, she broke it
herself, with a very simple question; a question of mere little
business that she had come to ask Dot.
"Were the little under-kerchiefs done?"
It was just the same sweet, cheery tone; she dropped nothing, she
took up nothing, turning from the inward to the outside. It was all
one quiet, harmonious sense of wholeness; living, and expression of
living. That was what made Miss Euphrasia's "words" chord so
pleasantly, always, without any jar, upon whatever string was being
played; and the impulse and echo of them to run on through the music
afterward, as one clear bell-stroke marking an accent, will seem to
send its lingering impression through the unaccented measures
following.
Dot went into the house and got the things; fine cambric
neck-covers, frilled around the throat with delicate lace. She
folded them small, and put them in a soft paper. Miss Kirkbright
took the parcel, and paid Dot the money for her work; she gave her
three dollars. Then she said to Sylvie,--
"Will you walk as far as the car corner with me? I have missed a
real call that I meant to have had with you. I have been to your
house."
"Did you see mother?" Sylvie asked, as they walked on, having said
good-by, and passed out through the shop.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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