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
"One of them _was_ a chapel girl. Miss Kirkbright told me. She grew
up there till she was sixteen years old; then she went to live in
the country. Now I must have those two in, you see. I don't know but
Mr. Vireo would say it was making a feast for friends and neighbors,
if I pick out the ready-made. But this sort of thing--you must have
some reliance, you know; then there's something for the rest to come
to, and grow to. I think I shall begin about it before vacation,
while they're all together and alive to things. It takes so long to
warm up to the same point after the break. We might have one
meeting, just to organize, and make it a settled thing. O, how good
it will be when Mr. Vireo comes home!"
If I had not so many things to tell before my story can be at all
complete, I should like nothing better than to linger here in Desire
Ledwith's room, where there was so really "a beautiful east window,
and the morning had come in." I should like to just stay in the
sunshine of it, and show what the stir of it was, and what it had
come to with these two; what a brightness, day by day, they lived
in. I should be glad to tell their piece of the story minutely; but
I should not be able to get at it to tell. We may touch such lives,
and feel the lovely pleasantness; but to enter in, and have the
whole--that may only be done in one way; by going and doing
likewise.
This talk of theirs gives one link; it shows you how easily and
naturally they came to have to do with the Ingrahams; how they
belonged in one sphere and drew to one centre; how simply things
happen, after all, when they have any business to happen.
Somebody speaks of the ascent of a lofty church spire, as giving
such a wonderful glimpse of the unity of a great city; showing its
converging movements, its net-work of connection,--its human
currents swayed and turned by intelligible drifts of purpose; all
which, when one is down among them, seem but whirls of a confusing
and distracting medley; a heaping and a rushing together of many
things and much conflicting action; where the wonder is that it
stays together at all, or that one part plays and fits in with any
other to harmony of service. If we could climb high enough, and see
deep enough, to read a spiritual panorama in like manner, we should
look into the mystery of the intent that builds the worlds and works
with "birth and death and infinite motion" to evolve the wonders of
all human and angelic history. We should only marvel, then, at what
we, with our little bit of wayward free will, hinder; not at what
God gently and mightily forecasts and brings to pass.
To find another link, we must go away and look in elsewhere.
CHAPTER X.
FILLMER AND BYLLES.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account