Kate Drumgoold - "A Slave Girl's Story"

Harold MacGrath - "The Adventures of Kathlyn"

Various - "Sleep Book"

William Henry Holmes - "Prehistoric Textile Fabrics Of The United States, Derived From Impressions On Pottery"

Books of The Times: A 5th Gospel Can Be Like a 5th Wheel
An independent publisher said it was negotiating to release Herman Rosenblat’s discredited memoir, “Angel at the Fence,” as fiction.

Arts, Briefly: False Memoir May Find New Life as Fiction
The architectural historian Kenneth Frampton has updated his 1995 book with 11 additional houses.

Currents | Books: 11 More Great Homes
A personal Christmas tale posted online by the author Neale Donald Walsch turns out to belong to someone else — the writer Candy Chand, who first published it 10 years ago.

Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney - The Other Girls

M >> Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney >> The Other Girls




Hazel Ripwinkley, and very often Ada Geoffrey, was here at these
travelling parties. Ada had all her mother's resources of books,
engravings, models, specimens, at her command; she would come with a
carriage-full. Sometimes the library was Rome for an evening, with
its Sistine Raphaels, its curious relics and ornaments, its Coliseum
and St. Peter's in alabaster, its views of tombs, and baths, and
temples. Sometimes it was Venice; again it was transformed into a
dream of Switzerland, and again, there were the pyramids, the
obelisks, the sphinxes, the giant walls and gateways of Egypt, with
a Nile boat, and lotus flowers, and papyrus reeds, in reality or
fac-simile,--even a mummied finger and a scaraboeus ring.

They were not restricted, even, to a regular route, when their
subject took them out of it. They could have a glimpse of Memphis,
or Babylon, or Alexandria, or Athens, by way of following out an
allusion or synchronism.

Hazel and Ada almost came to the conclusion that this was the
perfection of travelling, and the supersedure of all literal and
laborious sightseeing; and Sylvie Argenter ventured the Nipperism
that "tea and coffee and spices might or might not be a little
different right off the bush, but if shiploads were coming in to you
all the time, you might combine things with as much comfort on the
whole, perhaps, as you would have in sailing round for every
separate pinch to Ceylon, and Java, and Canton."

The leaf had got turned between Leicester Place and Pilgrim Street.
I suppose you knew it would as well as I.

Bel Bree had met Dorothy first in silk-and-button errands for her
Aunt Blin's "finishings," at the thread-store where Dot tended.
(Such machine-sewing as they could obtain, Ray had done at home,
since they came into the city; and Dot had taken this place at Brade
and Matchett's.) Then they came across each other in their waitings
at the Public Library, and so found out their near neighborhood. At
last, growing intimate, Dorothy had introduced Bel to the Chapel
Bible class, and thence brought her into Desire's especial little
club at her own house.

After the travel-talk was over,--and they began with it early, so
that all might reach home at a safe hour in the evening,--very often
some one or two would linger a few moments for some little talk of
confidence or advice with Desire. These girls brought their plans to
her; their disappointments, their difficulties, their suggestions;
not one would make a change, or take any new action, without telling
her. They knew she cared for them. It was the beginning of all
religion that she taught them in this faith, this friendliness.
Every soul wants some one to come to; it is easy to pass from the
experience of human sympathy to the thought of the Divine; without
it the Divine has never been revealed.

One bright night in this October, Dot Ingraham waited, letting her
sister walk on with Frank Sunderline, who had called for them, and
asking Bel Bree to stop a minute and go with her. "We'll take the
car, presently," she said to Ray. "We shall be at home almost as
soon as you will."

"It is about the shop work," she said to Desire, who stepped back
into the library with her.

"I do not think I can do it much longer. I am pretty strong for some
things, but this terrible _standing_! I could _walk_ all day; but
cramped up behind those counters, and then reaching up and down the
boxes and things,--I feel sometimes when I get through at night, as
if my bones had all been racked. I haven't told them at home, for
fear they would worry about me; they think now I've lost flesh, and
I suppose I have; and I don't have much appetite; it seems dragged
out of me. And then,--I can't say it before the others, for they're
in shops, some of 'em, and places may be different; but it's such a
window and counter parade, besides; and they do look out for it.
People stare in at the store as they go by; Margaret Shoey has the
glove counter at that end, and she knows Mr. Matchett keeps her
there on purpose to attract; she sets herself up and takes airs upon
it; and Sarah Cilley does everything she sees her do, and comes in
for the second-hand attention. Mr. Matchett asked me the other day
if I couldn't wear a panier, and do up my hair a little more
stylish! I can't stay there; it isn't fit for girls!"

Dot's cheeks flamed, and there were tears in her eyes. Desire
Ledwith stood with a thoughtful, troubled expression in her own.

"There ought to be other ways," she said. "There ought to be more
_sheltered_ work for girls!"

"There is," said little Bel Bree from the doorway "in houses. If I
hadn't Aunt Blin, I'd go right into a family as seamstress or
anything. I don't believe in out-doors and shops. I've only lived in
the city a little while, but I've seen it. And just think of the
streets and streets of nice houses, where people live, and girls
have to live with 'em, to do real woman's home work! And it's all
given up to foreign servants, and _our_ girls go adrift, and live
anyhow. 'Tain't right!"

"There is a good deal that isn't right about it," said Desire,
gravely; knowing better than Bel the difficulties in the way of new
domestic ideas. "And a part of it is that the houses aren't built,
or the ways of living planned, for 'our girls,' exactly. Our girls
aren't happy in underground kitchens and sky bedrooms."

"I don't know. They might as well be underground as in some of those
close, crowded shops. And their bedrooms can't be much to compare,
certain. I'm afraid they like the crowds best. If they wanted to,
and would work in, and try, they might contrive. Things fix
themselves accordingly, after a while. Somebody's got to begin. I
can't help thinking about it."

Desire smiled.

"Your thinking may be a first sign of good times, little Bel," she
said. "Think on. That is the way everything begins; with a
restlessness in some one or two heads about it. Perhaps that is just
what you have come down from New Hampshire for."

"I don't know," said Bel again. She began a good many of her
reflective, suggestive little speeches with that hesitating feeler
into the fog of social perplexity she essayed. "They're just as bad
up there, now. They all get away to the towns, and the trades, and
the stores They won't go into the houses; and they might have such
good places!"

"You came yourself, you see?"

"Yes. I wasn't contented. And things were particular with me. And I
had Aunt Blin. I don't want to go back, either. But I can see how it
is."

"Things are particular with each one, in some sort or another. That
is what settles it, I suppose, and ought to. The only thing is to be
sure that it is a _right_ particular that does it; that we don't let
in any wrong particular, anywhere. For you, Dorothy, I don't believe
shop-life is the thing. You have found it out. Why not change at
once? There is the machine at home, and Ray is going to be busy in
Neighbor Street. Won't her work naturally come to you?"

"There isn't much of it, and it is so uncertain. The shops take up
all the bulk of work nowadays; everything is wholesale; and I don't
want to go into the rooms, if I can help it. I don't like days'
work, either. The fact is, I want a quiet place, and the same
things. I like my own machine. I would go with it into a family, if
I could have my own room, and be nice, and not have to eat with
careless, common servants in a dirty kitchen. Mother would spare
me,--to a real good situation; and I would come home Sundays."

"I see. What you want is somewhere, of course. Wouldn't you
advertise?"

"Would _you_?"

"Yes, I think I would. Say exactly what you want, wages and all. And
put it into some family Sunday paper,--the 'Christian Register,' for
instance. Those things get read over and over; and the same paper
lies about a week. In the dailies, one thing crowds out another; a
new list every night and morning. See here, I'll write one now.
Perhaps it wouldn't be too late for this week. Would you go out of
town?"

"_Wouldn't_ I? I think sometimes that's just what ails me; wanting
to see soft roads and green grass and door-yards and sun between the
houses! But I couldn't go far, of course."

Desire's pencil was flying over the paper.

"'Wanted; a permanent situation in a pleasant family, as seamstress,
by a young girl used to all kinds of sewing, who will bring her own
machine. Would like a room to herself, and to have her meals
orderly and comfortable, whether with the family or otherwise.
Wages'--What?"

"By the day, I could get a dollar and a quarter, at least; but for a
real good home-place, I'd go for four dollars a week."

"'Wages, $4.00 per week. A little way out of town preferred.' There!
There are such places, and why shouldn't one come to you? Take that
down to the 'Register' office to-morrow morning, and have it put in
twice, unless stopped."

"Thank you. It's all easy enough, Miss Ledwith. Why didn't I work it
out myself?"

"It isn't quite worked out, yet. But things always look clearer,
somehow, through two pairs of eyes. Good-night. Let me know what you
hear about it."

"She'll surprise some family with such a seamstress as they read
about," said Bel Bree, on the door-step. "I should like to astonish
people, sometime, with a heavenly kind of general housework."

"That was a good idea of yours about the Sunday paper," said Sylvie,
as she and Hazel and Desire went back into the library to put away
the books. "But what when the common sort pick up the dodge, and
the weeklies get full of 'Wanteds'? Nothing holds out fresh, very
long."

"There _ought_ to be," said Desire, "some filtered process for these
things; some way of sifting and certifying. A bureau of mutual
understanding between the 'real folks,'--employers and employed. I
believe it might be. There ought to be for this, and for many
things, a fellowship organized, between women of different outward
degree. And something will happen, sooner or later, to bring it
about. A money crisis, perhaps, to throw these girls out of
shop-employment, and to make heads of households look into ways of
more careful managing. A mutual need,--or the seeing of it. The need
is now; these girls--half of them--want homes, more than anything;
and the homes are suffering for the help of just such girls."

"Why don't you edit a paper, Desire? The 'Fellowship Register,' or
the 'Domestic Intelligencer,' or something! And keep lists of all
the nice, real housekeepers, and the nice, real, willing girls?"

"That isn't a bad notion, Hazie. Your notions never are. May be that
is what is waiting for you. Just cover up that 'raised Switzerland,'
will you, and bring it over here? And roll up the 'Course of the
Rhine,' and set it in the corner. There; now we may put out the gas.
Sylvie, has your mother had her fresh camomile tea?"

The three girls bade each other good-night at the stairs; just where
Desire had stood once, and put her arms about Uncle Titus's neck for
the first time. She often thought of it now, when they went up after
the pleasant evenings, and came down in the bright mornings to their
cheery breakfasts. She liked to stop on just that step. Nobody knew
all it meant to her, when she did. There are places in every
dwelling that keep such secrets for one heart and memory alone.

Yes, indeed. Sylvie was very happy now. All her pretty pictures, and
little brackets, and her mother's stands and vases in the gray
parlor, were hung with the lovely, wreathing, fairy stems of
star-leaved, blossomy fern; and the sweet, dry scent was a perpetual
subtle message. That day in the train from East Keaton was a day to
pervade the winter, as this woodland breath pervaded the old city
house. Sylvie could wait with what she had, sure that, sometime,
more was coming. She could wait better than Rodney. Because,--she
knew she was waiting, and satisfied to wait. How did Rodney know
that?

It was what he kept asking his Aunt Euphrasia in his frequent,
boyish, yet most manly, letters. And she kept answering, "You need
not fear. I think I understand Sylvie. I can see. If there were
anything in the way, I would tell you."

But at last she had to say,--not, "I think I understand
Sylvie,"--but, "I understand girls, Rodney. I am a woman, remember.
I have been a girl, and I have waited. I have waited all my life.
The right girls can."

And Rodney said, tossing up the letter with a shout, and catching it
with a loving grasp between his hands again,--

"Good for you, you dear, brave, blessed ace of hearts in a world
where hearts are trumps! If you ain't one of the right old girls,
then they don't make 'em, and never did!"




CHAPTER XXI.

VOICES AND VISIONS.


Madame Bylles herself walked into the great work-room of Mesdames
Fillmer & Bylles, one Saturday morning.

Madame Bylles was a lady of great girth and presence. If Miss Tonker
were sub-aristocratic, Madame Bylles was almost super-aristocratic,
so cumulative had been the effect upon her style and manner of
constant professional contact with the elite. Carriages had rolled
up to her door, until she had got the roll of them into her very
voice. Airs and graces had swept in and out of her private
audience-room, that had not been able to take all of themselves away
again. As the very dust grows golden and precious where certain
workmanship is carried on, the touch and step and speech of those
who had come ordering, consulting, coaxing, beseeching, to her
apartments, had filled them with infinitesimal particles of a
sublime efflorescence, by which the air itself in which they floated
became--not the air of shop or business or down-town street--but the
air of drawing-room, and bon-ton, and Beacon Hill or the New Land.

And Madame Bylles breathed it all the time; she dwelt in the courtly
contagion. When she came in among her work-people, it was an advent
of awe. It was as if all the elegance that had ever been made up
there came floating and spreading and shining in, on one portly and
magnificent person.

But when Madame Bylles came in, in one of her majestic hurries!
Then it was as if the globe itself had orders to move on a little
faster, and make out the year in two hundred and eighty days or so,
and she was appointed to see it done.

She was in one of these grand and grave accelerations this morning.
Miss Pashaw's marriage was fixed for a fortnight earlier than had
been intended, business calling Mr. Soldane abroad. There were
dresses to be hurried; work for over-hours was to be given out. Miss
Tonker was to use every exertion; temporary hands, if reliable,
might be employed. All must be ready by Thursday next; Madame Bylles
had given her word for it.

The manner in which she loftily transmitted this grand intelligence,
warm from the high-born lips that had favored her with the
confidence,--the air of intending it for Miss Tonker's secondarily
distinguished ear alone, while the carriage-roll in her accents bore
it to the farthest corner in the room, where the meekest little
woman sat basting,--these things are indescribable. But they are in
human nature: you can call them up and scrutinize them for yourself.

Madame Bylles receded like a tidal wave, having heaved up, and
changed, and overwhelmed all things.

A great buzz succeeded her departure; Miss Tonker followed her out
upon the landing.

"I'll speak for that cashmere peignoir that is just cut out. I'll
make it nights, and earn me an ostrich band for my hat," said Elise
Mokey.

One spoke for one thing; one another; they were claimed beforehand,
in this fashion, by a kind of work-women's code; as publishers
advertise foreign books in press, and keep the first right by
courtesy.

Miss Proddle stopped her machine at last, and caught the news in her
slow fashion hind side before.

"We might some of us have overwork, I should think; shouldn't you?"
she asked, blandly, of Miss Bree.

Aunt Blin smiled. "They've been squabbling over it these five
minutes," she replied.

Aunt Blin was sure of some particular finishing, that none could do
like her precise old self.

Kate Sencerbox jumped up impatiently, reaching over for some fringe.

"I shall have to give it up," she whispered emphatically into Bel
Bree's ear. "It's no use your asking me to go to Chapel any more. I
ain't sanctified a grain. I did begin to think there was a kind of
work of grace begun in me,--but I _can't_ stand Miss Proddle! What
_are_ people made to strike ten for, always, when it's eleven?"

"I think _we_ are all striking _twelve_" said Bel Bree. "One's too
fast, and another's too slow, but the sun goes round exactly the
same."

Miss Tonker came back, and the talk hushed.

"Clock struck one, and down they run, hickory, dickory, dock," said
Miss Proddle, deliberately, so that her voice brought up the
subsiding rear of sound and was heard alone.

"What _under_ the sun?" exclaimed Miss Tonker, with a gaze of
mingled amazement, mystification, and contempt, at the poor old
maiden making such unwonted noise.

"Yes'm," said Kate Sencerbox. "It is 'under the sun,' that we're
talking about; the way things turn round, and clocks strike; some
too fast, and some too slow; and--whether there's anything new under
the sun. I think there is; Miss Proddle made a bright speech, that's
all."

Miss Tonker, utterly bewildered, took refuge in solemn and
supercilious disregard; as if she saw the joke, and considered it
quite beneath remark.

"You will please resume your work, and remember the rules," she
said, and sailed down upon the cutters' table.

There was a certain silk evening dress, of singular and
indescribably lovely tint,--a tea-rose pink; just the color of the
blush and creaminess that mingle themselves into such delicious
anonymousness in the exquisite flower. It was all puffed and fluted
till it looked as if it had really blossomed with uncounted curving
petals, that showed in their tender convolutions each possible
deepening and brightening of its wonderful hue.

It _looked_ fragrant. It conveyed a subtle sense of flavor. It fed
and provoked every perceptive sense.

It was not a dress to be hurried with; every quill and gather of its
trimming must be "set just so;" and there was still one flounce to
be made, and these others were only basted, as also the corsage.

After the hours were up that afternoon, Miss Tonker called Aunt Blin
aside. She uncovered the large white box in which it lay,
unfinished.

"You have a nice room, Miss Bree. Can you take this home and finish
it,--by Wednesday? In over-hours, I mean; I shall want you here
daytimes, as usual. It has been tried on; all but for the hanging of
the skirt; you can take the measures from the white one. _That_ I
shall finish myself."

Aunt Blin's voice trembled with humble ecstasy as she answered. She
thanked Miss Tonker in a tone timid with an apprehension of some
possible unacceptableness which should disturb or change the
favoring grace.

"Certainly, ma'am. I'll spread a sheet on the floor, and put a
white cloth on the table. Thank you, ma'am. Yes; I have a nice room,
and nothing gets meddled with. It'll be quite safe there. I'm sure
I'm no less than happy to be allowed. You're very kind, ma'am."

Miss Tonker said nothing at all to the meekly nervous outpouring.
She did not snub her, however; that was something.

Miss Bree and her niece, between them, carried home the large box.

On the way, a dream ran through the head of Bel. She could not help
it.

To have this beautiful dress in the house,--perhaps to have to stand
up and be tried to, for the fall of its delicate, rosy trail; with
the white cloth on the floor, and the bright light all through the
room,--why it would be almost like a minute of a ball; and what if
the door should be open, and somebody should happen to go by,
up-stairs? If she could be so, and be seen so, just one minute, in
that blush-colored silk! She should like to look like that, just
once, to somebody!

Ah, little Bel! behind all her cosy, practical living--all her busy
work and contentedness--all her bright notions of what might be
possible, for the better, in things that concerned her class,--she
had her little, vague, bewildering flashes of vision, in which she
saw impossible things; things that might happen in a book, things
that must be so beautiful if they ever did really happen!

A step went up and down the stairs and along the passage by her
aunt's room, day by day, that she had learned to notice every time
it came. A face had glanced in upon her now and then, when the door
stood open for coolness in the warm September weather, when they
had been obliged to have a fire to make the tea, or to heat an iron
to press out seams in work that they were doing. One or two days of
each week, they had taken work home. On those days, they did,
perhaps, their own little washing or ironing, besides; sewing
between whiles, and taking turns, and continuing at their needles
far on into the night. Once Mr. Hewland had come in, to help Aunt
Blin with a blind that was swinging by a single hinge, and which she
was trying, against a boisterous wind, to reset with the other.
After that, he had always spoken to them when he met them. He had
opened and shut the street-door for them, standing back,
courteously, with his hat in his hand, to let them pass.

Aunt Blin,--dear old simple, kindly-hearted Aunt Blin, who believed
cats and birds,--_her_ cat and bird, at least,--might be thrown
trustfully into each other's company, if only she impressed it
sufficiently upon the quadruped's mind from the beginning, that the
bird was "very, _very_ precious,"--thought Mr. Hewland was "such a
nice young man."

And so he was. A nice, genial, well-meaning, well-bred gentleman;
above anything ignoble, or consciously culpable, or common. His
danger lay in his higher tendencies. He had artistic tastes; he was
a lover of all grace and natural sweetness; no line of beauty could
escape him. More than that, he drew toward all that was most
genuine; he cared nothing for the elegant artificialities among
which his social position placed him. He had been singularly
attracted by this little New Hampshire girl, fresh and pretty as a
wild rose, and full of bright, quaint ways and speech, of which he
had caught glimpses and fragments in their near neighborhood. Now
and then, from her open window up to his had come her gay, sweet
laugh; or her raised, gleeful tone, as she said some funny, quick,
shrewd thing in her original fashion to her aunt.

Through the month of August, while work was slack, and the Hewland
family was away travelling, and other lodgers' rooms were vacated,
the Brees had been more at home, and Morris Hewland had been more in
his rooms above, than had been usual at most times. The music
mistress had taken a vacation, and gone into the country; only old
Mr. Sparrow, lame with one weak ankle, hopped up and down; and the
spare, odd-faced landlady glided about the passages with her prim
profile always in the same pose, reminding one of a badly-made
rag-doll, of which the nose, chin, and chest are in one invincible
flat line, interrupted feebly by an unsuccessful hint of drawing in
at the throat.

Mr. Hewland liked June for his travels; and July and August, when
everybody was out of the way, for his quiet summer work.

The Hewlands called him odd, and let him go; he stayed at home
sometimes, and he happened in and out, they knew where to find him,
and there was "no harm in Morris but his artistic peculiarities."

He had secured in these out-of-the way-lodgings in Leicester Place,
one of the best north lights that could be had in the city; he would
not take a room among a lot of others in a Studio Building. So he
worked up his studies, painted his pictures, let nobody come near
him except as he chose to bring them, and when he wanted anything of
the world, went out into the world and got it.

Now, something had come right in here close to him, which brought
him a certain sense of such a world as he could not go out into at
will, to get what he wanted. A world of simplicities, of blessed
contents, of unworn, joyous impulses, of little new, unceasing
spontaneities; a world that he looked into, as we used to do at
Sattler's Cosmoramas, through the merest peepholes, and comprehended
by the merest hints; but which the presence of this girl under the
roof with himself as surely revealed to him as the wind-flower
reveals the spring.

On her part, Bel Bree got a glimpse, she knew not how, of a world
above and beyond her own; a world of beauty, of power, of reach and
elevation, in which people like Morris Hewland dwelt. His step, his
voice, his words now and then to the friend or two whom he had the
habit of bringing in with him,--the mere knowledge that he "made
pictures," such pictures as she looked at in the windows and in
art-dealers' rooms, where any shop-girl, as freely as the most
elegant connoisseur, can go in and delight her eyes, and inform her
perceptions,--these, without the face even, which had turned its
magnetism straight upon hers only once or twice, and whose
revelation was that of a life related to things wide and full and
manifold,--gave her the stimulating sense of a something to which
she had not come, but to which she felt a strange belonging.

Copyright (c) 2007. topmasterworks.com. All rights reserved.