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"He's come, Julia," Peachy whispered softly. The women withdrew from the inner room as Billy passed over the threshold. Julia lay on the couch stately and still. One long white hand rested on her breast. The other stretched at her side; its fingers touched a little bundle there. Her wings the glorious pinions of her girlhood towered above the pillow, silver-shining, quiescent.
During their girlhood Emily and Lilias had had no more concern with their clothes than with their food; Eleanor had carefully taught them plain needlework, and they had assisted in making more than one set of shirts; but they had nothing to do with the choice or fashion of their own apparel.
Trained for years to the routine of factory and laundry work, she could not abide this unaccustomed idleness. She could not bear to sit and do nothing, while she could not pay calls on her girlhood friends, for they still worked in factory and laundry.
But the change had come gradually, and the husband noticed it not. To him, Mary had only grown more matronly, and, wisely laying aside the frivolity of girlhood, had acquired the sedateness of riper years. True, there were moments when his indifference was somewhat annoying.
Undoubtedly, however, American motherhood and girlhood represent something more and more intelligent; indeed, in physical culture women are beginning to keep step with men, and it is upon this fact that school and college depend in their splendid efforts to make the sum of feminine vitality, despite the pressure of modern civilization, plus rather than minus.
‘Very pretty, i’faith,’ said he, after attentively regarding it for a few seconds; ‘and a very fitting study for a young lady. Spring just opening into summer—morning just approaching noon—girlhood just ripening into womanhood, and hope just verging on fruition. She’s a sweet creature! but why didn’t you make her black hair?’ ‘I thought light hair would suit her better.
After a conventional period of mourning she began to relive the past, her husband's mistakes, her own girlhood and offers of marriage such incidents as these sufficed to keep her from enjoying the present, while Mary rose from errand girl to grocery clerk, with night school as a recreation, from grocery clerk to filing clerk, assistant bookkeeper, bookkeeper, stenographer, and finally private secretary to Steve O'Valley, one of the war-fortune kings.
But in a woman's complete love of a man there is something deeper than girlhood or womanhood or wifehood: it is the maternal that dependence on his strength when he is well and strong, that passion of protection and defence when he is frail or stricken. Into her mood and feeling toward him even the maternal had forced its way. She would have found some expression for it but he anticipated her.
Traditions of her girlhood days are still treasured up in many Boston families and pleasant stories are told of this part of her life. She here grew in mind and stature and she was no longer little Camilla but Mademoiselle Camilla Urso.
Standing there in her spring-like dress beside the dead woman who had been her mother, Corinna felt intuitively that Patty had left her girlhood behind her. The child had lived in one night through an inner crisis, through a period of spiritual growth, which could not be measured by years.
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