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Updated: May 27, 2025
One April day, as she sat in her usual place, with knitting cast aside and eyes fixed on the blue sky mottled with round clouds, a knock at the door announced the entrance of her landlady. Mrs. Manstey did not care for her landlady, but she submitted to her visits with ladylike resignation. To-day, however, it seemed harder than usual to turn from the blue sky and the blossoming magnolia to Mrs.
Early the next day she was up and at the window. It was raining, but even through the slanting gray gauze the scene had its charm and then the rain was so good for the trees. She had noticed the day before that the ailanthus was growing dusty. "Of course I might move," said Mrs. Manstey aloud, and turning from the window she looked about her room.
Sampson's unsuggestive face, and Mrs. Manstey was conscious of a distinct effort as she did so. "The magnolia is out earlier than usual this year, Mrs. Sampson," she remarked, yielding to a rare impulse, for she seldom alluded to the absorbing interest of her life.
"Mamma says you were her friend." Mrs. Manstey laughed. "Couldn't I have been both?" she gayly put it. "Friends are better than sweethearts they last longer. Though of course you won't agree, at your age, to such heresy." "Sweethearts?" the girl pondered as she lifted her hands to take off her hat. "I don't know. It's such a pretty word, but it doesn't mean much these days there aren't any!"
She always filled and lit it with her own hands, keeping a kettle of kerosene on a zinc-covered shelf in a closet. As the lamp-light filled the room it assumed its usual peaceful aspect. The books and pictures and plants seemed, like their mistress, to settle themselves down for another quiet evening, and Mrs. Manstey, as was her wont, drew up her armchair to the table and began to knit.
Some of the yards were, indeed, but stony wastes, with grass in the cracks of the pavement and no shade in spring save that afforded by the intermittent leafage of the clothes-lines. These yards Mrs. Manstey disapproved of, but the others, the green ones, she loved.
Manstey continued. "It was always one disappointment after another. For years I wanted to live in the country. I dreamed and dreamed about it; but we never could manage it. There was no sunny window in our house, and so all my plants died. My daughter married years ago and went away besides, she never cared for the same things. Then my husband died and I was left alone.
That night she could not sleep. The weather had changed and a wild wind was abroad, blotting the stars with close-driven clouds. Mrs. Manstey rose once or twice and looked out of the window; but of the view nothing was discernible save a tardy light or two in the opposite windows. These lights at last went out, and Mrs. Manstey, who had watched for their extinction, began to dress herself.
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