Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 5, 2025
The first onslaught took Marise's breath, as though a literal storm had burst around her. She was shaken as she had been shaken so many times before. She lost her hold on her staff . . . what had that staff been? At the thought, the master-words came to her mind again; and all fell quiet and in a great hush waited on her advance. Neale had said, "What is deepest and most living in you."
She ran forward and stooped over a little panting yellow ball. Across the intervening space and beyond all those carelessly alive bodies, Marise's eyes caught the unmistakable aspect of death in the tiny creature lying there. "Mother!" cried Elly, "his eyes look so! He can't get his breath. Mother!" Marise felt the child's agitation and alarm knock at her heart.
And yet she heard her voice asking, urgently, peremptorily, "What was the name of the man from New Hampshire?" Eugenia said, "What man from New Hampshire?" and then, under Marise's silent gaze, corrected herself and changed her tone. "Oh yes, let me see: Neale introduced him, of course. Why, some not uncommon name, and yet not like Smith or Jones. It began with an L, I believe."
Well, there was one, anyhow, of Marise's audience who often gave her a silent hand-clap of admiration. The wailing, lugubrious notes of the negro lament rose now, Paul's voice loud and clear and full of relish. "It takes a heavy stimulant to give Paul his sensations," thought his father. "What would take the hide right off of Elly, just gives him an agreeable tingle."
Seems as though every minute she'd come in, stepping quick, the way she did. And I fairly open my mouth to ask her, 'Now Miss Hetty, what shall I do next? and then it all comes over me." Marise's impatience and scorn were flooded by an immense sympathy. What a pitiable thing a dependent is! Poor old Agnes! She leaned down to the humble, docile old face, and put her cheek against it.
She moved to the small, black-lacquered table where her work-box stood and leaned on it for a moment, watching the dim reflection of her pointed white fingers in the glistening surface of the wood. They did not look like Marise's brown, uncared-for hands. She opened the inlaid box and took from it the thimble which she had bought in Siena, the little antique masterpiece of North Italian gold-work.
She knew with one corner of her mind that Agnes must be terrified. What if she were? Marise's life-long habit of divining another's need and ministering to it, vanished like a handful of dust in a storm. What did she care about Agnes? What did she care about anything in the world but that she should have back again what she had valued so little as to lose it from her mind altogether?
The thick-set, myriad-leaved young maples held all their complicated delicately-edged foliage motionless in perfect calm. It was very still in the depths of Marise's complicated mind also, although the wind stirred the surface. Yes, she knew what had happened to her.
He added as final information, "Spinster, by conviction," as he stepped forward to greet her. The other two men stood up to be presented to the newcomer, who, making everything to Marise's eyes seem rough and countrified, advanced towards them, self-possessed, and indifferent to all those eyes turned on her.
But there was about him something more than astonishment, something which Marise's mother-eye catalogued as furtitve, that consciousness of something to hide which always looks to grown-ups like guilt. She gave no sign of seeing this, however, stopping short to catch her breath, smiling at him, and wondering with great intensity what in the world it could be. He looked a little frightened.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking