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Updated: May 3, 2025
One could almost hear the shrieks of the wounded. Upon the least thorny of these I seated myself and in tender melancholy gazed upon the home of my childhood. That is, upon the home that might-have-been. When surveying a completed country home, to make the owner thoroughly incensed the correct thing to say is, "This place has great possibilities!"
When the latter was able to examine her correspondence, Diana brought her the heap for perusal, her own sealed scribble, throbbing with all the fatal might-have-been, under her eyes. She could have concealed and destroyed it. She sat beside her friend, awaiting her turn, hearing her say at the superscription: 'Your writing, Tony? and she nodded.
Chifney such entertainings as the present marked the red-letter days of her calendar. Temporarily she forgave Chifney the doubtful nature of his calling and his occasional outbreaks of profane swearing alike. She ceased to regret that snug might-have-been, little, grocery business in a country town.
Of Pin she preferred not to think; nor could she dwell with equanimity on her late misfortunes at school and the trials that awaited her on her reappearance; and since she HAD to think of something, she fell into the habit of making up might-have-been, of narrating to herself how things would have fallen out had her fictions been fact, her ascetic hero the impetuous lover she had made of him.
A vision of the life of devotion spent at the feet of an ideal lover, that life of sacrifice and tenderness which had been her dream, and which she had so utterly failed to attain, again rose up to tantalize her like a glittering mirage: and she could not help wondering whether she would have realized this beautiful, this wonderful might-have-been if she had chosen this other man.
Swaying from side to side, he ran on from tune to tune waltzes, reminiscences from operas, fragments of overtures, delightful snatches from Schubert; and when he introduced Willy to one tune a tune in which all his might-have-been was bound the dry man seemed to grow drier: perhaps it brought a glow of pleasure to his heart: but be this as it may, he only sat and puffed more emphatically at his pipe.
Three people, or sets of people, observe him in his sleep. The first would confer upon him Wealth, the second Love, the third Death, if he should waken at the moment. But David Swan sleeps deeply; the people pass on; and all that almost happened to him subsides forever to the region of the might-have-been.
At the same time the sad "too late, too late," was knelled in my ears, and I thought of the might-have-been, and rode the merry-go-round of regret's banalities. I had grown old. Passion had died.
I went to see the livery stable, after one of these Miriam-like flights of prophecy on the might-have-been. It isn't fair to judge a man's promise by one performance, and that one a livery stable, so I shall say nothing.
The movement of Longstreet to East Tennessee and Hood through Middle Tennessee was but the commencement of a series of blunders on the part of our war department that culminated eventually in the South's downfall. But it is not our province to speculate in the rosy fields of "might-have-been," but to record facts.
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