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Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 By: Henry C. Bunner (1855-1896) |
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Stories by American Authors VOLUME I WHO WAS SHE. By BAYARD TAYLOR THE DOCUMENTS IN THE CASE. By BRANDER MATTHEWS AND H.C. BUNNER ONE OF THE THIRTY PIECES. By WILLIAM HENRY BISHOP BALACCHI BROTHERS. By REBECCA HARDING DAVIS AN OPERATION IN MONEY. By ALBERT WEBSTER
1903
[Illustration: BRANDER MATTHEWS] Stories by American Authors VOLUME I
WHO WAS SHE? BY BAYARD TAYLOR. Come, now, there may as well be an end of this! Every time I meet your
eyes squarely I detect the question just slipping out of them. If you
had spoken it, or even boldly looked it; if you had shown in your
motions the least sign of a fussy or fidgety concern on my account; if
this were not the evening of my birthday, and you the only friend who
remembered it; if confession were not good for the soul, though harder
than sin to some people, of whom I am one, well, if all reasons were
not at this instant converged into a focus, and burning me rather
violently in that region where the seat of emotion is supposed to lie, I
should keep my trouble to myself. Yes, I have fifty times had it on my mind to tell you the whole story.
But who can be certain that his best friend will not smile or, what is
worse, cherish a kind of charitable pity ever afterwards when the
external forms of a very serious kind of passion seem trivial,
fantastic, foolish? And the worst of all is that the heroic part which I
imagined I was playing proves to have been almost the reverse. The only
comfort which I can find in my humiliation is that I am capable of
feeling it. There isn't a bit of a paradox in this, as you will see; but
I only mention it, now, to prepare you for, maybe, a little morbid
sensitiveness of my moral nerves. The documents are all in this portfolio, under my elbow. I had just read
them again completely through, when you were announced. You may examine
them as you like, afterwards: for the present, fill your glass, take
another CabaƱa, and keep silent until my "ghastly tale" has reached its
most lamentable conclusion. The beginning of it was at Wampsocket Springs three years ago last
summer. I suppose most unmarried men who have reached, or passed, the
age of thirty and I was then thirty three experience a milder return
of their adolescent warmth, a kind of fainter second spring, since the
first has not fulfilled its promise. Of course, I wasn't clearly
conscious of this at the time: who is? But I had had my youthful passion
and my tragic disappointment, as you know: I had looked far enough into
what Thackeray used to call the cryptic mysteries, to save me from the
Scylla of dissipation, and yet preserved enough of natural nature to
keep me out of the Pharisaic Charybdis. My devotion to my legal studies
had already brought me a mild distinction; the paternal legacy was a
good nest egg for the incubation of wealth, in short, I was a fair,
respectable "party," desirable to the humbler mammas, and not to be
despised by the haughty exclusives. The fashionable hotel at the Springs holds three hundred, and it was
packed. I had meant to lounge there for a fortnight and then finish my
holidays at Long Branch; but eighty, at least, out of the three hundred,
were young and moved lightly in muslin. With my years and experience I
felt so safe, that to walk, talk, or dance with them became simply a
luxury, such as I had never at least so freely possessed before. My
name and standing, known to some families, were agreeably exaggerated to
the others, and I enjoyed that supreme satisfaction which a man always
feels when he discovers or imagines that he is popular in society. There
is a kind of premonitory apology implied in my saying this, I am aware.
You must remember that I am culprit and culprit's counsel at the same
time. You have never been at Wampsocket? Well, the hills sweep around in a
crescent on the northern side and four or five radiating glens
descending from them unite just above the village... Continue reading book >>
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Fiction |
Literature |
Short stories |
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