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Stories from Everybody's Magazine By: Various |
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Scanned by Charles Keller with OmniPage Professional OCR software
donated by Caere Corporation, 1 800 535 7226. Contact Mike Lough
Vol. XXIII No.1 JULY 1910 THE LAYING OF THE MONSTER BY THEODOSIA GARRISON Dorothea reposed with her shoulders in the shade of the bulkhead
and her bare feet burrowing in the sun warmed sand. Beneath her
shoulder blades was a bulky and disheveled volume a bound year
of Godey's Lady Book of the vintage of the early seventies.
Having survived the handling of three generations, this seemed to
take naturally to being drenched with rain and warped by sun, or,
as at the present moment, serving its owner either as a
sand pillow or as a receptacle for divers scribbled verses on its
fly leaves and margins. It was with a poem now that Dorothea was wrestling, as she
wriggled her toes in the sand and gazed blankly oceanward. Under
the scorching August sun, the Atlantic seemed to purr like a
huge, amiable lion cub. It was not the amiabilities of nature, however, in which Dorothea
found inspiration. A harp of a single string, she sang as that
minstrel might who was implored to make love alone his theme. Given an imaginative young person of eleven, who, when not
abandoning herself utterly to athletics, has secret and continual
access to the brand of literature peculiar to the "Seaside
Library," and the result is obvious. Dorothea's mother read
recipes; her father was addicted to the daily papers. It was only
in her grandmother that Dorothea found a literary taste she
approved. On that cozy person's bookshelves one could always find
what happened to Goldie or what the exquisite Irish heroine said
to the earl before she eloped with the captain. In this knowledge Dorothea's parents had no ambition that their
daughter should excel. In fact, an uncompromising edict on the
subject had been given forth more than once to a sullen and
rebellious sinner. But how should the most suspicious parent,
when his daughter sits in his presence apparently engrossed in a
book entitled "The Girlhood of Famous Women," guess that
carefully concealed in its interior is a smaller volume bearing
the title "Muriel's Mistake, or, For Another's Sin?" Having acquired knowledge, the true student seeks to demonstrate.
Dorothea had promptly and intentionally fallen in love with the
son of her next door neighbor. Amiel fresh from his first year
in college was a tall, broad shouldered youth, with kindly
brown eyes and a flash of white teeth when he smiled. In contrast
to the small boys and the sober going fathers of families in
which the summer colony abounded, he shone, as Dorothea's
favorite novelists would have expressed it, "like a Greek god." It was this unsuspecting person whom Dorothea had, at first
sight, elected to be the Hero of her Dreams. She trailed him,
moreover, with a persistency that would have done credit to a
detective. Did he go to the post office, he was sure to meet
Dorothea returning (Lady Ursula, strolling through her estate,
comes upon her lover unawares). Dorothea, emulating her heroine's
example by vaulting a fence and cutting across lots, could be
found also strolling (if slightly breathless) as he approached. She timed her day, as far as possible, with his. Would he swim,
play tennis, or go crabbing there was Dorothea. Would he repose
in the summerhouse hammock and listen to entire pages declaimed
from Tennyson and Longfellow, the while being violently
swung his slave was ready. She read no story in which she was
not the heroine and Amiel the hero. At the same time, she was
perfectly and painfully conscious in the back of her brain that
Amiel regarded her only as a sun browned, crop headed tomboy, who
had an extraordinary facility for remembering all the poetry she
had ever read, and who amused and interested him as his own small
sister might. Outwardly she kept strictly to this role a purely
natural one while inwardly she soared dizzily from fantasy to
fantasy, even while her physical body was plunging in the waves
or leaping on the tennis court... Continue reading book >>
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Literature |
Short stories |
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