Stories from Everybody's Magazine   By: Various

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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.