The silent partner

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

There are people who never do anything that is not worth watching; they cannot eat an apple or button a shoe in an unnoticeable, unsuggestive manner. If they undertake to be awkward, they do it so symbolically that you feel in debt to them for it.

It must rain on many girls while she sat in her sweet, warm, sheltered darkness.

steps shiver in response to the bells. The bells hurry, hurry, hurry on the steps. The steps hurry, hurry, hurry to the bells. The bells grow cross and snappish, — it is so cold.

he slipped from her life, as he slips from her story, so heart slips away from heart, and love from love, with the slide of every hour. To cross the gap from life with a father to life without, very much as the February night descended upon the July house, were not unnatural. One

To be at first very sadly shocked, to be next very truly lonely; to wish that she had never been cross to him (which she had), and to be sure that he had never been cross to her (which he had); to see, and love to see, the best of the departed life and the sweetest of the departed days; and then to wander musing away, by sheer force of contrast, upon her own unfinished life, and into the sweetness of her own coming days, and repent of it next moment; to forget one afternoon to notice the five-o'clock solitude because Maverick comes in; to take very much to her Prayer-Book the first fortnight, and entirely to Five Falls the second; and to be pouring out her lover's coffee this morning, very lovely, a little quiet, and less unhappy.

Something in their kindred deprivation moved Perley; an emotion more like sympathy than recoil, and more like attraction than disgust, took possession of her as they walked slowly and more slowly, in the ever-widening

For the first time in her life, she was inclined to feel ashamed of being a woman. She was seriously interested, — perhaps, again, for the first time in her life, seriously interested — in this matter. A faint sense of degradation at being so ignorant that she could not command the respect of two men sufficiently to the bare discussion of it possessed her.

while I suppose we shall all go on and be very good-natured about it, I shall feel that you refuse it to me because I am a young lady, not because I do not stand ready to remove a young lady's disqualifications."