Friendship Village Love Stories

all find in them something all my own. For the old rosewood clock which has told time for me these m

swells richly to its zenith of expression and almost says something else. Through even the organ fulness of the cathedral bells I shall hear the tingling melody of the rosewood clock chimes, for their sweet incidence has been to me both matins and lullaby and often trembles within my sleep. I have the clock always[Pg 34] with me. It is a little voice-friend, it is one of those half folk, like flowers

turned from me, and she was wearing a high-necked gingham apron faded to varying values of brown and faint purple and

t again," she said, standing w

haps, to-morro

dlongs. Who of us has not chosen a vase, a chair, a rug, by some motive transcending taste, by the bidding of a friendly-faithful monitor who, somewhere inside one, nodded a choice which we obeyed? And yet a vase is a dead thing with no little seeking tentacles that catch and cling, while in choosing the living it is that one's friendly-faithful monitor is simply recognizing

regarding

day, where the crape is on the door,"

very big people brush aside the minor conventions and do it

there was your frie

didn't always bother her head to[Pg 36] speak to me. I j

rdon. To get—w

our own breath better—like it was something alive inside you. That's why I nev

the nearest to the truth about things, but as I grow older I find myself getting to take a surpassing comfort in the

hinks you should be my secretary." (It is a big wor

d Miggy, simply, "I wa

n anybody's secret

never saw anybody befo

r think you would do," I suggest

get ahead. And I think so because I generally think I can do anyth

ese extraordinary qualifications for duty; "excep

er how much I wanted to come back. Calliope Marsh says she's always expecting to find some folks' heads

I never have a fr

ome," said M

k of anxiety, and her face was pointed and bi

forgot. I meant t

not come, after all

said Miggy, soberly. "A

es me, though at the wrist they taper and in their extreme littleness are yet round. Because

u that?" I a

'most," said Miggy. "They all laugh

n that,—save with my neighbour, and Calliope, and a few more whom I love—here in the village I miss the simple good breeding of the perception that nothing is nobler than

rve that I instance a commercialization which I deplore by not insisting on this secre

ttle nods which seeme

39] isn't me that's in love at all. It's Peter.

ter to such a Miggy. I must have looked "Poor Peter," because the girl's face took on its first sm

all day and then he practises violin and tinkers. I only see h

make a mental note for me: remind me

al scared. Now about my being your secretary

child!" I

a secretary and she takes down every single thing

hat I had a secretary, but rather that I had surprisingly acquired a Miggy, who might be of use in many a little

it up with a sigh. "Everything is, ain't it?

is," I t

best when you have to do just exactly what you

ending to interfere with set tasks in Miggy's possible duties with me. She had the truth, though: that the strong creative instinct is the chi

at eleven, if it is, as it often is, my one and my eleven and nobody else's. For, as between the clock and me alone, one and eleven and all other o'clocks are mine and I am not theirs. But I have known men and women living in hotels who would[Pg 41

ess, a hint which I welcomed. I think that every one to whom I am permanently d

nice things to do and I do 'em. But I'm always waking up in the night and thinking what a lot there must be th

at faint, swift, solemn minute which sometimes reveals on a face the childlike wist

do not feel this sense of emptiness whenever we leave one another. Would you not think that it would be so with us who live above the abyss and below the uttermost spaces? It is not so, and there are those from whose presence I long to be gone in a discomfort which is a kind of orison of my sou

fancy that Miggy is no o'clock. She is not Dawn o'clock, because already she has lived so much; nor Noon o'clock, because she is far from her high moment; nor is she Du