Cecilia of the Pink Roses

Time had been careful with Father McGowan. Perhaps he thought Father McGowan rather nice as he was, and unneedful of the lines that usually come with heart and soul expansion. B...

Jeremiah Madden surveyed a Greek Venus as he spoke, whose arms were quite lacking. "As fer me," he went on, "I like 'em with all their limbs with 'em,--tasty and neat. This here...

Cecilia sat well forward in the parquet seats of an opera house in Boston. Her small hand was curled up in the fat palm of a fat priest. The people who saw this smiled indulgent...

At five K. Stuyvesant and John started for the Sound house. The sun beat down cruelly with the same murky, hot-damp feel. The car wove between the traffic of the crowded streets...

"Oh, I don't know," said John in a lazy way; "girls are queer,--sometimes sentimental. He was good to her when she was tiny. She always remembers things like that. I think she's...

Father McGowan, holding a cassock high about his black-clad legs, stood in the back yard of the rectory grounds. The back yard looked like those photographs entitled, "Rude shel...

"Miss Cecilia----" said Stuyvesant Twombly into the telephone which stood on his desk. His heart hammered so that his ears ached, and the furniture in the room swayed and bent.

"No," answered Cecilia, "but I do think we ought to give them a good time, not reform them. Why, they get discipline all day at their work. I wanted to make them forget that, an...

The Madden flat was hot and the smell of frying potatoes filled it. Two or three flies buzzed tirelessly here and there, now and again landing with sticky clingingness on a smal...

"'The Iron Claw,'" said the younger impressively. "It's grand. Them there shows learn yuh a lot too." His voice showed his great thirst for knowledge. Father McGowan smiled. He...

The day had been terrible for Cecilia. She had learned from Mrs. De Pui that she had hopelessly offended.... What she had done, Mrs. De Pui said, was an act suitable for one of...

"I'm stopping at a house up the road for Sunday," explained Annette. "Cecilia wanted to motor me back, but I needed air. Indigestion and conscience are so much alike. You want t...

Cecilia stood in her bedroom in the new house. The paper in her bedroom was pink and hung in panels. At the top of each panel was a hip-diseased, and goitered cupid, who threw r...

A month had passed. Cecilia quite understood what Father McGowan had meant about clothes. Cecilia wore no more French heels. She had taken down her hair and discarded her beauti...

"Gee, it's hot!" said John. He sat opposite Stuyvesant Twombly in a restaurant famed for its coolness. "Come out with me to-night!" he added. "Dad and Celie will be glad to have...

Father McGowan supplied the handkerchief. Cecilia dabbed her eyes. "You see she's so attractive," she went on, "and I'm--I'm not so very. And then John, and everything. I'm asha...

"Marjory told me he said it was--papa," said Cecilia. All the tragedy possible to feel at twenty-one was in her young eyes. "She did it kindly," added Cecilia. Then she went on...

The rectory hall was quiet, although it was well filled with people--shabby, the most of them, and sitting uneasily upright in their chairs. Damp snow clung to the coat of one w...

As Mrs. Madden had said, "The kids that grow up better than their folks go to the devil." Cecilia felt this at eleven, for she was all of Johnny's mother, and the role was a dif...

"Oh, yes!" answered Cecilia. She caught her breath rather spasmodically and went on: "Of course I'm happy! Here I am, all through being improved and ready to stay at home with y...

"Celie," said John, "honestly he was devilish to me, and I deserved it!" John was lying on a lounge, covered and looking wan. The library fire burned cheerfully, and the portrai...