The Happy Average

Lawrence led the way with a jaunty step that was intended to show his easy footing with the Carters. But Marley lagged behind. Even if calling on girls had not been such a serio...

Marley halted at the threshold and glanced up at the sign that swung over the doorway. The gilt lettering of the sign had long ago been tarnished, and where its black sanded pai...

The girls, flitting about with nervous laughter and now and then little screams, had spread long cloths over the table of plain boards that had served so many picnic parties at...

The dance was proposed almost immediately. Marley had hoped up to the very last minute that something, possibly a miracle, would prevent it, but scarcely had the men finished th...

"I don't know what ails Lavinia," said Mrs. Blair to her husband as he sat on the veranda after dinner the next day. The judge laid his paper in his lap, and looked up at his wi...

The days following the picnic had been no easier for Marley than they had been for Lavinia. As he looked back on that night, a fear took hold of him; the whole experience, the m...

Marley heard on Monday evening that Judge Blair had gone to Cincinnati, and the news filled him with a high if somewhat culpable joy. He found Lavinia and her mother on the vera...

The judge refused to take a nap, though when he sat down on the veranda he did take one, lying back in his chair with one of the many sections of the Sunday paper spread over hi...

"Oh, how could you!" she went on, "how could you! Think how you must have wounded him! You not only reproached him with being poor, but you discouraged him as to his prospects!...

The little steamer for the islands rolled out of Sandusky Bay with Lavinia sitting by the forward rail. She had yielded to her father's wishes with an easy complaisance that mad...

Marley had not learned of Lavinia's departure until Monday afternoon; he had the news from Lawrence, who had it from the hackman who had taken Judge Blair and Lavinia to the tra...

"I guess it's no use," the judge said to Mrs. Blair when she had followed him up stairs, where he had gone to wash off the dust he had accumulated during the six hours the train...

The dust lay thick in Ward Street, sifting its fine powder on the leaves of the cottonwoods that grew at the weedy gutter. The grass in the yard grew long, and the bushes langui...

It was Sunday morning and Marley sat in church looking at a shaft of soft light that fell through one of the tall windows. From gazing at the shaft of light, he began to study t...

On Monday morning Marley found Dudley at his post in the First National Bank. He halted at the little low gate in the rail that ran round Dudley's desk until Dudley looked up an...

Marley was not surprised by the result of his visit to Selah Dudley. He made an effort to convince himself that there was truth in what Dudley had said to him, even if he could...

Marley did not see Wade Powell again for four days; a Sunday intervened, and Powell did not come back to the office until Monday morning. He came in with a solemn air upon him,...

Lavinia sat rocking quietly back and forth, and stitched away with her colored silks on her tambourine frames, while Marley told her of the fortune Wade Powell had brought them....

Carman was inducted into office the first Monday in December, quietly, as the _Republican_ said, as though it reflected credit on the new county clerk as a man who modestly avoi...

Marley sighed in relief when he went up the steps of the Blair house that evening. Somehow he had got through the long, desolate day. He was sore from his great defeat, but the...

Lawrence was arranging for a grand ball in the Odd Fellows' Hall, on Christmas Eve, and he had, as he came around to the office one day to assure Marley, counted him and Lavinia...

The first days of spring contrasted strongly with Marley's mood. Because of some mysterious similarity in the two seasons he found the melancholy suggestion of fall in this spri...

Marley went to Lavinia the next morning, and told her as they sat there on the veranda in the spring sunlight. She looked at him with distress in her wide blue eyes.

It was a relief to Marley when morning came and released him from the reclining chair that had held his form so rigidly all the night. He had not taken a sleeper because he felt...

"How does she seem since he went away?" asked Judge Blair of his wife two days after Marley had gone. He spoke in his usual habit of deference to his wife's observation, though...

"I am very tired to-night," Marley wrote to Lavinia a day or so later. "I have been making the rounds of the law offices; I have been to all the leading firms, but--here I am, s...

"I've got a job at last! I'm now working for the C. C. and P. Railroad, in their local freight office, and I'm not trucking freight either, but I'm a clerk--a bill clerk, to be...

"Doesn't he say anything about you?" said Lawrence. "Why don't you read that? You skip the most interesting parts. You'd better let me read them. Here--" and he held out his han...

The Macochee gossips, after they were assured he was engaged in clerical, and not manual work, might have promoted Marley much more rapidly than his railroad would have done, ha...

the city editor, and that he had told him to bring Marley around that evening. And so, other hours of waiting, and then, at last, another letter. Marley announced the result wit...

Marley, after a year or more in Chicago, found the excitement of his first return home growing upon him as he looked out the car window and long before the train entered the bor...

It was a pleasure to Marley to accept the homage the people paid him; they confounded his success in journalism with a success in literature, and under the impression that all w...

Marley, in that compensatory pleasure we find in difficulties in the retrospect, was afterward fond of saying that if he had waited until he had the money and the position to wa...