The Iron Woman

"Do you think," Robert Ferguson wrote Mrs. Richie about the middle of September--"do you think you could come to Mercer for a little while and look after Nannie? The poor child...

After his first spasm of angry disgust, when he declared he would go East the next morning, Blair's fancy for "hanging round Mercer" hardened into purpose; but he did not "hang...

Of course, with that scene in the parlor, all the intimacies of youth were broken short off; although between the two girls some sort of relationship was patched up. Nannie, thr...

On the other side of the street, opposite the Maitland house, was a huddle of wooden tenements. Some of them were built on piles, and seemed to stand on stilts, holding their dr...

"Climb up in this tree, and play house!" Elizabeth Ferguson commanded. She herself had climbed to the lowest branch of an apple-tree in the Maitland orchard, and sat there, swin...

When Robert Ferguson came in to luncheon the next day, he asked for Elizabeth. "She hasn't come home yet from Nannie's," Miss White told him; "I thought she would be here immeje...

When Nannie Maitland, trembling very much, pressed into her brother's hand that certificate for what was, in those days, a very considerable fortune, Blair had been deeply moved...

Blair shouted with laughter. "Oh, Elizabeth, what a goose you are! That's just the way you used to bite your arm when you were mad. You always did cut off your nose to spite you...

Mrs. Maitland and Nannie were having their supper at the big, cluttered office table in the shabby dining-room--shabbier now by twenty years than when Blair first expressed his...

The Maitland Works were still. High in the dusty gloom of the foundry, a finger of sunshine pointing down from a grimy window touched the cold lip of a cupola and traveled noise...

No one spoke. The murmuring crash along the sands was suddenly loud in their ears, but the room was still. It was the stillness of finality; David had lost Elizabeth.

There came a day when Miss White's little school in the garret was broken up. Mr. Ferguson declared that David and Blair needed a boot instead of a petticoat to teach them their...

The coming back to Mercer some six weeks later was to Blair a miserable and skulking experience. To Elizabeth it was almost a matter of indifference; there is a shame which goes...

After the marriage in the mayor's office--where they paused long enough to write the two notes that were received the next day--Blair had fled with her up into the mountains to...

When the door closed behind Blair and Elizabeth, Nannie set out to do that "best," which her brother had demanded of her. She went at once into the dining-room; but before she c...

distressing hour, during which Robert Ferguson succeeded in drawing the facts from Blair's sister, there was not the slightest consciousness of wrong-doing. Over and over, with...

Mr. Ferguson made no protest in regard to Blair's increased allowance. "If his mother wants to ruin him, it isn't my business," he said. The fact was, he had not recovered from...

For the next five or six years Blair was not often at home. At the end of his freshman year he was conditioned, and found a tutor and the seashore and his sketching--for he pain...

"I'm not going to have it in that hole of a dining-room; I'm going to have it in the parlor. Harris says he can manage perfectly well. We'll hang a curtain across the arch and h...

"Your coming might be misunderstood," David's mother said; her voice was very harsh; the gentle loveliness of her face had changed to an incredible harshness. "I shall say I was...

"... And that was Thursday; your letter had come in the first mail; and--oh, hush, hush; it was not a wicked letter, David. Don't you suppose I know that, now? I knew it--the ne...

When Mr. Ferguson said good night, David, apparently unable to find the book he had promised to take in to Elizabeth, made no effort to help his mother in her usual small nightl...

David did not see her for a day or two, except out of the corner of his eye when, during the new and still secret rite of shaving--for David was willing to shed his blood to pro...

All night long Elizabeth watched a phantom landscape flit past the window of the sleeping-car. Sometimes a cloud of smoke, shot through with sparks, brushed the glass like a bil...

The rainy dawn which Elizabeth had seen glimmering in the steam and smoke of the railroad station filtered wanly through Mercer's yellow fog. In Mrs. Maitland's office-dining-ro...

Except in his gust of primitive fury when he first knew that he had been robbed, and in that last breaking down in the hall, David knew what had happened to him only, if one may...

When the doctor came to tell Nannie that Sarah Maitland was dead, he found her in the parlor, shivering up against her brother. Blair had come to his mother's house early that a...

Of course, after a while, as time passed, all the people who had been caught in the storm the two reckless creatures had let loose, shook down again into their grooves, and the...

The morning Blair heard his sentence from his mother, Elizabeth spent in her parlor in the hotel, looking idly out of the window at the tawny current of the river covered with i...

Nearly two months had passed since that dreadful day when David Richie had gone to his mother to be comforted. In his journey back across the mountains his mind and body were te...

At first he did not grasp the significance of her absence. He called to her from their parlor: "I want to tell you about the play; perfect trash!" No answer. He glanced through...

It was the very next afternoon that Mrs. Maitland found time to look after Nannie's matrimonial interests. In the raw December twilight she tramped muddily into Mrs. Richie's fi...

Robert Ferguson, in his library, and poor Miss White in the hall, listened with tense nerves for the wheels of the carriage that was to bring David Richie "to breakfast."

Blair started. "Why!" he said. "So I am! I never thought of it." And when he got his breath, the radiant darkness of his eyes sparkled into laughter. "Yes, _I'm engaged!_" He pu...

"They have all suddenly grown up!" Mrs. Richie said, disconsolately. She had left the "party" early, without waiting for her carriage, because Mrs. Maitland's impatient glances...

That autumn, with its heats and brown fogs and sharp frosts, was the happiest time in Sarah Maitland's life--the happiest time, at least, since those brief months of marriage;--...

After Mrs. Maitland had had an interview with the Dean, she went off across the yard, under the great elms dripping in the rainy January thaw. Following his directions, she foun...

When, after his interview with David, Robert Ferguson went into Mrs. Maitland's office at the Works, he looked older by twenty years than when he had left it the night before. S...