The Wyndham Girls

Phyllis sat looking, with unseeing eyes, out upon the small courtyard below her window for more than an hour. All day her brain had been full of sweet, indefinite girlish dreams...

The evening turned cool and damp, with the unreliability of May. Mrs. Wyndham was too ill to rise; the doctor had given her sedatives, and she slept in utter exhaustion. Jessamy...

While Jessamy and Barbara were tasting the joys of glory and the applause of the public,--at least, a little section of it,--the "Stray Unit," as her aunt called her, was having...

"No pink for me, please; I want that beautiful shimmering green, made up over shining white silk. It will make my glossy brown eyes and hair look like a ripe chestnut among its...

Mrs. Wyndham, Jessamy, and Barbara, with Tom as escort, returned heavy-heartedly from the Warren Street pier, where they had been seeing off Phyllis at the beginning of her firs...

Events moved swiftly for the Wyndhams, impelled by the force of necessity. The trust company that had made the loan to Mr. Abbott which had been secured by Mrs. Wyndham's house,...

While Phyllis was having, as she said in her letters, a pleasant amphibious summer, the rest of the Wyndhams were staying in town for the first time in their lives. New York is...

Jessamy and Barbara were ready for their expedition in search of peace by nine o'clock the next morning. Phyllis had solemnly promised to prepare for herself and her aunt altern...

Phyllis was finding her occupation trying. The children had not been accustomed to obedience, and Muriel proved intractable; Phyllis could neither win her affection nor subdue h...

The pleasantest and most tangible thing that had happened was that Jessamy had been asked by the editor of the magazine which had bought her illustrations and Phyllis's two stor...

Two letters were despatched to Boston that night--one from Jessamy, one from Bab--like a duet chanted to Phyllis. The burden of one was, in brief, that the millennium had come u...

Christmas morning dawned clear and cold, with a few errant snowflakes drifting on the wind as if to show New York that the great Northwest had not forgotten her, but had only de...

There were hints of spring in the air. The willows near the northern entrance to Central Park had a filmy, yellow-green effect in the distance, as if the coming leaves were fore...

"I don't know where to put another thing," said Mrs. Wyndham, pushing aside a hat-box to sit beside it on the rocker, and casting a despairing glance from the shallow closet, al...

The swelling twigs of March had burst into leafage; rough winds had shaken the "darling buds of May," and the fruit hung fully formed, even ripened in many cases, on the branche...

The Wyndhams had been "out of Egypt," as Phyllis called it, a month. Tom painted a highly decorative sign bearing the word "Canaan," in gold letters on a red ground, to be place...

Aunt Henrietta always stayed until November in her cottage near Marblehead. She said that she never enjoyed the ocean until she was alone with it, and Jessamy suggested afterwar...

Four days after New Year's began a week of shut-in weather, the kind of days which drive one nearly frantic, or make one perfectly happy, according to the state of mind in which...