The Project Gutenberg EBook of Children of the Whirlwind, by Leroy Scott

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Title: Children of the Whirlwind

Author: Leroy Scott

Release Date: April, 2002 [Etext #3321]
Posting Date: October 9, 2009 [EBook #3321]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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CHILDREN OF THE WHIRLWIND

By Leroy Scott

CHAPTER I

It was an uninspiring bit of street: narrow, paved with cobble; hot and
noisy in summer, reeking with unwholesome mud during the drizzling and
snow-slimed months of winter. It looked anything this May after noon
except a starting-place for drama. But, then, the great dramas of life
often avoid the splendid estates and trappings with which conventional
romance would equip them, and have their beginnings in unlikeliest
environment; and thence sweep on to a noble, consuming tragedy, or to
a glorious unfolding of souls. Life is a composite of contradictions--a
puzzle to the wisest of us: the lily lifting its graceful purity aloft
may have its roots in a dunghill. Samson's dead lion putrefying by a
roadside is ever and again being found to be a storehouse of wild honey.
We are too accustomed to the ordinary and the obvious to consider that
beauty or worth may, after bitter travail, grow out of that which is
ugly and unpromising.

Thus no one who looked on Maggie Carlisle and Larry Brainard at their
beginnings, had even a guess what manner of persons were to develop from
them or what their stories were to be.

The houses on the bit of street were all three-storied and all of a
uniform, dingy, scaling redness. The house of the Duchess, on the left
side as you came down the street toward the little Square which squatted
beside the East River, differed from the others only in that three balls
of tarnished gilt swung before it and unredeemed pledges emanated a
weakly lure from behind its dirt-streaked windows, and also in that the
personality of the Duchess gave the house something of a character of
its own.

The street did business with her when pressed for funds, but it knew
little d