Project Gutenberg's Stories by American Authors, Volume 1, by Various

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Title: Stories by American Authors, Volume 1

Author: Various

Release Date: March 4, 2004 [EBook #11436]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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STORIES BY AMERICAN AUTHORS. VOLUME I

[Illustration]

Stories by American Authors VOLUME I

WHO WAS SHE. By BAYARD TAYLOR

THE DOCUMENTS IN THE CASE. By BRANDER MATTHEWS AND H.C. BUNNER

ONE OF THE THIRTY PIECES. By WILLIAM HENRY BISHOP

BALACCHI BROTHERS. By REBECCA HARDING DAVIS

AN OPERATION IN MONEY. By ALBERT WEBSTER

1903

[Illustration: BRANDER MATTHEWS]

Stories by American Authors VOLUME I

WHO WAS SHE?

BY BAYARD TAYLOR.

Come, now, there may as well be an end of this! Every time I meet your
eyes squarely I detect the question just slipping out of them. If you
had spoken it, or even boldly looked it; if you had shown in your
motions the least sign of a fussy or fidgety concern on my account; if
this were not the evening of my birthday, and you the only friend who
remembered it; if confession were not good for the soul, though harder
than sin to some people, of whom I am one,--well, if all reasons were
not at this instant converged into a focus, and burning me rather
violently in that region where the seat of emotion is supposed to lie, I
should keep my trouble to myself.

Yes, I have fifty times had it on my mind to tell you the whole story.
But who can be certain that his best friend will not smile--or, what is
worse, cherish a kind of charitable pity ever afterwards--when the
external forms of a very serious kind of passion seem trivial,
fantastic, foolish? And the worst of all is that the heroic part which I
imagined I was playing proves to have been almost the reverse. The only
comfort which I can find in my humiliation is that I am capable of
feeling it. There isn't a bit of a paradox in this, as you will see; but
I only mention it, now, to prepare you for, maybe, a little morbid
sensitiveness of my moral nerves.

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