n of
adjectives.

Rose began at the top of the pile, in her orderly fashion, and read
straight through to the last. It took one hour. Half of that time she
was not reading. She was staring straight ahead with what is mistakenly
called an unseeing look, but which actually pierces the veil of years
and beholds things far, far beyond the vision of the actual eye. They
were the letters of a commonplace man to a commonplace woman, written
when they loved each other, and so they were touched with something of
the divine. They must have been, else how could they have sustained this
woman through fifteen years of drudgery? They were the only tangible
foundation left of the structure of dreams she had built about this man.
All the rest of her house of love had tumbled about her ears fifteen
years before, but with these few remaining bricks she had erected many
times since castles and towers more exquisite and lofty and soaring than
the original humble structure had ever been.

The story? Well, there really isn't any, as we've warned you. Rose had
been pretty then in much the same delicate way that Floss was pretty
now. They were to have been married. Rose's mother fell ill, Floss and
Al were little more than babies. The marriage was put off. The illness
lasted six months--a year--two years--became interminable. The breach
into which Rose had stepped closed about her and became a prison. The
man had waited, had grown impatient, finally rebelled. He had fled,
probably, to marry a less encumbered lady. Rose had gone dully on,
caring for the household, the children, the sick woman. In the years
that had gone by since then Rose had forgiven him his faithlessness.
She only remembered that he had been wont to call her his Roeschen,
his Rosebud, his pretty flower (being a German gentleman). She only
recalled the wonder of having been first in some one's thoughts--she
who now was so hopelessly, so irrevocably last.

As she sat there in her kitchen, wearing her soap-stained and faded blue
gingham, and the dust-cap pushed back at a rakish angle, a simpering
little smile about her lips, she was really very much like the
disappointed old maids you used to see so cruelly pictured in the comic
valentines. Had those letters obsessed her a little more strongly she
might have become quite mad, the Freudians would tell you. Had they held
less for her, or had she not been so completely the household's slave,
she might have found a certain solace