Balcony Stories

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Balcony Stories

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Balcony Stories, by Grace E. King
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Title: Balcony Stories
Author: Grace E. King
Release Date: March 8, 2004 [EBook #11514]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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STORIES ***

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Distributed Proofreading Team.

BALCONY STORIES
BY

GRACE KING
1892

CONTENTS
THE BALCONY
A DRAMA OF THREE
LA GRANDE DEMOISELLE
MIMI'S MARRIAGE
THE MIRACLE CHAPEL
THE STORY OF A DAY
ANNE MARIE AND JEANNE MARIE
A CRIPPLED HOPE
"ONE OF US"
THE LITTLE CONVENT GIRL
GRANDMOTHER'S GRANDMOTHER
THE OLD LADY'S RESTORATION
A DELICATE AFFAIR
PUPASSE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
"WALKING AWAY WITH A SHRUG OF THE SHOULDERS"

"WHERE IS THAT IDIOT, THAT DOLT, THAT SLUGGARD,
THAT SNAIL, WITH MY MAIL?"
CHAMPIGNY
"I WEPT, I WEPT, I WEPT"
"HER HEART DROVE HER TO THE WINDOW"
"ALL THAT DAY WAS DESPONDENCY, DEJECTION"
"THIS TIME WE HAVE CAUGHT IT!"
"THE QUIET, DIM-LIGHTED ROOM OF A CONVALESCENT"
"LITTLE MAMMY"
"TO POSE IN ABJECT PATIENCE AND AWKWARDNESS"
THE SISTERS BID HER GOOD-BY
WATCHING A LANDING
"TURNED TO HER DOMESTIC DUTIES"
THE ROOM IN THE OLD GALLERY
THE FIRST COMMUNION

BALCONY STORIES

THE BALCONY
There is much of life passed on the balcony in a country where the
summer unrolls in six moon-lengths, and where the nights have to
come with a double endowment of vastness and splendor to

compensate for the tedious, sun-parched days.
And in that country the women love to sit and talk together of summer
nights, on balconies, in their vague, loose, white garments,--men are
not balcony sitters,--with their sleeping children within easy hearing,
the stars breaking the cool darkness, or the moon making a show of
light--oh, such a discreet show of light!--through the vines. And the
children inside, waking to go from one sleep into another, hear the low,
soft mother-voices on the balcony, talking about this person and that,
old times, old friends, old experiences; and it seems to them, hovering a
moment in wakefulness, that there is no end of the world or time, or of
the mother-knowledge; but, illimitable as it is, the mother-voices and
the mother-love and protection fill it all,--with their mother's hand in
theirs, children are not afraid even of God,--and they drift into slumber
again, their little dreams taking all kinds of pretty reflections from the
great unknown horizon outside, as their fragile soap-bubbles take on
reflections from the sun and clouds.
Experiences, reminiscences, episodes, picked up as only women know
how to pick them up from other women's lives,--or other women's
destinies, as they prefer to call them,--and told as only women know
how to relate them; what God has done or is doing with some other
woman whom they have known--that is what interests women once
embarked on their own lives,--the embarkation takes place at marriage,
or after the marriageable time,--or, rather, that is what interests the
women who sit of summer nights on balconies. For in those long-moon
countries life is open and accessible, and romances seem to be
furnished real and gratis, in order to save, in a languor-breeding climate,
the ennui of reading and writing books. Each woman has a different
way of picking up and relating her stories, as each one selects different
pieces, and has a personal way of playing them on the piano.
Each story is different, or appears so to her; each has some unique and
peculiar pathos in it. And so she dramatizes and inflects it, trying to
make the point visible to her apparent also to her hearers. Sometimes
the pathos and interest to the hearers lie only in this--that the relater has
observed it, and gathered it, and finds it worth telling. For do we not

gather what we have not, and is not our own lacking our one motive? It
may be so, for it often appears so.
And if a child inside be wakeful and precocious it is not dreams alone
that take on reflections from the balcony outside: through the half-open
shutters the still, quiet eyes look across the dim forms on the balcony to
the star-spangled or the moon-brightened heavens beyond; while
memory makes stores for the future, and germs are sown, out of which
the slow, clambering vine of thought issues, one day, to decorate or
hide, as it may be, the structures or ruins of life.

A DRAMA OF THREE
It was a regular