Sisters

Sisters

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sisters, by Kathleen Norris #9 in our
series by Kathleen Norris
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Title: Sisters
Author: Kathleen Norris
Release Date: January, 2004 [EBook #4947] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on April 3,
2002]
Edition: 10

Language: English
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THE WORKS OF KATHLEEN NORRIS
SISTERS
VOLUME X

TO
FRANCES ROSE BENET
Dear mother of my mother's child, to you The tribute brings not praise
from me alone, Still clings some grace of hers to what I do, And the
gift comes in her name, as my own.

CHAPTER I
Cherry Strickland came in the door of the Strickland house, and shut it
behind her, and stood so, with her hands behind her on the knob, and
her slender body leaning forward, and her breath rising and falling on
deep, ecstatic breaths. It was May in California, she was just eighteen,
and for twenty-one minutes she had been engaged to be married.
She hardly knew why, after that last farewell to Martin, she had run so
swiftly up the path, and why she had flashed into the house, and closed
the door with such noiseless haste. There was nothing to run for! But it
was as if she feared that the joy within her might escape into the
moonlight night that was so perfumed with lilacs and the scent of wet
woods. In this new happiness of hers a fear was already mingled, a
sweet fear, truly, and a delicious fear, but she had never feared anything

before in her life. She was afraid now that it was all too wonderful to be
true, that she would awaken in the morning to find it only a dream, that
she would somehow fall short of Martin's ideal-- somehow fail
him--somehow turn all this magic of moonshine and kisses into ashes
and heartbreak.
She was a miser with her treasure, already; she wanted to fly with it,
and to hide it away, and to test its reality in secret, alone. She had come
running in from the wonderland down by the gate, just for this, just to
prove to herself that it would not vanish in the commonplaceness of the
shabby hall, would not disappear before the everyday contact of
everyday things.
There was moonlight here, too, falling in clear squares on the stairway
landing, white and mysterious and bewitching, but on the other side of
the hall was wholesome, cheerful lamplight creeping in a warm streak
under the sitting-room door.
Dad was in the sitting room, with the girls. The doctor's house was full
of girls. Anne, his niece, was twenty-four; Alix, Cherry's sister, three
years younger--how staid and unmarried and undesired they seemed
to-night to panting and glowing and glorified eighteen! Anne, with
Alix's erratic help, kept house for her uncle, and was supposed to keep
a sharp eye on Cherry, too. But she hadn't been sharp enough to keep
Martin Lloyd from asking her to marry him, exulted Cherry, as she
stood breathless and laughing in the dark hallway.
Cherry had never had any other home than this shabby brown
bungalow, and she knew every inch of the hall, even without light to
see it. She knew the faded rugs, and the study door that swallowed up
her father every day, and the table where Alix had put a great bowl of
buttercups, and the glass-paned door at the back through which the
doctor's girls had looked out at many a frosty morning, and red sunset,
and sun-steeped summer afternoon. But even the old hall had seemed
transformed to-night, lighted with a beauty quite new, scented with an
immortal sweetness.
Hong came out of the dining room; the varnished buttercups twinkled

in a sudden flood of light. He had come