Stories from Everybodys Magazine, 1910 | Page 3

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These are stories from Everybody's Magazine, 1910 issues.

Scanned by Charles Keller with OmniPage Professional OCR software
donated by Caere Corporation, 1-800-535-7226. Contact Mike Lough


Vol. XXIII No.1 JULY 1910
THE LAYING OF THE MONSTER
BY THEODOSIA GARRISON
Dorothea reposed with her shoulders in the shade of the bulkhead and
her bare feet burrowing in the sun-warmed sand. Beneath her shoulder
blades was a bulky and disheveled volume--a bound year of Godey's
Lady Book of the vintage of the early seventies. Having survived the
handling of three generations, this seemed to take naturally to being
drenched with rain and warped by sun, or, as at the present moment,
serving its owner either as a sand-pillow or as a receptacle for divers
scribbled verses on its fly-leaves and margins.
It was with a poem now that Dorothea was wrestling, as she wriggled

her toes in the sand and gazed blankly oceanward. Under the scorching
August sun, the Atlantic seemed to purr like a huge, amiable lion cub.
It was not the amiabilities of nature, however, in which Dorothea found
inspiration. A harp of a single string, she sang as that minstrel might
who was implored to make love alone his theme.
Given an imaginative young person of eleven, who, when not
abandoning herself utterly to athletics, has secret and continual access
to the brand of literature peculiar to the "Seaside Library," and the
result is obvious. Dorothea's mother read recipes; her father was
addicted to the daily papers. It was only in her grandmother that
Dorothea found a literary taste she approved. On that cozy person's
bookshelves one could always find what happened to Goldie or what
the exquisite Irish heroine said to the earl before she eloped with the
captain.
In this knowledge Dorothea's parents had no ambition that their
daughter should excel. In fact, an uncompromising edict on the subject
had been given forth more than once to a sullen and rebellious sinner.
But how should the most suspicious parent, when his daughter sits in
his presence apparently engrossed in a book entitled "The Girlhood of
Famous Women," guess that carefully concealed in its interior is a
smaller volume bearing the title "Muriel's Mistake, or, For Another's
Sin?"
Having acquired knowledge, the true student seeks to demonstrate.
Dorothea had promptly and intentionally fallen in love with the son of
her next-door neighbor. Amiel--fresh from his first year in college--
was a tall, broad-shouldered youth, with kindly brown eyes and a flash
of white teeth when he smiled. In contrast to the small boys and the
sober-going fathers of families in which the summer colony abounded,
he shone, as Dorothea's favorite novelists would have expressed it,
"like a Greek god."
It was this unsuspecting person whom Dorothea had, at first sight,
elected to be the Hero of her Dreams. She trailed him, moreover, with a
persistency that would have done credit to a detective. Did he go to the

post-office, he was sure to meet Dorothea returning (Lady Ursula,
strolling through her estate, comes upon her lover unawares). Dorothea,
emulating her heroine's example by vaulting a fence and cutting across
lots, could be found also strolling (if slightly breathless) as he
approached.
She timed her day, as far as possible, with his. Would he swim, play
tennis, or go crabbing--there was Dorothea. Would he repose in the
summerhouse hammock and listen to entire pages declaimed from
Tennyson and Longfellow, the while being violently swung--his slave
was ready. She read no story in which she was not the heroine and
Amiel the hero. At the same time, she was perfectly and painfully
conscious in the back of her brain that Amiel regarded her only as a
sun-browned, crop-headed tomboy, who had an extraordinary facility
for remembering all the poetry she had ever read, and who amused and
interested him as his own small sister might. Outwardly she kept
strictly to this role--a purely natural one--while inwardly she soared
dizzily from fantasy to fantasy, even while her physical body was
plunging in the waves or leaping on the tennis court.
Could Amiel have had the slightest insight into the fancies seething in
his small neighbor's mind, he