J.B. Bury - "The Idea of Progress"

Charles Darwin - "The Power of Movement in Plants"

Edna St. Vincent Millay - "The Lamp and the Bell"

John Lothrop Motley - "History of the United Netherlands, 1588"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: The Heart of Rachael

K >> Kathleen Norris >> The Heart of Rachael




"Ah, Elinor, it's wonderful to marry the man you love!" Rachael
turned from the mirror, her blue eyes misted with tears under the
brim of her wedding hat.

"YOU!" Elinor smiled. "That I should live to see it! You--in
love!"

"And unashamed, and proud of it!" Rachael said with a tremulous
laugh. "Are you all ready? Shall we go down?" She turned at the
door and put one arm about her friend. "Kiss me, Elinor, and wish
me joy," said she.

"I don't have to!" asserted Miss Vanderwall, with a hearty kiss
nevertheless, "for it will be your own fault entirely if there's
ever the littlest, teeniest cloud in the sky!"

END OF BOOK I




BOOK II




CHAPTER I


Yet, even then, as Rachael Gregory admitted to herself months
later, there had been a cloud in the sky--a cloud so tiny and so
vague that for many days she had been able to banish it in the
flooding sunshine all about her whenever it crossed her vision.

But it was there, and after a while other tiny clouds came to bear
it company, and to make a formidable shadow that all her
philosophy could not drive away. Philosophy is not the bride's
natural right; the honeymoon is a time of unreason; a crumpled
rose-leaf in those first uncertain weeks may loom larger than all
the far more serious storms of the years to come.

Rachael, loving at last, was overwhelmed, intoxicated, carried
beyond all sanity by the passion that possessed her.

When Warren Gregory came to find her at Quaker Bridge on that
unforgettable morning after the storm, a chance allusion to Mrs.
Valentine, the charming unknown lady with the gray hair, had
distracted Rachael's thoughts from the point at issue. But later
on, during the long drive, she had remembered it again.

"But Greg, dear, did you tell me that you and Doctor Valentine
drove down yesterday in all that frightful storm?"

"No, no, of course not, my child; we came down late the night
before--why, yesterday we couldn't get as far as the gate! Mrs.
Valentine's brother was there, and we played thirty-two rubbers of
bridge! Sweet situation, you two miles away, and me held up after
three months of waiting!"

She said to herself, with a little pain at her heart, that she
didn't understand it. It was all right, of course, whatever Greg
did was all right, but she did not understand it. To be so near,
to have that hideous war of wind and water raging over the world,
and not to come somehow--to swim or row or ride to her, to bring
her delicious companionship and reassurance out of the storm! Why,
had she known that Greg was so near no elements that ever raged
could have held her--

But of course, she was reminding herself presently, Greg had never
been to Quaker Bridge, he had no reason to suppose her in actual
danger; indeed, perhaps the danger had always been more imagined
than real. If his hosts had been merely bored by the weather,
merely driven to cards, how should he be alarmed?

"Did the Valentines know what a tide we were having in Quaker
Bridge?" she asked, after a while.

"Never dreamed it; didn't know we'd been cut off until it was all
over!" That was reassuring, at least. "And, you see, I couldn't
say much about our plans. Alice Valentine's all wool, of course,
but she's anything but a yard wide! She wouldn't have understood--
not that it matters, but it was easier not! She was sweet to you
at the wedding, and she'll ask us to dinner, and you two will get
along splendidly. But she's not as--big as George."

"You mean, she doesn't like the--divorce part of it?"

"Or words to that effect," the doctor answered comfortably. "Of
course, she'd never have said a word. But they are sort of simple
and old-fashioned. George understands--that's all I care about. Do
you see?"

"I see," she answered slowly. But when he spoke again the sunshine
came back to her heart; he had planned this, he had planned that,
he had wired Elinor, the power boat was ready. She was a woman,
after all, and young, and the bright hours of shopping, of being
admired and envied, and, above all, of being so newly loved and
protected, were opening before her. What woman in the world had
more than she, what woman indeed, she asked herself, as he turned
toward her his keen, smiling look of solicitude and devotion, had
one-tenth as much?

Later on, in that same day, there was another tiny shadow.
Rachael, however, had foreseen this moment, and met it bravely.

"How's your mother, Greg?" she asked suddenly.

"Fine," he answered, and with a swift smile for her he added, "and
furious!"

"No--is she really furious?" Rachael asked, paling.

"Now, my dearest heart," Warren Gregory said with an air of
authority that she found strangely thrilling and sweet, "from this
moment on make up your mind that what my good mother does and says
is absolutely unimportant to you and me! She has lived her life,
she is old, and sick, and unreasonable, and whatever we did
wouldn't please her, and whatever anyone does, doesn't satisfy her
anyway! In forty years--in less than that, as far as I'm
concerned--you and I'll be just as bad. My mother acted like a
martyr on the steamer; she was about as gay with her old friends
in London as you or I'd be at a funeral; she had an air of lofty
endurance and forbearance all the way, and, as I said to Margaret
Clay in Paris, the only time I really thought she was enjoying
herself was when she had to be hustled into a hospital, and for a
day or two there we really thought she was going to have
pneumonia!"

Rachael's delightful laugh rang out spontaneously from utter
relief of heart.

"Oh, Greg, you're delicious! Tell me about old Lady Frothingham,
is she difficult, too? And how's pretty Magsie Clay?"

"Now, if we're married to-morrow," the doctor Went on, too much
absorbed in his topic to be lightly distracted. "But do you hear
me, Ma'am? How does it sound?"

"It sounds delicious! Go on!"

"If we're married to-morrow, I say--it could be to-day just as
well, but I suppose you girls have to buy clothes, and have your
hands manicured, and so on--"

"You know we do, to say nothing of lying awake all night talking
about our beaux!"

"Well"--he conceded it somewhat reluctantly--"then, to-morrow,
some time before I go with Valentine to call for you, I'll go down
to see my mother. She'll kiss me, and sigh, and feel martyred. In
a month or two she'll call on me at the office. 'Why don't you and
your wife come to see me, James?' 'Would you like us to, Mother?
We fancied you were angry at us.' 'I am sorry, my son, of course,
but I have never been angry. Will you come to-morrow night?' And
when we go, my dear, you'd never dream that there was anything
amiss, I assure you!"

"I'll make her love me!" said Rachael, smiling tenderly.

"Perhaps some day you'll have a very powerful argument," he said
with a significant glance that brought the quick blood to her
face. "Mother couldn't resist that!"

She did not answer. It was a part of this new freshness and purity
of aspect that she could not answer.

"You asked about Margaret Clay," the doctor remembered presently.
"She was the same old sixpence, only growing up now; she owns to
nineteen--isn't she more than that? She always did romance and
yarn so much about herself that you can't believe anything."

"She's about twenty-one, perhaps no more than twenty," Rachael
said, after some thought. "Did they say anything about Parker and
Leila?"

"No, but the old lady can't do much harm there. She'll not last
another six months. She may leave Margaret a slice, but it won't
be much of a slice, for Parker could fight if it was. Leila's
pretty safe. We'll have to go to that wedding, by the way!"

"Oh, Greg, the fun of going places together!" She was her happiest
self again. His mother and Alice Valentine and everything else but
their great joy was forgotten as they lingered over their luncheon
and planned for their wedding day.

If they could only have been alone together, always, thought the
new-made wife, when two perfect weeks on the powerful motor boat
were over, and all the society editors were busily announcing that
Doctor and Mrs. James Warren Gregory were furnishing their
luxurious apartment in the Rotterdam, where they would spend the
winter. They were so happy together; there was never enough time
to talk and to be silent, never enough of their little luncheons
all by themselves, their theatre trips, their afternoon drives
through the sweet, clear early winter sunshine on the Park.

Always in the later years Rachael could feel the joy of these days
again when she caught the scent of fresh violets. Never a day
passed that Warren did not send her or bring her a fragrant
boxful. They quivered on the breast of her gown, and on her
dressing-table they made her bedroom sweet. Now and then when she
and Warren were to be alone she braided her dark hair and wound it
about her head, tucking a few violets against the rich plaits,
conscious that the classic simplicity of the arrangement enhanced
her beauty, and was pleased in his pleasure.

It suited her whim to carry out the little affectation in her
soaps and toilet waters; he could not pick up her handkerchief or
hold her wrap for her without freeing the delicate faint odor of
her favorite flower. When they met downtown for dinner there was
always the little ceremony of finding the florist, and all the
operas this winter were mingled for Rachael with the most
exquisite fragrance in the world.

These days were perfect. It was only when the outside world
entered their paradise that anything less than perfect happiness
entered, too. Rachael's old friends--Judy Moran, Elinor, and the
Villalongas--said, and said with truth, that she had changed. She
had not tried to change, but it was hard for her to get the old
point of view now, to laugh at the old jokes, to listen to the old
gossip. She had been cold and wretched only a year before, but she
had had the confident self-sufficiency of a gypsy who walks
bareheaded and irresponsible through a world whose treasure will
never come her way. Now Rachael, tremulous and afraid, was the
guardian of the great treasure, she knew now what love meant, and
she could no longer face even the thought of a life without love.

Tirelessly, and with increasing satisfaction, she studied her
husband's character, finding, like all new wives, that almost all
her preconceived ideas of him had been wrong. Like all the world,
she had always fancied Greg something of an autocrat, positive
almost to stubbornness in his views.

Now it was amusing to discover that he was really a rather mild
person, except where his work was concerned, rarely taking the
initiative in either praising or blaming anybody or anything,
deeply influenced by the views of other persons, and content to be
rather a listener and onlooker than an active participant in what
did not immediately concern him. Rachael found this, for some
subtle reasons of her own, highly pleasing. It made her less
afraid of her husband's criticism, and spared her many of those
tremors common to the first months of married life. Also, it gave
her an occasional chance to influence him, even to protect him
from his own indifference to this issue or that.

She laughed at him, accusing him of being an impostor. Why,
everyone thought Dr. Warren Gregory, with his big scowl and his
firm-set jaw, was an absolute Tartar, she exulted, when as a
matter of fact he was only a little boy afraid of his wife! He
hated, she learned, to be uncertain as to just the degree of
dressing expected of him on different occasions, he hated to enter
hotels by the wrong doors, to hear her dispraise an opera
generally approved, or find good in a book branded by the critics
as worthless. With all his pride in her beauty, he could not bear
to have her conspicuous; if her laughter or her unusual voice
attracted any attention in a public place, she could see that it
made him uncomfortable. These things Rachael might have considered
flaws in another man. In Warren they were only deliciously
amusing, and his reliance upon her, where she had expected only
absolute self-possession from him, seemed to make him more her
own.

Rachael, daughter of wandering adventurers, had a thousand times
more assurance than he. In her secret heart she had no regard for
any social law; society was a tool to be used, not a weight under
which one struggled helplessly. She dictated where he followed
precedent; she laughed where he was filled with apprehension.
Seriously, she set her wits and her love to the task of
accustoming him to joy, and day by day he flung off the old, half-
defined reluctances that still bound him, and entered more fully
into the delights of the care-free, radiant hours that lay before
them.

His wife saw the change in him, and rejoiced. But what she did not
see, as the months went on, was the no less marked change in
herself. As Warren's nature expanded, and as he began to reach
quite naturally for the various pleasures all about him, Rachael's
soul experienced an alteration almost directly opposed.

She became thoughtful, almost reserved, she began to show a
certain respect for convention--not for the social conventions at
which she had always laughed, and still laughed, but for the
fundamental laws of truth, simplicity, and cleanness, upon which
the ideal of civilization, at least, is based. She noticed that
she was beginning to like "good" persons, even homely, dowdy, good
persons, like Alice and George Valentine. She lost her old
appetite for scandal, for ugly stories, for reckless speech.

Warren, freed once and for all from his old prejudice, found
nothing troublesome now in the thought that she had been another
man's wife; it was a common situation, it was generally approved.
As in other things, he had had stupidly conventional ideas about
it once--that was all. But Rachael winced at the sound of the word
"divorce," not because of her own divorce, but at the thought that
some other man and woman had promised in their first love what
later they could not fulfil, and hated each other now where they
had loved each other once, at the thought that perhaps--perhaps
one of them loved the other still!

"Divorce is--monstrous," she said soberly to her husband in one of
their hours of perfect confidence.

"How can we say it, of all persons, my darling? Don't be
hidebound!"

"No," she smiled reluctantly, "I suppose we can't. But--but I
never feel like a divorced woman, Warren, I feel like a different
woman, but not as if that term fitted me. It sounds so--coarse.
Don't you think it does?"

"No, I never thought of it quite that way. Everyone makes
mistakes," he answered cheerfully.

"Don't you care--that it's true of me?" she asked.

"Are you trying to make me jealous, you gypsy!" he laughed. But
there was no answering laughter in her face.

"Yes, perhaps I am," she admitted, as if she were a little
surprised that it was so. And in her next slowly worded sentence
she discovered for herself another truth. "I mind it, Warren!" she
said. "I wish, with all my heart, that it wasn't so!"

"That isn't very consistent, sweet. Your life made you what you
were, the one woman in the world I could ever have loved. Why
quarrel with the process?"

"I wish you cared!" she said wistfully.

"Cared?"

"Yes--suffered over it--objected. Then I could keep proving to you
that I never in my life loved anyone, man, woman, or child, until
now!"

"But I believe that, my darling!"

She smiled at his wide, innocent look, a mother's amused yet
hopeless smile, and as they rose from their late luncheon he put
his arm about her and tipped her beautiful face up toward his own.

"Don't you realize, my darling, that just as you are, you are
perfect to me--not nearly perfect, or ninety-nine per cent.
perfect, but pressed down and running over, a thousand per cent.,
a million per cent.?" he asked.

Her dark beauty glowed; she was more lovely than ever in her
exquisite content.

"Oh, Warren, if you'd only say that to me over and over!" she
begged.

"Dear Heaven, hear the woman! What else DO I do?"

"Oh, I don't mean now. I mean always, all through our lives. It's
ALL I want to hear!"

"Do you realize that you are an absolute--little--tyrant?" he
asked, laughing. Radiantly she laughed back.

"I only realize one thing in these days," she answered; "I only
live for one thing!"

It was true. The world for her now was all in her husband, his
smile was her light, and she lived almost perpetually in the
sunshine. When they were parted--and they were never long parted--
the memory of this glance or that tone, this eager phrase or that
sudden laugh, was enough to keep her happy. When they met again,
whether she came to meet him in his own hallway, or rose, lovely
in her furs, and walked toward him in some restaurant or hotel,
joy lent her a new and almost fearful beauty. To dress for him, to
make him laugh, to hold his interest, this was all that interested
her, and for the world outside of their own house she cared not at
all. They had their own vocabulary, their own phrases for moments
of mirth or tenderness; among her gowns he had his favorites.
among the many expressions of his sensitive face there were some
that it was her whimsical pleasure always to commend. Their
conversation, as is the way with lovers, was all of themselves,
and all of praise.

Long before they were ready for the world it began to make its
demands. Rachael loved her own home--they had chosen a large
duplex apartment on Riverside Drive--loved the memorable little
meals they had before the fire, the lazy, enchanting hours of
reading or of music in the big studio that united the two large
floors, the scent of her husband's cigar, the rustle of her own
gown, the snow slipping and lisping against the window, and it was
with great reluctance that she surrendered even one evening. But
there was hospitable Vera Villalonga and her dreadful New Year's
dance, and there were the Bowditch dinner and the Hoyt dinner and
the Parmalee's dance for Katrina. Unwillingly the beautiful Mrs.
Gregory yielded to the swift current, and presently they were
caught in the rush of the season, and could not have withdrawn
themselves except for serious cause.

Rachael smiled a little wryly one morning over Mrs. George
Valentine's cordially worded invitation to an informal dinner, but
she accepted it as a matter of course, and wore her most beautiful
gown. She deliberately set out to capture her hostess' friendship,
and simple, sweet Mrs. Valentine could not long resist her guest's
beauty and charm--such a young, fresh creature as she was, not a
bit one's idea of an adventuress, so genuinely interested in the
children, so obviously devoted to Warren.

Rachael, on her side, contemplated the Valentines with deep
interest. She found them a rather puzzling study, unlike any
married couple that she had ever chanced to know. Alice was one of
those good, homely, unfashionable women who seem utterly devoid of
the instinct for dressing properly. Her masses of dull brown hair
she wore strained from her high forehead and wound round her head
in a fashion hopelessly obsolete. Her evening gown, of handsome
gray silk, was ruined by those little fussy touches of lace and
ruffling that brand a garment instantly as "homemade."

George was one of the plainest of men, shy, awkward, insignificant
looking, with a long-featured, pleasant face, and red hair. Warren
had told his wife at various times that George was "a prince," and
physically, at least, Rachael found him disappointing, especially
beside her own handsome husband. She knew he was clever, with a
large practice besides his work as head surgeon at one of the big
hospitals, but Warren had added to this the information that
George was a poor business man, and ill qualified to protect his
own interests.

Yet, in his own home--a handsome and yet shabby brownstone house
in the West Fifties--he appeared to better advantage. There was a
brightness in his plain face when he looked at his wife, and an
adoring response in her glance that after twelve years of married
life seemed admirable to Rachael. "Alice" was a word continually
on his lips; what Alice said and thought and did was evidently
perfection. Before the Gregorys had been ten minutes in the house
on their first visit he had gone downstairs to inspect the
furnace, wound and set a stopped clock, answered the telephone
twice, and fondly carried upstairs a refractory four-year-old
girl, who came boldly down in her nightgown, with reproaches and
requests. On his return from this trip he brought down the one-
year-old baby, another girl, delicious in the placid hour between
supper and bed, and he and his wife and Warren Gregory exchanged
admiring glances as the beautiful Mrs. Gregory took the child
delightedly in her arms, contrasting her own dark and glowing
loveliness with the tiny Katharine's gold and roses.

It was a quiet evening, but Rachael liked it. She liked their
simple, affectionate talk, their reminiscences, the serenity of
the large, plainly furnished rooms, the glowing of coal fires in
the old-fashioned steel-barred grates. She liked Alice Valentine's
placidity, the sureness of herself that marked this woman as more
highly civilized than so many of the other women Rachael knew.
There was none of Judy's and Gertrude's and Vera's excitability
and restlessness here. Alice was concerned neither with her own
appearance nor her own wants; she was free to comment with
amusement or wonder or admiration upon larger affairs. Rachael
wondered, as beautiful women have wondered since time began, what
held this man so tightly to this mild, plain woman, and by what
special gift of the gods Alice Valentine might know herself secure
beyond all question in a world of beauty and charm and youth.

"Well, what d'you think of her, Alice?" Doctor Gregory had asked
proudly when his wife was on his arm and leave-taking was in
order.

"Think you're lucky, Greg," Mrs. Valentine answered earnestly.
"You've got a dear, good, lovely wife!"

"And you are going to let me come and make friends with the boy
and the girls some afternoon?" Rachael asked.

"If you WILL," their mother said, and she and Rachael kissed each
other. Gregory chuckled, in high feather, all the way home.

"You're a wonder, Ladybird! I have NEVER seen you sweeter nor
prettier than you were to-night!"

Rachael leaned back in the car with a long, contented sigh.

"One can see that she was all ready to hate me, Greg; a woman who
had been married, and who snapped up her favorite bachelor--"

He laughed triumphantly. "She doesn't hate you now!"

"No, and I'll see to it that she never does. She's my sort of
woman, and the children are absolute loves! I like that sort of
old-fashioned prejudice--honestly I do--that honor-thy-father-and-
thy-mother-and-keep holy-the-sabbath-day sort of person. Don't
you, Greg?"

"We--ll, I don't like narrowness, sweet."

"No." Rachael pondered in the dark. "Yet if you're not narrow you
seem to be--really the only word for it is--loose," she submitted.
"Somehow lately, a great many persons--the girls I know--do seem
to be a little bit that way."

"You don't find THEM judging you!" her husband said. Rachael
answered only by a rather faint negative; she would not elucidate
further. This was one of the things she could never tell Warren, a
thing indeed that she would hardly admit to her own soul.

But she said to herself that she knew now the worst evil of
divorce. She knew that it coarsened whomever it touched, that it
irresistibly degraded, that it lowered all the human standard of
goodness and endurance, and self-sacrifice. However justified, it
was an evil; however properly consummated, it soiled the little
group it affected. The disinclination of a good woman like Alice
Valentine to enter into a close friendship with a younger and
richer and more beautiful woman whose history was the history of
Rachael Gregory was no mere prejudice. It was the feeling of a
restrained and disciplined nature for an unchecked and ill-
regulated one; it was the feeling of a woman who, at any cost, had
kept her solemn marriage vow toward a woman who had broken her
word.

Rachael was beginning to find it more comprehensible, even more
acceptable, than the attitude of her own old world. Fresh from the
Eden that was her life with Warren, she had turned back to the
friends whose viewpoint had been hers a few months ago.

Were they changed, or was she? Both were changed, she decided. She
had been a cold queen among them once, flattered by their praise
and laughter, reckless in speech, and almost as reckless in
action. But now her only kingdom was in Warren Gregory's heart.
She had no largesse for these outsiders; she could not answer them
with her old quick wit now; indeed she hardly heard them. And on
their side, where once there had been that certain deference due
to the woman who, however wretched and neglected, was still
Clarence Breckenridge's wife, now she noticed, with quick shame, a
familiarity, a carelessness, that indicated plainly exactly the
fine claim to delicacy that she had forfeited. Her position in
every way was better now than it had been then. But in some subtle
personal sense she had lost caste. A story was ventured when she
chanced to be alone with Frank Whittaker and George Pomeroy that
her presence would have forbidden in the old days, and Allen
Parmalee gave her a sensation of absolute sickness by merrily
introducing her to his sister from Kentucky with the words: "Don't
stare at her so hard, Bess! Of course you remember her: she was
Mrs. Breckenridge last year, but now she's making a much better
record as Mrs. Gregory!"