George Gissing - "In the Year of Jubilee"

T.S. Arthur - "Lizzy Glenn"

Ludwig van Beethoven, edited by Friedrich Kerst - "Beethoven: the Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words"

Henry F. Lutz - "To Infidelity and Back"

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




More than that, she would never be younger, never handsomer, never
better able to take the plunge, and face the consequences.

"I'm twenty-eight, Greg," she said reasonably, "I'm not stupid,
I'm not plain--don't interrupt me! Is this to be my fate? I'm
capable of loving--of living--I don't want to be bored--bored--
bored for the rest of my life!"

Warren Gregory, stunned and surprised, eyed her sympathetically.

"Belvedere Bay bore you?" he asked, smiling a little uneasily.

"No--it's not that. I don't want more dinners and dances and
jewels and gowns!" Rachael answered musingly. She stared sombrely
at the fire, and there was a moment's silence.

Suddenly her mood changed. She smiled, and locking her hands
together, as she leaned far forward in her chair, she looked
straight into his eyes.

"Greg," she said, "do you know what I'd like to be? I'd like to be
far away from cities and people, a fisherman's wife on an ocean
shore, with a baby coming every year, and just the delicious sea
to watch! I could be a good wife, Greg, if anybody really--loved
me!"

Laughing as she looked at him, she did not disguise the fact that
tears misted her lashes. Warren Gregory felt himself stirred as he
had not been before in his life.

"Well," he said, with an unsteady laugh, "you could be anything!
With you for his wife, what couldn't a man do!"

Hardly conscious of what he did or said, he got to his feet, and
she stood, too, smiling up at him. Both were breathing hard.

"To think," he said, with a sort of repressed violence, "that you,
of all women, should be Clarence Breckenridge's wife!"

"Not long!" she answered, in a whisper.

"You mean that you are really going to leave him, Rachael?"

"I mean that I must, Greg, if I am not to go mad!"

"And where will you go?" she asked.

"Oh--to Vera, to Elinor." She paused, frowning. "Or away by
myself," she decided suddenly. "Away from them all!"

"Rachael," he said quickly, "will you come to my mother?"

Rachael smiled. "To your mother!"

He read her incredulity in her voice.

"But she loves you," he said eagerly. "And she'd be--we'd both be
so proud to show people--to prove--that we knew where the right
lay!"

"My dear Don Quixote," she answered affectionately, "I love you
for asking me! But I will be better alone. I must think, and plan.
I've made a mess of my life so far, Greg; I must take the next
step carefully!"

He was clinging to her hands as she stood, in all her grave
beauty, before him.

"If I hadn't been such a bat, Rachael, all those eleven years
ago!" he said, daringly, breathlessly.

"Have we known each other so long, Greg?"

"Ever since that first visit of yours with little Persis Pomeroy!
And I remember you so well, Rachael. I remember that Bobby
Governeur was enslaved!"

"Dear old Bobby! But I don't remember you, Greg!"

"Because I was thirty then, my dear, and you were seventeen! I was
just home from four years' work in Germany; I was afraid of girls
your age!"

"Afraid--of ME?" The three words were like a caress, like holding
her in his arms.

"I'm afraid so!" he said, not quite steadily. "I'm afraid I've
always liked you too well. I--I CARE--that you're unhappy, that
you're unkindly treated. I--I--wish I could do something,
Rachael."

"You DO do something," she said, deeply stirred in her turn. "I'm-
-you don't know how fond I am of you, Greg!"

For answer she felt his arms about her, and for a throbbing minute
they stood so; Rachael braced lightly, her beautiful breast rising
and falling, her breath coming quickly. Her magnificent eyes,
wide-open, like a frightened child's, were fixed steadily upon
him. He caught the fragrance of her hair, of her fresh skin; he
felt the softness and firmness of her slender arms.

"Rachael!" he said, in a sharp whisper. "Don't--don't say that--if
you don't--mean it!"

"Greg!" she answered, in the same tone. "Don't--frighten me!"

Instantly she was free, and he was standing by the fire with
folded arms, looking at her.

"You have missed love, and I have missed it," Warren Gregory said
presently. "We'll be patient, Rachael. I'll wait; we'll both wait-
-"

"Greg!" she could only answer still in that stricken whisper,
still pale. She stood just as he had left her.

A silence fell between them. The physician took out a cigarette
from his gold case with trembling ringers.

"I'm a little giddy, Rachael," he said after a moment. "I--on my
honor I don't know what's happened to me! You're the most
wonderful woman in the world--I've always thought that--but it
never occurred to me--the possibility--"

He paused, confused, unable to find the right words.

"You've been facing this all alone," he continued presently. "Poor
Rachael! You've been splendid--wonderfully brave! You have me
beside you now; I'll help you if I may. Some day we may find a way
out! Well," he finished abruptly, "suppose I go up and see
Clarence?"

For answer she rose, and without speaking again went ahead of him
up the stairway and left him at the door of her husband's room. He
did not see her again that night.

Half an hour later he came down, dismissed his car, and walked
home under the spring stars. In his veins, like a fire, still ran
the excited, glorious consciousness of his madness. In his ears
still echoed the wonderful golden voice; he could hear her very
words, and he took certain phrases from his memory, and gloated
over them as another man might have gloated over strings of
pearls: "I'd like to be far away from cities and people, a
fisherman's wife on an ocean shore with a baby coming every year
and just the delicious sea to watch!" "Greg--don't frighten me!"

Exquisite, desirable, enchanting--every inch of her--her voice,
her eyes, her slender hand with its gold circle. What a woman!
What a wife! What radiant youth and beauty and charm--and all
trampled in the mire by Clarence Breckenridge, of all insensate
brutes! How could laughter and courage and beauty survive it?

He was going to the club, a mile away from the Breckenridge house,
but long before the visions born that evening were exhausted, he
saw the familiar lights, and the awninged porches, and heard the
faint echoes of the orchestra. They were dancing.

Warren Gregory turned away again, and plunged into the darkness of
the roadside afresh. "My dear Don Quixote!" With what a look of
motherly amusement and tenderness she had said it. What a woman!
He had never kissed her. He had never even thought of kissing
Clarence Breckenridge's wife.

He thought of his mother, tried to forget her with a philosophical
shrug, and found that the slender, black-clad, quiet-voiced vision
was not to be so easily dismissed. It was said of old Madam
Gregory that she had never been heard to raise her voice in the
course of her sixty honored years. Of the four sons she had borne,
three were dead, and the husband she had loved so faithfully lay
beside them. She was slightly crippled, her outings confined to a
slow drive every day. She was solitary in a retinue of servants.
But that modulated voice and those cool, temperate eyes were still
a power. His mother's displeasure was a very real thing to Warren
Gregory, and the thought of adding another sorrow to the weight on
those thin shoulders was not an easy one for him to entertain.

It would be a sorrow. Mrs. Gregory was a rigid Catholic, her
life's one prayer nowadays was that her beloved son might become
one, too. Her marriage at seventeen to a non-Catholic had been
undertaken in the firm conviction that faith like hers must win
the conversion of her beloved James, the best, the most honorable
of men. When her oldest son was born, and given his father's name,
she saw, in her husband's willingness to further plans for the
baptism, definite cause for hope. Another son was born, there was
another christening; it was the father's own hand that gave the
third baby lay-baptism only a few moments before the tiny life
slipped back into the eternity from which it had so lately come.

A year or two later a fourth son was born. Presently the dignified
Mrs. Gregory was taking a trio of small, sleek-headed boys to
Sunday-school, watching every phase in the development of their
awakening souls with terror and with hope. What fears she suffered
in spirit during those years no one but herself knew. Outwardly,
the hospitable, gracious life of the great house went on; the
Gregorys were prominent in charities, they opened their mountain
camp for the summer, they travelled abroad, they had an audience
with the Pope. Time went on, and the twelve-year-old George was
taken from them, breaking the father's heart, said the watching
world. But there was a strange calm in the mother's eyes as they
rested on the dead child's serene face: Heaven had her free
offering, now she must have her reward.

A few months later James Gregory became a convert to her religion.
Charles, the second son, had never wavered from his mother's
faith, and rejoiced with her in this great event. But the first-
born, Warren, as all but his mother called him, to avoid confusion
with his father, was a junior in college when these changes took
place, and when he came home for the long vacation his mother knew
what her cross must be for the years to come. He listened to her
with the appalling silence of the nineteen-year-old male, he
kissed her, he returned gruff, embarrassed answers to her
searching questions of his soul, and he escaped from her with
visibly expanding lungs and averted eyes. She knew that she had
lost him.

Men called him a good man, and she assented with dry lips and
heavy eyelids. Charles died, leaving a young widow and an infant
son, the father shortly followed, and Warren came home from his
interne year, and was a good son to her in her dark hour. When
they began to say of him that he would be great, she smiled sadly.
"My father was a doctor," she said once to an old friend, "and
James inherits it!" But at a memory of her own father, erect and
rosy among his girls and boys in the family pew, she burst into
tears. "I would rather have him with his father, with George and
Charles, and with my angel Francis, than have him the greatest man
that ever lived!" she said.

But if she had not made him a good Catholic she had made him a
good man, and it was a fair and honorable record that Warren
Gregory could offer to the woman he loved. Love--it had come to
him at last. His thoughts went back to Rachael. It seemed to him
that he had always known how deeply, how recklessly he loved her.

He had a thrilling memory of her as Persis Pomeroy's guest, years
ago, an awkward, delightful seventeen-year-old, with her hair in
two thick braids, looped up at the neck, and tied with a flaring
black bow. He remembered watching her, hearing for the first time
the delicious voice with its English accent: "Well, I should say
it was indeed!"

"Well, I should say it was indeed!" Across more than ten years he
recalled the careless, crisp little answer to some comment from
Persis, his first precious memory of Rachael. The girls, he
remembered, were supposedly too young for a certain dance that was
imminent, they were opposing their youthful petulance--baffled
roses and sunshine--to Mrs. Pomeroy's big, placid negatives.
Gregory could still see the matron's comfortably shaking head, see
Persis attacking again and again like a frantic butterfly, and see
"the little English girl," perched on the porch rail, looking from
mother to daughter smilingly, with her blue, serious eyes.

Why had he never thought of her again until Clarence Breckenridge
brought her back with him, a bride, six years later? Or, rather,
having thought of her, as he undoubtedly had, why had he not found
the time to cross the water and go to see her? Nothing might have
come of it, true. But she might have yielded to him as readily as
to Clarence Breckenridge!

"I love her!" he said to himself, and it seemed wonderful, sad,
and sweet, joyous and terrible to admit it. "I love her. But she
doesn't love me or anyone, poor Rachael! She's forgotten me
already!"




CHAPTER III


As a matter of fact, Rachael thought about him very often during
the course of the next two or three days, and after he had left
her that night she could think of nothing else. To the admiration
of men she was cheerfully accustomed; perhaps it would be safe to
say that not in the course of the past ten years had she ever
found herself alone in a man's company without evoking a more or
less definite declaration of his admiration for her. But to-
night's affair was a little distinctive for several reasons.
Warren Gregory was a most exceptional man, for one thing; he was
reputedly a coldblooded man, for another; and for a third, he had
been extraordinarily in earnest. There had been no hesitation, he
had committed himself wholeheartedly. She was conscious of a
pleasurable thrill. However gracious, however gallant Warren was,
there had been no social pretence in his attitude to-night.

And for a few moments she let her imagination play pleasantly with
the situation. It was at least a new thought, and life had run in
a groove for a long, long time. Granted the preliminaries safely
managed, it would be a great triumph for the woman whom Clarence
Breckenridge had ignored to come back into this group as Warren
Gregory's wife.

Rachael got into bed, flinging two or three books down beside her
pillow and lighting the shaded lamp that stood at the bedside. She
found herself unable to read.

"Wouldn't Florence and Gardner buzz!" she thought with a smile.
"And if they buzzed at the divorce, what WOULDN'T they say if I
really did remarry? But the worst of it is"--and Rachael reaching
for The Way of All Flesh sighed wearily--"the worst of it is that
one never DOES carry out plans, or _I_ never do, any more. I used
to feel equal to any situation, now I don't--getting old, perhaps.
I wonder"--she stared dreamily at the soft shadows in the big
room--"I wonder if things are as queer to most people as they are
to me? I don't get much joy out of life, as it is, and yet I don't
DARE cut loose and go away. No maid, no club, living at some cheap
hotel--no, I couldn't do that! I wish there was someone who could
advise me--some disinterested person, someone who--well, who loved
me, and who knew that I've always tried to be decent, always tried
to play the game. All I want is to be reasonably well treated; to
have a good time and be among pleasant people--"

Her thoughts wandered about among the various friends whose
judgment might serve at this crisis to clear her own thoughts and
simplify the road before her. Strangely enough, Warren Gregory's
own mother was the first of whom she thought; that pure and
austere and uncompromising heart would certainly find the way.
Whether Rachael had the courage to follow it was another question.
She loved old Mrs. Gregory; they were good friends. But Rachael
dismissed her with a little shudder, as from the spatter of icy
water against her bared breast. The bishop? Rachael and Clarence
duly kept a pew in one of the city's fashionable churches; it was
the Breckenridge family pew, rented by the family for a hundred
years. But they never sat in it, although Rachael felt vaguely
sometimes that for reasons undefined they should, and Clarence was
apt in moments of sentiment to reproach his wife with the
statement that his grandmother had been a faithful church woman,
and his mother had always attended church on pleasant mornings in
winter.

But the bishop called on Rachael once a year, and Rachael liked
him, and mingled an air of pretty penitence for past negligences
with a gracious promise of better conduct in future. His Grace was
a fine, breezy, broadminded man, polished in manner, sympathetic,
and tolerant. He had not risen to his present eminence by too
harsh a rebuke of the sinner.

His handsome young assistant, Father Graves, as he liked to be
called, was far more radical. But a great deal was forgiven this
attractive boyish celibate by the women of the Episcopal parish.
They enjoyed his scoldings, gave him their confidences, and asked
his advice, though they never followed it. His slender, black-clad
figure, with the Roman collar, was admired by many bright eyes at
receptions and church bazaars.

Still, Rachael could not somehow consider herself as seriously
asking either of these two clergymen for advice. She could see the
bishop, fitting finely groomed fingers together, pursing his lips
for a judicial reply.

"My dear Mrs. Breckenridge, that Clarence is now passing through a
most unfortunate, most lamentable, period in his life is, alas,
perfectly true. His mother--a lovely woman--was one of my wife's
dearest friends, one of my own. His first marriage was much
against her wishes, poor dear lady, and--as my wife was saying the
other day--had she lived to see him happily married again, and her
grandchild in such good hands, it could not but have been a great
joy to her. Yes. ... Now, you and I know Clarence--know his good
points, and know his faults. That's one of the sad things about us
poor human beings, we get to know each other so well! And isn't it
equally true that we're not patient enough with each other?--oh,
yes, I know we try. But do we try HARD enough? Isn't there
generally some fault on both sides, quick words, angry, hasty
actions, argument and blame, when we say things we don't mean and
that we are sure to regret, eh? We all get tired of the stupid
round of daily duty, and of the people we are nearest to--that's a
sad thing, too. We'd all like a change, like to see if we couldn't
do something else better! And so comes the break, and the cloud on
a fine old name, and all because we aren't better soldiers--we
don't want to march in line! Bless me, don't I know the feeling
myself? Why, that good little wife of mine could tell you some
tales of discouragement and disenchantment that would make you
open your eyes! But she braces me up, she puts heart into me--and
the first thing I know I'm marching again!"

And having comfortably shifted the entire trend of the
conversation from his parishioner to himself and found nothing
insurmountable in his own problem, the good bishop would chuckle
mischievously at finding his eminent self quite human after all,
and would suggest their going in to find Mrs. Bishop, and having a
cup of tea. These women, always restless and dissatisfied, were a
part of his work; he prided himself upon the swiftness and tact
with which he disposed of them.

Rachael's mouth twisted wryly at the thought of him. No, she could
not bare her soul to the bishop.

Nor could she approach Father Graves with any real hope of a
helping word. To seek him out in his study--that esthetically bare
and yet beautiful room, with its tobacco-brown hangings and
monastic furnishing in black oak--would be to invite mischief. To
sit there, with her eloquent eyes fixed upon his, her haunting
voice wrapping itself about his senses, would be a genuine cruelty
toward a harmless, well-intentioned youth whose heroism in
abjuring the world, the flesh, and the devil had not yet been
great enough to combat his superb and dignified egotism. At best,
he would be won by Rachael's revelation of her soul to a long and
frankly indiscreet talk of his own; at worst, he would construe
her confidences in an entirely personal sense, and feel that she
came not at all to the priest and all to the man.

Dismissing him from her councils, Rachael thought of Florence
Haviland, the good and kind-hearted and capable matron who was
Clarence's sister and only near relative. She and Florence had
always been good friends, had often discussed Clarence of late.
What sort of advice would Florence's forty-five years be apt to
give to Rachael's twenty-eight? "Don't be so absurd, Rachael, half
the men in our set drink as much as Clarence does. Don't jump from
the frying-pan into the fire. Remember Elsie Rowland and Marian
Cowles when you talk so lightly of divorce!"

That would be Florence's probable attitude. Still, it was a
bracing attitude, heartily positive, like everything Florence did
and said. And Florence was above everything else a church member,
a prominent Christian in her self-sacrificing wifehood and
motherhood, her social and charitable and civic work. She might be
unflattering, but she would be right. Rachael's last conscious
thought, as she went off to sleep, was that she would take the
earliest possible moment to extract a verdict from Florence,

She went into her husband's room at ten o'clock the next morning
to find Billy radiantly presiding over a loaded breakfast tray,
and the invalid, pale and pasty, and with no particular interest
in food evinced by the twitching muscles of his face, nevertheless
neatly brushed and shaved, propped up in pillows, and making a
visible effort to appear convalescent.

"How are you this morning?" Rachael asked perfunctorily, with her
quick glance moving from the books on the table to the wood fire
burning lazily behind brass firedogs. Everything was in perfect
order, Helda's touch visible everywhere.

"Fine," Clarence answered, also perfunctorily. His coffee was
untouched, and the cigarette in his long holder had gone out, but
Billy was disposing of eggs, toast, bacon, and cream with youthful
zest. Clarence's hot, sick gaze rested almost with hostility upon
his wife's cool beauty; in a gray linen gown, with a transparent
white ruffle turned back from her white throat, she looked as
fresh as the fresh spring morning.

"Headache?" said the nicely modulated, indifferent voice.

To this solicitude Clarence made no answer. A dark, ugly look came
into his face, and he turned his eyes sullenly and wearily away.

"How was the Chase dinner, Bill?" pursued the cheerful visitor,
unabashed.

"Same old thing," Carol answered briefly.

"You're not up to the Perrys' lunch to-day, are you, Clancy?"

"Oh, my God, no!" burst from the sufferer.

"Well, I'll telephone them. If Florence comes in this morning I'm
going to say you're asleep, so keep quiet up here. Do you want to
see Greg again?"

"No, I don't!" said Clarence, with unexpected vigor. "Steer him
off if you can. Preaching at me last night as if he'd never
touched anything stronger than malted milk!"

"I don't imagine I'll have much trouble steering him off," Rachael
said coldly. "His Sundays are pretty well occupied without--sick
calls!"

There was a delicate and scornful emphasis on the word "sick" that
brought the blood to Clarence Breckenridge's face. Billy flushed,
too, and an angry light flamed into her eyes.

"That's not fair, Rachael!" the girl said hotly, "and you know
it's not!"

The glances of the three crossed. Billy was breathing hard;
Clarence, shakily holding a fresh match to his cold cigarette,
sent a lowering look from daughter to wife. Rachael shrugged her
shoulders.

"Well, I'll have my breakfast," she said, and turning she went
from the room and downstairs to the sunshiny breakfast porch.
There were flowers on the little round table, a bright glitter was
struck from silver and glass, an icy grapefruit, brimming with
juice, stood at her place. The little room was all windows, and
to-day the cretonne curtains had been pushed back to show the
garden brave in new spring green, the exquisite freshness of elm
and locust trees that bordered it, and far away the slopes of the
golf green, with the scarlet and white dots that were early
players moving over it. Sunshine flooded the world, great plumes
of white and purple lilac rustled in their tents of green leaves,
a bee blundered from the blossoming wistaria vine into the room,
and blundered out again. Far off Rachael heard a cock breaking the
Sabbath stillness with a prolonged crow, and as the clock in the
dining-room chimed one silver note for the half-hour, the bells of
the church in the little village of Belvedere Bay began to ring.

Of the comfort, the beauty, and the harmony of all this, however,
Rachael saw and felt nothing. Her brief interview with her husband
had left a bitter taste in her mouth. She felt neither courage nor
appetite for the new day. Annie carried away the blue bowl of
porridge untouched, reporting to Ellie: "She don't want no eggs,
nor sausage, nor waffles--nothing more!"

Ellie, the cook, who boarded a four-year-old daughter with the
gardener and his wife, at the gate-lodge, was deep in the robust
charms of this young person, and not sorry to be uninterrupted.

"Thank goodness she don't," she said. "Do you want a little waffle
all for yourself, Lovey? Do you want to pour the batter into Ma's
iron yourself? Pin a napkin round her, Annie! An' then you can eat
it out on the steps, darlin', because it just seems to be a shame
to spend a minute indoors when God sends us a mornin' like this!"

"It must have been grand, walking to church this morning, all
right," said Alfred, who was busy with golf sticks and emery on
the vine-shaded porch.

"It was!" said Ellie and Annie together, and Annie added: "Rose
from Bowditch's was there, and she says she can't get away but
about once a month. She always has to wait on the children's
breakfast at eight, and then down comes the others at half-past
nine, or later, the way she never has a moment until it's too late
for High! I told her she had a right to look for another place!"