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One Woman's Life by Robert Herrick
"Is that the house!" Milly Ridge exclaimed disapprovingly.
Her father, a little man, with one knee bent against the unyielding, newly varnished front door, glanced up apprehensively at the figures painted on the glass transom above. In that block of little houses, all exactly alike, he might easily have made a mistake. Reassured he murmured over his shoulder,-"Yes-212-that's right!" and he turned the key again.
Milly frowning petulantly continued her examination of the dirty yellow brick face of her new home. She could not yet acquiesce sufficiently in the fact to mount the long flight of steps that led from the walk to the front door. She looked on up the street, which ran straight as a bowling-alley between two rows of shabby brick houses,-all low, small, mean, unmistakably cheap,-thrown together for little people to live in. West Laurence Avenue was drab and commonplace,-the heart, the crown, the apex of the commonplace. And the girl knew it.... The April breeze, fluttering carelessly through the tubelike street, caught her large hat and tipped it awry. Milly clutched her hat savagely, and something like tears started to her eyes.
"What did you expect, my dear?" Grandmother Ridge demanded with a subtle undercut of reproof. The little old lady, all in black, with a neat bonnet edged with white, stood on the steps midway between her son and her granddaughter, and smiled icily at the girl. Milly recognized that smile. It was more deadly to her than a curse-symbol of mocking age. She tossed her head, the sole retort that youth was permitted to give age.
Indeed, she could not have described her disappointment intelligibly. All she knew was that ever since their hasty breakfast in the dirty railroad station beside the great lake her spirits had begun to go down, and had kept on dropping as the family progressed slowly in the stuffy street-car, mile after mile, through this vast prairie wilderness of brick buildings. She knew instinctively that they were getting farther and farther from the region where "nice people" lived. She had never before been in this great city, yet something told her that they were journeying block by block towards the outskirts,-the hinterland of the sprawling city. (Only Milly didn't know the word hinterland.) She had gradually ceased to reply to her father's cheerful comments on the features of the West Side landscape. And now she was very near tears.
She was sixteen-it was the spring of '86. Ever since her mother's death, two years before, the family had done "light housekeeping" in three rooms in St. Louis. This 212 West Laurence Avenue, Chicago, was to be her first home-this slab of a dirty yellow wall!
"There!" her father muttered with satisfaction, as, after a last twist of key and thump of knee, he effected an entrance. Grandma Ridge moved up the flight of steps, the girl following reluctantly.
"See, mother," little Horatio Ridge said, jingling his keys, "it's fresh and clean!"
The new varnish smelt poignantly. The fresh paint clung insidiously to the feet.
"And it's light too, mother, isn't it?" He turned quickly from the cavernous gloom of the rear rooms and pointed to a side window in the hall where one-sixteenth of the arc of the firmament was visible between the brick walls of the adjoining houses.
"The dining-room's downstairs-that makes it roomier," he continued, throwing open at random a door. "There's more room than you'd think from the outside."
Milly and her grandmother peered downwards into the black hole from which came a mouldy odor.
"Oh, father, why did you come 'way out here!" Milly wailed.
"Why not?" Horatio retorted defensively. "You didn't expect a house on the lake front, did you?"
Just what she had expected from this new turn in the family destiny was not clear to herself. But ever since it had been decided that they were to have a house of their own in Chicago-her father having at last secured a position that promised some permanence-the girl's buoyant imagination had begun to soar, and out of all the fragments of her experience derived by her transient residence in Indianapolis, Kansas City, and Omaha-not to mention St. Louis-she had created a wonderful composite-the ideal American home, architecturally ambitious, suburban in tone. In some of the cities where she had lived the Ridges had tarried as long as three years, and each time, since she was a very little girl in short dresses and had left Indianapolis crying over the doll in her arms, she had believed they were permanently settled: this was to be their home for always.
Her mother had had the same forlorn, homesick hope, but each time it was doomed to disappointment. Always they had had to move on,-to make a new circle of temporary acquaintances, to learn the ropes of new streets and shops and schools all over again. Always it was "business" that did the mischief,-the failure of "business" here or the hope of better "business" somewhere else that had routed them out of their temporary shelter. Horatio Ridge was "travelling" for one firm or another in drugs and chemicals: he was of an optimistic and sanguine temperament. Milly's mother, less hopeful by nature, had gradually succumbed under the perpetual tearing up of her thin roots, and finally faded away altogether in the light housekeeping phase of their existence in St. Louis.
Milly was sanguine like her father, and she had the other advantage of youth over her mother. So she had hoped again-overwhelmingly-of Chicago. But as she gazed at the row of pallid houses and counted three "To rent" signs in the cobwebby front windows opposite, she knew in her heart that this was not the end-not this, for her! It was another shift, another compromise to be endured, another disappointment to be overcome.
"Well, daughter, what d'ye think of your new home?" Little Horatio's blustering tone betrayed his timidity before the passionate criticism of youth. Milly turned on him with flashing blue eyes.
"I think, my dear," her grandmother announced primly, "that instead of finding fault with your father's selection of a home, you had better look at it first."
Grandma Ridge was a tiny lady, quite frail, with neat bands of iron-gray hair curling over well-shaped ears. Her voice was soft and low,-the kind of voice which her generation described as "ladylike." But Milly knew what lay beneath its gentle surface. Milly did not love her grandmother. Milly's mother had not loved the little old lady. It was extremely doubtful if any one had ever loved her. Mrs. Ridge embodied unpleasant duties; she was a vessel of unwelcome reproof that could be counted upon to spill over at raw moments, like this one.
"You'll like it first rate, Milly," her father continued robustly, "once you get settled in it. It's a great bargain, the real estate man said so, almost new and freshly painted and papered. It's close to the cars and Hoppers'"-Hoppers' was the Chicago firm that had offered Horatio his latest opportunity. "And I don't care about travelling all over Illinois to get to my work...."
Curiosity compelled Milly to follow the others up the narrow stairs that reached from the hall to the floor above. Milly was a tall, well-developed girl for sixteen, already quite as large as her father and enough of a woman physically to bully the tiny grandmother when she wished to. Her face was now prettily suffused with color due to her resentment, and her blue eyes moist with unshed tears. She glanced into the small front chamber which had been decorated with a pink paper and robin's-egg blue paint.
"Pretty, ain't it?" Horatio observed, seeking his crumb of appreciation.
"It's a very nice home, Horatio-I'm sure you displayed excellent taste in your choice," his mother replied.
"Pretty? ... It's just awful!" Milly burst forth, unable to control herself longer. She felt that she should surely die if she were condemned to sleep in that ugly chamber even for a few months. Yet the house was on the whole a better one than any that the peripatetic Ridges had thus far achieved. It was fully as good as most of those that her acquaintances lived in. But it cruelly shamed Milly's expectations.
"It's perfectly horrid,-a nasty, cheap, ugly little box, and 'way out here on the West Side." Somehow Milly had already divined the coming degradation of the West Side. "I don't see how you can tell father such stories, grandma.... He ought to have waited for us before he took a house."
With that she turned her back on the whole affair and whisked down the narrow stairs, leaving her elders to swallow their emotions while inspecting the tin bath-tub in the closet bath-room.
"Milly has her mother's temper," Mrs. Ridge observed sourly.
"She'll come 'round all right," Horatio replied hopefully.
Milly squirmed, but on the whole she "took her medicine" as well as most human beings....
Meantime she stood before the dusty window in the front room eyeing the dirty street, dabbing the tears from her eyes with her handkerchief, welling with resentment at her fate.
* * *
Years later she remembered the fierce emotions of that dreary April day when she had first beheld the little block house on West Laurence Avenue, recalling vividly her rage of rebellion at her father and her fate, the hot disgust in her soul that she should be forced to endure such mean surroundings. "And," she would say then to the friend to whom she happened to be giving a vivacious account of the incident, "it was just as mean and ugly and depressing as I thought it.... I can see the place now-the horror of that basement dining-room and the smells! My dear, it was just common West Side, you know."
But how did Milly Ridge at sixteen perceive all this? What gave her the sense of social distinctions,-of place and condition,-at her age, with her limited, even if much-travelled experience of American cities? To read this mystery will be to understand Milly Ridge-and something of America as well.
* * *
This hushed moment was broken by the resonant tones of the minister as he began the opening words of the sacrament that had been said over so many millions of human beings. Familiar as the phrases were, she did not realize them, could not summon back her attention from that depth within of awed expectancy. After a time she became aware of the subdued movements in the chapel, of people breaking into the remote circle of her mystery, even here they must needs have their part, and of the man beside her looking intently at her, with flushed face. It was this man, this one here at her side, whom she had' chosen of all that might have come into her life; and suddenly he seemed a stranger, standing there, ready to become her husband! The wood bine waved, recalling to her flashing thoughts that day two years before when the chapel was dedicated, and they two, then mere friends, had planted this vine together. And now, after certain meetings, after some surface intercourse, they had willed to come here'to be made one.
1900. Herrick wrote realistic social novels about the conflict between professional and personal values in American capitalistic society. The Web of Life begins: The young surgeon examined the man as he lay on the hospital chair in which ward attendants had left him. The surgeon's fingers touched him deftly, here and there, as if to test the endurance of the flesh he had to deal with. The head nurse followed his swift movements, wearily moving an incandescent light hither and thither, observing the surgeon with languid interest. Another nurse, much younger, without the black band, watched the surgeon from the foot of the cot. Beads of perspiration chased themselves down her pale face, caused less by sympathy than by sheer weariness and heat. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.
Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories by Robert Herrick
"I've warned you from the beginning. Don't marry him, but you won't listen." She stood close to me and smiled with concern. "You are not a woman worthy of a man as handsome, rich, smart, and virile as Blaze." My whole body trembled at her words. "Have you no shame?" I asked in a quivering voice. "Take a good look at yourself, Heather." She looked at me in the mirror. "You can't even look at your ugly face. Do you think Blaze can endure a lifetime of looking at that face?" Heather Bailey had a surprise from her husband that night: a divorce agreement. After a year of marriage and facing ups and downs, she couldn't believe Blaze intended to divorce her. But she was devastated when she saw him gazing lovingly at another woman because that person was closest to her. Shortly after she put her signature on their divorce papers, shock waves caught her up. Her flower shop was severely burnt, beyond repair. Her father's company collapsed, and her parents blamed her. She struggled to rebuild her life from the ground up and became more successful than ever. Having many customers who came from influential families, she started her action against Blaze. She won the very thing he wanted. But that was just the beginning.
For three years, Shane and Yvonne were wed, sharing heated nights, while his devotion clung to his ex. Yvonne strove to be a dutiful wife, yet their marriage felt hollow, built on desire rather than real warmth. All changed when she became pregnant, only for Shane to thrust her onto the operating table, warning, “Either you or the baby survives!” Broken by his cruelty, she vanished in grief and later returned, radiantly accomplished, leaving everyone awestruck. Haunted by remorse, Shane begged for another chance, but Yvonne only smiled and replied, “I’m sorry, men no longer interest me.”
Bailey seems to be never destined to fit in, a little geeky, but under it all, a hidden beauty that so many seem to miss, but still not what her pack Alpha is looking for in a fated mate... so he is determined to reject her and make her life hell. Bailey, knowing her life will likely never be the same focuses on what she can control, her future, and heads off to study; becoming a teacher. Asher is the Beta of Autumn Valley Pack, a neighbouring pack. A broken man having suffered the loss of his mate after a rogue attack, Asher is slowly crumbling. Falling to pieces. A shadow of his former self, and not a man that anyone wants to be around anymore... Until, Autumn Valley Pack require a new teacher, and Bailey finds herself there and pushed together with the Beta. Is there a connection building or is that in their imaginations? And what will happen when Bailey's mate comes back to claim what is his?
After three secretive years of marriage, Eliana never met her enigmatic husband until she was served with divorce papers and learned of his extravagant pursuit of another. She snapped back to reality and secured a divorce. Thereafter, Eliana unveiled her various personas: an esteemed doctor, legendary secret agent, master hacker, celebrated designer, adept race car driver, and distinguished scientist. As her diverse talents became known, her ex-husband was consumed by remorse. Desperately, he pleaded, "Eliana, give me another chance! All my properties, even my life, are yours."
"Never let anyone treat you like shit!" I learned that the hard way. For three years, I lived with my in-laws. They didn't treat me as their son-in-law but as a slave. I put up with everything because of my wife, Yolanda Lambert. She was the light of my life. Unfortunately, my whole world came crashing down the day I caught my wife cheating on me. I have never been so heartbroken. To have my revenge, I revealed my true identity. I was none other than Liam Hoffman—the heir of a family with trillions of dollars in assets! The Lamberts were utterly shocked after the big reveal. They realized what fools they had been for treating me like trash. My wife even knelt down and begged for my forgiveness. What do you think I did? Did I take her back or made her suffer? Find out!
My boyfriend called, "Baby!" as he jumped out of bed and scrambled to pull his pants off the ground. "Please, I can explain my love." Shutting my eyes, I inhaled deeply and tried not to cry when I realized that my dream of the man not being my boyfriend had been dashed. "What?" I asked, "What do you want to explain?" How did you lie about having a business meeting while you were in bed enjoying yourself with my best friend, even though I told you I was in serious pain, is that it?" I stood there, my heart pounding, and tears streaming down my face...