Jeanne Robert Foster
Published: 2013-09
Total Pages: 30
Get eBook
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1916 edition. Excerpt: ... THE SANE WOMAN "No, I'm not crazy, Doctor, I'm all right . . . "Whose business is it if I lock the door To the spare room? You couldn't stand that noise And work. If I stir round out here, Jingle the tins and clatter dishwashing, I can go all day without hearing it. "I get along all right through the day time . . . Perhaps you could do something for me nights. Yes, what you heard I told Mis' Peck is true: She walks out of her picture frame at night; I hear her stepping light around the house And laughing in the dark. "I'd laugh that way If I were she; Oh, I would laugh and laugh . . . When I first came here as a second wife I hated the old picture on the wall Just as a young girl would, but Dana said His boys would think their father had forgot Their mother if we took the picture down. There in the picture they are little boys, -- Five of them hanging on her plumped out arms, With shining faces and clean roundabouts. They were grown men-folks when I married him. But I said, ' Very soon I shall not care About the picture hanging on the wall; I shall not care, ' and in wild make-believe I'd snatch a pillow tight up in my arms. The years went by ... you see I have grown old, And he is old too; all day by the fire He sits and stares at the big picture there Of his first wife and her five little boys. "Since he's grown feeble I have sold the wool And yearlings and made sharp trades out at town. I'll 'never want for anything, ' you say -- I never had anything, you mean to say. Men don't count women in their worldly lives, -- They count their children, and their farms and stock! They're like a river flowing -- all these men -- And if you haven't children you're no more Than driftwood floating on the river's breast, Flung in an eddy when the tide is...