The Jamesons by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Author:Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781776670253
Publisher: The Floating Press

V - Their Second Summer

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The Jamesons returned to Linnville the first of June. For some weeks we had seen indications of their coming. All through April and May repairs and improvements had been going on in their house. Some time during the winter the Jamesons had purchased the old Wray place, and we felt that they were to be a permanent feature in our midst.

The old Wray house had always been painted white, with green blinds, as were most of our village houses; now it was painted red, with blinds of a darker shade. When Louisa and I saw its bright walls through the budding trees we were somewhat surprised, but thought it might look rather pretty when we became accustomed to it. Very few of the neighbors agreed with us, however; they had been so used to seeing the walls of their dwellings white that this startled them almost as much as a change of color in their own faces would have done.

"We might as well set up for red Injuns and done with it," said Mrs. Gregg one afternoon at the sewing circle. "What anybody can want anything any prettier than a neat white house with green blinds for, is beyond me."

Every month during the winter a letter had come to our literary society in care of the secretary, who was my sister-in-law, Louisa Field. Louisa was always secretary because she was a school-teacher and was thought to have her hand in at that sort of work. Mrs. Jameson wrote a very kind, if it was a somewhat patronizing, sort of letter. She extended to us her very best wishes for our improvement and the widening of our spheres, and made numerous suggestions which she judged calculated to advance us in those respects. She recommended selections from Robert Browning to be read at our meetings, and she sent us some copies of explanatory and critical essays to be used in connection with them. She also in March sent us a copy of another lecture about the modern drama which she had herself written and delivered before her current literature club. With that she sent us some works of Ibsen and the Belgian writer, Maeterlinck, with the recommendation that we devote ourselves to the study of them at once, they being eminently calculated for the widening of our spheres.

Flora Clark, who is the president of the society; Mrs. Peter Jones, who is the vice-president; Louisa, and I, who am the treasurer, though there is nothing whatever to treasure, held a council over the books. We all agreed that while we were interested in them ourselves, though they were a strange savor to our mental palates, yet we would not read Mrs. Jameson's letter concerning them to the society, nor advise the study of them.

"I, for one, don't like to take the responsibility of giving the women of this village such reading," said Flora Clark. "It may be improving and widening, and it certainly is interesting, and there are fine

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