The air was heavy with the perfume of many flowers, and pulsed
with dreamy music. Mrs. Trenton, in billows of black lace and glinting
jet, presided with her usual graciousness. She introduced Mrs. Dawson
briefly.
Whatever the attitude of the audience was at first, they soon followed
her with eager interest as she told them, in her easy way, simple
stories of the people she knew so well and so lovingly understood.
There was no art in the telling, only a sweet naturalness and an
apparent honesty--the honesty of purpose that comes to people in lonely
places. Her stories were all of the class that magazine editors call
"homely, heart-interest stuff," not deep or clever or problematical--
the commonplace doings of common people--but it found an entrance into
the hearts of men and women.
They found themselves looking with her at broad sunlit spaces, where
struggling hearts work out noble destinies, without any thought of
heroism. They saw the moonlight and its drifting shadows on the wheat,
and smelled again the ripening grain at dawn. They heard the whirr of
prairie chickens' wings among the golden stubble on the hillside, and
the glamor of some old forgotten afternoon stole over them. Men and
women country-born who had forgotten the voices of their youth, heard
them calling across the years, and heard them, too, with opened hearts
and sudden tears. There was one pathetic story she told them, of the
lonely prairie woman--the woman who wished she was back, the woman to
whom the broad outlook and far horizon were terrible and full of fear.
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