| | 1 | Author: | Phillips, David Graham, 1867-1911 | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise, Volume II  | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | SUSAN'S impulse was toward the stage. It had become a definite ambition with her,
the stronger because Spenser's jealousy and suspicion had forced her to keep it
a secret, to pretend to herself that she had no thought but going on
indefinitely as his obedient and devoted mistress. The hardiest and best growths
are the growths inward—where they have sun and air from without. She
had been at the theater several times every week, and had studied the
performances at a point of view very different from that of the audience. It was
there to be amused; she was there to learn. Spenser and such of his friends as
he would let meet her talked plays and acting most of the time. He had forbidden
her to have women friends. "Men don't demoralize women; women demoralize each
other," was one of his axioms. But such women as she had a bowing acquaintance
with were all on the stage—in comic operas or musical farces. She was
much alone; that meant many hours every day which could not but be spent by a
mind like hers in reading and in thinking. Only those who have observed the
difference aloneness makes in mental development, where there is a good mind,
can appreciate how rapidly, how broadly, Susan expanded. She read plays more
than any other kind of literature.
She did not read them casually but was always
thinking how they would act. She was soon making in imagination stage scenes out
of dramatic chapters in novels as she read. More and more clearly the characters
of play and novel took shape and substance before the eyes of her fancy. But the
stage was clearly out of the question. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 3 | Author: | Phillips, David Graham, 1867-1911 | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise, Volume II | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | SUSAN'S impulse was toward the stage. It had become a
definite ambition with her, the stronger because Spenser's
jealousy and suspicion had forced her to keep it a secret, to
pretend to herself that she had no thought but going on
indefinitely as his obedient and devoted mistress. The
hardiest and best growths are the growths inward—where they
have sun and air from without. She had been at the theater
several times every week, and had studied the performances at
a point of view very different from that of the audience. It
was there to be amused; she was there to learn. Spenser and
such of his friends as he would let meet her talked plays and
acting most of the time. He had forbidden her to have women
friends. "Men don't demoralize women; women demoralize each
other," was one of his axioms. But such women as she had a
bowing acquaintance with were all on the stage—in comic
operas or musical farces. She was much alone; that meant many
hours every day which could not but be spent by a mind like
hers in reading and in thinking. Only those who have observed
the difference aloneness makes in mental development, where
there is a good mind, can appreciate how rapidly, how broadly,
Susan expanded. She read plays more than any other kind of
literature. She did not read them casually but was always
thinking how they would act. She was soon making in
imagination stage scenes out of dramatic chapters in novels as
she read. More and more clearly the characters of play and
novel took shape and substance before the eyes of her fancy.
But the stage was clearly out of the question. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 10 | Author: | Phillips, David Graham, 1867-1911 | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Grain of Dust. | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | INTO the offices of Lockyer, Sanders, Benchley,
Lockyer & Norman, corporation lawyers, there drifted
on a December afternoon a girl in search of work at
stenography and typewriting. The firm was about the
most important and most famous — radical orators often
said infamous — in New York. The girl seemed, at a
glance, about as unimportant and obscure an atom as
the city hid in its vast ferment. She was blonde — tawny
hair, fair skin, blue eyes. Aside from this hardly
conclusive mark of identity there was nothing positive,
nothing definite, about her. She was neither tall nor
short, neither fat nor thin, neither grave nor gay. She
gave the impression of a young person of the feminine
gender — that, and nothing more. She was plainly
dressed, like thousands of other girls, in darkish blue
jacket and skirt and white shirt waist. Her boots and
gloves were neat, her hair simply and well arranged.
Perhaps in these respects — in neatness and taste — she
did excel the average, which is depressingly low. But
in a city where more or less strikingly pretty women,
bent upon being seen, are as plentiful as the blackberries
of Kentucky's July — in New York no one would
have given her a second look, this quiet young woman
screened in an atmosphere of self-effacement. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 11 | Author: | Phillips, David Graham, 1867-1911 | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Price She Paid. | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | HENRY GOWER was dead at sixty-one—the end of
a lifelong fraud which never had been suspected, and
never would be. With the world, with his acquaintances
and neighbors, with his wife and son and
daughter, he passed as a generous, warm-hearted,
good-natured man, ready at all times to do anything
to help anybody, incapable of envy or hatred or
meanness. In fact, not once in all his days had he ever
thought or done a single thing except for his own
comfort. Like all intensely selfish people who are wise,
he was cheerful and amiable, because that was the
way to be healthy and happy and to have those around
one agreeable and in the mood to do what one wished
them to do. He told people, not the truth, not the
unpleasant thing that might help them, but what they
wished to hear. His family lived in luxurious comfort
only because he himself was fond of luxurious comfort.
His wife and his daughter dressed fashionably and
went about and entertained in the fashionable,
expensive way only because that was the sort of life
that gratified his vanity. He lived to get what he
wanted; he got it every day and every hour of a life
into which no rain ever fell; he died, honored, respected,
beloved, and lamented. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 12 | Author: | Romeyn, Henry | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | 'Little Africa': The Last Slave Cargo Landed in the United States | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | Among the passengers of the "Roger B. Taney," Captain Timothy Meaher, plying
between Mobile and Montgomery, Ala. in April, 1858, were a number of Northern
gentlemen returning to their homes after a winter spent in the South. The trip
occupied several days, and as might have been expected, the slavery question was
a fruitful theme of discussion. Captain Meaher, though born in Gardiner, Maine,
had removed, when a mere lad, to the Gulf States, and accumulated quite a
fortune for those days; a large portion of which was in "chattels" employed on
his half dozen steamboats, or on cotton plantations in the interior of the
state, and in lumbering among the pines and cypress lands near the coast. Of
course he was a defender of "the institution," and, in reply to the expressed
belief of one of his passengers that "with the supply by importation from Africa
cut off and any further spread in the Territories denied, the thing was doomed,"
he declared that, despite the stringent measures taken by most of the civilized
powers to crush out the over-sea traffic, it could be still carried on
successfully. In response to the disbelief expressed by his opponent, he offered
to wager any amount of money that he would "import a cargo in less than two
years, and no one be hanged for it." | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 20 | Author: | Washington, Booker T. | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Negro Self-Help | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | FROM time to time in the past a great deal of matter has been
furnished to the public, with the praiseworthy purpose of portraying
the individual struggles and sacrifices of colored youths to secure an
education. These efforts of struggling young men and women, with
no inspiration in family tradition and fortune, and with little or no
money with which to secure the knowledge they crave, is one of the
most encouraging as well as pathetic features I have come across in
my educational work during the past twenty years. As a hopeful
indication of race character, and I may safely so describe it, it must
be of peculiar interest to the average American interested in the
Negro people. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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