We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Early on that birthday morning Peter woke me with a | kiss. He gave me a bracelet he'd made of tiny shells.
<1
■v^r^'.uH > IP?
v_ i '-Sfc^ if x 'v ■*■• V f .^t
THE lake was like a crimson jewel at my feet, caught in the glory of sunset. In another moment it would be opalescent with pale blues and pinks and lavenders that are a poet's dream and a painter's despair. The world was bathed in radiance — our white honeymoon cottage touched with pink, the roses in our garden red as heart's blood, the sandy beach where we bathed like rosy coral.
I looked at it all and thought wistfully that the neon lights of a smart night club would have been the most beautiful sight in the world to me at that moment. I'd seen that sun set a thousand times. Well — two hundred and sixty-four. I was tired of it. Nine months of the same old sun, the same old lake. Nine months of never going anywhere, never seeing anybody, of cooking and slaving. No people to see, no dances, no fun. And I was the one who had thought this
would be romantic! But that was before Peter and I were married. . . .
A year ago I hadn't known Peter Morris existed. Imagine. Living in the world twenty-two years and not knowing about Peter. But when we did meet, we made up for lost time.
It was at a country club dance, just outside Detroit where I lived with my father. The Joey Kellers had Peter as a guest, and introduced him to me. He was tall and wiry, with quick movements, and he had a keen, eager look in his eyes. My father used to go in for falconry, and something about Peter reminded me of a hawk — strong and poised ready to swoop. The minute I stepped into his arms to dance, I said to myself, "Ellen, honey, this is it\"
Peter felt the same way. By the time the evening was over, he was telling me things. About how he was a physio-chemist or a chemical
physicist — never can remember about those things — and was experimenting with some terribly important kind of war gas. How he'd worked his way through college and worked afterwards till he'd saved enough money to give all his time to the experiments, and how they were like mother, father, girls — everything he'd never had — to him. But he told me more important things, too — that my hair was like golden mist in the early sun, and my eyes the color of the deepest, lake in the world. When it was time to go home, he'd gotten up the courage to ask me for a date. I say "gotten up the courage" because he was poor and I was rich, and Peter had a funny sort of pride about that — as I was to discover later.
Being poor was something I didn't know about then. I knew there were girls who had to go to public high school instead of an Eastern finishing school, and that they had to stay
Over and over she pictured her husband's eyes as she had last seen them— full of hatred because in her selfish passion she had destroyed the thing he loved