Excerpt from The Glorious Hope: A Novel
Evelyn Kerwin waved good-bye to "the crowd' at the little railway station and shook herself like a cat after a nap under the parlor stove. After all, she had been asleep, if not under, then, beside the parlor stove for some twenty-two years. Uh! How she hated that parlor stove with its red isinglass teeth eternally grinning at her and her dream. All the memories of her life were bound up somehow with that parlor stove. She had been bathed beside it, way, way long ago. She had learned her lessons, snugged up to it all through her school life and from graduation day onward she had flirted across its grin with the various beaux of the village.
And now it was sold. Tony Crack, the Italian farmer, had purchased it. "Goody, goody, goody!" she murmured, "it's sold!" Then she smiled as she thought of all the little Cracks being bathed and tutored and courted in the glare of those half-friendly, half-sneering red teeth.
Only the tiniest little pull came at her throat as the train wound out of Port Illington. More out of fake sentimentality than any real emotion she wandered to the platform and watched her past come to a point and dwindle away.
"Well, that's over at last," she said, coming back to her seat and making herself comfortable for the journey. "There isn't a single thing in Port Illington that I want - thank all the gods, I'm through with it!" She folded her veil neatly and tucked it into her suit case.
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