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FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES

BY

ZONA GALE

AUTHOR OF "FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE," "THE LOVES
OF PELLEAS AND ETARRE," ETC.

NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS


COPYRIGHT, 1909,

BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1909. Reprinted
November, 1909; April, 1912.


_Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A._


To

MY FRIENDS IN PORTAGE
WISCONSIN


Certain of the following chapters have appeared in _Everybody's_, _The
American Magazine_, _The Outlook_, _The Woman's Home Companion_, and
_The Delineator_. Thanks are due to the editors for their courteous
permission to reprint these chapters, and to Messrs. Harper Brothers for
permission to reprint the sonnet in Chapter XI.




CONTENTS

CHAPTER                         PAGE
    I. OPEN ARMS                   1

   II. INSIDE JUNE                15

  III. MIGGY                      33

   IV. SPLENDOUR TOWN             43

    V. DIFFERENT                  62

   VI. THE FOND FORENOON          81

  VII. AFRAID                     96

 VIII. THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT    116

   IX. THE COLD SHOULDER         136

    X. EVENING DRESS             148

   XI. UNDERN                    176

  XII. THE WAY THE WORLD IS      191

 XIII. HOUSEHOLDRY               206

  XIV. POSTMARKS                 223

   XV. PETER                     248

  XVI. THE NEW VILLAGE           258

 XVII. ADOPTION                  274

XVIII. AT PETER'S HOUSE          293

  XIX. THE CUSTODIAN             309




Friendship Village Love Stories




I

OPEN ARMS


Although it is June, the Little Child about whom I shall sometimes write
in these pages this morning brought me a few violets. June violets. They
sound unconvincing and even sentimental. However, here they are in their
vase; and they are all white but one.

"Only one blue one," said Little Child, regretfully; "May must be'most
dead by mistake."

"Don't the months die as soon as they go away?" I asked her, and a
little shocked line troubled her forehead.

"Oh, no," she said; "they never die at all. They wait and show the next
months how."

So this year's May is showing June how. As if one should have a kind of
pre-self, who kept on, after one's birth, and told one what to live and
what not to live. I wish that I had had a pre-self and that it had kept
on with me to show me how. It is what one's mother is, only one is so
occupied in being one's born self that one thinks of her worshipfully
as one's mother instead. But this young June seems to be chiefly May,
and I am glad: for of all the months, May is to me most nearly the
essence of time to be. In May I have always an impulse to date my
letters "To-morrow," for all the enchantment of the usual future seems
come upon me. The other months are richly themselves, but May is all the
great premonitory zest come true; it is expectation come alive; it is
the Then made Now. Conservatively, however, I date my May letters merely
"To-morrow," and it is pleasant to find a conservative estimate which no
one is likely to exceed. For I own that though there is a conservatism
which is now wholly forbidden to me, yet I continue to take in it a
sensuous, stolen pleasure, such as I take in certain ceremonies; and I
know that if I were wholly pagan, extreme conservatism would be my chief
indulgence.

This yet-May morning, then, I have been down in the village, gardening
about the streets. My sort of gardening. As in spring another looks
along the wall for her risen phlox and valley-lilies, or for the
upthrust of the annuals, so after my year's absence I peered round this
wall and that for faces and things in the renascence of recognition, or
in the pleasant importance of having just been born. Many a gate and
façade and well-house, of which in my absence I have not thought even
once, has not changed a whit in consequence. And when changes have come,
they have done so with the