The Little God Ebisu (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1914. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VI AT THE TURN OF THE YEAR At times Dru laughed at herself. "You're a silly old spinster " she said and believed her words. Had she not almost declined into the sere and yellow leaf of four and twenty years? But even had her years been double, she, the girl who all her days had lived in her books and seen life hazily through the penumbra of their creation, had remained at heart a child. Like a child indeed, for all her degree with frills, a child younger than that tall sister Cynthia, who had always a boy or two with whom to comrade, she let herself drift upon the enchanted billows of that wide and dangerous sea that she knew, from her books, had echoed down the ages under the name of love. She had met Eliot's sister, though it was Marjorie Cathcart, not Eliot, who brought her to call, and she found Marjorie curiously guarded in all that she said. But she had met Eliot's sister. And she had gone several times to rather large teas at the town-house of the Severances. Odd, in those days, to remember how, as a little, lonely child, she had stood by the crack of the fence to watch these same glorious young Severances at their play She had been to the theatre with Eliot; she had had long spins in his motor-car; she had received gifts from him--the new books that she could never afford herself, the sweets that were sinful and delicious luxury, the flowers that made her narrow room a place in which to dream. Best of all, she had had the many hours of his dear companionship, with the heartening sense they brought that she was needful to him. Underlying all, the rock foundation on which the structure of her happiness was built, she had the consciousness that all was right. For, she reasoned pathetically from the books in which she believed, a man does not...