Saxe Holm's Stories 1st2d Ser - 1 Author:Helen Hunt Jackson Volume: 1 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1898 Original Publisher: Scribner Subjects: Fiction / Classics Fiction / Literary Fiction / Short Stories Fiction / Family Life History / United States / General Literary Criticism / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. ... more »It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: HOW ONE WOMAN KEPT HER HUSBAND. HY my sister married John Gray, I never could understand. I was twenty-two and she was eighteen when the marriage took place. They had known each other just one year. He had been passionately in love with her from the first day of their meeting. She had come more slowly to loving him: but love him she did, with a love of such depth and fervor as are rarely seen. He was her equal in nothing except position and wealth. He had a singular mixture of faults of opposite temperaments. He had the reticent, dreamy, procrastinating inertia of the bilious melancholic man, side by side with the impressionable sensuousness, the sensitiveness and sentimentalism of the most sanguine- nervous type. There is great charm in such a combination, especially to persons of a keen, alert nature. My sister was earnest, wise, resolute. John Gray was nonchalant, shrewd, vacillating. My sister was exact, methodical, ready. John Gray was careless, spasmodic, dilatory. My sister had affection. He had tenderness. She was religious of soul; he had i sort of transcendental perceptivity, so to speak, which kept him more alive to the comforts of religion than to its obligations. My sister would have gone to the stake rather than tell a lie. He would tell a lie unhesitatingly, rather than give anybody pain. My sister lived earnestly, fully, actively, in each moment of the present. It never seemed quite cl...« less