is a beautiful character, too,
they say, but somehow Gabriella, even as a child, appealed to me more.
She has three times the sense of her sister."

Then they shook hands and parted, while Gabriella, tripping through the
Second Market, was saying to herself: "There's not the least bit of
sense in your thinking about him, Gabriella."

In Hill Street, maple and poplar trees were in full leaf, and little
flakes of sunshine, as soft as flowers, were scattered over the brick
pavement. Beyond the housetops the sky was golden, and at the corner the
rusty ironwork of an old balcony had turned to the colour of bronze. The
burning light of the sunset blinded her eyes, while an intense sweetness
came to her from the honeysuckle clambering over a low white porch; and
this light and this sweetness possessed an ineffable quality. Life,
which had been merely placid a few hours before, had become suddenly
poignant--every instant was pregnant with happiness, every detail was
piercingly vivid. Her whole being was flooded with a sensation of
richness and wonder, as if she had awakened with surprise to a different
world from the one she had closed her eyes on a minute before.

As she crossed the street she saw her mother's head above a box of clove
pinks in the window; and a little later the front door opened and Miss
Polly Hatch, a small, indomitable spinster who sewed out by the day,
walked rapidly between the iron urns and stopped under the creamy
blossoms of the old magnolia tree in the yard.

"It's too late for your ma to be workin', Gabriella. You'd better stop
her."

Pausing in the middle of the walk, she comfortably tucked under her arm
an unwieldy bundle she carried, and added, with the shrewdness which was
the result of a long and painful experience with human nature: "It's
funny--ain't it?--how downright mulish your ma can be when she wants
to?"

"I can't do a thing on earth with her," answered Gabriella in distress.
"You have more influence over her than I have, Miss Polly."

Miss P

Martha Finley (1828 - 1909) was a teacher and author of numerous works, the most well known being the 28 volume Elsie Dinsmore series which was published over a span of 38 years. The daughter of Presbyterian minister Dr. James Brown Finley and his wife and cousin Maria Theresa Brown Finley, she was born on April 26th, 1828 in Chillicothe, Ohio. Finley wrote many of her books under the psodonym Martha Farquharson. She died in 1909 in Elkton, Maryland, where she moved in 1876.

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