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ALICE LAUDER.
61

enjoy this turn of the wheel! but the gods willed otherwise.

“Money is certainly the best patent medicine for a case like mine, and under its prescription I began to get stronger by degrees, and even to see a prospect of getting fat in some remote future; but it was a long weary time before I could call back the natural spring and enjoyment of life. Clare insisted on taking me through a London season, but I can’t say it was a great success. I had neither spirits nor energy for the hard work of society, and I soon got tired of its endless vain repetitions. Music was a sealed book; since my illness I could not bear even to listen to it. I seemed to get tired even of the beautiful dim repose of the English scenery. Its vivid green did not harmonize with my native associations of summer. Our summer is not green, but white; as the Bible truly says, ‘white unto the harvest,’ and I longed for her dry, stimulating air and aromatic breath, even ‘with fire and fierce heat on her tresses,’ as of old.

“Mrs. Damon’s husband is in the Navy. Last year he was ordered to the South Pacific station, and it occurred to Clare that she would come out to this place for a year or so, to be near him. She took it for granted that I was coming too,

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