"Never mind, ladies," said Arthur Carroll. "There is really very little use in your telling me your names, because my memory is so bad. I remember neither names nor faces. If I should meet you on the street, and should fail to recognize you on that account, I trust that you will pardon me. And --" said Captain Carroll, "on that account, I will not say anything about your call to the ladies of my family; I should be sure to get it all wrong. We will wait, and trust that you will find them at home the next time you call. Good-afternoon, ladies." Captain Carroll had further mercy. He allowed the ladies to leave the house unattended and to dive desperately into the waiting coach. "Home at once," Mrs. Van Dorn cried, hoarsely, to Samson Rawdy, waking from his nap in some bewilderment. Captain Carroll was standing on the porch with a compound look of kindest pity and mirth on his face when the Carroll ladies came strolling round that way from the pond. He kissed them all, as was his wont; then he laughed out inconsequently. "What are you laughing at, dear?" asked Amy. "At my thoughts, sweetheart."
Author Biography
Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman (1852 - 1930) was a prominent 19th-century American author. Freeman began writing stories and verse for children while still a teenager to help support her family and was quickly successful. Her career as a short story writer launched in 1881 when she took first place in a short story contest with her submission "The Ghost Family." When the supernatural caught her interest, the result was a group of short stories which combined domestic realism with supernaturalism and these have proved very influential. Her best known work was written in the 1880s and 1890s while she lived in Randolph. She produced more than two dozen volumes of published short stories and novels. She is best known for two collections of stories, A Humble Romance and Other Stories (1887) and A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891). Her stories deal mostly with New England life and are among the best of their kind. Freeman is also remembered for her novel Pembroke (1894) and she contributed a notable chapter to the collaborative novel The Whole Family (1908). Through her different genres of work including children's stories, poems and short stories, Mary Wilkins Freeman sought to demonstrate her values as a feminist. During the time which she was writing, she did this in nonconventional ways; for example, she diverged from making her female characters weak and in need of help which was a common trope in literature.
