An Old Maid's Paradise Author:Elizabeth Stuart Phelps General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1885 Original Publisher: Houghton, Mifflin and Company Subjects: Fiction / General Fiction / Classics Fiction / Historical Fiction / Literary Fiction / Short Stories Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may b... more »e 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: IV. POSSESSION. Cokona recovered the use of her ankle so slowly that, as Susy said, so long as Baby had the mumps it did not seem wise to visit Fairharbor just at present. Corona sighed and submitted. She held the baby, with one foot on a chair, and contented herself by writing more or less contradictory orders to her builder by every mail. Corona had her share of friends -- kind, obliging, good people ; but there seemed to be no one of them on whom she felt at precise liberty to call and say: " Run down to Fairharbor in the month of April, and put a house in order for a lame woman." At the age Corona had reached, a woman's friends are more or less unavailable to her for emergencies. Most of them had neuralgia or a baby, sick-headaches or a husband, a public school or a bronchial cough. If not these, then a widower, a minister, a Sunday-school, a mother, a flirtation, or a Society for the Elevation of the Human Race, to keep them at home. More and more, as Corona grew older, she was impressed by the great helplessness of human friendship. " We don't serve each other very far," whispered Corona, mournfully, to the baby. " It is little we can do, after all. We hold out a hand now and then, impulsively or guardedly, as the case may be; we throng on and pass; we jostle and are gone; we reserve our real needs from each other as if they were guilty secrets. Who perceives when his friend is starving? Who cries out: Give me bread ? Emerson was r...« less