The Common Lot and Other Stories. Emma Bell Miles

and how he laughed, too. She went, on feet that love made light, to prepare her dinner of herbs.

      Later, she might lose sight of the vision somewhat, for we are all as incapable of holding constantly to great thoughts as of putting such definitely into words; but when the trailing glories paled, here was a child, gloriously alive, to remind her that she had once been inspired with the profoundly rational courage of seeing things as they are.

      And on the cradle, pieced by Nigarie in the summer mornings while both babies slept, lay a little quilt of the pattern they had named the Friendship’s Urn.

      three

      A Dark Rose

      From Harper’s Monthly Magazine 118 (February 1909): 426–33; illustrated by Lucius Wolcott Hitchcock

      Averilla Sargent, the pampered village flirt in “A Dark Rose,” leads young Luther Estill, a budding country preacher, on a merry chase as he woos her to be his wife. Thinking that the constriction of a preacher’s life is not what she had in mind for herself, Averilla declines initially, but then she accepts him and declares herself ready to be a preacher’s wife with all the “goodness” that entails. But the conversion perhaps comes too easily for Averilla and causes the reader to suspect her sincerity. Other questions arise as well: Is Miles deliberately presenting Averilla as an unreliable narrator? Is she positing this character as an archetype of the Appalachian woman who must play a role of subservience because she has no other option in the patriarchal culture she lives in?

      . . .

      Five preachers, in the intervals of a brush-meeting on Puncheon Camp Creek, were enjoying the hospitality of Brother Zack Lowry, whose big log house was near the place of meeting. Aunt Sa’Jane, the house-mother, quick and tireless as an ant despite her fifty-odd years, was clearing the dinner from the table in the open entry, and the men, sitting on the long porch, told stories of past revivals.