Vocabulary List for William Dean Howells's "Editha"

He had quickened his pace in mystical response to her mystical urgence, before he could have heard her; now he looked up and answered, "Well?"

All through their courtship, which was contemporaneous with the growth of the war feeling, she had been puzzled by his want of seriousness about it.

Not but that she felt herself able to cope with a congenital defect of that sort, and make his love for her save him from himself.

Not but that she felt herself able to cope with a congenital defect of that sort, and make his love for her save him from himself.

The mystery that had bewildered her was solved by the word; and from that moment she rose from groveling in shame and self-pity, and began to live again in the ideal.

"But don't you see, dearest," she said, "that it wouldn't have come to this if it hadn't been in the order of Providence?

"That ignoble peace!

Besides, she felt, more subliminally, that he was never so near slipping through her fingers as when he took that meek way.

"Now, George, that is blasphemy."

He went away without kissing her, and she felt it a suspension of their engagement.

Within her willfulness she had been frightened by a sense of subtler force in him, and mystically mastered as she had never been before.

Gearson came again next afternoon, looking pale and rather sick, but quite himself, even to his languid irony.

"I guess I'd better tell you, Editha, that I consecrated myself to your god of battles last night by pouring too many libations to him down my own throat.

"I guess I'd better tell you, Editha, that I consecrated myself to your god of battles last night by pouring too many libations to him down my own throat.

My idea is that this isn't going to be a very protracted struggle; we shall just scare the enemy to death before it comes to a fight at all.

Then he added, gravely: "He came home with misgivings about war, and they grew on him.

Whether his sophistries satisfied him or not, they satisfied her.

What she called her God, always speaking the name in a deep voice and with the implication of a mutual understanding, would watch over him and keep him and bring him back to her.

"Yes," Editha said, more like a culprit than a comforter.

"You just expected him to kill some one else, some of those foreigners, that weren't there because they had any say about it, but because they had to be there, poor wretches--conscripts, or whatever they call 'em.