- Sarah Walker
It was very hot. Not a breath of air was stirring throughout the western wing of the Greyport Hotel, and the usual feverish life of its four hundred inmates had succumbed to the weather. The great veranda was deserted; the corridors were desolated; no footfall echoed in the passages; the lazy rustle of a wandering skirt, or a passing sigh that was half a pant, seemed to intensify the heated silence. An intoxicated bee, disgracefully unsteady in wing and leg, who had been holding an inebriated conversation with himself in the corner of my window pane, had gone to sleep at last and was snoring. The errant prince might have entered the slumberous halls unchallenged, and walked into any of the darkened rooms whose open doors gaped for more air, without awakening the veriest Greyport flirt with his salutation. At times a drowsy voice, a lazily interjected sentence, an incoherent protest, a long-drawn phrase of saccharine tenuity suddenly broke off with a gasp, came vaguely to the ear, as if indicating a half-suspended, half-articulated existence somewhere, but not definite enough to indicate conversation. In the midst of this, there was the sudden crying of a child.
I looked up from my work. Through the camera of my jealously guarded window I could catch a glimpse of the vivid, quivering blue of the sky, the glittering intensity of the ocean, the long motionless leaves of the horse-chestnut in the road, all utterly inconsistent with anything as active as this lamentation. I stepped to the open door and into the silent hall.
...
- What Miss Edith Saw From Her Window
Our window's not much, though it fronts on the street;
There's a fly in the pane that gets nothin' to eat;
But it's curious how people think it's a treat
For me to look out of the window!
...
- Miss Edith Makes Another Friend
Oh, you're the girl lives on the corner? Come in if you want to come quick!
There's no one but me in the house, and the cook but she's only a stick.
Don't try the front way, but come over the fence through the window that's how.
Don't mind the big dog he won't bite you just see him obey me! there, now!
...
- Miss Edith Makes It Pleasant For Brother Jack
"Crying!" Of course I am crying, and I guess you would be crying, too,
If people were telling such stories as they tell about me, about you.
Oh yes, you can laugh if you want to, and smoke as you didn't care how,
And get your brains softened like uncle's. Dr. Jones says you're gettin' it now.
...
- Miss Edith's Modest Request
My papa knows you, and he says you're a man who makes reading for books;
But I never read nothing you wrote, nor did Papa, I know by his looks.
So I guess you're like me when I talk, and I talk, and I talk all the day,
And they only say, "Do stop that child!" or, "Nurse, take Miss Edith away."
...