The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Precipice, by Elia Wilkinson Peattie

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Title: The Precipice

Author: Elia Wilkinson Peattie

Release Date: April 27, 2004 [EBook #12177]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE PRECIPICE

_A Novel_

BY

ELIA W. PEATTIE

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

1914

_A fanfare of trumpets is blowing to which women the world
over are listening. They listen even against their wills, and
not all of them answer, though all are disturbed. Shut their
ears to it as they will, they cannot wholly keep out the
clamor of those trumpets, but whether in thrall to love or to
religion, to custom or to old ideals of self-obliterating
duty, they are stirred. They move in their sleep, or spring
to action, and they present to the world a new problem, a new
force--or a new menace_....

THE PRECIPICE

I

It was all over. Kate Barrington had her degree and her graduating
honors; the banquets and breakfasts, the little intimate farewell
gatherings, and the stirring convocation were through with. So now she
was going home.

With such reluctance had the Chicago spring drawn to a close that, even
in June, the campus looked poorly equipped for summer, and it was a
pleasure, as she told her friend Lena Vroom, who had come with her to
the station to see her off, to think how much further everything would
be advanced "down-state."

"To-morrow morning, the first thing," she declared, "I shall go in the
side entry and take down the garden shears and cut the roses to put in
the Dresden vases on the marble mantelshelf in the front room."

"Don't try to make me think you're domestic," said Miss Vroom with
unwonted raillery.

"Domestic, do you call it?" cried Kate. "It isn't being domestic; it's
turning in to make up to lady mother for the four years she's been
deprived of my society. You may not believe it, but that's been a
hardship for her. I say, Lena, you'