Project Gutenberg's The Shoulders of Atlas, by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

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Title: The Shoulders of Atlas
A Novel

Author: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Release Date: January 21, 2006 [EBook #17566]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SHOULDERS OF ATLAS ***

Produced by Jeff Kaylin and Andrew Sly

The Shoulders of Atlas

A Novel

By
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Author of
"By the Light of the Soul" "The Debtor"
"Jerome" "A New England Nun" etc.

New York and London
Harper & Brothers Publishers
MCMVIII

Copyright, 1908, by the New York Herald Co.
All rights reserved.
Published June, 1908.

Chapter I

Henry Whitman was walking home from the shop in the April afternoon.
The spring was very early that year. The meadows were quite green,
and in the damp hollows the green assumed a violet tinge--sometimes
from violets themselves, sometimes from the shadows. The trees
already showed shadows as of a multitude of bird wings; the
peach-trees stood aloof in rosy nimbuses, and the cherry-trees were
faintly a-flutter with white through an intense gloss of gold-green.

Henry realized all the glory of it, but it filled him with a renewal
of the sad and bitter resentment, which was his usual mood, instead
of joy. He was past middle-age. He worked in a shoe-shop. He had
worked in a shoe-shop since he was a young man. There was nothing
else in store for him until he was turned out because of old age.
Then the future looked like a lurid sunset of misery. He earned
reasonably good wages for a man of his years, but prices were so high
that he was not able to save a cent. There had been unusual expenses
during the past ten years, too. His wife Sylvia had not been well,
and once he himself had been laid up six weeks with rheumatism. The
doctor charged two dollars for every visit, and the bill was not
quite settled yet.

Then the little house which had come to him from his father,
encumbered with a mortgage as is usual, had all at once seemed to
need repairs at every point. The roof had leaked like a sieve, two
windows had been blown in, the paint had turned a gray-black, the
gutters had bee