Loveliness: A Story

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

At first, her father took her out with him in the cab, so she should feel that she was conducting the search herself. But she had grown too feeble for this exertion. Sometimes, on such drives, she saw cruel sights,—animals suffering at the black tempers of men or the diabolic jests of boys; and she was hurried home, shivering and sobbing. When night came she would ask for the Yorkshire's bed to be put beside her own, and with trembling fingers would draw up the crimson blankets over the crimson mattress, as if the dog had been between them. Then she would ask the question that haunted her most:—

"Mamma, who will put Loveliness into a little baxet to sleep, and cover him up? Papa, Papa, will they be kind to Loveliness?"

Stormy nights and days were always the hardest.

"Will Loveliness be out and get wet? Will he shiver like 'e black dog I saw to-day? Will he have warm milk for his supper? Is there anybody to rub him dry and cuddle my Loveliness?"

To divert the child from her grief proved impossible. They took her somewhere, in the old, idle effort to change the place and help the pain; but she mourned so, "because he might come home, and nobody see him but me," that they brought her back.

The president of the university, who was a dogless and childless man, presented the bereaved household with a mongrel white puppy, purchased under the amiable impression that it was of a rare, Parisian breed. The distinguished man cherished the ignorant hope of bestowing consolation. But the invalid child, with the sensitiveness of invalid children, refused to look at the puppy, who was returned to his donor, and constituted himself henceforth the tyrant and terror of that scholastic household.

As the weather grew warmer, little Adah failed and sank. It came on to be the bloom of the year, and she no longer left the house.

The carrier and the cab driver lifted their hats in silence now, when they passed the window where the little girl sat, and the newsboy looked up with a sober face, like that of a man. The faculty and the neighbors did not ask, "How is the child?" but always, "Have you heard from the dog?" The doctor began to call daily. He did not shake his head,—no doctor does outside of an old-fashioned story,—and he smiled cheerfully enough inside the house; but when he came out of it, to his carriage, he did not smile. So the spring mellowed, and it was the first of June.

One night, the poor professor sat trying to put into shape an impossible thesis on an incomprehensible subject (it was called The Identity of Identity and Non-Identity), for Commencement delivery in his department. Pulling aside some books of reference that he needed, he dragged to view a pamphlet from the lowest shelf of the revolving bookcase. Then he saw the marks of the Yorkshire's teeth and claws on the pamphlet corners, and, sadly smiling, he opened and read.

The Commencement thesis on The Identity of Identity and Non-Identity was not corrected that night. The professor of psychology sat moulded into his study chair, rigid, with iron lips and clenched hands, and read the pamphlet through, every word, from beginning to end. For the first time in his life, this eminent man, wise in the wisdom of the world of mind, and half educated in the practical affairs of the world of matter, studied for himself the authenticated records of the torments imposed upon dumb animals in the name of science.