The Wreck of the South Pole and Other Strange Tales — page 153: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

146 What Shall She Do? In all my wanderings I never met with but one woman who embodied all the graces which I had in my mind ascribed to the fictitious person who should at some time be my wife. But while in St. Louis on the Globe-Demo- crat I met a lady who interested me strangely. She was married, and that, of course, placed her beyond my reach, although she was such a one as I would have desired as a wife. I was introduced to her three years before I went to Kansas City, and in these three years was so far favored as to become an adopted son in the family and to be al- lowed to call this woman mother. Yet she was scarce ten years older than myself. I wish I could describe her better, for, as I have said, she was to me the embodiment of all that was womanly. Cold and reserved, she allowed no one to be familiar and she had no intimate friends, though many adored her. She was cold and reserved, and yet I have known her to be very tender to a poor sick person or one in distress. Then she was small, and had a face which once seen would be remembered by its proud, aristocratic look. She was a little autocrat. Perhaps that is why I, bohemian that I am, loved her. One evening after my reports had been sent to To- peka, and I was busily engaged upon a news letter which was to be sent by the ten o'clock mail, a man nearly forty years of age entered my office and inquired if I was the Capital reporter. I replied in the affirmative, with my usual agreeable advertising smile, and asked what I could Gomicbooks co