The Indiscreet Letter
1915
The Indiscreet Letter, published in 1915 by Eleanor Hallowell Abbott, is a novel set during a train journey that focuses on the interactions between passengers, including a traveling salesman and a young girl who has penned an 'indiscreet letter.' The narrative delves into themes of love, uncertainty, and the consequences of revealing one's true feelings, as the girl grapples with her past and the emotional fallout from a train wreck. The story culminates at a train station, where the potential for romantic fulfillment and the legitimacy of her emotions are poignantly explored.
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“Why, I've been all over the world, I tell you, and fairly loafed and lolled in every conceivable sort of ease and luxury, but the Soul of me”
— Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
“Provide for her Future”
— Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
“I wish I could have lived just one day when the world was new. I wish”
— Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
“More than being absurdly blond and absurdly messy, the Young Electrician had one of those extraordinarily sweet, extraordinarily vital, strangely mysterious, utterly unexplainable masculine faces that fill your senses with an odd, impersonal disquietude, an itching unrest, like the hazy, teasing reminder of some previous existence in a prehistoric cave, or, more tormenting still, with the tingling, psychic prophecy of some amazing emotional experience yet to come.””
— Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
“...a fellow's a fool when he marries who don't go to work deliberately to study and understand his wife. Women are awfully understandable if you only go at it right.””
— Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
“As unappreciatingly as a duck might shake champagne from its back, the Traveling Salesman shrugged the compliment from his shoulders.””
— Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
“As far as I can reckon, a woman can stand absolutely anything under God's heaven that she knows; but she just up and can't stand the littlest, teeniest, no-account sort of thing that she ain't sure of. Answers may kill 'em dead enough, but it's questions that eats 'em alive.””
— Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
“Out from the servient shoulders of some smooth-tongued Waiter it stares, into the scared dilating pupils of the White Satin Bride with her pledged hand clutching her Bridegroom's sleeve. Up from the gravelly, pick-and-shovel labor of the new-made grave it lifts its weirdly magnetic eyes to the Widow's tears. Down from some petted Princeling's silver-trimmed saddle horse it smiles its electrifying, wistful smile into the Peasant's sodden weariness. Across the slender white rail of an always out-going steamer it stings back into your gray, land-locked consciousness like the tang of a scarlet spray. And the secret of the face, of course, is "Lure"; but to save your soul you could not decide in any specific case whether the lure is the lure of personality, or the lure of physiognomy”
— Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
