What in most literatures appears as a catastrophe appears in New England as a relief.  Energy has run low in the calm veins of such women, and they have better things to do than to dwell upon the lives they might have led had marriage complicated them.  Here genre painting reaches its apogee in American literature:  quaint interiors scrupulously described; rounds of minute activity familiarly portrayed; skimpy moods analyzed with a delicate competence of touch.  At the same time, New England literature was now too sentimental and now too realistic to allow all its old maids to remain perpetually sweet and passive.  In its sentimental hours it liked to call up their younger days and to show them at the point which had decided or compelled their future loneliness—­again and again discovering some act of abnegation such as giving up a lover because of the unsteadiness of his moral principles or surrendering him to another woman to whom he seemed for some reason or other to belong.  In its realistic hours local color in New England liked to examine the atrophy of the emotions which in these stories often grows upon the celibate.  One formula endlessly repeated deals with the efforts of some acrid spinster—­or wife long widowed—­to keep a young girl from marriage, generally out of contempt for love as a trivial weakness; the conclusion usually makes love victorious after a thunderbolt of revelation to the hinderer.  There are inquiries, too, into the repressions and obsessions of women whose lives in this fashion or that have missed their flowering.  Many of the inquiries are sympathetic, tender, penetrating, but most of them incline toward timidity and tameness.  Their note is prevailingly the note of elegy; they are seen through a trembling haze of reticence.  It is as if they had been made for readers of a vitality no more abundant than that of their angular heroines.

It would be possible to make a picturesque, precious anthology of stories dealing with the types and humors of New England.  Different writers would contribute different tones:  Sarah Orne Jewett the tone of faded gentility brooding over its miniature possessions in decaying seaport towns or in idyllic villages a little further inland; Mary E. Wilkins Freeman the tone of a stern honesty trained in isolated farms and along high, exposed ridges where the wind seems to have gnarled the dispositions of men and women as it has gnarled the apple trees and where human stubbornness perpetually crops out through a covering of kindliness as if in imitation of those granite ledges which everywhere tend to break through the thin soil; Alice Brown the tone of a homely accuracy touched with the fresh hues of a gently poetical temperament.  More detailed in actuality than the stories of other sections, these New England plots do not fall so readily into formulas as do those of the South and West; and yet they have their formulas:  how a stubborn pride worthy of some supreme cause holds an elderly Yankee