Transcriber's Note:
The images for this text were scanned from the 1894 edition.




Pembroke

Mary E. Wilkins

Harper & Brothers Publishers; New York: 1900


[Illustration: "'It's beautiful,' Rose said"]


Introductory Sketch


_Pembroke_ was originally intended as a study of the human will in
several New England characters, in different phases of disease and
abnormal development, and to prove, especially in the most marked
case, the truth of a theory that its cure depended entirely upon the
capacity of the individual for a love which could rise above all
considerations of self, as Barnabas Thayer's love for Charlotte
Barnard finally did.

While Barnabas Thayer is the most pronounced exemplification of this
theory, and while he, being drawn from life, originally suggested the
scheme of the study, a number of the other characters, notably