midday
She said that they were terrible , and she knew that in each of them was one of those dreary old women , or disappointed girls , or unhappy wives , or bereaved mothers , she had read of in Miss Wilkins 's stories . She had been too little sensible of the humor which forms the relief of these stories , as it forms the relief of the bare , duteous , conscientious , deeply individualized lives portrayed in them ; and no doubt this can not make its full appeal to the heart of youth aching for their stoical sorrows . Without being so very young , I , too , have found the humor hardly enough at times , and if one has not the habit of experiencing support in tragedy itself , one gets through a remote New England village , at nightfall , say , rather limp than otherwise , and in quite the mood that Miss Wilkins 's bleaker studies leave one in . At midday , or in the bright sunshine of the morning , it is quite possible to fling off the melancholy which breathes the same note in the fact and the fiction ; and I have even had some pleasure at such times in identifying this or , that one-story cottage with its lean-to as a Mary Wilkins house and in placing one of her muted dramas in it . One can not know the people of such places without recognizing her types in them , and one can not know New England without owning the fidelity of her stories to New England character , though , as I have already suggested , quite another sort of stories could be written which should as faithfully represent other phases of New England village life . To the alien inquirer , however , I should be by no means confident that their truth would evince itself , for the reason that human nature is seldom on show anywhere . I am perfectly certain of the truth of Tolstoy and Tourguenief to Russian life , yet I should not be surprised if I went through Russia and met none of their people .