The only time she had recited it had been at the
"dress rehearsal" two nights before, at which Sara Ray had not
been present.
In the poem a Florentine lady of old time, wedded to a cold and
cruel husband, had died, or was supposed to have died, and had
been carried to "the rich, the beautiful, the dreadful tomb" of
her proud family. In the night she wakened from her trance and
made her escape. Chilled and terrified, she had made her way to
her husband's door, only to be driven away brutally as a restless
ghost by the horror-stricken inmates. A similar reception awaited
her at her father's. Then she had wandered blindly through the
streets of Florence until she had fallen exhausted at the door of
the lover of her girlhood. He, unafraid, had taken her in and
cared for her. On the morrow, the husband and father, having
discovered the empty tomb, came to claim her. She refused to
return to them and the case was carried to the court of law. The
verdict given was that a woman who had been "to burial borne" and
left for dead, who had been driven from her husband's door and
from her childhood home, "must be adjudged as dead in law and
fact," was no more daughter or wife, but was set free to form what
new ties she would. The climax of the whole selection came in the
line,
"The court pronounces the defendant--DEAD!" and the Story Girl was
wont to render it with such dramatic intensity and power that the
veriest dullard among her listeners could not have missed its
force and significance.
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