BOOKS.RESEAU.ORG - English-French Library

- Excerpts -

Page 1 : Produced by Distributed Proofreaders HENRY B. FULLER With the Procession Introduction by Mark Harris I When old Mr. Marshall finally took to his bed, the household viewed this action with more surprise than sympathy, and with more impatience than surprise. It seemed like the breaking down of a machine whose trustworthiness had been hitherto infallible; his family were almost forced to the acknowledgement that he was but a mere human being after all. They had enjoyed a certain intimacy with him, in lengths varying with their respective ages, but they had never made a full avowal that his being rested on any tangible physical basis.

Page 14 : "The carpet's all right, as far as I can see," declared Jane. "What if it is fifteen years old? Have you got one at Riverdale that is even fifteen months old? You know you haven't; if you had you'd start a museum of antiques with it. And as for our budging from this dear old place, don't you look for it; we're attached to it, even if you're not. Besides, to move would be to throw away the one advantage that we really have. Why, think of it!" she continued with a gesticulating and wide-eyed eloquence. "We have lived right here in this one house over thirty years. How many families in this town have lived in one house thirty years? Or twenty? Or even ten? We've always had the same door-plate on the same door. We've always had the same number in the directory.

Page 27 : The other girl rose. She was tall and slender, like Jane. She had a pasty complexion and weak, reddish eyes. Her expression was somewhat plaintive and distressed--irritating, too, in the long run. "Step along," called Mrs. Bates. She traversed the "office," passed into a room beyond, pushed Jane ahead of her, and shut the door. "I don't care if it does hurt her feelings." Mrs. Bates's reference appeared to be to Miss Peters. The door closed with a light click, and Jane looked about her with a great and sudden surprise. Poor stupid, stumbling child!--she understood at last in what spirit she had been received and on what footing she had been placed. She found herself in a small, cramped, low-ceiled room which was filled with worn and antiquated furniture. There was a ponderous old mahogany bureau, with the veneering cracked and peeled, and a bed to correspond. There was a shabby little writing-desk, whose let-down lid was lined with faded and blotted green baize.

Page 40 : Mrs. Bates seated herself and threw open her furs. Her affluence, her expansiveness, her easy mastery of the situation seemed to crowd this square and ineffective old man quite into a corner. She counted his wrinkles and his gray hairs; she noted the patient dulness of his eye and the slow deliberation of his movements. "He is old," she thought; "older than I should have imagined. I might have bestirred myself and come before." She turned on him with a flash of her own magnificent and abounding vitality. "I want you to assure me that I am not in the way--that I am not interrupting business. This is not the 'busy day,' I hope, that the little placards in the offices tell about." She must meet his unreadiness with the fluency over which she had such a fortunate and unfailing command. "This isn't the busy hour of the day, nor the busy day of the week, nor the busy week of the year?" Marshall smiled slowly.

Page 53 : As for the picture-dealers, he complained that a canvas of any importance was likely to be displayed after a fashion frankly mercantile, in the show-window of the shop--a step which met more than halfway the public demand for free art, but which unjustly caused many an original to be taken for a copy. "Perhaps, though," he would say, "the public has got so far along as to judge of a picture independent of its surroundings. Possibly the crimson draperies and the row of gas-jets have really come to be superfluous." He missed, furthermore, many of his accustomed pleasures and conveniences. He was astonished to find a metropolis without a promenade. True, on Sunday afternoons there was a good deal of strolling up and down along a half-mile of the lake shore; but he never observed that the people whose houses overlooked all this strolling ever took any part in it, and he never learned that they enjoyed this diversion anywhere else. "Singular," he said; "no concerted walking or driving.

Page 66 : Bates--it was nothing less than a command, of course, and he must obey it. He had found it something of an ordeal to lead even Jane round the floor once; how much greater a one, then, to perform the like service for Mrs. Granger Bates, whose escort could not but expect to draw scrutiny and to provoke inquiry. He was a modest man with no pronounced social ambitions; he would immensely have preferred to pass the same length of time staring into a locomotive head-light. Mrs. Bates presently effected a clearance, and with Brower as a convoy steered straight for the open sea. She carried a bunch of plumes aloft, showed a flashing brilliant on both the port and the starboard side, and left a long trail of rustling silk and lace behind her. And as she pursued her course, other craft, great and small, dipped their colors right and left. "I want you to see both ends of the scale," she presently said to Brower. "You are trying to bring them closer together, they tell me.

Page 79 : Or, again "Imagine; I am to have a tooth filled. Auntie says I needn't trouble to go away down-town--there is a very good man right on Twenty-second Street. 'Go early,' she says; 'and try to be over with it by eleven, so that you can enjoy your lunch.' Did you ever know of such thoughtfulness?" "No, I never did," acknowledged Truesdale, grimly. By these and other such subterfuges did Gladys keep her epistolary hand in, until the time came when she really had something of consequence to communicate. Once or twice she also regaled him with the comments of the Beldens on the building projects of the Marshalls. Truesdale had the same tepid interest for these advices as for her other notes and comments. He did not consider himself as particularly concerned. At best he was but a bird of passage. And it seemed to him a sad error to load one's self down with so dense and stationary a thing as a house.

Page 92 : "Do you know," said Brower, at the first crossing, "I'm going to talk to your father about this justice business." "Well," rejoined Truesdale, "he'll listen to you if he'll listen to anybody; but he's awfully sore about it." "So are other people sore about it--hundreds of people much poorer and humbler than any of us, people to whom the miscarriage of justice is not a mere matter of exasperation and annoyance, but a real matter of life and death. They want care and attention--as the doctors say; they need a law-dispensary--that's about it. There are institutions that look after people's minds and bodies gratis; I want to see an institution started up that will do as much for their estates. I want to see a building for it, with an endowment and a library and a force of practitioners.

Page 105 : Paston helped Mrs. Bates out on to the pier with a cautious gallantry, and immediately betook himself to the younger members of the party; he considered the courtesies due from a guest as now amply accomplished. He attached himself at once to Rosamund; he helped her over the loose litter of lumber; he steadied ladders for her at every fresh feint of mounting; he bestirred himself to a rapacious culling of wild-flowers for the mere opportunity of tying them together with a shaving. Once he sprinkled them over with a handful of sawdust, after the manner of a florist extemporizing a heavy dew. Rosy laughed and nodded, and thrust the flowers into her belt. "You will never be serious," she protested. "Oh yes, I shall. I am always a good deal more serious than people suppose." He bestowed upon her a look serious enough to match his words. It was as serious as any one could have wished, and Rosy dropped her eyes and was distinctly pensive for a minute or two.

Page 118 : She made a thorough revision of her mother's list. Then she turned to her own. "Now, these people--I know all of them, and am indebted to them, and expect to have relations with them after I come back. They've all got to stay on." "Very good," said Jane, meekly. What else could she say? Was it not to some such social triumph as this that for a good six months she had bent all her own endeavors? She tried now to make the triumph seem as glorious as it should, but she could not feel that she was succeeding. Another stage in the proceeding arrived when the gowns began to come home from the dress-maker's. Jane then laid aside her pen to find pins, to contrive ruchings, to catch up the loose ends of draperies, while her mother and her sister Alice and her aunt Lydia circled and fluttered and swooped and chattered through a hundred suggestions and amendments and alterations. Then Jane would stand upon the threshold, and blink tearfully and indignantly into the gloom of the hall.