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"Life had better wane slowly away than to go out in lurid gleams like the flashes of a dying volcano." And now, reader, after this long digression, you can understand my surprise at seeing broad gleams of light reaching out into the darkness from the windows of that north-west chamber, as I breasted the storm on my way to visit the sick child of Mary Jones.
He was no martyr at all. Nobody is a martyr, if he cannot help himself. If Frederic had the least spirit of martyrdom, he would have breasted his sorrow manfully and alone. Instead of which, he shuffled himself and his misery upon poor simple Jane, getting all the solace he could from her, and leading her a wretched, almost hopeless life for years. This is what we are to admire!
Such as it was I feel again its majesty on those occasions on which I dragged if I must here once more speak for myself only after Albany cousins through its courts of edification: I remember being very tired and cold and hungry there, in a little light drab and very glossy or shiny "talma" breasted with rather troublesome buttonhole-embroideries; though concomitantly conscious that I was somehow in Europe, since everything about me had been "brought over," which ought to have been consoling, and seems in fact to have been so in some degree, inasmuch as both my own pain and the sense of the cousinly, the Albany, headaches quite fade in that recovered presence of big European Art embodied in Thorwaldsen's enormous Christ and the Disciples, a shining marble company ranged in a semicircle of dark maroon walls.
They breasted into the hollows like any sea-bird and lifted with every heave to shake the water from bilge to quarter. They came across with never a let-up, shaving everything along the way until a good berth was picked out. Then they let go sails, dropped anchor and were ready for a rest. Nobody got by our fellows without a word. And we weren't the only crew of critics.
Looking back over the eleven years of severe struggles, pecuniary embarrassments, unexpected difficulties, anxious days, toiling, wearisome nights, with hopes of relief dashed at almost every turn, surrounded by the indifference of friends, and with the violent opposition of enemies, we can only wonder that the society has breasted the storm and is saved from a complete and total wreck. * This society never was endowed, never had a working capital, never has been the recipient of contributions from churches or of systematic donations from individuals.
Grace apparently dreaded discovery as shrinkingly as if her conscience were not clear, and Gregory, in the midst of his own perturbation, found it incongruous that she who was always right, wanted to hide. As they breasted the billows of jollity which in its vocal stress became almost materialized, there grew up within him a feeling uneasily akin to the shame of his past.
Shrimplin was attacking his Thanksgiving turkey, North, from his window, watched the leaden clouds that overhung the housetops. From the frozen dirt of the unpaved streets the keen wind whipped up scanty dust clouds, mingling them with sudden flurries of fine snow. Save for the passing of an occasional pedestrian who breasted the gale with lowered head, the Square was deserted.
Tom said nothing till they had breasted a hill, at the top of which he paused panting, and confronted David. 'Noo yo'll not mak a rumpus, Davy, he said, mistrustfully. 'An if do, can't a hundred or two o' yo kick me out? asked David, mockingly. 'I'll mak no rumpus. P'raps yor Mr. Dyson'll convert me. And he walked on laughing.
They laughed as they breasted the wind which swept across the little clearing, and they looked like a bunch of school boys as they plunged through the snow to the shelter of the trees beyond. As Jean stood and watched them through a tiny spot in the little window which the banked-up snow had not covered, her heart thrilled with pride.
In his erratic, tempestuous way, T. X. had suggested the greatest idea for a plot that any author could desire. But it was not of T. X. that John Lexman thought as he breasted the hill, on the slope of which was the tiny habitation known by the somewhat magnificent title of Beston Priory.
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