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A European girl, brought up in the strictest ignorance of the world, would still have had intuitions to make her either painfully embarrassed or secretly delighted with this impromptu visit to a young bachelor; but Lydia, who had been allowed to read "everything" and the only compromise to whose youth had been fitful attempts of the family to remember "not to talk too much about things before Lydia," was clad in that unearthly innocence which the advancing tide of sophistication has still left in some parts of the United States that sweet, proud, pathetic conviction of the American girl that evil is not a vital force in any world that she knows.
It was an inconsistent supplement to the sermon but characteristic. "Carl," he said, flushing under the ironical battery of the other's eyes, "I don't think I understand you " Carl laughed. "Nobody does," he said. "I don't myself." The fire in the marble fireplace died down, leaping in fitful shadow over the iron-bound doors riveted in nail-heads.
The fitful wind whistled up, wild and plaintive; the river chafed and bubbled through the iron grating below; the loose scales of the dragon clashed as the night breezes reached them: and these sounds were still to him as the language of his gods, which filled him with a fearful rapture, and inspired him, in the terrible degradation of his being, as with a new soul. He listened and listened yet.
He understood, no one better than he, the tendency of all his family to an uprising in the world, which tendency was almost as strong in his mother as in his father. And he had been by no means without a similar ambition himself, though with him the ambition had been only fitful, not enduring.
"It's a very morbid letter," he said, with a perplexed air, when he had finished. "Yes," she assented. "But it's a very good letter. Poor Ben!" Her husband took it up again, and read here and there a passage from it. "But I am turning to you now for help in a matter on which my own conscience throws such a fitful and uncertain light that I cannot trust it.
Here is one" she read the inscription on the base of a narrow gray stone "'After life's fitful fever she sleeps well." "Ach," Aunt Maria said tartly, "I guess her man knowed why he put that on. That poor woman had three husbands and eleven children, so I guess she had fitful fever enough."
Fitful flashes of flame now and then burst out amid the ruins, silhouetting the shadows of the lynchers into fierce giant forms with frenzied faces from which came first murmurs and finally shouts of: "Lynch her! Lynch her!"
I will meet one day the Joy without me that dwells behind the screen of light and will stand in the overflowing solitude where all things are seen as by their creator. This autumn morning is tired with excess of light, and if your songs grow fitful and languid give me your flute awhile.
The curtains of the sitting-room were still undrawn, and from within he caught the cheerful glow of the fire, and Sally seated on the rug before it reading by the fitful light.
However, long trailing kelp from sunken rocks waved forebodingly under her keel, and the wreck of a great steamship smashed on the beach abreast gave a gloomy aspect to the scene. I was not to be let off easy. The Virgins would collect tribute even from the Spray passing their promontory. Fitful rain-squalls from the northwest followed the northeast gale.
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