United States or Norway ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Dominic Iglesias moved across and drew down the blinds, catching sight as he did so between the tossing foliage of the balsam-poplars which glistened in the driving wet of the unwinking gaselier in the Lovegroves' dining-room, on the other side of the Green. He remembered that he ought to have called on Mrs.
The room had been originally intended for a drawing-room, as was evident from the inevitable white and gold wall-paper and the tarnished gilt beading round the doors and window shutters; the mantelpiece, too, was of white marble, and the gaselier fitted with dingy crystal lustres.
In its simplest form it is merely betting on the turn of each card throughout a pack. Although it was broad daylight, the room in which the operations took place was shuttered and had the blinds drawn. A three-light gaselier beat down on a big table in the centre of the room, round three sides of which were ranged a dozen or fifteen men eagerly intent on the operations of the banker.
Then the door closed behind us with an echoing clang, and the small, cold rooms came forward stiffly to greet us. The man in grey went to the one window and drew back the curtain; it was growing dusk now. My aunt sat on a straight, hard chair and stared fixedly at the three-armed gaselier.
In course I couldn't tell what form it might take, and fire I must say I did not expect. I 'adn't on'y been in the place not a quarter of a hour, watering the gaselier in the libery the libery as was, I should say when it struck me I'd forgot my screw-driver, so, fortunately, as things turned out, I went 'ome to my place to get it, and I come back to see the place all in a blaze.
He observed, criticised, judged, condemned unsparingly, all mental courtesies in abeyance. When, therefore, at this juncture the three eyes of the Lovegroves' dining-room gaselier winked slowly, and closed their lids so to speak ceasing to watch and to supplicate, he suffered no self-reproach. The good, simple couple were shutting up house and going to bed, he supposed.
Papa had left the dining-room. Mary sat at the foot of the table, and her mother at the head. The space between was covered and piled with Mark's kit: the socks, the pocket-handkerchiefs, the vests, the fine white pyjamas. The hanging white globes of the gaselier shone on them. All day Mary had been writing "M.E. Olivier, M.E. Olivier," in clear, hard letters, like print.
The room was repulsive in its disorder. The one lighted burner of the gaselier, turned too high, hissed up into a long tongue of flame. The fire smoked feebly under a newly administered shovelful of 'slack', and a heap of ashes and cinders littered the grate. A pair of walking boots, caked in dry mud, lay on the hearth-rug just where they had been thrown off.
Its one important piece of furniture was a circular table of rosewood standing in the centre of the carpet under a brass gaselier, of which the burnish had perished in patches; and in the centre of the table stood a round-topped glass case containing a stuffed kestrel, with a stuffed lark prostrate under its talons and bleeding vermilion wax.
The blinds were up, the curtains half-drawn, revealing the allurements of the interior. From both sides of the street, the entire length of the dinner-table was visible. Above it, a handsome gilt gaselier spread out its branches, and on this gaselier as many as three gas-jets burned furiously at once. In the intense illumination the faces of the boarders could be distinctly seen.
Word Of The Day