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I may have a very specific use for them later. Au revoir and may it be soon!" The two days succeeding seemed to Average Jones, haunted as he was by an importunate craving to look again into Miss Graham's limpid and changeful eyes, a dull and sodden period of probation. The messenger boy who finally brought her expected note, looked to him like a Greek godling.
The rifle-fire dropped. The devil had driven home all his tin-tacks, and for the rest of the day we had calm. Nov. 11. Ugh! What a day! Dull, cold, dank, and misty the spit of an 11th of November at home. Not even a shell from Long Tom to liven it. The High Street looks doubly dead; only a sodden orderly plashes up its spreading emptiness on a sodden horse.
Nothing was to be heard except the occasional crack of the sniper's shot, the dripping of the rain, and the low murmur of voices from the outer cave. In the narrow space beside me lay my equipment; revolver, and a sodden packet of cigarettes. Everything damp, cold and dark; candle-end guttering.
It was these two timid, well-meaning statesmen who now found themselves pitted against Napoleon, and Napoleon's Minister, Talleyrand; against the greatest warrior and lawgiver, and against one of the greatest diplomats, of modern times; against two men, moreover, whose sodden lack of conscience was but heightened by the contrast with their brilliant genius and lofty force of character; two men who were unable to so much as appreciate that there was shame in the practice of venality, dishonesty, mendacity, cruelty, and treachery.
Presently it began to descend steeply in a narrow green gully, where the going was bad, and Dickson, weighted with pack and waterproof, had much ado to keep his feet on the sodden slopes. Then, as he rounded a crook of hill, the ground fell away from his feet, the burn swept in a water-slide to the boulders of the shore, and the storm-tossed sea lay before him.
They were all blotted and blurred, and sodden with the water, but there were whole sentences in the inner folds that were sufficient for him to recognize his wife's handwriting, and to see what was the drift and the meaning of them.
It had all become a great nest of dirt and stealing and busy chicanery, where dingy, hawk-eyed men with sodden white faces and disgusting hands lay in wait for the unwary who had business with the city government, to rob them on pretence of facilitating their affairs, to cringe for a little coin flung them in scorn sometimes by one who had grown rich in greater robbery than they could practise sometimes, too, springing aside to escape a kick or a blow as ill-tempered success went swinging by, high-handed and vulgarly cruel, a few degrees less filthy and ten thousand times more repulsive.
He felt as if quite ten years had passed since he had half fallen in love with Alexina Groome in a ball room that was now a charred heap in the sodden wreck of a city he barely could conjure in memory. Besides, he had half fallen in love so often. And she was too young. He had really been more drawn to that strange Miss Dwight; upon whom, however, he had not yet called.
Poor crumbling bones, mouldy and sodden as the rotten wood of older trees, yet once clothed with form and vigour, lay everywhere, while under the cotton wood trees skulls were heaped and vultures hovered about in hundreds.
As we skurried through the snoring camp, unperceived by the sodden sleepers, Agathemer said, aloud: "This looks increasingly bad. The Praetorians are standing with interlocked elbows; they look unpleasantly like samples of a complete cordon round the camp. The mounted Praetorians are behind them not two horse-lengths and less than that apart.
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