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"One winter," says the author of The English Army in France, vol. ii. p. 106-7, "our commanding officer's wife formed the project of hiring the chateau during the absence of the owner; but a more profound insult could not have been offered to a Chevalier de St. Louis. Hire his house! What could these people take him for? A sordid wretch who would stoop to make money by such means?
And forth-with he showed them, in there exoteric side, sordid, ugly and bloody; and then, on the top of that showing, tried to twist them round to the symbolic impersonal plane again; and so left a discord not properly solved, an imperfect harmony; a sense of loss rather than gain; of much torn down, and nothing built up to take its place.
It was so nearly like visiting the battlefield to look over these views, that all the emotions excited by the actual sight of the stained and sordid scene, strewed with rags and wrecks, came back to us, and we buried them in the recesses of our cabinet as we would have buried the mutilated remains of the dead they too vividly represented.
All the uneasy and sordid services about these halls are performed by their slaves; but the dressing and cooking their meat, and the ordering their tables, belong only to the women, all those of every family taking it by turns.
An extraordinary bitterness possessed me at this invasion of the stupendous beautiful business of love by sordid necessity. I answered her with immense restraint. "If," I said, "we could have a double-fronted, detached house at Ealing, say with a square patch of lawn in front and a garden behind and and a tiled bathroom." "That would be sixty pounds a year at least."
"I bet you made a jim-dandy good report," says Ed, taking heart again after this sordid dollars-and-cents talk. "It was certainly a fine chance to write something exciting if a man had any imagination. You probably won't have another chance like that in all your career." "My report pleased the Old Man all right," says Ben. "He's kind of had his eye on me ever since.
Larssen knew that his point was won, and long experience had taught him to close an interview as soon as he had carried conviction. "I won't tire you any longer," he said, rising. "I just want to say this: you're big. You're the finer woman by far, but she is his wife." The trial at Nîmes proved a wearisome, sordid affair, and its result was a foregone conclusion.
A few days sufficed to show me my mistake. My scanty purse was exhausted, and for the first time in my life I experienced the sordid distress of penury. I had never known the want of money, and had never adverted to the possibility of such an evil. I was ignorant of the world and all its ways; and when first the idea of destitution came over my mind its effect was withering.
To make a profit of such pitiful misadventures seemed an unmanly and a sordid act; and I began to think of my then quest as of something sacrilegious in its nature. But when I remembered Mary, I took heart again. My uncle would never consent to an imprudent marriage, nor would she, as I was persuaded, wed without his full approval.
He, too, was perhaps a little overstrung in the nerves. Not for the first time, he mentally threw a malediction at business, and all its sordid appurtenances. A change came over Sherwood. His smile grew more natural; his eye lost its fixity; he puffed at his cigar with enjoyment. "What news of Franks?" were his next words. "Nothing very good," answered Will, frowning.
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