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And I recalled, with mingled bitterness and tenderness, the turn of her head, the down on her neck, the half-revealed curve of her arm.... In spite of the growing sordidness of Lyme Street, my mother and I still lived in the old house, for which she very naturally had a sentiment. In vain I had urged her from time to time to move out into a brighter and fresher neighbourhood.
"Her beauty would not have taken you ten steps out of your way, if she had not been such an heiress," retorted Bulchester. "Don't be so blunt, my friend. Is it my fault that I am obliged to look out for money? If a man has only a tenth of the income he needs to live upon, what is he going to do? It is well enough for you to be above sordidness, so could I be with your purse and your prospects.
She makes me ashamed of things I have written about the sordidness of her race, but I shall vainly seek to atone for them by open-handedness to her. She will give favor for favor; she will not even count the money she receives; our bargaining is a contest of the courtliest civilities, ending in many an "Adieu!" "To meet again!"
She took off her hat and swiftly tidied herself, yet the relief she felt at Lise's absence was modified by a sudden, vehement protest against sordidness. Why should she not live by herself amidst clean and tidy surroundings?
"Indeed," said his Lordship. "I was not aware that America had yet enough of age and old misfortune, crime, sordidness, that accumulate with it, to have produced spiders like this. Had he sucked into himself all the noisomeness of your heat?"
This is the sort of home in which the minds of thousands of young Englishmen and Englishwomen receive their first indelible impressions. Can one expect them to escape the contagion of its cramped pretentiousness, its dingy narrowness, its shy privacy of social degradation, its essential sordidness and inefficiency? Our skilled operative, on the other hand, will pocket his tip.
Of course, he spoke Urdu, but he had also mastered many queer side-speeches like the chotee bolee of the women, and held grave converse with shopkeepers and Hill-coolies alike. He was precocious for his age, and his mixing with natives had taught him some of the more bitter truths of life: the meanness and the sordidness of it.
And again, as when swept along East Street with the mob, that sense of identity with these people and their wrongs, of submergence with them in their cause possessed her. Despite her ancestry, her lot was cast with them. She, too, had been precariously close to poverty, had known the sordidness of life; she, too, and Lise and Hannah had been duped and cheated of the fairer things.
It seemed to him that in this young girl, who bad the look and poise of a woman, he had found what hitherto he had vainly sought in the wilderness the beauty and the charm of it, refined and separated from its sordidness and its uncouthness in a word, from all that was base and ugly. It was for this that he had left his home in the East.
The grime and sordidness of the House of the Seven Gables seemed to have vanished since her appearance there; the gnawing tooth of the dry-rot was stayed among the old timbers of its skeleton frame; the dust had ceased to settle down so densely, from the antique ceilings, upon the floors and furniture of the rooms below, or, at any rate, there was a little housewife, as light-footed as the breeze that sweeps a garden walk, gliding hither and thither to brush it all away.
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