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Updated: May 10, 2025
An alarm-clock on a small shelf edged in scalloped white oilcloth ticked with spick-and-span precision into a kitchen so correspondingly spick and span that even its silence smelled scoured, rows of tins shining into it. A dun-colored kind of dusk, soot floating in it, began to filter down the air-shaft, dimming them. Mrs. Ross lowered the shade and lighted the gas-jet.
As if life were not sad enough, good heavens! And then, after all, Sidonie had always been a good girl; why should she not be a good woman? Night was falling. M. Chebe rose gravely to close the shutters of the shop and light a gas-jet which illumined the bare walls, the empty, polished shelves, and the whole extraordinary place, which reminded one strongly of the day following a failure.
The sack of coal was over his shoulder when they turned into Apple Blossom Court. It would have been a black hole on a sunny day, and now it was like Hades, lit grimly by a gas-jet or two, small and flickering, with the orange haze about them. Filthy, flagging, murky doorways, broken steps and broken windows stuffed with rags, and the smell of the sewers let loose had Apple Blossom Court.
But madame, after her laughter, answered this by proceeding to steep some tea in an odd little contrivance over the gas-jet, much as Sara did over the log- fire at home; but neither Morton nor Molly would have been surprised to see food come sliding in, all cooked, or clothes all made, by the simple turn of a crank, so like fairyland was it all.
He turned the gas-jet on full a man that had just made that sum could afford to burn a little gas and, first satisfying himself by looking under the counter and round the shop, re-entered the sitting room. Despite his efforts, he could not get rid of the sense of loneliness and danger which possessed him.
There would be no Corklesville wedding if she could help it, with gaping loungers at the church door; nor would there be any Maryland wedding with a ten-mile ride over rough roads to a draughty country-house, where your back would freeze while your cheeks burned up; nor yet again any city wedding, with an awning over the sidewalk, a red carpet and squad of police, with Tom, Dick, and Harry inside the church, and Harry, Dick and Tom squeezed into an oak-panelled dining-room at high noon with every gas-jet blazing.
Among the other miseries of that night was the dreadful shortage of all hospital supplies, and the scarcity of food for the men. There was a little coffee which they would have liked, but there was no possibility of hot water. The place had been hastily fitted up with electric light, and the kitchen was arranged for steam cooking, so there was not even a gas-jet to heat anything on.
A single gas-jet was burning over the mantel-piece, and above it I saw a "writing on the wall" which implied that Jane Jackson had run up a washing-score of fifty dollars! I was congratulating myself on not having to pay that woman's laundry-bills, when the Judge said, "You want supper. What shall we order?" "A slice of hot corn-bread would make me the happiest man in Richmond."
She had worn the frock when she met George, and though it was old, she knew it was becoming, and she told herself joyfully that if she put it on to-night, "something must come of it." As she smoothed her hair by the dim gas-jet over the mirror, she saw again the face of George as it had first smiled down on her beneath the boughs of a mimosa tree in Mrs. Spencer's front garden.
"You can see that the 'b' is knocked about and the 'o' is out of line." "That's all right," said Foyle. "I wasn't thinking of that. It looks to me as if there's some sympathetic writing on this." He held the paper so that the heat from the gas-jet warmed it. Every moment he expected that the heat would bring something to light on the paper.
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