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Updated: May 31, 2025
It was nearly dark when she awoke; and after dinner she went out for a walk with Austin, in the bright gas-lit streets, and along a wide boulevard, where the tall bare trees looked grim in the darkness. The freedom of this new life seemed strange to her, after the forms and ceremonies of her position as Daniel Granger's wife, and Sophia Granger's stepmother strange, and not at all unpleasant.
And then in the gas-lit gloom of the warm summer night he perceived a vast and vague rectangular form in the slow movement towards the slope of Brougham Street. It was a pantechnicon van. But the extraordinary thing was, not that it should be a pantechnicon van, but that if should be moving of its own accord and power.
"Uncle Mathew!" she whispered, and then she called more loudly. "Uncle Mathew! Uncle Mathew!" There was no answer and suddenly a strange, quite unreasoning terror caught her by the throat. It was all that she could do not to cry out and run down to the gas-lit passage. She held herself there by sheer force; the smell of the sea was now very strong; there was a tang of rotten seaweed in it.
The stockings and shoes, exquisite, but strangely out of place with their high heels buried in the sand. "How do I know," she demanded, "that I am not one of the children of the cities, that I was not fashioned and made for the gas-lit life, to eat unreal food at unreal hours, and feed my brain upon the unreal epigrams of the men whom you would call decadents. Two days here, a week very well.
The only thing we regretted was that we had not left some portion of our clothing on the beach to give verisimilitude to the suggestion. However, we troubled ourselves not one whit about the past. I was glad to escape from the doom of the gas-lit cellar, and was looking forward with keen anticipation to a new life in that mystic country, Africa.
If it's Care or Continuation or Library, I shall send it away. You're not going to do any more business to-night." She went to the door, and there, her lithe, drooping slimness outlined against the gas-lit street, stood Nan Hilary. "Oh, Nan.... But what a late call. Yes, Pamela's just in from a committee. Tired to death; she's had neuralgia all this week. She mustn't sit up late, really.
Stuart, tilted back in his chair, his shining boots on the window-sill of the drawing-room, gazing out at the gas-lit highways of Liverpool, he listened in abstracted silence. There was a long pause after the captain concluded then Charley opened his lips and spoke: "This is all nonsense, you know, Hammond," he said gravely, "folly madness, on your part.
When the front door of the Orgreaves interposed itself that night between Edwin and a little group of gas-lit faces, he turned away towards the warm gloom of the garden in a state of happy excitement. He had left fairly early, despite protests, because he wished to give his father no excuse for a spectacular display of wrath; Edwin's desire for a tranquil existence was growing steadily.
"Well, well," he soothed his conscience, going down-stairs, "maybe that bit of canvas is as much to that poor chap as the phalanstery was once to another fool." And so went on through the gas-lit streets into his parishes in cellars and alleys, with a sorer heart, but cheerfuller words, now that he had nothing but words to give.
The familiar gas-lit street, the usual number of passengers, the usual care-worn or vice-worn faces passing by, damp pavements, muddy roads, fresh winter wind, all seemed so natural, but to talk of the deepest things in heaven and earth was so unnatural. He was a very reserved man, but looking down at the eager, questioning face beside him his reserve all at once melted.
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