United States or Oman ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"She went away, Hugh," replied my mother, looking greatly troubled. "Why?" I persisted. "It is something you are too young to understand." Of course I started an investigation, and the next day at school I asked the question of Gene Hollister himself, only to discover that he believed his aunt to be dead! And that night he asked his mother if his Aunt Grace were really alive, after all?
Warde Hollister stopped up his ears in an agony of torture while a dozen famishing boys flopped this way and that in attitudes of suffering despair. "Yes, it will be all right," called poor Minerva in a kind of desperation. "It's the only thing, you might as well." She seemed resigned if not reconciled. "You might as well eat the ice cream anyway, it will only melt."
Bland haunted the creeks where the trout lurked, tramped the woods gun in hand, a dog at his heels, oblivious to everything but his own primitive, purposeless pleasures. "I shouldn't care to settle here for good," he once said to Hollister. "But really, you know, it's not half bad. If money wasn't so dashed scarce.
Then Hollister moved back over the little ridge into the shadow of a clump of young firs and sat down on a flat rock with his head in his hands, to fight it out with himself. To stake everything on a single throw of the dice, and the dice loaded against him! If peace had its victories no less than war, it had also crushing defeats.
The valley itself was shrouded under the dark blanket of the night, through which the river murmured unseen and distant waterfalls roared over rocky precipices. The two Indians attending Lawanne squatted within the red glow of their fire on the bank. Downstream a yellow spot broke out like a candle flame against black velvet. "There is some one at Bland's now," Hollister said.
Were there no other prizes save those known as greatness of character and depth of human affections? Cousin Robert looked worn and old. The other pall-bearers, men of weight, of long standing in the community, were aged, too; Mr. Blackwood, and Mr. Jules Hollister; and out of place, somehow, in this new church building.
He had grasped at a renewal of Rutherford's acquaintance as a man drowning in a sea of loneliness would grasp at any friendly straw. And Rutherford, Hollister quickly realized, was the most fragile sort of straw. The man was a profound, non-thinking egotist, the adventurer pure and simple, whose mentality never rose above grossness of one sort and another, in spite of a certain outward polish.
But he could not shut away the consciousness that they were there, that he must meet Myra and her vague questioning, Mills with his strange repression, his brooding air. He must see them again, be perplexed by them, perhaps find his own life, his own happiness, tangled in the web of their affairs. Hollister could frown over that unwelcome possibility.
I could see you beginning to chafe finally under the burden of a blind wife, growing impatient at my helplessness which you do not yet realize and in the end oh, well, one can think all sorts of things in spite of a resolution not to think." It stung Hollister. "Good God," he cried, "you don't realize it's only the fact you can't see me that makes it possible.
And so the Reverend Mr Hollister, and Deacon Moses Turner, and other good men among them, thought themselves justified in setting them down as narrow-minded and bigoted, and incapable of appreciating the privileges which had fallen to their lot.
Word Of The Day