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What was more, rage as they would at it, they were impressed by Ranny's firmness, his unalterable and imperturbable determination to marry, and to marry the unknown Violet Usher. And on the main issue they gave way.
The process of dissolution had nothing to do with Mr. Ransome. It went on, not in him but outside him, in the room. He was almost unaware of it, it was so inconceivably gradual, so immeasurably slow. First of all the room began to fill with gray fog, and for ages and ages Ranny's face and his wife's face hung over him, bodiless, like pale lumps in the fog.
It was the death of a man who had made them all ashamed and miserable; who had tried to take the joy out of Ranny's life as he had already taken it out of Ranny's mother's face; who had hardly ever spoken a kind word to him; who, if it came to that, had never done anything for him beyond contributing, infinitesimally, to his existence. And even this Mr.
Then Ranny, who had tilted his chair most dangerously backward, was heard saying something. A bit of scrap, now and then, with other nations was, in Ranny's opinion, a jolly good thing. Kept you from gettin' Flabby. Kept you Fit. Mr. Randall, in a large, forbearing manner, dealt with Ranny. He wanted to know whether he, Ranny, thought that the world was one almighty Poly. Gym.? And Mr.
"Well I've got to think of them. For them, in some ways, the poor old Humming-bird might, you see, be almost as bad as Virelet." She knew. She had known it all the time. She had even got so far in knowledge as to see that Ranny's father was in a measure responsible for Ranny's marriage.
That bad word that he had once let out through the window had been in Ranny's simple mind a mere figure of speech, a flowering expletive, flung to the dark, devoid of meaning and of fitness. He did not know what Violet's impulses and her instincts really were.
Why shouldn't we have gone on as we were?" He couldn't criticize her in a moment that was still so blessed; otherwise it might have struck him that Granville was certainly too small for Violet's voice. But it struck Ranny's mother as she heard it from the bedroom overhead, where she labored, spreading with her own hands the sheets for her son's marriage bed. "Why shouldn't we?"
They were living, all three of them, in a state of tension most fretting to the nerves. The whole house fairly vibrated with it. It was as if the fearful instability of Mr. Ransome's nervous system communicated itself to everybody around him. At the cry or the sudden patter of Ranny's children overhead, Mr. Ransome would be set quivering and shaking, and this disturbance of his reverberated.
To Ranny's amazement, the old Humming-bird bore himself in those days of stress, not with that peculiar savage obduracy that distinguished his more insignificant hostilities, but with a certain sad and fine insistence. It was as if for the first time in his life he was aware that he cared for his son Randall and was afraid of losing him.
The flying wonder of it had barely flicked his brain when it was gone. Ranny's thoughts were where his heart was, where he was back again in an instant, in the bedroom with Winny and the Baby. Nightfall, and Violet hadn't come back. "I'm glad she's got out at last," Winny said. "She's had such an awful day." "You think she doesn't get out enough, then?" She hesitated. "I do.
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