United States or Chile ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"That's Him," Ranny assented. His mother looked him in the face. It was the look, familiar to Ranny on a Sunday morning, that, while it reinstated Ranny's father in his rectitude, contrived subtly, insidiously, to put Ranny in the wrong. "You're going, too," his mother said. Well, no, he wasn't exactly going. Not, that was to say, to any church in Wandsworth.
Eyes and mouth recovered only downstairs among the carpets, where they again asserted themselves by insisting on a Kidderminster with a slender pattern of blue on a drab ground; though Ranny's mother had advised the black and crimson. Ranny's mother contended almost with passion that drab showed every stain. But Violet would have that carpet and no other.
For Ranny's mother, such reference would have been the last profanity, a sacrilege committed against the divinities of the hearth and of the marriage bed. But for that phrase Mr. Ransome's weakness must have been passed in silence as the unspeakable, incredible, unthinkable thing it was.
Ranny's unconquerable soul still cried "Stick it!" as he grappled with her shameless blouses. And now, suddenly, she had changed all that. She had become once more the creature of mysterious elegance, of beauty charged with magical reminiscence, in the trim skirt and stainless blouse, clipped by the close belt; and with the bit of narrow black velvet ribbon round her throat.
But she had savored sorrow so far off that now that the cup was brought to her it had lost half its bitterness. "You couldn't have done different, even then, dear. Don't worry about me. It's not as if I hadn't been happy with you. I've had you reelly Ranny, all these years." But the happiness that by way of comfort she held out to him was the very dregs of Ranny's cup. "That's it," he said.
For in Ranny's heart there was another magic and another madness. And it was as if Life itself had caught him and locked him with a woman in the whirling of its Great Wheel. He haunted that door in the shutter more than ever in the hope of seeing Violet Usher. Not that he wanted to haunt it.
Under them, dividing the window pane, a narrow gold band with black lettering advertised three distinct mineral waters. A yellow-ochre blind now screened the lower half of that window. Drawn down unevenly and tilted at the bottom corner, it suffered a vague glimpse of objects that from his earliest years had never ceased to offend Ranny's sense of the beautiful and fit.
"I mean, if we could get it fixed up right, I'd live here the year round. We are only fifteen minutes from town, and all our friends live out this way." "By George, I've almost a notion to try it!" Mr. Ranny's eyes were shining. "Do you believe I could pull it off, Quin? I've made such a darned fizzle of things in the past that I'm almost afraid to kick over the traces again."
And underneath Ranny's rooms, between the bedroom at the back and the back parlor, between the parlor and the shop, between the shop and the dispensing-room, Fulleymore Ransome dragged himself to and fro, more than ever weedy, more than ever morose, more than ever sublime in his appearance of integrity; and with it all so irritable that Ranny's children had to be kept out of his way.
Bangs's other characteristics into startling relief. He saw him at the head of his firm, hated and despised by every employee. He saw him deceiving Madam Bartlett, sneering at Mr. Ranny's efforts at reform, terrorizing little Miss Leaks. Then he had a swift and relentless vision of himself in his new position, a well trained automaton, expected to execute Mr.
Word Of The Day