United States or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Old enough to have lost the first fine careless rapture that showers on the immature 'Stunt imaginary Commissionerships and Stars, and sends him into the collar with coltish earnestness and abandon; too young to be yet able to look back upon the progress he had made, and thank Providence that under the conditions of the day he had come even so far, he stood upon the dead-centre of his career.
He knew by instinct the precise moment in a newspaper's life when the impetus of past good management is exhausted and it fetches up on the dead-centre between slow and expensive collapse and the new start which can be given by gold injections and genius. He was wisely ignorant of journalism; but when he stooped on a carcase there was sure to be meat.
Then he hunted up a pretty young married woman occupying the dead-centre of the sanctified social circle, went into spasms over her beauty so classic, such an exquisite outline; grew confidential with the husband at the club, and begged permission to make just a sketch only the size of his hand wanted it for his head of Sappho, Berlin Exhibition.
The Compound sighed pityingly, and said no more. "Git 'em all shapes in this world, don't ye?" said Poney, "that's Mass'chusetts all over. They half start, an' then they stick on a dead-centre, an' blame it all on other folk's ways o' treatin' them. Talkin' o' Boston, Comanche told me, last night, he had a hot-box just beyond the Newtons, Friday.
Excuse me, madam, but you've the track.... She's stuck on a dead-centre again bein' specially designed not to." The Compound crawled across the tracks on a long slant, groaning horribly at each switch, and moving like a cow in a snow-drift. There was a little pause along the yard after her tail-lights had disappeared; switches locked crisply, and every one seemed to be waiting.
He stood there for a moment, drinking in the fresh morning air. The sun was just coming up behind the solitary tree that had so interested him the previous evening, and he noticed that from his position in the dead-centre of the doorway the sun and the tree were right in line. Again that curious, humorless smile flickered about the corners of his mouth.
Word Of The Day