Nothing could be
more displeasing than this indifference when people didn't agree with
you. That he should agree she did not in the least expect of him; how
could a Mississippian agree? If she had supposed he would agree, she
would not have written to him.
III
When he had told her that if she would take him as he was he should be
very happy to dine with her, she excused herself a moment and went to
give an order in the dining-room. The young man, left alone, looked
about the parlour--the two parlours which, in their prolonged, adjacent
narrowness, formed evidently one apartment--and wandered to the windows
at the back, where there was a view of the water; Miss Chancellor having
the good fortune to dwell on that side of Charles Street toward which,
in the rear, the afternoon sun slants redly, from an horizon indented at
empty intervals with wooden spires, the masts of lonely boats, the
chimneys of dirty "works," over a brackish expanse of anomalous
character, which is too big for a river and too small for a bay. The
view seemed to him very picturesque, though in the gathered dusk little
was left of it save a cold yellow streak in the west, a gleam of brown
water, and the reflexion of the lights that had begun to show themselves
in a row of houses, impressive to Ransom in their extreme modernness,
which overlooked the same lagoon from a long embankment on the left,
constructed of stones roughly piled.
Pages:
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31