Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Marriage -- Fiction; Women -- Social and moral questions -- Fiction
As a lecturer--may we say as a prophet?--Walter had a manner original
and taking in the extreme. Anybody less sustained by his vision and less
upheld by his faith might have been a little tempted to put on "side,"
but not so Walter. Perhaps his familiarity with the stage--everybody
knew his father, Herman Wyron, of the New Greek Theatre--had taught him
the value of the large and simple statement of large and simple things;
anyhow, he did not so much lecture to his audiences as accompany them,
chattily and companionably, through the various windings of his subject.
With his hands thrust unaffectedly into the pockets of his knickers,
and a sort of sublimated "Well, here we are again" expression on his
face, he allayed his hearers' natural timidity before the magnitude of
his mission, and gave them a direct and human confab. on a subject that
returned as it were from its cycle of vastness to simple personal
experience again. His every sentence seemed to say, "Don't be afraid;
it's nothing really; soon you'll be as much at your ease in dealing with
these things as I am; just let me tell you an anecdote." No wonder Laura
held her long and muscular neck very straight above her hand-embroidered
yoke. Everybody understood that unless she adopted some sort of an
attitude her proper pride in such a married lover must show, which would
have been rather rubbing it in to the rest of her sex. So she booked
dates for new lectures almost nonchalantly, and, when the platform was
invaded at the end of the Lecture, or Walter stepped down to the level
of those below, she was there in person as the final demonstration of
how well these things actually would work as soon as Society had decided
upon some concerted action.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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