Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Marriage -- Fiction; Women -- Social and moral questions -- Fiction
Amory wished that something would bring Mr. Strong up that afternoon. It
was one of the days on which the editing of the "Novum" could take care
of itself, and besides, they would actually be editing it together. For
the next number but one--the forthcoming one was already passed--was to
be their most important utterance yet. It was to indicate clearly,
firmly and once for all, their Indian policy. The threatened failure of
the monsoon made the occasion urgent, and Mr. Suwarree Prang himself had
explained to Amory only the night before precisely what the monsoon was,
and how its failure would provide, from the point of view of those who
held that the present wicked regime of administration by the strong hand
was at last tottering to its fall, a providential opportunity. It had
struck Amory as wondrously romantic and strange that a meteorological
condition half-way round the world, in a place she had never seen,
should thus change the course of her quiet life in Hampstead; but,
properly considered, no one thing in this wonderful world was more
wonderful than another. It was Life, and Life, as she remembered to have
read somewhere or other, is for the Masters of it. And she was beginning
to find that after all these things only required a little confidence.
It was as easy to swim in six miles deep of water, like that place in
Cosimo's atlas of which the name escaped her for the moment, as it was
in six feet. And Mr. Prang had talked to her so long and so vividly
about India that she sometimes found it quite difficult to realize that
she had never been there.
Still wishing that Mr. Strong would come, she slowly left the garden
and entered the house. In the hall she paused for a moment, and a tender
little smile softened her face. She had stopped before the exquisite
casts of the foot and the arm. Pensively she took the foot up from the
console table, and then, coming to a resolution, she took the arm down
from its hook on the wall. After all, beautiful as she had to admit them
to be, the studio, and not the hall, was the proper place for them.
With the foot and Edward Carpenter in her left hand, and the plaster arm
hugged to her right breast, she walked along the passage and sought the
studio.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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