Between the Dark and the DaylightHowells, William Dean
General
Between the Dark and the Daylight
Howells, William Dean
Short stories
"Yes," she assented. "They are something like that. But I should not
call them illusions."
"No. And they represent scenes, events?"
"You said yourself they were not dramatic."
"I meant, represent pictorially."
"No; they are like the landscape that flies back from your train or
towards it. I can't explain it," she ended, rising with what he felt a
displeasure in his pursuit.
IV
He reported what had passed to her father when Mr. Gerald came back from
his stroll into the town, with his hands full of English papers; Gerald
had even found a New York paper at the news-stand; and he listened with
an apparent postponement of interest.
"I think," Lanfear said, "that she has some shadowy recollection, or
rather that the facts come to her in a jarred, confused way--the
elements of pictures, not pictures. But I am afraid that my inquiry has
offended her."
"I guess not," Gerald said, dryly, as if annoyed. "What makes you think
so?"
"Merely her manner. And I don't know that anything is to be gained by
such an inquiry."
"Perhaps not," Gerald allowed, with an inattention which vexed Lanfear
in his turn.
The elderly man looked up, from where he sat provisionally in the hotel
veranda, into Lanfear's face; Lanfear had remained standing. "_I_ don't
believe she's offended. Or she won't be long. One thing, she'll forget
it."
He was right enough, apparently. Miss Gerald came out of the hotel door
towards them, smiling equally for both, with the indefinable difference
between cognition and recognition habitual in her look. She was dressed
for a walk, and she seemed to expect them to go with her. She beamed
gently upon Lanfear; there was no trace of umbrage in her sunny gayety.
Her face had, as always, its lurking pathos, but in its appeal to
Lanfear now there were only trust and the wish of pleasing him.
They started side by side for their walk, while her father drove beside
them in one of the little public carriages, mounting to the Berigo Road,
through a street of the older San Remo, and issuing on a bare little
piazza looking towards the walls and roofs of the mediaeval city,
clustered together like cliff-dwellings, and down on the gardens that
fell from the villas and the hotels. A parapet kept the path on the
roadside nearest the declivities, and from point to point benches were
put for the convenient enjoyment of the prospect. Mr. Gerald preferred
to take his pleasure from the greater elevation of the seat in his
victoria; his daughter and Lanfear leaned on the wall, and looked up to
the sky and out to the sea, both of the same blue.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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