Male friendship -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Young men -- Fiction
“They will never get along. Never. Never. They are so different: as
different as ...” She stopped: she said to herself that this was her
brother whom she loved, and how could she think unkind thoughts of her
brother? It must not be. In the stifled conflict, she was moved. She got
up, flung wide a window.
Night. It was cold. Gas-lamps blinked and strutted through the air.
Their lights were false: they brought out only darkness. The street lay
low and reeled and swung away on either side like the deck of a pitching
vessel. The vessel was the world. It crashed through a sea of love that
spumed upward to Cornelia’s eyes. Her heart’s heat condensed it; there
were tears. She had a sense of the bleak urgency of life: of its passage
and of its passengers. She had a sense of the element through which she
and those she loved and the vessel plunged: how it was a sweet element
and dim and how hard it was not to forget. Surely, all thought in her
cold day was a denial of the Sea through which life was a passing:
denial of all save the vessel: denial of the terror of its movement and
of its passionate immersion. She, also, forgot. She, also, was a coward
with the rest before such words as “religion,” or as “mystic.” The salty
tang of this Sea beyond her plunging little world was in her eyes and
her mouth: all her body wept silently....
The cadenced strokes of an elevated train knocked at her mind. The truth
faded.
Cornelia brushed back her hair from her brow. “You are a silly woman,”
she said aloud. “He doesn’t care for you really. You don’t really care
for him. He will go away, and marry. He lives after all in a different
world. Tom and I will console each other.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account