The Wife of Sir Isaac HarmanWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
England -- Fiction; Upper class -- Fiction; Women's rights -- Fiction
She turned like one who remembers, to where her chauffeur stood
waiting.
§3
As her motor car, with a swift smoothness, carried her along the
Embankment towards the lattice bar of Charing Cross bridge and the
remoter towers of the Houses of Parliament, grey now and unsubstantial
against the bright western sky, her mind came back slowly to her
particular issues in life. But they were no longer the big
exasperatingly important things that had seemed to hold her life by a
hundred painful hooks before she went into the cathedral. They were
small still under this dome of evening, small even by the measure of
the grey buildings to the right of her and the warm lit river to her
left, by the measure of the clustering dark barges, the teeming trams,
the streaming crowds of people, the note of the human process that
sounds so loud there. She felt small even to herself, for the touch of
beauty saves us from our own personalities, makes Gods of us to our own
littleness. She passed under the railway bridge at Charing Cross,
watched the square cluster of Westminster’s pinnacles rise above her
until they were out of sight overhead, ran up the little incline and
round into Parliament Square, and was presently out on the riverside
embankment again with the great chimneys of Chelsea smoking athwart the
evening gold. And thence with a sudden effect of skies shut and
curtains drawn she came by devious ways to the Fulham Road and the
crowding traffic of Putney Bridge and Putney High Street and so home.
Snagsby, assisted by a new under-butler, a lean white-faced young man
with red hair, received her ceremoniously and hovered serviceably about
her. On the hall table lay three or four visiting cards of no
importance, some circulars and two letters. She threw the circulars
into the basket placed for them and opened her first letter. It was
from Georgina; it was on several sheets and it began, “I still cannot
believe that you refuse to give me the opportunity the
director-generalship of your hostels means to me. It is not as if you
yourself had either the time or the abilities necessary for them
yourself; you haven’t, and there is something almost
dog-in-the-manger-ish to my mind in the way in which you will not give
me my chance, the chance I have always been longing for——”
At this point Lady Harman put down this letter for subsequent perusal
and took its companion, which was addressed in an unfamiliar hand. It
was from Alice Burnet and it was written in that sprawling hand and
diffused style natural to a not very well educated person with a
complicated story to tell in a state of unusual emotion. But the gist
was in the first few sentences which announced that Alice had been
evicted from the hostel. “I found my things on the pavement,” wrote
Alice.
Lady Harman became aware of Snagsby still hovering at hand.
“Mrs. Pembrose, my lady, came here this afternoon,” he said, when he
had secured her attention.
“Came here.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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