Wide-eyed and restless, Claire Robson felt a sudden pity for her father.
Tears sprang to her eyes; it overwhelmed her to discover this new father
so full of human failings and yet so full of human provocation. In her
twenty-four years of life she had never shed a tear for him, or felt the
slightest pang for his failure. If she had ever doubted the Carrol
viewpoint, she had never given her lack of faith any scope. She had
taken their cast-off prejudices and threadbare convictions as docilely
as she had once received their stale garments. She had shrunk from
spiritual independence with all the obsequious arrogance of a poor
relation at a feast. Her diffidence, her self-consciousness, her
timidity, were the outward forms of an inbred snobbery. It was curious
how suddenly all this was made clear to her....
At length she fell into a troubled sleep.... When she awoke the room's
outlines were reviving before the advances of early morning. For the
first time in her life she caught the poetry of the new day at first
hand. For years she had reveled vicariously in the delights of morning.
But it had always been to her a thing apart, a matter which the writers
of romantic verse beheld and translated for the benefit of late
sleepers. It never occurred to her that the day crawling into the
light-well of her Clay Street flat was lit with precisely the same flame
that colored the far-flung peaks of the poet's song.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25