But she simmered with indignation, and contemplated futile
plans--especially in the long, empty hours of the afternoon, between
luncheon and the hour of the apertifs--countless vain plans for abolishing
these intolerable conditions.
She thought a great deal of the strange man who had talked with young Mr.
Karslake, and wondered about him. Somehow she seemed unable to forget him;
never before had any one she didn't know made such a lasting impression
upon her imagination.
Sometimes she wasted time trying to explain to herself why the man had
seemed, for that brief instant, to think he knew her, only to dismiss such
speculations eventually with the assurance that she probably resembled in
moderate degree somebody whom he had once known.
But mostly she was preoccupied with pondering the strangeness of it, that
he who seemed so brilliant and brave a figure of the great world should,
according to his own confession, have risen from beginnings as lowly as her
own. All that he had suffered in the days of his youth, in that place in
Paris which he called Troyon's, Sofia had suffered here and in large part
continued to suffer without prospect of alleviation or hope of escape. And
remembering what he had said, that his own trials had come to an end only
when he awakened to the fact that he was, as he had put it, "less than half
alive" there at Troyon's, and had simply "walked out into life," she was
persuaded that the cure for her own discomfort and discontent would never
be found in any other way.
Pages:
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87