The Project Gutenberg eBook, The House of Pride, by Jack London

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Title: The House of Pride

Author: Jack London

Release Date: January 11, 2007 [eBook #2416]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HOUSE OF PRIDE***

Transcribed from the 1919 Mills & Boon edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org

THE HOUSE OF PRIDE

Contents:

The House of Pride
Koolau the Leper
Good-bye, Jack
Aloha Oe
Chun Ah Chun
The Sheriff of Kona
Jack London

THE HOUSE OF PRIDE

Percival Ford wondered why he had come. He did not dance. He did not
care much for army people. Yet he knew them all--gliding and revolving
there on the broad _lanai_ of the Seaside, the officers in their fresh-
starched uniforms of white, the civilians in white and black, and the
women bare of shoulders and arms. After two years in Honolulu the
Twentieth was departing to its new station in Alaska, and Percival Ford,
as one of the big men of the Islands, could not help knowing the officers
and their women.

But between knowing and liking was a vast gulf. The army women
frightened him just a little. They were in ways quite different from the
women he liked best--the elderly women, the spinsters and the
bespectacled maidens, and the very serious women of all ages whom he met
on church and library and kindergarten committees, who came meekly to him
for contributions and advice. He ruled those women by virtue of his
superior mentality, his great wealth, and the high place he occupied in
the commercial baronage of Hawaii. And he was not afraid of them in the
least. Sex, with them, was not obtrusive. Yes, that was it. There was
in them something else, or more, than the assertive grossness of life. He
was fastidious; he acknowledged that to himself; and these army women,
with their bare shoulders and naked arms, their straight-looking eyes,
their vitality and challenging femaleness, jarred upon his sensibilities.

Nor did he get on better with the army men, who took life lightly,
drinking and smoking and swearing their way through life and asserting
the essential grossness of flesh