FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   107   108   109   110   111   112   113   114   115   116   117   118   119   120   121   122   123   124   125   126   127   128   129   130   131  
132   133   134   135   136   137   138   139   140   141   142   143   144   145   146   147   148   149   150   151   152   153   154   155   156   >>   >|  
e arrested by the artistic perfection of the lady's appearance. Her gait, too, had a flexuousness about it, which seemed to avoid angularity. It was a revelation to Elizabeth that human beings could reach this stage of external development--she had never suspected it. She felt all the freshness and grace to be stolen from herself on the instant by the neighbourhood of such a stranger. And this was in face of the fact that Elizabeth could now have been writ handsome, while the young lady was simply pretty. Had she been envious she might have hated the woman; but she did not do that--she allowed herself the pleasure of feeling fascinated. She wondered where the lady had come from. The stumpy and practical walk of honest homeliness which mostly prevailed there, the two styles of dress thereabout, the simple and the mistaken, equally avouched that this figure was no Casterbridge woman's, even if a book in her hand resembling a guide-book had not also suggested it. The stranger presently moved from the tombstone of Mrs. Henchard, and vanished behind the corner of the wall. Elizabeth went to the tomb herself; beside it were two footprints distinct in the soil, signifying that the lady had stood there a long time. She returned homeward, musing on what she had seen, as she might have mused on a rainbow or the Northern Lights, a rare butterfly or a cameo. Interesting as things had been out of doors, at home it turned out to be one of her bad days. Henchard, whose two years' mayoralty was ending, had been made aware that he was not to be chosen to fill a vacancy in the list of aldermen; and that Farfrae was likely to become one of the Council. This caused the unfortunate discovery that she had played the waiting-maid in the town of which he was Mayor to rankle in his mind yet more poisonously. He had learnt by personal inquiry at the time that it was to Donald Farfrae--that treacherous upstart--that she had thus humiliated herself. And though Mrs. Stannidge seemed to attach no great importance to the incident--the cheerful souls at the Three Mariners having exhausted its aspects long ago--such was Henchard's haughty spirit that the simple thrifty deed was regarded as little less than a social catastrophe by him. Ever since the evening of his wife's arrival with her daughter there had been something in the air which had changed his luck. That dinner at the King's Arms with his friends had been Henchard's Austerlitz: he had
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   107   108   109   110   111   112   113   114   115   116   117   118   119   120   121   122   123   124   125   126   127   128   129   130   131  
132   133   134   135   136   137   138   139   140   141   142   143   144   145   146   147   148   149   150   151   152   153   154   155   156   >>   >|  



Top keywords:
Henchard
 

Elizabeth

 

stranger

 

simple

 

Farfrae

 
aldermen
 
vacancy
 

chosen

 
daughter
 

waiting


unfortunate

 

discovery

 
arrival
 

caused

 
changed
 

Council

 
played
 
things
 

Interesting

 

Austerlitz


butterfly

 

friends

 

dinner

 

mayoralty

 

ending

 

turned

 

Mariners

 

social

 

cheerful

 

Lights


importance

 
incident
 

exhausted

 

haughty

 

thrifty

 
regarded
 

aspects

 
attach
 

catastrophe

 
poisonously

evening
 

rankle

 
learnt
 
personal
 

humiliated

 

Stannidge

 
upstart
 

inquiry

 
Donald
 

treacherous