The Project Gutenberg EBook of Fraternity, by John Galsworthy

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Title: Fraternity

Author: John Galsworthy

Release Date: June 14, 2006 [EBook #2773]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRATERNITY ***

Produced by David Widger

FRATERNITY

By John Galsworthy

CHAPTER I

THE SHADOW

In the afternoon of the last day of April, 190-, a billowy sea of little
broken clouds crowned the thin air above High Street, Kensington.
This soft tumult of vapours, covering nearly all the firmament, was in
onslaught round a patch of blue sky, shaped somewhat like a star, which
still gleamed--a single gentian flower amongst innumerable grass. Each
of these small clouds seemed fitted with a pair of unseen wings, and, as
insects flight on their too constant journeys, they were setting forth
all ways round this starry blossom which burned so clear with the colour
of its far fixity. On one side they were massed in fleecy congeries, so
crowding each other that no edge or outline was preserved; on the other,
higher, stronger, emergent from their fellow-clouds, they seemed leading
the attack on that surviving gleam of the ineffable. Infinite was the
variety of those million separate vapours, infinite the unchanging unity
of that fixed blue star.

Down in the street beneath this eternal warring of the various
soft-winged clouds on the unmisted ether, men, women, children, and
their familiars--horses, dogs, and cats--were pursuing their occupations
with the sweet zest of the Spring. They streamed along, and the noise of
their frequenting rose in an unbroken roar: "I, I--I, I!"

The crowd was perhaps thickest outside the premises of Messrs. Rose and
Thorn. Every kind of being, from the highest to the lowest, passed in
front of the hundred doors of this establishment; and before the costume
window a rather tall, slight, graceful woman stood thinking: "It really
is gentian blue! But I don't know whether I ought to buy it, with all
this distress about!"

Her eyes, which were greenish-grey, and often ironical lest they should
reveal her soul, seemed probing a blue gown displayed in that window, to
the very hea