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TWO:"There they are!" said the corporal and I at the same moment, when we had been but a few minutes on the Plank-road. Two men were ahead of us riding abreast, and a few rods in front of them was a third horseman, apparently alone. Two others had pushed on, one to the house, the other for surgical aid. The two in the rear knew us and let us come up unchallenged; the corporal stayed with them, and I rode on to my leader's side.This absolute numbness came with him into his library, where he went when his wife and daughter, on the warning of the pink clock, proceeded upstairs, after the usual kisses. He did not want to wake his sensibilities up, simply because he did not want anything. Even here, in his secret garden, all he saw round him was meaningless: his library was a big pleasant room and he wondered why he had kept it so sacredly remote from his wife and Alice. There were some books in it, of course. Hugh had got a mercantile idea from one, Alice had been a little shy of an illustration in another, and for some reason he had felt that these attitudes were not tuned to the spirit he found here. But to-night there was no spirit of any kind here, and Alice might be shocked if she chose, Hugh might pick up hints for the printing of advertisements, his wife might put the Leonardo volume in her chair if she did not find it high enough, and if that did not give her the desirable position in which to doze most comfortably, there was the catalogue ready to make her a footstool. Books, books?... They were all strange and silly. In some there were pictures over which he had pored, in others there were verses that had haunted{320} his memory as with magic, and all had a certain perfection about them, whether in print or page or binding or picture, that had once satisfied and intoxicated a certain desire for beauty that he had once felt. There they were on their shelves, there was the catalogue that described them, and the shelves were full of corpses, and the catalogue was like a column of deaths in the daily paper, of some remote individuals that concerned him no more than the victims of a plague in Ethiopia.We offer the best Services in our Restarant.
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TWO:"Listen to me!" I had tried twice to interrupt and now I yelled; "was it Oliver, and a new gang, that Quinn fought last night, and have you got him at union Church?"Glad was I then to be on a true cavalryman's horse that answered the closing of my left leg and moved steadily around till I could see down the bridge. Oliver, after a step or two, stopped. "Turn!" I yelled, and swelled. "One, two,--"We offer the best Services in our Restarant.
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TWO:"Ah, well, I grant you that. They say you cure more with your tongue than with your physic.""Now that sounds interesting," murmured the Curate, as the other paused, although rather for matter than for breath, "it's so authoritativeas though it were a quotation from some standard work. All the same, and much as I should like to hear more"We offer the best Services in our Restarant.
