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The Pretty Lady by Arnold Bennett
page 303 of 323 (93%)
And after another moment's pause Emily, apparently with a challenging
reluctance, receded through the shadows of the room and vanished.

G.J. was extremely depressed and somewhat indignant. He gazed down
bitterly at the water, following with his eye the incredibly long
branches of the tree that from the height of the buttresses drooped
perpendicularly into the water. He had had an astounding week-end; and
for having responded to Concepcion's telegram, for having taken the
telegram seriously, he had deserved what he got. Thus he argued.

She had met him on the hot Saturday afternoon in a Ford car. She did
not look ill. She looked as if she had fairly recovered from her
acute neurasthenia. She was smartly and carelessly dressed in a summer
sporting costume, and had made a strong contrast to every other human
being on the platform of the small provincial station. The car drove
not to the famous principal hotel, but to a small hotel just beyond
the bridge. She had given him tea in the coffee-room and taken him out
again, on foot, showing him the town--the half-timbered houses, the
immense castle, the market-hall, the spacious flat-fronted residences,
the multiplicity of solicitors, banks and surveyors, the bursting
provision shops with imposing fractions of animals and expensive pies,
and the drapers with ladies' blouses at 2s. 4d. Then she had conducted
him to an organ recital in the vast church where, amid faint gas-jets
and beadles and stalls and stained glass and holiness and centuries
of history and the high respectability of the town, she had whispered
sibilantly, and other people had whispered, in the long intervals of
the organ. She had removed him from the church before the collection
for the Red Cross, and when they had eaten a sort of dinner she had
borne him away to the Russian dancers in the Moot Hall.

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