Hilda - A Story of Calcutta by Sara Jeannette Duncan
page 77 of 305 (25%)
page 77 of 305 (25%)
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in the evening."
"He seems to be a--a member of the corps," said Lindsay. "He would be, only for the carriage works. He says he doesn't find himself strong enough in grace to give up his situation yet. But he wears the uniform at the meetings to show his sympathy, and the Ensign doesn't think there's any objection." Laura was sitting straight up in one of the cane-bottomed chairs, her _sari_ drawn over her head, her hands folded in her lap. The native dress clung to her limbs in sculpturable lines, and her consecrated ambitions seemed more insistent than ever. She had nothing to do with anything else, nothing to do with her room or its arrangements, nothing, Lindsay felt profoundly, to do with him. Her personal zeal for him seemed to resolve itself, at the point of contact, into something disappointingly thin; he saw that she counted with him altogether as a unit in a glorious total, and that he himself had no place in her knowledge or her desire. This brought him, with something like a shock, to a sense of how far he had depended on her interest for his soul's sake to introduce her to a wider view of him. "But you have come to tell me about yourself," she said, suddenly, it seemed to Lindsay, who was wrapped in the contemplation of her profile. "Well, is there any special stumbling-block?" "There are some things I should certainly like you to know," replied Lindsay; "but you can't think how difficult"----he glanced at the lath and plaster partition, but she, to whom publicity was a condition salutary, if not essential, to spiritual experience, naturally had no |
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