Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Parisians, the — Volume 04 by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton
page 31 of 67 (46%)
listened to him in these intellectual skirmishes with the more glittering
Parisian. There was this distinction she made between him and Savarin,--
when the last spoke she often chimed in with some happy sentiment of her
own; but she never interrupted Graham, never intimated a dissent from his
theories of art, or the deductions he drew from them; and she would
remain silent and thoughtful for some minutes when his voice ceased.
There was passing from his mind into hers an ambition which she imagined,
poor girl, that he would be pleased to think he had inspired, and which
might become a new bond of sympathy between them. But as yet the
ambition was vague and timid,--an idea or a dream to be fulfilled in some
indefinite future.

The last night of this short-lived holiday-time, the party, after staying
out on the lake to a later hour than usual, stood lingering still on the
lawn of the villa; and their host, who was rather addicted to superficial
studies of the positive sciences, including, of course, the most popular
of all, astronomy, kept his guests politely listening to speculative
conjectures on the probable size of the inhabitants of Sirius, that very
distant and very gigantic inhabitant of heaven who has led philosophers
into mortifying reflections upon the utter insignificance of our own poor
little planet, capable of producing nothing greater than Shakspeares and
Newtons, Aristotles and Caesars,--mannikins, no doubt, beside intellects
proportioned to the size of the world in which they flourish.

As it chanced, Isaura and Graham were then standing close to each other
and a little apart from the rest. "It is very strange," said Graham,
laughing low, "how little I care about Sirius. He is the sun of some
other system, and is perhaps not habitable at all, except by Salamanders.
He cannot be one of the stars with which I have established familiar
acquaintance, associated with fancies and dreams and hopes, as most of us
DigitalOcean Referral Badge