One wore the deepest black of widowhood, the other was dressed in bridal
white, and they were both alike awful in their mockery of guiltless
sorrow and guiltless joy. They were not old, but the soul of youth was
dead in their pretty, lamentable faces, and ruin ancient as sin looked
from their eyes; their talk and laughter seemed the echo of an
innumerable multitude of the lost haunting the world in every land and
time, each solitary forever, yet all bound together in the unity of an
imperishable slavery and shame.
What a stale effect! What hackneyed characters! Let us be glad the night
drops her curtain upon the cheap spectacle, and shuts these with the
other actors from our view.
Within the cabin, through which Basil and Isabel now slowly moved, there
were numbers of people lounging about on the sofas, in various attitudes
of talk or vacancy; and at the tables there were others reading
"Lothair," a new book in the remote epoch of which I write, and a very
fashionable book indeed. There was in the air that odor of paint and
carpet which prevails on steamboats; the glass drops of the chandeliers
ticked softly against each other, as the vessel shook with her
respiration, like a comfortable sleeper, and imparted a delicious feeling
of coziness and security to our travellers.
Pages:
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78