Title:  The Inheritors

Author:  Joseph Conrad
        Ford M. Hueffer

Release Date:  February 3, 2005 [EBook #14888]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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THE INHERITORS

An Extravagant Story

By

JOSEPH CONRAD & FORD M. HUEFFER

   "Sardanapalus builded seven cities in a day. 
   Let us eat, drink and sleep, for to-morrow we die."

MCCLURE, Phillips & co.

New York

MCMI

London, William Heinemann. 1901, by MCCLURE, Phillips & co.

   The Trow Printing Company
   New York

To BORYS & CHRISTINA

THE INHERITORS

CHAPTER ONE

“Ideas,” she said.  “Oh, as for ideas—­”

“Well?” I hazarded, “as for ideas—?”

We went through the old gateway and I cast a glance over my shoulder.  The noon sun was shining over the masonry, over the little saints’ effigies, over the little fretted canopies, the grime and the white streaks of bird-dropping.

“There,” I said, pointing toward it, “doesn’t that suggest something to you?”

She made a motion with her head—­half negative, half contemptuous.

“But,” I stuttered, “the associations—­the ideas—­the historical ideas—­”

She said nothing.

“You Americans,” I began, but her smile stopped me.  It was as if she were amused at the utterances of an old lady shocked by the habits of the daughters of the day.  It was the smile of a person who is confident of superseding one fatally.

In conversations of any length one of the parties assumes the superiority—­superiority of rank, intellectual or social.  In this conversation she, if she did not attain to tacitly acknowledged temperamental superiority, seemed at least to claim it, to have no doubt as to its ultimate according.  I was unused to this.  I was a talker, proud of my conversational powers.

I had looked at her before; now I cast a sideways, critical glance at her.  I came out of my moodiness to wonder what type this was.  She had good hair, good eyes, and some charm.  Yes.  And something besides—­a something—­a something that was not an attribute of her beauty.  The modelling of her face was so perfect and so delicate as to produce an effect of transparency, yet there was no suggestion of frailness; her glance had an extraordinary strength of life.  Her hair was fair and gleaming, her cheeks coloured as if a warm light had fallen on them from somewhere.  She was familiar till it occurred to you that she was strange.