The Judge eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 707 pages of information about The Judge.

The Judge eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 707 pages of information about The Judge.

Ellen made a confused noise as if she were committing an indiscretion, and was furious at having made it, and then furious that she had betrayed the fact that she did not know an anchovy when she saw it; and then furious when the next moment Marion let the waiter put the limp bronze things on her own plate.  Why shouldn’t she like them if Marion did?  Did Marion think she was a child who liked nothing but sugar-cakes?  When another waiter came and Marion murmured tentatively, “Wine?” she answered with passionate assumption of self-possession, “Yes, please.”  She almost wavered when Marion, not raising her eyes, asked, “Red or white?” It brought her back to that night in the office when Mr. Philip had made her drink that Burgundy and then had come towards her, looking almost hump-back with strangeness, while all the shadows in the corners had seemed to leap a little and then stand still in expectation.  Fear travelled through all her veins, weakening the blood; she pressed her lips together and braced her shoulders, living the occasion over again till all the evil things dissolved at Richard’s knock upon the door.  Because of him, how immune from fear she had become!  She lifted her eyes to Marion and said confidently, “Red, please.”

The blankness of the gaze that met her had, she felt sure, been substituted but the second before for a gaze richly complicated with observation and speculation.  She scowled and remembered that she was disliking this woman on the highest grounds, and as she ate she sent her eyes round the restaurant, knowing quite well the line of the thought she expected it to arouse in her.  She was not, in fact, seeing things with any acuteness.  There was a woman at a table close by wearing a dress of a very beautiful blue, the colour of the lower flowers of the darkest delphiniums, but the sight of it gave her none of the pleasant physical sensations, the pricking of the skin, the desire to rub the palms of the hands together quickly that she usually experienced when she saw an intense, clear colour.  But she saw, though all the images seemed to refuse to travel from her eyes to the nerves, many people in bright clothes, the women showing their arms and shoulders as she had always heard rich women do, the men with glossy faces which reminded her in their brilliance and their blankness of the nails on Marion’s hands; pretty food, like the things to eat in Keat’s St. Agnes’ Eve, being carried about on gleaming dishes by waiters whose bodies seemed deformed with obsequiousness; jewel-coloured wines hanging suspended over the white cloths in glasses invisible save where they glittered; bottles with gold necks lolling in pails among lumps of ice like tipsy gnomes overcome by sleep on some Alpine pass; innumerable fairy frocks and vessels of alabaster patterned like a cloud invested strong lights with the colour of romance.  It would have roused her fatigued imagination had she not remembered that she had other business in hand.  She organised her face to look on the spectacle with innocent pleasure, and then to darken at some serious reflection, and finally to assume the expression which she had always thought Socialist leaders ought to wear, though at public meetings she had noticed they do not.

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Project Gutenberg
The Judge from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.