Secrets by the Sea (Passenger to Paradise) Perfect Paperback – April 1, by . 'Hearts Across Forever' and 'Eagle Rising', I was anxiously awaiting the.
Table of contents
Amory spread the table of their future friendship with all his ideas of what college should and did mean. Kerry, not inclined as yet to take things seriously, chided him gently for being curious at this inopportune time about the intricacies of the social system, but liked him and was both interested and amused. Burne, fair-haired, silent, and intent, appeared in the house only as a busy apparition, gliding in quietly at night and off again in the early morning to get up his work in the library — he was out for the Princetonian, competing furiously against forty others for the coveted first place.
In December he came down with diphtheria, and some one else won the competition, but, returning to college in February, he dauntlessly went after the prize again. Amory was far from contented. He missed the place he had won at St. The upper-class clubs, concerning which he had pumped a reluctant graduate during the previous summer, excited his curiosity: Amory found that writing for the Nassau Literary Magazine would get him nothing, but that being on the board of the Daily Princetonian would get any one a good deal.
His vague desire to do immortal acting with the English Dramatic Association faded out when he found that the most ingenious brains and talents were concentrated upon the Triangle Club, a musical comedy organization that every year took a great Christmas trip. Many afternoons they lounged in the windows of 12 Univee and watched the class pass to and from Commons, noting satellites already attaching themselves to the more prominent, watching the lonely grind with his hurried step and downcast eye, envying the happy security of the big school groups.
I distrust that sort. All diamonds look big in the rough. I honestly think so sometimes. I want to pull strings, even for somebody else, or be Princetonian chairman or Triangle president. I want to be admired, Kerry. Amory gradually accepted this point of view, decided that next fall would inaugurate his career, and relinquished himself to watching Kerry extract joy from 12 Univee.
The donor of the party having remained sober, Kerry and Amory accidentally dropped him down two flights of stairs and called, shame-faced and penitent, at the infirmary all the following week. As soon as I get hold of a hand they sort of disconnect it from the rest of them. I wrote a St. Timothy girl a really loving letter last year.
In one place I got rattled and said: February dripped snow and rain, the cyclonic freshman mid-years passed, and life in 12 Univee continued interesting if not purposeful. The latter was a quiet, rather aloof slicker from Hotchkiss, who lived next door and shared the same enforced singleness as Amory, due to the fact that his entire class had gone to Yale.
His father had been experimenting with mining stocks and, in consequence, his allowance, while liberal, was not at all what he had expected. One day in March, finding that all the tables were occupied, he slipped into a chair opposite a freshman who bent intently over a book at the last table.
See a Problem?
He was, perhaps, nineteen, with stooped shoulders, pale blue eyes, and, as Amory could tell from his general appearance, without much conception of social competition and such phenomena of absorbing interest. Still, he liked books, and it seemed forever since Amory had met any one who did; if only that St. In a good-natured way he had almost decided that Princeton was one part deadly Philistines and one part deadly grinds, and to find a person who could mention Keats without stammering, yet evidently washed his hands, was rather a treat.
You can borrow it if you want to. Amory hesitated, glanced at the St. Amory liked him for being clever and literary without effeminacy or affectation. In fact, Amory did most of the strutting and tried painfully to make every remark an epigram, than which, if one is content with ostensible epigrams, there are many feats harder. Amory, who was performing, looked annoyed, and claimed that he needed a record with less piano in it. Kerry thereupon rolled on the floor in stifled laughter. Alec Connage, another frequent visitor, liked him in a vague way, but was afraid of him as a highbrow.
Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens of the big estates near Princeton, while swans made effective atmosphere in the artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed harmoniously above the willows. May came too soon, and suddenly unable to bear walls, he wandered the campus at all hours through starlight and rain. The night mist fell.
From the moon it rolled, clustered about the spires and towers, and then settled below them, so that the dreaming peaks were still in lofty aspiration toward the sky. Figures that dotted the day like ants now brushed along as shadowy ghosts, in and out of the foreground. The Gothic halls and cloisters were infinitely more mysterious as they loomed suddenly out of the darkness, outlined each by myriad faint squares of yellow light.
Passenger to Paradise Book Series: leondumoulin.nl
Indefinitely from somewhere a bell boomed the quarter-hour, and Amory, pausing by the sun-dial, stretched himself out full length on the damp grass. The cool bathed his eyes and slowed the flight of time — time that had crept so insidiously through the lazy April afternoons, seemed so intangible in the long spring twilights. Evening after evening the senior singing had drifted over the campus in melancholy beauty, and through the shell of his undergraduate consciousness had broken a deep and reverent devotion to the gray walls and Gothic peaks and all they symbolized as warehouses of dead ages.
The tower that in view of his window sprang upward, grew into a spire, yearning higher until its uppermost tip was half invisible against the morning skies, gave him the first sense of the transiency and unimportance of the campus figures except as holders of the apostolic succession. He liked knowing that Gothic architecture, with its upward trend, was peculiarly appropriate to universities, and the idea became personal to him.
The silent stretches of green, the quiet halls with an occasional late-burning scholastic light held his imagination in a strong grasp, and the chastity of the spire became a symbol of this perception. Where now he realized only his own inconsequence, effort would make him aware of his own impotency and insufficiency. The college dreamed on — awake. He felt a nervous excitement that might have been the very throb of its slow heart. It was a stream where he was to throw a stone whose faint ripple would be vanishing almost as it left his hand.
As yet he had given nothing, he had taken nothing. A belated freshman, his oilskin slicker rasping loudly, slushed along the soft path. A hundred little sounds of the current drifting on under the fog pressed in finally on his consciousness. The rain dripped on. A minute longer he lay without moving, his hands clinched. Then he sprang to his feet and gave his clothes a tentative pat.
The war began in the summer following his freshman year. Beyond a sporting interest in the German dash for Paris the whole affair failed either to thrill or interest him. With the attitude he might have held toward an amusing melodrama he hoped it would be long and bloody. If it had not continued he would have felt like an irate ticket-holder at a prize-fight where the principals refused to mix it up. The coach fumed helplessly, the Triangle Club president, glowering with anxiety, varied between furious bursts of authority and fits of temperamental lassitude, when he sat spiritless and wondered how the devil the show was ever going on tour by Christmas.
A great, seething ant-hill was the Triangle Club. It gave a musical comedy every year, travelling with cast, chorus, orchestra, and scenery all through Christmas vacation. The play and music were the work of undergraduates, and the club itself was the most influential of institutions, over three hundred men competing for it every year. Amory, after an easy victory in the first sophomore Princetonian competition, stepped into a vacancy of the cast as Boiling Oil, a Pirate Lieutenant. A rare scene, the Casino. A big, barnlike auditorium, dotted with boys as girls, boys as pirates, boys as babies; the scenery in course of being violently set up; the spotlight man rehearsing by throwing weird shafts into angry eyes; over all the constant tuning of the orchestra or the cheerful tumpty-tump of a Triangle tune.
How a Triangle show ever got off was a mystery, but it was a riotous mystery, anyway, whether or not one did enough service to wear a little gold Triangle on his watch-chain. It is also a tradition that the members are invariably successful in later life, amassing fortunes or votes or coupons or whatever they choose to amass. It was claimed though never proved that on one occasion the hired Elis were swelled by one of the real thing. They played through vacation to the fashionable of eight cities. Amory liked Louisville and Memphis best: Chicago he approved for a certain verve that transcended its loud accent — however, it was a Yale town, and as the Yale Glee Club was expected in a week the Triangle received only divided homage.
In Baltimore, Princeton was at home, and every one fell in love. There was a proper consumption of strong waters all along the line; one man invariably went on the stage highly stimulated, claiming that his particular interpretation of the part required it. Everything was so hurried that there was no time to be bored, but when they arrived in Philadelphia, with vacation nearly over, there was rest in getting out of the heavy atmosphere of flowers and grease-paint, and the ponies took off their corsets with abdominal pains and sighs of relief.
He remembered Isabelle only as a little girl with whom he had played sometimes when he first went to Minneapolis. She had gone to Baltimore to live — but since then she had developed a past. Amory was in full stride, confident, nervous, and jubilant. Scurrying back to Minneapolis to see a girl he had known as a child seemed the interesting and romantic thing to do, so without compunction he wired his mother not to expect him.
None of the Victorian mothers — and most of the mothers were Victorian — had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed. Huston-Carmelite to her popular daughter. Amory saw girls doing things that even in his memory would have been impossible: But he never realized how wide-spread it was until he saw the cities between New York and Chicago as one vast juvenile intrigue.
Afternoon at the Plaza, with winter twilight hovering outside and faint drums down-stairs. Then the swinging doors revolve and three bundles of fur mince in. The theatre comes afterward; then a table at the Midnight Frolic — of course, mother will be along there, but she will serve only to make things more secretive and brilliant as she sits in solitary state at the deserted table and thinks such entertainments as this are not half so bad as they are painted, only rather wearying.
Try to find the P. Amory found it rather fascinating to feel that any popular girl he met before eight he might quite possibly kiss before twelve. I wanted to come out here with you because I thought you were the best-looking girl in sight. Amory was now eighteen years old, just under six feet tall and exceptionally, but not conventionally, handsome. He had rather a young face, the ingenuousness of which was marred by the penetrating green eyes, fringed with long dark eyelashes. He lacked somehow that intense animal magnetism that so often accompanies beauty in men or women; his personality seemed rather a mental thing, and it was not in his power to turn it on and off like a water-faucet.
But people never forgot his face. She paused at the top of the staircase. The sensations attributed to divers on spring-boards, leading ladies on opening nights, and lumpy, husky young men on the day of the Big Game, crowded through her. She had been sixteen years old for six months. Isabelle started toward the dressing-room for a last peek in the mirror, but something decided her to stand there and gaze down the broad stairs of the Minnehaha Club.
They curved tantalizingly, and she could catch just a glimpse of two pairs of masculine feet in the hall below. Pump-shod in uniform black, they gave no hint of identity, but she wondered eagerly if one pair were attached to Amory Blaine.
Abandoned Memories
This young man, not as yet encountered, had nevertheless taken up a considerable part of her day — the first day of her arrival. Coming up in the machine from the station, Sally had volunteered, amid a rain of question, comment, revelation, and exaggeration:. This had pleased Isabelle. It put them on equal terms, although she was quite capable of staging her own romances, with or without advance advertising.
But following her happy tremble of anticipation, came a sinking sensation that made her ask:. She was accustomed to be thus followed by her desperate past, and it never failed to rouse in her the same feeling of resentment; yet — in a strange town it was an advantageous reputation. Well — let them find out. Out of the window Isabelle watched the snow glide by in the frosty morning. It was ever so much colder here than in Baltimore; she had not remembered; the glass of the side door was iced, the windows were shirred with snow in the corners.
Her mind played still with one subject. Did he dress like that boy there, who walked calmly down a bustling business street, in moccasins and winter-carnival costume? Really she had no distinct idea of him. An ancient snap-shot she had preserved in an old kodak book had impressed her by the big eyes which he had probably grown up to by now. However, in the last month, when her winter visit to Sally had been decided on, he had assumed the proportions of a worthy adversary.
Isabelle had been for some time capable of very strong, if very transient emotions. They drew up at a spreading, white-stone building, set back from the snowy street. Weatherby greeted her warmly and her various younger cousins were produced from the corners where they skulked politely. Isabelle met them tactfully. At her best she allied all with whom she came in contact — except older girls and some women.
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All the impressions she made were conscious. The half-dozen girls she renewed acquaintance with that morning were all rather impressed and as much by her direct personality as by her reputation. Amory Blaine was an open subject. Evidently a bit light of love, neither popular nor unpopular — every girl there seemed to have had an affair with him at some time or other, but no one volunteered any really useful information.
He was going to fall for her. Sally had published that information to her young set and they were retailing it back to Sally as fast as they set eyes on Isabelle. Isabelle resolved secretly that she would, if necessary, force herself to like him — she owed it to Sally.
Suppose she were terribly disappointed. In fact, he summed up all the romance that her age and environment led her to desire. She wondered if those were his dancing-shoes that fox-trotted tentatively around the soft rug below. All impressions and, in fact, all ideas were extremely kaleidoscopic to Isabelle. She had that curious mixture of the social and the artistic temperaments found often in two classes, society women and actresses. Her education or, rather, her sophistication, had been absorbed from the boys who had dangled on her favor; her tact was instinctive, and her capacity for love-affairs was limited only by the number of the susceptible within telephone distance.
Flirt smiled from her large black-brown eyes and shone through her intense physical magnetism. So she waited at the head of the stairs that evening while slippers were fetched. The name Blaine figured somewhere, but at first she could not place him. A very confused, very juvenile moment of awkward backings and bumpings followed, and every one found himself talking to the person he least desired to.
Isabelle manoeuvred herself and Froggy Parker, freshman at Harvard, with whom she had once played hop-scotch, to a seat on the stairs. A humorous reference to the past was all she needed. The things Isabelle could do socially with one idea were remarkable. Froggy was fascinated and quite unconscious that this was being done, not for him, but for the green eyes that glistened under the shining carefully watered hair, a little to her left, for Isabelle had discovered Amory.
As an actress even in the fullest flush of her own conscious magnetism gets a deep impression of most of the people in the front row, so Isabelle sized up her antagonist. First, he had auburn hair, and from her feeling of disappointment she knew that she had expected him to be dark and of garter-advertisement slenderness. For the rest, a faint flush and a straight, romantic profile; the effect set off by a close-fitting dress suit and a silk ruffled shirt of the kind that women still delight to see men wear, but men were just beginning to get tired of.
There was a stir, and Sally led the way over to their table. Isabelle gasped — this was rather right in line. But really she felt as if a good speech had been taken from the star and given to a minor character.
The dinner-table glittered with laughter at the confusion of getting places and then curious eyes were turned on her, sitting near the head. Amory was on the other side, full of confidence and vanity, gazing at her in open admiration. He began directly, and so did Froggy:. Isabelle turned to Amory shyly. Her face was always enough answer for any one, but she decided to speak. She leaned slightly toward him and looked modestly at the celery before her. Froggy sighed — he knew Amory, and the situations that Amory seemed born to handle.
He turned to Sally and asked her if she was going away to school next year. Amory opened with grape-shot. Amory attempted to make them look even keener. He fancied, but he was not sure, that her foot had just touched his under the table. But it might possibly have been only the table leg. It was so hard to tell. Still it thrilled him. He wondered quickly if there would be any difficulty in securing the little den up-stairs.
Isabelle and Amory were distinctly not innocent, nor were they particularly brazen. Moreover, amateur standing had very little value in the game they were playing, a game that would presumably be her principal study for years to come. She had begun as he had, with good looks and an excitable temperament, and the rest was the result of accessible popular novels and dressing-room conversation culled from a slightly older set.
Isabelle had walked with an artificial gait at nine and a half, and when her eyes, wide and starry, proclaimed the ingenue most. Amory was proportionately less deceived. He waited for the mask to drop off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear it. She had lived in a larger city and had slightly an advantage in range. But she accepted his pose — it was one of the dozen little conventions of this kind of affair.
He was aware that he was getting this particular favor now because she had been coached; he knew that he stood for merely the best game in sight, and that he would have to improve his opportunity before he lost his advantage. So they proceeded with an infinite guile that would have horrified her parents. After the dinner the dance began. She was conscious that they were a handsome pair, and seemed to belong distinctively in this seclusion, while lesser lights fluttered and chattered down-stairs. Boys who passed the door looked in enviously — girls who passed only laughed and frowned and grew wise within themselves.
They had now reached a very definite stage. They had traded accounts of their progress since they had met last, and she had listened to much she had heard before. He was a sophomore, was on the Princetonian board, hoped to be chairman in senior year. A good half seemed to have already flunked out of various schools and colleges, but some of them bore athletic names that made him look at her admiringly. Such is the power of young contralto voices on sink-down sofas.
He asked her if she thought he was conceited. She said there was a difference between conceit and self-confidence. She adored self-confidence in men. Amory denied this painfully. However, he sized up several people for her. Then they talked about hands. I have said they had reached a very definite stage — nay, more, a very critical stage. Amory had stayed over a day to see her, and his train left at twelve-eighteen that night. His trunk and suitcase awaited him at the station; his watch was beginning to hang heavy in his pocket.
Amory reached above their heads and turned out the electric light, so that they were in the dark, except for the red glow that fell through the door from the reading-room lamps. He continued a bit huskily:. Silence for a moment. Isabelle was quite stirred; she wound her handkerchief into a tight ball, and by the faint light that streamed over her, dropped it deliberately on the floor.
Their hands touched for an instant, but neither spoke. Silences were becoming more frequent and more delicious. Outside another stray couple had come up and were experimenting on the piano in the next room. As he swung the door softly shut, the music seemed quivering just outside. What a wonderful song, she thought — everything was wonderful to-night, most of all this romantic scene in the den, with their hands clinging and the inevitable looming charmingly close.
The future vista of her life seemed an unending succession of scenes like this: He took her hand softly. With a sudden movement he turned it and, holding it to his lips, kissed the palm. Her breath came faster. Suddenly the ring of voices, the sound of running footsteps surged toward them. Quick as a flash Amory reached up and turned on the light, and when the door opened and three boys, the wrathy and dance-craving Froggy among them, rushed in, he was turning over the magazines on the table, while she sat without moving, serene and unembarrassed, and even greeted them with a welcoming smile.
But her heart was beating wildly, and she felt somehow as if she had been deprived. It was evidently over. There was a clamor for a dance, there was a glance that passed between them — on his side despair, on hers regret, and then the evening went on, with the reassured beaux and the eternal cutting in. At quarter to twelve Amory shook hands with her gravely, in the midst of a small crowd assembled to wish him good-speed. For an instant he lost his poise, and she felt a bit rattled when a satirical voice from a concealed wit cried:.
Isabelle turned to her quietly. In her eyes was the light of the idealist, the inviolate dreamer of Joan-like dreams. He had such a good-looking mouth — would she ever ——? Amory, by way of the Princetonian, had arrived. The minor snobs, finely balanced thermometers of success, warmed to him as the club elections grew nigh, and he and Tom were visited by groups of upper classmen who arrived awkwardly, balanced on the edge of the furniture and talked of all subjects except the one of absorbing interest.
Amory was amused at the intent eyes upon him, and, in case the visitors represented some club in which he was not interested, took great pleasure in shocking them with unorthodox remarks. When the fatal morning arrived, early in March, and the campus became a document in hysteria, he slid smoothly into Cottage with Alec Connage and watched his suddenly neurotic class with much wonder.
There were fickle groups that jumped from club to club; there were friends of two or three days who announced tearfully and wildly that they must join the same club, nothing should separate them; there were snarling disclosures of long-hidden grudges as the Suddenly Prominent remembered snubs of freshman year. This orgy of sociability culminated in a gigantic party at the Nassau Inn, where punch was dispensed from immense bowls, and the whole down-stairs became a delirious, circulating, shouting pattern of faces and voices.
Tore over to Murray-Dodge on a bicycle — afraid it was a mistake. When the bar closed, the party broke up into groups and streamed, singing, over the snow-clad campus, in a weird delusion that snobbishness and strain were over at last, and that they could do what they pleased for the next two years. Long afterward Amory thought of sophomore spring as the happiest time of his life.
His ideas were in tune with life as he found it; he wanted no more than to drift and dream and enjoy a dozen new-found friendships through the April afternoons. Alec Connage came into his room one morning and woke him up into the sunshine and peculiar glory of Campbell Hall shining in the window.
Speed it up, kid! In fact, it was stolen from Asbury Park by persons unknown, who deserted it in Princeton and left for the West. Heartless Humbird here got permission from the city council to deliver it. Some people have lived on nothing for years at a time. Read the Boy Scout Monthly. Amory subsided resignedly and drooped into a contemplation of the scenery. Swinburne seemed to fit in somehow.
I can see it in his eye. I ought to make up to-night; but I can telephone back, I suppose. Amory flushed and it seemed to him that Ferrenby, a defeated competitor, winced a little. It was a halcyon day, and as they neared the shore and the salt breezes scurried by, he began to picture the ocean and long, level stretches of sand and red roofs over blue sea. The car was obligingly drawn up at a curb, and Amory ran for the boardwalk.
First, he realized that the sea was blue and that there was an enormous quantity of it, and that it roared and roared — really all the banalities about the ocean that one could realize, but if any one had told him then that these things were banalities, he would have gaped in wonder. They strolled along the boardwalk to the most imposing hostelry in sight, and, entering the dining-room, scattered about a table. The food for one. Hand the rest around. Amory ate little, having seized a chair where he could watch the sea and feel the rock of it. When luncheon was over they sat and smoked quietly.
Kerry, collect the small change. The waiter approached, and Kerry gravely handed him a dollar, tossed two dollars on the check, and turned away. They sauntered leisurely toward the door, pursued in a moment by the suspicious Ganymede. At four there were refreshments in a lunch-room, and this time they paid an even smaller per cent on the total cost; something about the appearance and savoir-faire of the crowd made the thing go, and they were not pursued.
They became jovial about five-thirty and, linking arms, strolled up and down the boardwalk in a row, chanting a monotonous ditty about the sad sea waves. Then Kerry saw a face in the crowd that attracted him and, rushing off, reappeared in a moment with one of the homeliest girls Amory had ever set eyes on. Her pale mouth extended from ear to ear, her teeth projected in a solid wedge, and she had little, squinty eyes that peeped ingratiatingly over the side sweep of her nose.
Kerry presented them formally. Let me present Messrs. Connage, Sloane, Humbird, Ferrenby, and Blaine. The girl bobbed courtesies all around. Poor creature; Amory supposed she had never before been noticed in her life — possibly she was half-witted. While she accompanied them Kerry had invited her to supper she said nothing which could discountenance such a belief.
All through supper he addressed her in the most respectful language, while Kerry made idiotic love to her on the other side, and she giggled and grinned. Amory was content to sit and watch the by-play, thinking what a light touch Kerry had, and how he could transform the barest incident into a thing of curve and contour. They all seemed to have the spirit of it more or less, and it was a relaxation to be with them. Amory usually liked men individually, yet feared them in crowds unless the crowd was around him. He wondered how much each one contributed to the party, for there was somewhat of a spiritual tax levied.
Alec and Kerry were the life of it, but not quite the centre. Somehow the quiet Humbird, and Sloane, with his impatient superciliousness, were the centre. Dick Humbird had, ever since freshman year, seemed to Amory a perfect type of aristocrat. He was slender but well-built — black curly hair, straight features, and rather a dark skin. Everything he said sounded intangibly appropriate. He possessed infinite courage, an averagely good mind, and a sense of honor with a clear charm and noblesse oblige that varied it from righteousness. He differed from the healthy type that was essentially middle class — he never seemed to perspire.
He was not a snob, though he knew only half his class. Servants worshipped him, and treated him like a god. He seemed the eternal example of what the upper class tries to be. This present type of party was made possible by the surging together of the class after club elections — as if to make a last desperate attempt to know itself, to keep together, to fight off the tightening spirit of the clubs.
It was a let-down from the conventional heights they had all walked so rigidly. After supper they saw Kaluka to the boardwalk, and then strolled back along the beach to Asbury. They had suppered greatly on their last eleven cents and, singing, strolled up through the casinos and lighted arches on the boardwalk, stopping to listen approvingly to all band concerts.
In one place Kerry took up a collection for the French War Orphans which netted a dollar and twenty cents, and with this they bought some brandy in case they caught cold in the night. They finished the day in a moving-picture show and went into solemn systematic roars of laughter at an ancient comedy, to the startled annoyance of the rest of the audience. Their entrance was distinctly strategic, for each man as he entered pointed reproachfully at the one just behind him. Sloane, bringing up the rear, disclaimed all knowledge and responsibility as soon as the others were scattered inside; then as the irate ticket-taker rushed in he followed nonchalantly.
They reassembled later by the Casino and made arrangements for the night. Kerry wormed permission from the watchman to sleep on the platform and, having collected a huge pile of rugs from the booths to serve as mattresses and blankets, they talked until midnight, and then fell into a dreamless sleep, though Amory tried hard to stay awake and watch that marvellous moon settle on the sea. So they progressed for two happy days, up and down the shore by street-car or machine, or by shoe-leather on the crowded boardwalk; sometimes eating with the wealthy, more frequently dining frugally at the expense of an unsuspecting restaurateur.
They had their photos taken, eight poses, in a quick-development store. The photographer probably has them yet — at least, they never called for them. The weather was perfect, and again they slept outside, and again Amory fell unwillingly asleep. Sunday broke stolid and respectable, and even the sea seemed to mumble and complain, so they returned to Princeton via the Fords of transient farmers, and broke up with colds in their heads, but otherwise none the worse for wandering.
Even more than in the year before, Amory neglected his work, not deliberately but lazily and through a multitude of other interests. Co-ordinate geometry and the melancholy hexameters of Corneille and Racine held forth small allurements, and even psychology, which he had eagerly awaited, proved to be a dull subject full of muscular reactions and biological phrases rather than the study of personality and influence.
That was a noon class, and it always sent him dozing. They all cut more classes than were allowed, which meant an additional course the following year, but spring was too rare to let anything interfere with their colorful ramblings. He discovered Isabelle to be discreetly and aggravatingly unsentimental in letters, but he hoped against hope that she would prove not too exotic a bloom to fit the large spaces of spring as she had fitted the den in the Minnehaha Club.
I mean the future, you know. I wish my girl lived here. But marry — not a chance. But Amory sighed and made use of the nights. He had a snap-shot of Isabelle, enshrined in an old watch, and at eight almost every night he would turn off all the lights except the desk lamp and, sitting by the open windows with the picture before him, write her rapturous letters. Your last letter came and it was wonderful! Be sure and be able to come to the prom. I often think over what you said on that night and wonder how much you meant.
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Book 5 of 5. More About the Authors. Those early years in a landscape where tears still flowed sparked her interest in the psychic and the paranormal that carries over into her writing today. More psychic encounters in Sedona, Arizona led to her novel, Eagle Rising. Adventures in Antigua became the book, Secrets by the Sea. Then, an escapade in Trinidad developed into the story of Night Watch.
She has been told by readers that her novel, Daddy's Christmas Angel, set in a small fictitious American town, is the "best book I've ever read". The romance is a little like "Sleepless in Seattle" and has a happy ending. Always looking for new writing challenges and adventures, Sikes currently is visiting some of the most picturesque National Parks of the western United States, and she plans to paint and write about them. Her travels and paintings could result in another coffee table book similar to Hotels to Remember which she researched and developed a few years ago.
Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations. But the surprises that followed her moving to the island were not quite what she had expected. Shortly after moving in, Dana encounters Clifton Wilder who is the number one suspect in the death of her grandfather. Clifton hated Old Man Bryson and didn't mind letting his hatred show. But after meeting Dana, he forms a protective attraction for the Old Man's granddaughter.
Dana, on the other hand, fears Clifton. She finds him in her home after knowing she locked the doors. She sees lights swaying from an upstairs room and hears footsteps when there's no one there. It starts becoming apparent that Clifton has to be the one behind the mysterious happenings but as Dana gets to know him better, she can't but hope that he's not the one causing the fear she has developed about living in her own home.
Follow Dana as she encounters "ghosts", murders, and a strange artist while trying to stay alive. Read along with her as she reads her grandfather's diary in hopes of answering some of her questions about the reason for his death. And find out if there really is a pot of gold coins hidden somewhere in the house. See all 3 reviews. Pages with related products. See and discover other items: There's a problem loading this menu right now.
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