The Imperialist by Sara Jeannette Duncan Page B

prefer the sophistication of chimney-pots,” she replied. “I’ve always longed to see a sunset in London, with the fog breaking over Westminster.”
    “Then you don’t care about them for themselves, sunsets?” he asked, with the simplest absence of mind.
    “I never yet could see the sun go down,
But I was angry in my heart.”
    she said, and this time he looked at her.
    “How does it go on?” he said.
    “Oh, I don’t know. Only those two lines stay with me. I feel it that way, too. It’s the seal upon an act of violence, isn’t it, a sunset? Something taken from us against our will. It’s a hateful reminder, in the midst of our delightful volitions, of how arbitrary every condition of life is.”
    “The conditions of business are always arbitrary. Life is a business – we have to work at ourselves till it is over. So much cut off and ended it is,” he said, glancing at the sky again. “If space is the area of life and time is its opportunity, there goes a measure of opportunity.”
    “I wonder,” said Advena, “where it goes?”
    “Into the void behind time?” he suggested, smiling straight at her.
    “Into the texture of the future,” she answered, smiling back.
    “We might bring it to bear very intelligently on the future, at any rate,” he returned. “The world is wrapped in destiny, and but revolves to roll it out.”
    “I don’t remember that,” she said curiously.
    “No, you couldn’t,” he laughed outright. “I haven’t thought it good enough to publish.”
    “And it isn’t the sort of thing,” she ventured gaily, “you could put in a sermon.”
    “No, it isn’t.” They came to a corner of the street which led to Mr. Finlay’s boarding-house. It stretched narrowly to the north and there was a good deal more snow on each side of it. They lingered together for a moment talking, seizing the new joy in it, which was simply the joy of his sudden liberation with her, consciously pushing away the moment of parting; and Finlay’s eyes rested once again on the evening sky beyond the river.
    “I believe you are right, and I am a moralizer,” he said. “There
is
pain over there. One thinks a sunset beautiful and impressive, but one doesn’t look at it long.”
    Then they separated, and he took the road to the north, which was still snowbound, while she went on into the chilly yellow west, with the odd sweet illusion that a summer day was dawning.

NINE
    T he office of Messrs. Fulke, Warner, & Murchison was in Market Street, exactly over Scott’s drug store. Scott, with his globular blue and red and green vessels in the window and his soda-water fountain inside, was on the ground floor; the passage leading upstairs separated him from Mickie, boots and shoes; and beyond Mickie, Elgin’s leading tobacconist shared his place of business with a barber. The last two contributed most to the gaiety of Market Street; the barber with the ribanded pole, which stuck out at an angle; the tobacconist with a nobly-featured squaw in chocolate effigy, who held her draperies under her chin with one hand and outstretched a packet of cigars with the other.
    The passage staircase between Scott’s and Mickie’s had a hardened look, and bore witness to the habit of expectoration; ladies, going up to Dr. Simmons, held their skirts up and the corners of their mouths down. Dr. Simmons was the dentist: you turned to the right. The passage itself turned to the left, and after passing two doors bearing the law firm’s designation in black letters on ground glass, it conducted you with abruptness to the office of a bicycle agent, and left you there.For greater emphasis the name of the firm of Messrs. Fulke, Warner, & Murchison was painted on the windows also; it could be seen from any part of the market square, which lay, with the town hall in the middle, immediately below. During four days in the week the market square was empty. Odds and ends of straw and paper blew about it; an occasional pedestrian