The townspeople
were a particularly uninteresting type--unmarried females were
predominant for the most part--with school-festival horizons and souls
bleak as the forbidding white architecture of the three churches. The
only native with whom they came into close contact was the broad-hipped,
broad-shouldered Swedish girl who came every day to do their work. She
was silent and efficient, and Gloria, after finding her weeping
violently into her bowed arms upon the kitchen table, developed an
uncanny fear of her and stopped complaining about the food. Because of
her untold and esoteric grief the girl stayed on.
Gloria's penchant for premonitions and her bursts of vague
supernaturalism were a surprise to Anthony. Either some complex,
properly and scientifically inhibited in the early years with her
Bilphistic mother, or some inherited hypersensitiveness, made her
susceptible to any suggestion of the psychic, and, far from gullible
about the motives of people, she was inclined to credit any
extraordinary happening attributed to the whimsical perambulations of
the buried. The desperate squeakings about the old house on windy nights
that to Anthony were burglars with revolvers ready in hand represented
to Gloria the auras, evil and restive, of dead generations, expiating
the inexpiable upon the ancient and romantic hearth.
Pages:
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256