Sally Bishop eBook

E. Temple Thurston
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 456 pages of information about Sally Bishop.

Sally Bishop eBook

E. Temple Thurston
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 456 pages of information about Sally Bishop.

She turned away and walked down Waterloo Place, her head erect, her steps firm, but the tears rolling from her eyes, and her breast lifting with every sob that she stifled in her throat.

Mrs. Durlacher looked after her; then her eyes swept up to her brother’s face.

“Is she going to walk all the way to Waterloo Station?” she asked incredulously.

“Expect so.”

Mrs. Durlacher looked above her in a perfect simulation of amazement.  Then she stepped into the cab.

“Jack,” she said, when she was seated.

“What?”

She prefaced her words with a little laugh.  “I wouldn’t be a little milliner at your mercy for all I could see.”

Traill snorted contemptuously.  “She’s not a little milliner,” he said, cutting each word clean with irony.  “Neither in your sense, nor in reality.  Fortune has cursed her with being a lady and withheld the necessary increment that would make such things obvious to you.  Good night.”

He stood away, and told the chauffeur the address in Sloane Street.  They did not look at each other again, and the little vehicle pulled away from the kerbstone without the final nod of the head or shaking of the hand which usually terminated their meetings.

The last sight she had of him, was as he stood looking down Waterloo Place, his eyes picking out the people one by one, as the miner sifts the dross from the dust of gold.  Then she leant back in the cab and a low, sententious laugh lazily parted her lips.

For a moment, Traill stood there; but Sally was out of sight.  It crossed his mind to run down into Pall Mall—­coatless, hatless, as he was—­in the hope of finding her; but an inner consciousness convinced him that she would return, and he walked back into the house, upstairs to his room to wait for her.

When the mind had been made up to a critical sacrifice, it hates to be thwarted.  The more difficult the sacrifice may be, the more the mind is revolted by the hampering of circumstances.  Having brought herself through a thousand temptings to the determination that she must not keep the bangle which Traill had given her, Sally felt incensed with circumstances, incensed with everything, that she had been hindered in the carrying out of her design.  All that Janet had said about her ultimate going back to him, she had wiped out with a rough and unrelenting hand during that hour when she had been in his sister’s presence.  But the sting of the other remained, while she firmly believed that her desire to see him once more, herself in the frail attitude of hope, had vanished—­was dead, buried, almost forgotten.

The working of the mind is so like that of the body, that comparisons can be drawn at every point.  When the body needs nourishment, or exercise, or rest, and is denied all of these things, it circumvents its own master and steals its needs with cunning.  So is it precisely with the mind.  When the mind craves a certain expression of itself, needs a certain relief, and is denied its craving, then it, too, circumvents its own master, and, by the crafty displacement of ideas, hoodwinking the very power that governs it, it attains its end.

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
Sally Bishop from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.