Grey Roses By: Henry Harland

Grey Roses

• Author : Henry Harland
• Publisher : Rarebooksclub.com
• ISBN-13 : 9781459098930

About Grey Roses

The publisher of this book utilises modern printing technologies as well as photocopying processes for reprinting and preserving rare works of literature that are out-of-print or on the verge of becoming lost. This book is one such reprint.Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A BROKEN LOOKING-GLASS. He climbed the three flights of stone stairs, and put his key into the lock; but before he turned it, he stopped — to rest, to take breath. On the door his name was painted in big white letters, Mb. Kichard Dane. It is always silent in the Temple at midnight; to-night the silence was dense, like a fog. It was Sunday night; and on Sunday night, even within the hushed precincts of the Temple, one is conscious of a deeper hush. When he had lighted the lamp in his sitting-room, he let himself drop into an arm-chair before the empty fireplace. He was tired, he was exhausted. Yet nothing had happened to tire him. He had dined, as he always dined on Sundays, with the Eodericks, in Cheyne Walk; he had driven home in a hansom. There was no reason why he should be tired. But he was tired. A deadly lassitude penetrated his body and his spirit, like a fluid. He was too tired to go to bed. " I suppose I am getting old," he thought. To a second person the matter would have appeared not one of supposition, but of certainty, not of progression, but of accomplishment. Getting old, indeed ? But he was old. It was an old man, gray and wrinkled and wasted, who sat there, limp, sunken upon himself, in his easy-chair. In years, to be sure, hewas under sixty; but he looked like a man of seventy- five. "I am getting old, I suppose I am getting old." And vaguely, dully, he contemplated his life, spread out behind him like a misty landscape, and thought what a failure it had been. What had it come to ? What had it brought him ? What had he done or won? Nothing, nothing. It had brought him nothing but old age, solitude, disappointment, and, to-night especially, a sense of fatigue and apathy that weighed upon him like a suffocating blanket. On a table, a yard or two awa...

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