The Jolly Corner

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M. Secker, 1918 - 71 من الصفحات
Spencer Brydon returns to New York City after over 30 years abroad. He has agreed to demolish his old family home and move to an upmarket apartment building. Before the house is demolished, he begins prowling the house at night. Brydon discovers that he might have been an astute businessman if he hadn't taken the option of a more leisurely life. He discusses this with his friend, Alice Staverton, who has always lived in New York. Meanwhile Brydon begins to believe that his alter ego—the ghost of the man he could have been—is haunting the "jolly corner", his nickname for the old family house.
 

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الصفحة 63 - He had come back, yes — come back from further away than any man but himself had ever travelled ; but it was strange how with this sense what he had come back to seemed really the great thing, and as if his prodigious journey had been all for the sake of it.
الصفحة 5 - think' of everything," said Spencer Brydon; "and I make answer as I can — begging or dodging the question, putting them off with any nonsense. It wouldn't matter to any of them really," he went on, "for, even were it possible to meet in that standand-deliver way so silly a demand on so big a subject, my 'thoughts' would still be almost altogether about something that concerns only myself.
الصفحة 63 - It had brought him to knowledge, to knowledge— yes, this was the beauty of his state; which came to resemble more and more that of a man who has gone to sleep on some news of a great inheritance, and then, after dreaming it away, after profaning it with matters strange to it, has waked up again to serenity of certitude and has only to lie and watch it grow.
الصفحة 19 - He spoke of the value of all he read into it, into the mere sight of the walls, mere shapes of the rooms, mere sound of the floors, mere feel, in his hand, of the old silver-plated knobs of the several mahogany doors, which suggested the pressure of the palms of the dead; the seventy years of the past in fine that these things represented, the annals of nearly three generations, counting his grandfather's, the one that had ended there, and the impalpable ashes of his long-extinct youth, afloat in...
الصفحة 31 - He was a dim secondary social success — and all with people who had truly not an idea of him. It was all mere surface sound, this murmur of their welcome, this popping of their corks — just as his gestures of response were the extravagant shadows, emphatic in proportion as they meant little, of some game of ombres chinoises.
الصفحة 24 - I may say; not to have kept it up. so. "over there." from that day to this, without a doubt or a pang; not. above all, to have liked it. to have loved it. so much, loved it, no doubt, with such an abysmal conceit of my own preference; some variation from that. I say. must have produced some different effect for my life and for my "form.
الصفحة 55 - ... whistling in the dark" (whether literally or figuratively) have appeared basely vulgar; yet he liked none the less to hear himself go, and when he had reached his first landing-- taking it all with no rush, but quite steadily- -that stage of success drew from him a gasp of relief. The house, withal, seemed immense, the scale of space again inordinate; the open rooms to no one of which his eyes deflected, gloomed in their shuttered state like mouths of caverns; only the high skylight that formed...
الصفحة 28 - This did somehow a little speak to him, as it also gratified him. "You dream about me at that rate?" "Ah about him!" she smiled. His eyes again sounded her. "Then you know all about him." And as she said nothing more: "What's the wretch like?
الصفحة 35 - With habit and repetition he gained to an extraordinary degree the power to penetrate the dusk of distances and the darkness of corners, to resolve back into their innocence the treacheries of uncertain light, the evil-looking forms taken in the gloom by mere shadows...
الصفحة 48 - Show us how much you have !" It stared, it glared back at him with that challenge ; it put to him the two alternatives : should he just push it open or not? Oh, to have this consciousness was to think — and to think, Brydon knew as he stood there, was, with the lapsing moments, not to have acted! Not to have acted — that was the misery and the pang — was even still not to act; was in fact all to feel the thing in another, in a new and terrible way. How long did he pause and how long did he...

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