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Hazard of New Fortunes, a — Volume 2 by William Dean Howells
page 79 of 132 (59%)

Beaton lit his pipe when he found himself in his room, and sat down
before the dull fire in his grate to think. It struck him there was a
dull fire in his heart a great deal like it; and he worked out a fanciful
analogy with the coals, still alive, and the ashes creeping over them,
and the dead clay and cinders. He felt sick of himself, sick of his life
and of all his works. He was angry with Fulkerson for having got him into
that art department of his, for having bought him up; and he was bitter
at fate because he had been obliged to use the money to pay some pressing
debts, and had not been able to return the check his father had sent him.
He pitied his poor old father; he ached with compassion for him; and he
set his teeth and snarled with contempt through them for his own
baseness. This was the kind of world it was; but he washed his hands of
it. The fault was in human nature, and he reflected with pride that he
had at least not invented human nature; he had not sunk so low as that
yet. The notion amused him; he thought he might get a Satanic epigram out
of it some way. But in the mean time that girl, that wild animal, she
kept visibly, tangibly before him; if he put out his hand he might touch
hers, he might pass his arm round her waist. In Paris, in a set he knew
there, what an effect she would be with that look of hers, and that
beauty, all out of drawing! They would recognize the flame quality in
her. He imagined a joke about her being a fiery spirit, or nymph, naiad,
whatever, from one of her native gas-wells. He began to sketch on a bit
of paper from the table at his elbow vague lines that veiled and revealed
a level, dismal landscape, and a vast flame against an empty sky, and a
shape out of the flame that took on a likeness and floated detached from
it. The sketch ran up the left side of the sheet and stretched across it.
Beaton laughed out. Pretty good to let Fulkerson have that for the cover
of his first number! In black and red it would be effective; it would
catch the eye from the news-stands. He made a motion to throw it on the
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