"Doyle, Arthur Conan - The Land Of Mist" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doyle Arthur Conan)

chivalry which the strong can have for the weak. By yielding
everything she had won everything, as a sweet-natured, tactful woman
can. And when she died suddenly from virulent pneumonia following
influenza, the man staggered and went down. He came up again, smiling
ruefully like the stricken boxer, and ready to carry on for many a
round with Fate. But he was not the same man, and if it had not been
for the help and comradeship of his daughter Enid, he might have never
rallied from the blow. She it was who, with clever craft, lured him
into every subject which would excite his combative nature and
infuriate his mind, until he lived once more in the present and not
the past. It was only when she saw him turbulent in controversy,
violent to pressmen, and generally offensive to those around him, that
she felt he was really in a fair way to recovery.

Enid Challenger was a remarkable girl and should have a paragraph to
herself. With the raven-black hair of her father, and the blue eyes
and fresh colour of her mother, she was striking, if not beautiful, in
appearance. She was quiet, but she was very strong. From her infancy
she had either to take her own part against her father, or else to
consent to be crushed and to become a mere automaton worked by his
strong fingers. She was strong enough to hold her own in a gentle,
elastic fashion, which bent to his moods and reasserted itself when
they were past. Lately she had felt the constant pressure too
oppressive and she had relieved it by feeling out for a career of her
own. She did occasional odd jobs for the London press, and did them in
such fashion that her name was beginning to be known in Fleet Street.
In finding this opening she had been greatly helped by an old friend
of her father -- and possibly of the reader -- Mr. Edward Malone of
the Daily Gazette

Malone was still the same athletic Irishman who had once won his
international cap at Rugby, but life had toned him down also, and made
him a more subdued and thoughtful man. He had put away a good deal
when last his football-boots had been packed away for good. His
muscles may have wilted and his joints stiffened, but his mind was
deeper and more active. The boy was dead and the man was born. In
person he had altered little, but his moustache was heavier, his back
a little rounded, and some lines of thought were tracing themselves
upon his brow. Post-war conditions and new world problems had left
their mark. For the rest he had made his name in journalism and even
to a small degree in literature. He was still a bachelor, though there
were some who thought that his hold on that condition was precarious
and that Miss Enid Challenger's little white fingers could disengage
it. Certainly they were very good chums.

It was a Sunday evening in October, and the lights were just beginning
to twinkle out through the fog which had shrouded London from early
morning. Professor Challenger's flat at Victoria West Gardens was upon
the third floor, and the mist lay thick upon the windows, while the
low hum of the attenuated Sunday traffic rose up from an invisible