"GREY, Zane - Light Of The Western Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grey Zane)

these blurred in her sight. As her eyes grew accustomed to the
darkness she saw a superbly built horse standing near the window.
Beyond was a bare square. Or, if it was a street, it was the
widest one Madeline had ever seen. The dim lights shone from
low, flat buildings. She made out the dark shapes of many
horses, all standing motionless with drooping heads. Through a
hole in the window-glass came a cool breeze, and on it breathed a
sound that struck coarsely upon her ear--a discordant mingling of
laughter and shout, and the tramp of boots to the hard music of a
phonograph.

"Western revelry," mused Miss Hammond, as she left the window.
"Now, what to do? I'll wait here. Perhaps the station agent
will return soon, or Alfred will come for me."

As she sat down to wait she reviewed the causes which accounted
for the remarkable situation in which she found herself. That
Madeline Hammond should be alone, at a late hour, in a dingy
little Western railroad station, was indeed extraordinary.

The close of her debutante year had been marred by the only
unhappy experience of her life--the disgrace of her brother and
his leaving home. She dated the beginning of a certain
thoughtful habit of mind from that time, and a dissatisfaction
with the brilliant life society offered her. The change had been
so gradual that it was permanent before she realized it. For a
while an active outdoor life--golf, tennis, yachting--kept this
realization from becoming morbid introspection. There came a
time when even these lost charm for her, and then she believed
she was indeed ill in mind. Travel did not help her.

There had been months of unrest, of curiously painful wonderment
that her position, her wealth, her popularity no longer sufficed.
She believed she had lived through the dreams and fancies of a
girl to become a woman of the world. And she had gone on as
before, a part of the glittering show, but no longer blind to the
truth--that there was nothing in her luxurious life to make it
significant.

Sometimes from the depths of her there flashed up at odd moments
intimations of a future revolt. She remembered one evening at
the opera when the curtain bad risen upon a particularly
well-done piece of stage scenery--a broad space of deep
desolateness, reaching away under an infinitude of night sky,
illumined by stars. The suggestion it brought of vast wastes of
lonely, rugged earth, of a great, blue-arched vault of starry
sky, pervaded her soul with a strange, sweet peace.

When the scene was changed she lost this vague new sense of
peace, and she turned away from the stage in irritation. She