Library / Literature & Fiction
The Shape of Fear
- Pages
- about 85
- Category
- Literature & Fiction
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 1.6 h at 250 wpm
From the opening
TIM O'CONNOR--who was descended from the O'Conors with one N---- started
life as a poet and an enthusiast. His mother had designed him for
the priesthood, and at the age of fifteen, most of his verses had an
ecclesiastical tinge, but, somehow or other, he got into the newspaper
business instead, and became a pessimistic gentleman, with a literary
style of great beauty and an income of modest proportions. He fell in
with men who talked of art for art's sake,--though what right they had
to speak of art at all nobody knew,--and little by little his view of
life and love became more or less profane. He met a woman who sucked
his heart's blood, and he knew it and made no protest; nay, to the great
amusement of the fellows who talked of art for art's sake, he went the
length of marrying her. He could not in decency explain that he had
the traditions of fine gentlemen behind him and so had to do as he did,
because his friends might not have understood. He laughed at the days
when he had thought of the priesthood, blushed when he ran across any of
those tender and exquisite old verses he had written in his youth,
and became addicted to absinthe and other less peculiar drinks, and to
gaming a little to escape a madness of ennui.
As the years went by he avoided, with more and more scorn, that part of
the world which he denominated Philistine, and consorted only with the
fellows who flocked about Jim O'Malley's saloon. He was pleased with
solitude, or with these convivial wits, and with not very much else
beside. Jim O'Malley was a sort of Irish poem, set to inspiring measure.
He was, in fact, a Hibernian Mæcenas, who knew better than to put
bad whiskey before a man of talent, or tell a trite tale in the presence
of a wit.
A short sample. Read the whole book
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