This Side of Glory Read Online Free PDF Page A

earth.”
    “Do you know,” said Kester, “I’ve lived on the river all my life, but you make me feel as if I’m just beginning to learn about it. I’ve always thought of this country in terms of cotton.”
    “But you’d have to. After all, that’s your business, and building levees isn’t. Did you always want to be a planter?”
    “Why yes, I always took it for granted that I would be. My brother Sebastian wanted to go into business, so when my father retired he made over the plantation to me, and Sebastion went to New Orleans.”
    “What does he do?”
    “He’s a cotton broker.” Kester stood up, grinning. “Doing very well at it, I believe. A most excellent young man, the only one of us who is strong-minded enough to make cotton work for him instead of making himself work for cotton.”
    Kester stood with his elbow on the marble mantel. Her chin on her knees, Eleanor lifted her eyes to look up at him. “You needn’t try to be flippant,” she said. “I’m beginning to understand you love this place devotedly, and are a little bit ashamed to confess how much it means to you.”
    He nodded, half proud and half embarrassed. “I do love it, Miss Eleanor. I feel so much a part of it, you see—though not many people can make me own up to it so frankly.”
    There was a pause. The shadows were beginning to thicken in the corners, but Kester’s figure stood out in clear relief as though all the firelight had gathered to meet his glowing vitality. He was right, she thought: he belonged to Ardeith as essentially as the house or the oaks, and it would be impossible to think of him apart from his background. Though he was standing quietly by the fire she was acutely aware of his powerful presence. It was easy to imagine his entering a crowded room and making everybody else in it flatten into unimportance by the mere fact of his being there. Again remembering what her father had said about the Larnes, Eleanor reflected that Fred knew nothing about them and was relegating them to a category, perhaps unfairly; certainly Kester was an attractive young man, who had not only the gift of fascinating but the rarer gift of being fascinated. “I could like him very much,” Eleanor said to herself. “In fact, I do.”
    They both started as they heard a sound of footsteps at the front door.
    Eleanor sprang up, feeling suddenly self-conscious, as though she had been interrupted in a moment of intimacy. Kester had turned toward the door. “Is that company?” she asked.
    “No, only my mother and father. I’ll bring them in.”
    He crossed the room to meet them, and a moment later Eleanor was being presented to his parents.
    The first word that occurred to Eleanor in regard to Mr. and Mrs. Larne was exquisite. They looked rather alike: they were both tall and slender and graceful, they both spoke in soft, beautifully modulated voices, they both gave her an impression of perfectly charming uselessness. Mr. Larne insisted that she must have a glass of sherry with them before supper, and when she hesitated, thinking they might prefer to be left alone, he told her with flattering urgency that it was not every day Kester brought in a delightful young lady and he wouldn’t think of parting with her yet. Both amused and puzzled, Eleanor sat down again; it was quite impossible to tell whether these people meant what they were saying, but she decided to remain long enough for one glass of sherry and then go. Mrs. Larne gave her big plumed hat to a maid and Cameo brought in a decanter and glasses. Denis Larne II, married to Lysiane St. Clair, she remembered; yes, he did look like a gentleman whose doings would be rightly recorded in the right places. He would know vintages, and fine cigars, and clever lines from the new novels, he would like Debussy and shiver at ragtime, both he and Lysiane had distinction and a quiet air of breeding, but how in the name of heaven had this porcelain pair created Kester?
    “You are visiting in the