Sanctuary
Wharton, Edith, 1862-1937
English
We will print you a perfectly bound paperback of your selected title and send it to you at your nominated address
Below is a summary of Sanctuary
Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, William Flis, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team
SANCTUARY
BY
EDITH WHARTON
PART I
It is not often that youth allows itself to feel undividedly happy: the
sensation is too much the result of selection and elimination to be within
reach of the awakening clutch on life. But Kate Orme, for once, had yielded
herself to happiness; letting it permeate every faculty as a spring rain
soaks into a germinating meadow. There was nothing to account for this
sudden sense of beatitude; but was it not this precisely which made it
so irresistible, so overwhelming? There had been, within the last two
months--since her engagement to Denis Peyton--no distinct addition to
the sum of her happiness, and no possibility, she would have affirmed,
of adding perceptibly to a total already incalculable. Inwardly and
outwardly the conditions of her life were unchanged; but whereas, before,
the air had been full of flitting wings, now they seemed to pause over
her and she could trust herself to their shelter.
Many influences had combined to build up the centre of brooding peace in
which she found herself. Her nature answered to the finest vibrations,
and at first her joy in loving had been too great not to bring with it a
certain confusion, a readjusting of the whole scenery of life. She found
herself in a new country, wherein he who had led her there was least able
to be her guide. There were moments when she felt that the first stranger
in the street could have interpreted her happiness for her more easily
than Denis. Then, as her eye adapted itself, as the lines flowed into each
other, opening deep vistas upon new horizons, she began to enter into
possession of her kingdom, to entertain the actual sense of its belonging
to her. But she had never before felt that she also belonged to it; and
this was the feeling which now came to complete her happiness, to give it
the hallowing sense of permanence.
She rose from the writing-table where, list in hand, she had been going
over the wedding-invitations, and walked toward the drawing-room window.
Everything about her seemed to contribute to that rare harmony of feeling
which levied a tax on every sense. The large coolness of the room, its fine
traditional air of spacious living, its outlook over field and woodland
toward the lake lying under the silver bloom of September; the very scent
of the late violets in a glass on the writing-table; the rosy-mauve masses
of hydrangea in tubs along the terrace; the fall, now and then, of a leaf
through the still air--all, somehow, were mingled in the suffusion of
well-being that yet made them seem but so much dross upon its current.
The girl's smile prolonged itself at the sight of a figure approaching from
the lower slopes above the lake. The path was a short cut from the Peyton
place, and she had known that Denis would appear in it at about that hour.
Her smile, however, was prolonged not so much by his approach as by her
sense of the impossibility of communicating her mood to him. The feeling
did not disturb her. She could not imagine sharing her deepest moods with
any one, and the world in which she lived with Denis was too bright and
spacious to admit of any sense of constraint. Her smile was in truth a
tribute to that clear-eyed directness of his which was so often a refuge
from her own complexities.
Denis Peyton was used to being met with a smile. He might have been
pardoned for thinking smiles the habitual wear of the human countenance;
and his estimate of life and of himself was necessarily tinged by the
cordial terms on which they had always met each other. He had in fact found
life, from the start, an uncommonly agreeable business, culminating fitly
enough in his engagement to the only girl he had ever wished to marry,
and the inheritance, from his unhappy step-brother, of a fortune which
agreeably widened his horizon. Such a combination of circumstances might
well justify a young man in thinking himself of some account in the
universe; and it seemed the final touch of fitness that the mourning which
Denis still wore for poor Arthur should lend a new distinction to his
somewhat florid good looks.
Kate Orme was not without an amused perception of her future husband's
point of view; but she could enter into it with the tolerance which
allows for the inconscient element in all our judgments. There was, for
instance, no one more sentimentally humane than Denis's mother, the
second Mrs. Peyton, a scented silvery person whose lavender silks and
neutral-tinted manner expressed a mind with its blinds drawn down toward
all the unpleasantness of life; yet it was clear that Mrs. Peyton saw a
"dispensation" in the fact that her step-son had never married, and that
his death had enabled Denis, at the right moment, to step gracefully into
affluence. Was it not, after all, a sign of healthy-mindedness to take the
gifts of the gods in this religious spirit, discovering fresh evidence of
"design" in what had once seemed the sad fact of Arthur's inaccessibility
to correction? Mrs. Peyton, beautifully conscious of having done her "best"
for Arthur, would have thought it unchristian to repine at the providential
Back