The Olympian |
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Author:
| Oppenheim, James |
ISBN: | 978-0-217-60174-0 |
Publication Date: | Aug 2009 |
Publisher: | General Books LLC
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Book Format: | Paperback |
List Price: | USD $21.24 |
Book Description:
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE OUTSIDER AT five-thirty the next morning Kirby was up, writing letters. First he got the letter to his mother and sisters out of the way?a tedious chronicle of food, shelter, and health, with an American prospectus of New York as The Young Man's Friend, The Chance of a Lifetime. It was necessary to...
More DescriptionPurchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE OUTSIDER AT five-thirty the next morning Kirby was up, writing letters. First he got the letter to his mother and sisters out of the way?a tedious chronicle of food, shelter, and health, with an American prospectus of New York as The Young Man's Friend, The Chance of a Lifetime. It was necessary to reassure a doubting family. That done, he drew forth a fresh sheet and smiled. How should he address her? He wanted to write Dear Janice, but he didn't dare. Mrs. Hadden was too formal, Aunt Janice made her impossibly old. Finally he wrote Dear Friend, but even then he wondered what the professor might say. Janice, when she received the letter, thought it was very young and destroyed it before her husband knew of its existence. The reason was very simple. Kirby felt not the least bit romantic, yet deemed it necessary to preserve the King Arthur atmosphere of the kiss on the campus. To do this he had to press the loud pedal of his emotions; he had to pump. As, for instance: You cannot know what your least glance means to me; I am kept brave in these strange surroundings. I feel I am a man and can conquer anything. Brave the stings and scorns of time. I had a dream about you in the sleeping-car. But I cannot write it out. It was the most beautiful dream I have ever had. You were on a throne, and I had just conquered the world? Surely Kirby was an odd mixture of arrested adolescence and precocious manhood. For a male of twenty-four he was at times strangely boyish, unformed, yet at other times he seemed almost overdeveloped. But this had always been the contradiction in his character; it accounted for his spells of listlessness, his occasional blushing shyness, his four years over the average age in high school; and then again the emotion he had stirr...