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SOULS SALE (The Garland Classics of Film Literature)
SOULS SALE - The Garland Classics of Film Literature Author:Hughes 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: CHAPTER III NEXT morning Mem went about her household chores and said nothing of her promise. When she was reminded of it, she put off going until her mother ... more »threatened to go with her. Then she made haste to set out alone. She walked around Doctor Bretherick's block two or three times until she saw that no one was waiting. She caught the doctor, indeed, just hurrying out to his buggy. She asked him to turn back and talk to her. And she made sure that the door to his consulting room was closed. She told him that her parents were afraid her cold was more than a cold, and she coughed for him and endured his investigations and auscultations and the odd babyishness with which he laid his head on her breast and on her shoulder blades. He asked her many questions, and she grew so confused and apt in blushes that he asked her more. Suddenly he flung her a startled look, gasped, and stared into her eyes as if he would ransack her mind. In the mere shifting of his eyelid muscles she could read amazement, incredulity, conviction, anger, and finally pity. All he said was, "My child!" There could be no soletnner conference than theirs. Doctor Bretherick had attended Mem's mother when the girl was born. He thought of her still as a child, and now she dazed him and frightened him by her mystic knowledges and her fierce demands that he should help her out of her plight or help her out of the world. He refused to do either and demanded that she meet her fate with heroism. Somehow he woke a new courage in the panic of her soul, but she was convinced that her future must be one of degradation in obscurity. She quoted him the old saw: "It doesn't matter what a man does, but once a woman slips she is lost forever." "Nonsense!" he cried, and added: "Damned and damnable nonsen...« less