The Wise and the Foolish Virgins [antikvár]

CHAPTER I A TANK, filled to the brim with golden vapour, smooth, yet with a roughness like honey in it: a roughness perceptible to the eye, yet intangible: a bloom, that resolved itself here and there into soft, umbrian shade. A golden element, peopled with translucent beings that derived their motive-force from its deep nocturnal ebb and flow: delicate things, as elusive as breath. Down in the bottom of the tank, an undersea stillness, a vague stirring of nameless growths, livid, a little awful: but above them, up in the gold, that curious continual dance of ethereal creatures, that hint of music too fine for mortal ears. "Catherine Malley! What are you doing?" Catherine Malley, who had been occupied in blowing mouthfuls of breath into the fog, watching it turn yellow, and change into the airy sprites of her imagination, subsided guiltily, hanging her head. A thick, yellowy atmosphere, compounded of river-fog, malt, the breaths of children, damp clothing, dust, powdered chalk, and sour ink, lay about the large, bare apartment, in which, like anaemic stars in a yellow sky, burned several gases, one of which periodically shot upwards a shrill, triumphant, lilac jet. Each time this happened someone crossed the room and turned it down reprovingly, expressing with pinched lips and irritable eyebrows deprecation of the little act of chemical magic that drew the eyes of the pupils—especially the younger ones—from their dirty primers to rest on the lovely, gay, surprising thing.