Read "The Gilded Chair" by Melville Davisson Post online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
At noon on a certain Thursday, seven days after his arrival, the Duke of Dorset set out to shoot quail in the river bottom south of the château. A shower of rain had fallen in the morning. The air was clear and bright. The mountains gleamed as in a mirror, the haze, by some optical illusion, banked behind them. The vigor of spring, by some trick of Nature, seemed to have crept back into the earth; to swim in the dark waters of the river; to lie at the root of the grasses; to swell under the bark of the fir tree, waiting for a day or two of sun. The great principle of life, waning in the autumn, seemed moving, potent, on the point of recovering its vitality, as under some April shower. Birds fluttered in the thickets, as though seized with a nesting instinct; the cattle wandered in their pasture; new blades started green at the roots of the brown turf; and, now and then, as though misled, as though tricked, a little flower opened to the sun.
The man, walking through the fields, the meadows, over the moist leaves, received, like every other thing, his share of this subtle influence. The clean air whipped his blood; that virility, warming in the grasses, in the green stem of the flower, under the bark of the fir tree, warmed, too, in every fiber of his body.