Explore "The Master of the Mill" by Frederick Philip Grove on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The senator was failing fast. The first sign of the approach of the end consisted in his growing indifference to such matters as, for more than a decade, had constituted an almost sacred routine.
He refused to go down to the library when Captain Stevens was announced; Lady Clark took the report instead; and when the car drove up to take the senator and his daughter-in-law for the accustomed ride around the loop, he turned away with a shrug. The two women, drawn more intimately together by the desertion of the senator, took those rides together now; and invariably, during the first leg of the round, they talked of the new signs of decay that appeared in the old man. It was a perfectly normal process. More and more he lost control of his limbs. If, as he mostly did, in these first phases of his dissolution, he came down for his meals, he was apt to knock over his glass or his cup as he reached for it; or to drop food on his clothes.