Explore "A Marrying Man" by G.B. Stern on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
With the tremulous daring of a man who has caught a glimpse of a woman's face once, swiftly, by night, and has feared to see it the morning after, in case it should prove less lovely -- yet longed to gaze upon it and gaze upon it, that each subtle curve, each fleck of colour, might at last grow familiar to him as the sunshine, so Gareth set out, the morning after arrival at Rapparee House, to explore minutely that harbour which Heaven had dumped for his delight beneath his attic window. The streets were washed in gold, under a sky of stark cobalt; and the space between sky and street was wind-tumbled and uproarious. A fine jolly day for a landsman to prowl about among quays and ships and mariners... and dream that he too had raced through scudding seas and anchored in strange ports....
Gareth Temple, who would have made a poorer seaman than any who had ever doubled the Cape of Storms, found himself slouching along the cobbled streets, and looking ahead with that peculiar scrutiny, keen yet distant, which -- the sea novelist assures us -- is the inevitable result of perpetual communion with the far horizon; and that peculiar chin, dogged yet steadfast, which -- he omits to tell us -- is the inevitable result of the perpetual crunching of ship's biscuit.