Explore "Virginia" by Ellen Glasgow on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
A chill rain was falling when Virginia got out of the train the next morning, and the raw-boned nags hitched to the ancient "hacks" in the street appeared even more dejected and forlorn than she had remembered them. Then one of the noisy negro drivers seized her bag, and a little later she was rolling up the long hill in the direction of her home. Dinwiddie was the same; nothing had altered there since she had left it -- and yet what a difference! The same shops were unclosing their shutters; the same crippled negro beggar was taking his place at the corner of the market; the same maids were sweeping the sidewalks with the same brooms; the same clerk bowed to her from the drug store where she bought her medicines; and yet something -- the only thing which had ever interested her in these people and this place -- had passed out of them. Just as in New York yesterday, when she had watched the sunrise, so it seemed to her now that the spirit of reality had faded out of the world.
What remained was merely a mirage in which phantoms in the guise of persons made a pretence of being alive.