Explore "Irresolute Catherine" by Violet Jacob on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
ON the night before Catherine Dennis's wedding the spangled sky spread, still and cloudless, above Pencoed Chapel. The plain squareness of the house of worship, and the treeless stretch surrounding it and Mrs. Job's cottage hard by, looked all the plainer for the white points of light that burned in remote solemnity over the mountain. The building, but for the one insignificant dwelling, was, as it were, the solitary feature in a bare world; and the starlight on the grey walls gave them an even greater austerity than they had by day.
In the moonless night the gravestones round the chapel, having no shadows to throw them into relief, were merged into general neutrality with the grass. The sharpest things in earth or heaven were the angles of Cassiopeia's Chair, high among the constellations, which seemed not to look down on the sleep-bound world but to be turning from it, consciously aloof in their unwavering detachment; a sight to affect some not at all; to oppress some by the comparison of infinitude with their own individualities; to raise others, by that very comparison, to the height of ecstasy -- the dim foreknowledge of what that true sense of proportion must be which swallows the individual into the immutable and divine.