Explore "One Man in His Time" by Ellen Glasgow on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Outside in the narrow passage, smelling of dust and yesterday's cooking, the pallid light filtered in through the closed window; and it seemed to Corinna that this light pervaded her own thoughts until the images in her mind moved in a procession of stark outlines against a colourless horizon. In this unreal world, which she knew was merely a distorted impression of the external world about her, she saw the figure of the dead woman, still and straight as the effigy of a saint, the twisted shape of the old hunchback, and after these the shadow of the starved cat stealing along the top of the high brick wall. What was the meaning in these things? Where was the beauty? What inscrutable purpose, what sardonic humour, joined together beauty and ugliness, harmony and discord, her own golden heritage with the drab destinies of that dead woman and this work-worn cripple?
"I can't stand it any longer," she thought. "I must breathe the open air, or I shall die."