Explore "Our Lady of Darkness" by Bernard Capes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The morrow -- that is always, by some alchemistic process, to convert the drossy problems of the night into liquid gold -- greeted Ned with leaden untransmutable skies, that were only too representative of the irresolvable heaviness of his own thoughts. He looked out of his grimy window of the little tavern on which he had quartered himself, and saw the yellow of an almost substantial atmosphere sandwiched between a sagged grey welkin and a world of livid snow; and he saw no prospect, in that before him, of any illumination of his dull perplexity.
He dressed, breakfasted, and presently went out into the streets. The desire to postpone that hour of inevitable struggle with an allurement which, he dreaded, in his present condition of emotional bewilderment, he would be unable to resist, drove him to take a rambling course to his lodgings.