Indian Summer

Indian Summer

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Indian Summer, by William D.
Howells Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to
check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or
redistributing this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.
Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how
the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since
1971**
*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of
Volunteers!*****
Title: Indian Summer
Author: William D. Howells
Release Date: January, 2005 [EBook #7359] [This file was first posted
on April 20, 2003]
Edition: 10

Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO Latin-1
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, INDIAN
SUMMER ***

David Garcia, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks, and the Online Distributed
Proofreaders Team

INDIAN SUMMER
BY
WILLIAM D. HOWELLS
AUTHOR OF "THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM," "A MODERN
INSTANCE," "WOMAN'S REASON," ETC.

INDIAN SUMMER
* * * * *
I
Midway of the Ponte Vecchio at Florence, where three arches break the
lines of the little jewellers' booths glittering on either hand, and open an
approach to the parapet, Colville lounged against the corner of a shop
and stared out upon the river. It was the late afternoon of a day in
January, which had begun bright and warm, but had suffered a change
of mood as its hours passed, and now, from a sky dimmed with flying
grey clouds, was threatening rain. There must already have been rain in
the mountains, for the yellow torrent that seethed and swirled around
the piers of the bridge was swelling momently on the wall of the Lung'

Arno, and rolling a threatening flood toward the Cascine, where it lost
itself under the ranks of the poplars that seemed to file across its course,
and let their delicate tops melt into the pallor of the low horizon.
The city, with the sweep of the Lung' Arno on either hand, and its
domes and towers hung in the dull air, and the country with its white
villas and black cypresses breaking the grey stretches of the olive
orchards on its hill-sides, had alike been growing more and more
insufferable; and Colville was finding a sort of vindictive satisfaction in
the power to ignore the surrounding frippery of landscape and
architecture. He isolated himself so perfectly from it, as he brooded
upon the river, that, for any sensible difference, he might have been
standing on the Main Street Bridge at Des Vaches, Indiana, looking
down at the tawny sweep of the Wabash. He had no love for that stream,
nor for the ambitious town on its banks, but ever since he woke that
morning he had felt a growing conviction that he had been a great ass
to leave them. He had, in fact, taken the prodigious risk of breaking his
life sharp off from the course in which it had been set for many years,
and of attempting to renew it in a direction from which it had long been
diverted. Such an act could be precipitated only by a strong impulse of
conscience or a profound disgust, and with Colville it sprang from
disgust. He had experienced a bitter disappointment in the city to
whose prosperity he had given the energies of his best years, and in
whose favour he imagined that he had triumphantly established
himself.
He had certainly made the Des Vaches Democrat-Republican a very
good paper; its ability was recognised throughout the State, and in Des
Vaches people of all parties were proud of it. They liked every morning
to see what Colville said; they believed that in his way he was the
smartest man in the State, and they were fond of claiming that there
was no such writer on any of the Indianapolis papers. They forgave
some political heresies to the talent they admired; they permitted him
the whim of free trade, they laughed tolerantly when he came out in
favour of civil service reform, and no one had much fault to find when
the Democrat-Republican bolted the nomination of a certain politician
of its party for Congress. But when Colville permitted his own name to

be used by the opposing party, the people arose in their might and
defeated him by a tremendous majority. That was what the regular
nominee