Sanctuary

Sanctuary

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sanctuary, by Edith Wharton
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Title: Sanctuary
Author: Edith Wharton
Release Date: February, 2005 [EBook #7517] [This file was first
posted on May 13, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK,
SANCTUARY ***

Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, William Flis, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team

SANCTUARY
BY
EDITH WHARTON

PART I
It is not often that youth allows itself to feel undividedly happy: the
sensation is too much the result of selection and elimination to be
within reach of the awakening clutch on life. But Kate Orme, for once,
had yielded herself to happiness; letting it permeate every faculty as a
spring rain soaks into a germinating meadow. There was nothing to
account for this sudden sense of beatitude; but was it not this precisely
which made it so irresistible, so overwhelming? There had been, within
the last two months--since her engagement to Denis Peyton--no distinct
addition to the sum of her happiness, and no possibility, she would
have affirmed, of adding perceptibly to a total already incalculable.
Inwardly and outwardly the conditions of her life were unchanged; but
whereas, before, the air had been full of flitting wings, now they
seemed to pause over her and she could trust herself to their shelter.
Many influences had combined to build up the centre of brooding peace
in which she found herself. Her nature answered to the finest vibrations,
and at first her joy in loving had been too great not to bring with it a
certain confusion, a readjusting of the whole scenery of life. She found
herself in a new country, wherein he who had led her there was least
able to be her guide. There were moments when she felt that the first
stranger in the street could have interpreted her happiness for her more

easily than Denis. Then, as her eye adapted itself, as the lines flowed
into each other, opening deep vistas upon new horizons, she began to
enter into possession of her kingdom, to entertain the actual sense of its
belonging to her. But she had never before felt that she also belonged to
it; and this was the feeling which now came to complete her happiness,
to give it the hallowing sense of permanence.
She rose from the writing-table where, list in hand, she had been going
over the wedding-invitations, and walked toward the drawing-room
window. Everything about her seemed to contribute to that rare
harmony of feeling which levied a tax on every sense. The large
coolness of the room, its fine traditional air of spacious living, its
outlook over field and woodland toward the lake lying under the silver
bloom of September; the very scent of the late violets in a glass on the
writing-table; the rosy-mauve masses of hydrangea in tubs along the
terrace; the fall, now and then, of a leaf through the still air--all,
somehow, were mingled in the suffusion of well-being that yet made
them seem but so much dross upon its current.
The girl's smile prolonged itself at the sight of a figure approaching
from the lower slopes above the lake. The path was a short cut from the
Peyton place, and she had known that Denis would appear in it at about
that hour. Her smile, however, was prolonged not so much by his
approach as by her sense of the impossibility of communicating her
mood to him. The feeling did not disturb her. She could not imagine
sharing her deepest moods with any one, and the world in which she
lived with Denis was too bright and spacious to admit of any sense of
constraint. Her smile was in truth a tribute to that clear-eyed directness
of his which was so often a refuge from her own complexities.
Denis Peyton was used to being met with a smile. He might have been
pardoned for thinking smiles