Take the case of
Lorison. At one time he appeared to himself to be the feeblest of
fools; at another he conceived that he followed ideals so fine that
the world was not yet ready to accept them. During one mood he cursed
his folly; possessed by the other, he bore himself with a serene
grandeur akin to greatness: in neither did he attain the perspective.
Generations before, the name had been "Larsen." His race had
bequeathed him its fine-strung, melancholy temperament, its saving
balance of thrift and industry.
From his point of perspective he saw himself an outcast from society,
forever to be a shady skulker along the ragged edge of respectability;
a denizen _des trois-quartz de monde_, that pathetic spheroid lying
between the _haut_ and the _demi_, whose inhabitants envy each of their
neighbours, and are scorned by both. He was self-condemned to this
opinion, as he was self-exiled, through it, to this quaint Southern
city a thousand miles from his former home. Here he had dwelt for
longer than a year, knowing but few, keeping in a subjective world
of shadows which was invaded at times by the perplexing bulks of
jarring realities. Then he fell in love with a girl whom he met in a
cheap restaurant, and his story begins.
The Rue Chartres, in New Orleans, is a street of ghosts.
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