"Cather, Willa - Alexander's Bridge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cather Willa Sibert)

cigar smoke and chill out-of-doors air.
When Alexander reached the library door,
he switched on the lights and stood six feet
and more in the archway, glowing with strength
and cordiality and rugged, blond good looks.
There were other bridge-builders in the
world, certainly, but it was always Alexander's
picture that the Sunday Supplement men wanted,
because he looked as a tamer of rivers
ought to look. Under his tumbled sandy
hair his head seemed as hard and powerful
as a catapult, and his shoulders looked
strong enough in themselves to support
a span of any one of his ten great bridges
that cut the air above as many rivers.


After dinner Alexander took Wilson up to
his study. It was a large room over the
library, and looked out upon the black river
and the row of white lights along the
Cambridge Embankment. The room was not at all
what one might expect of an engineer's study.
Wilson felt at once the harmony of beautiful
things that have lived long together without
obtrusions of ugliness or change. It was none
of Alexander's doing, of course; those warm
consonances of color had been blending and
mellowing before he was born. But the wonder
was that he was not out of place there,--
that it all seemed to glow like the inevitable
background for his vigor and vehemence. He
sat before the fire, his shoulders deep in the
cushions of his chair, his powerful head upright,
his hair rumpled above his broad forehead.
He sat heavily, a cigar in his large,
smooth hand, a flush of after-dinner color in
his face, which wind and sun and exposure to
all sorts of weather had left fair and clearskinned.

"You are off for England on Saturday,
Bartley, Mrs. Alexander tells me."

"Yes, for a few weeks only. There's a
meeting of British engineers, and I'm doing
another bridge in Canada, you know."

"Oh, every one knows about that. And it
was in Canada that you met your wife, wasn't it?"