The Confounding of Camelia Author:Anne Douglas Sedgwick General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1899 Original Publisher: C. Scribner's Sons Subjects: Fiction / General Fiction / Classics Fiction / Historical Fiction / Literary Fiction / Short Stories Literary Criticism / General Literary Criticism / American / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR ... more »reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER V MICHAEL PERIOR was an unfortunate man ; unfortunate in his temperament, which was enthusiastic, sensitive, and idealistic ; unfortunate in the circumstances with which that temperament found itself called upon to do battle. To a man who had expected less of life the circumstances might have been more amenable and far more endurable, but Perior had the ill-luck to be born with an unmanageable instinct for the best, with an untamable scorn for the second-best. It is not necessary to go into the details of a life which had not spared these qualities nor improved while disillusionizing him. Two blinding buffets met him at its threshold. His father was ruined in a lawsuit, which by every ethical standard he should have won, and Perior was in consequence jilted by the girl whom he had enshrined in his heart as the perfect star of his existence. At twenty-three he found himself under a starless sky, with a heart stupefied at its own emptiness, and in a world of thieves and murderers -- for his father died under the shock of disaster, and Perior did not pick his phrases. The abject common-sense of his exfianc« less