Prince Fortunatus A Novel Author:William Black General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1890 Original Publisher: Harper Subjects: Fiction / Classics Fiction / Historical Fiction / Literary Fiction / Romance / General Fiction / Romance / Contemporary History / General Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Notes: This is a ... more »black and white OCR 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 XVIII. AN INVOCATION. All his vague, wild, impracticable hopes and schemes had suddenly received their death-blow ; but there was nothing worse than that; he himself (as he imagined) had been dealt no desperate wound. For one thing, flattered and petted as this young man had been, he was neither unreasoning nor vain ; that a woman should have refused to marry him did not seem to him a monstrous thing; she was surely within her right in saying no ; while, on the other hand, he was neither going to die of chagrin nor yet to plan a melodramatic revenge. But the truth was that he had never been passionately in love with Honnor Cun- yngham. Passionate love he did not much believe in; he associated it with lime-light and crowded audiences and the odor of gas. Indeed, it might almost be said that he had been in love not so much with Honnor Cunyngham as with the condition of life which she represented. He had grown restless and dissatisfied with his present state; he had been imagining for himself another sort of existence -- but always with her as the central figure of those fancied realms; he had been dreaming dreams -- of which she had invariably formed part. And now he had been awakened (somewhat abruptly, perhaps, but that may have been his own fault); and there was nothing for it but to summon his common-sense to his aid, and to assure himself that Honno...« less