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The Ring and the Man; With Some Incidental Relation to the Woman
The Ring and the Man With Some Incidental Relation to the Woman Author:Cyrus Townsend Brady General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1909 Original Publisher: Moffat, Yard and Company Notes: This is a 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 wher... more »e you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: BOOK I THE AWAKENED AMBITION CHAPTER I THE LONELINESS OF MR. GORMLY his great surprise, George Gormly some- times found himself feeling lonely, and the oftener so as he grew older. Every man who has a natural liking for women, -- and what true man has not? -- yet who has no intimate friendships with or relations to the other sex, is likely to find himself in that state of mind sooner or later. The exceptions to this rule are certain confirmed bachelors, whom age and experience, together with a certain habit of independent self reliance, not always the sole property of the male sex, have rendered immune to the depression of solitariness. Gormly was sufficiently aged; he was fourty-four although he looked much younger. He was sufficiently experienced; he had dealt with women for a straight quarter of a century although he had neither loved nor married one. He was sufficiently self reliant; he had built up by his own unaided efforts the greatest retail merchandise business of his day and generation. He was sufficiently independent -- for he had done it alone -- to have been above the ordinary feeling of loneliness. Nevertheless, he was tempermentally lonesome, and at this particular moment desperately so. He had drifted into New York some twenty- five years before, utterly unheralded, unnoticed. He had a little money in his pocket; youth, strength, good looks to accompany it; a certain keen commercial ability latent in his being; and a wealth of bitter cynicism in his heart, -- bad from the social viewpoint in one so young (he was only nineteen), but not ent...« less