Excerpt from The Windfall: A Novel
The tents reluctantly spread their mushroom-like contour, now and again suddenly collapsing from awkward handling or inadequate aid. The manager looked at the few humble toilers with a prescient pang. To be stranded here, on the uttermost confines of civilisation, seemed a disaster indeed of direful menace. He realised his friend's impressions and could have voiced in unison the exact phrase as a heavy fellow of medium height, arrayed in a ready-made suit of a loud plaid, slouched up with his hands in his pockets, and chewing a straw.
"Well, partner, we've done it again!" he said, not without the accents of reproach.
Lloyd obviously flinched at the tone, and his face flushed. It was of a singularly perfect contour and chiselling, according to the canons of art, and in its large nobility of expression it might have served, and possibly had, as a model for an artist's realisation of some high ideal. But there was a most mundane anxiety in his luminous eyes, darkly blue and long-lashed, and the alertness with which they eagerly surveyed the meagre festival preparations gave an accent of the ludicrous to his fine facial suggestions. He was like a man playing the role of a prince, unstaged, on the bare sidewalk, and his utter unconsciousness and indifference to the effect of his remarkable appearance added to its impressiveness.
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