"I had a builder's risk on it, but it expired last week.
It's a dead loss."
"Oh, thank the merciful Lord!" cried his wife.
"Merciful!" said Lapham. "Well, it's a queer way
of showing it."
He went to bed, and fell into the deep sleep which
sometimes follows a great moral shock. It was perhaps
rather a torpor than a sleep.
XXV.
LAPHAM awoke confused, and in a kind of remoteness from the
loss of the night before, through which it loomed mistily.
But before he lifted his head from the pillow, it gathered
substance and weight against which it needed all his will
to bear up and live. In that moment he wished that he
had not wakened, that he might never have wakened;
but he rose, and faced the day and its cares.
The morning papers brought the report of the fire,
and the conjectured loss. The reporters somehow had found
out the fact that the loss fell entirely upon Lapham;
they lighted up the hackneyed character of their statements
with the picturesque interest OF the coincidence that the
policy had expired only the week before; heaven knows
how they knew it. They said that nothing remained
of the building but the walls; and Lapham, on his way
to business, walked up past the smoke-stained shell.
The windows looked like the eye-sockets of a skull
down upon the blackened and trampled snow of the street;
the pavement was a sheet of ice, and the water from the
engines had frozen, like streams of tears, down the face
of the house, and hung in icy tags from the window-sills
and copings.
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