0.1 Book report on "advesary in the house_part2" by irving stone.  (Page 23/5)

The Book Report on “the Adversary in the House” by Irving Stone_ Part 2.

This novel is the biography of Eugene V. Debs, a pioneer Labour Union Leader. He was born and brought up in a time in which a new chapter was being written in U.S.A. The Civil War was over. Emancipation Bill had been signed. Slaves had been freed. Industrialization was moving full steam in U.S.A. It was the last quarter of 19 ^th Century.

Gloria was the first and the last love of Eugene. He loved Gloria second to his work only but could never marry her. Eugene, during his valiant march through the forbidden land of radical ideas, married Kate Mertazel on her insistence but could never really fall in love with her because their ideals, dreams and visions of the future were as immiscible as oil and water.

When Eugene was twenty, Gloria was seventeen. This was the year 1875.

“She had sparking green eyes, a tilted nose. When he was with her, Gene seemed to be laughing all the time. It would have been hard for him to say at what he was laughing: perhaps the turn of a phrase, a man chasing his hat across a canal street, the confiding way in which she slipped her had into his as they walked through the field on a Sunday morning. Gloria was small, hardly reaching his shoulders, but she had an attractive figure, with delicate ankles and full bosom which unlike most Terre Haitians, her mother refused to strap down as though it were the confession of the original sin.

Gloria liked people and houses and food, and liked the warm autumnal sun of Terra Haute touching the yellow leaves with rays of light and knocking them of their brittle stems; but best of all Gloria liked Gene Debs. To his great embarrassment she persisted in telling him he was the handsomest boy in Terra Haute. Everybody knew that she intended marrying him on his twenty-first birthday.”

Gloria often invited Eugene out with her and her family for a picnic or the like. But Eugene could never make it. All the spare time left outside his clerical job was devoted to his work for the Union. He first wanted to fit himself in a really useful role for the society and then only think about love and romance. Thus it was that he thought very little about his future with Gloria.

One Sunday afternoon in 1876 Gloria dropped into to see if she could persuade Eugene to take a break from his tough intellectual endeavour.

“Gene, you should not be indoors on such a lovely spring day. You should be taking me for a long walk out to the Indian Burial Ground”.

She raised her arms slightly for him to lift her onto the desk.

“ I can’t put you up there, Gloria, you will be sittling all over the charts I have made for the Labour Movement.”

“Did not you tell me that one of the major objectives of trade-unionism is a six-day a week ?” she twitted. “You had better take your best girl walking on Sunday”.