Gray youth: The story of a very modern courtship and a very modern marriageOnions, Oliver
General
Gray youth: The story of a very modern courtship and a very modern marriage
Onions, Oliver
Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Marriage -- Fiction; Women -- Social and moral questions -- Fiction
For she considered that Cosimo was at the bottom of all the trouble.
If Stan, at his most impecunious and happy-go-lucky, could still
stalk about the house saying "Dot, I won't have this," or "Look here,
Dorothy, that has got to stop," it seemed to her that Cosimo, with
never a care on his mind that was not his own manufacture, might
several times have prevented Amory from making rather a fool of
herself. But it seemed to Dorothy that kind of man was springing up
all over the place nowadays. Mr. Brimby was another of them. Dorothy
had read one of Mr. Brimby's books--"_The Source_," and hadn't liked
it. She had thought it terribly dismal. In it a pretty and rich young
widow, who might almost have been Amory herself, went slumming, and
spent a lot of money in starting a sort of Model Pawn Shop, and by and
by there came a mysterious falling-off in her income, and she went
to see her lawyer about it, and learned, of course, that her source
of income was that very slum in which she had stooped to labour so
angelically.... Dorothy didn't know very much about pawnshops, but then
she didn't believe that Mr. Brimby did either; and if her interest in
them ever should become really keen, she didn't think she should go
to Oxford for information about them. And Mr. Brimby himself seemed
to feel this "crab," as Stan would have called it, for after "_The
Source_" he had written a Preface for a book by a real and genuine
tramp.... And it had been Amory who had recommended "_The Source_" to
Dorothy. She had said that it just showed, that with vision and thought
and heart and no previous experience ("no prejudice" had been her exact
words), there need be none of these dreadful grimy establishments,
with their horrible underbred assistants who refused a poor woman
half a crown on her mattress and made a joke about it, but airy and
hygienic rooms instead, with rounded corners so that the dust could be
swept away in two minutes (leaving a balance of at least twenty-eight
minutes in which the sweeper might improve himself), and really
courtly-mannered attendants, full of half crowns and pity and Oxford
voice, who would give everybody twice as much as they asked for and a
tear into the bargain.
And Amory knew just as much about real pawnshops as did Dorothy and Mr.
Brimby.
For the life of her Dorothy could not make out what all these people
were up to.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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