Feminist fiction; Historical fiction; Southern States -- Fiction; Women -- Southern States -- Fiction; Women authors -- Fiction
Upstairs, at bedtime, now in Rachel's room, now in Hagar's the two
talked together. Daytime, they looked for Hagar's apartment. They
found it at last, high in air, overlooking the great city; roofs and
roofs and roofs at a hundred levels; curling streamers of white steam
like tossed plumes against the blue sky, bright pennants floating from
towering hotel or department store; a clock below a church spire, with
a gilt weather-cock far above; blurs of occasional trees seen in some
hollow opening; streets far below them, crossing, crossing--percolating
rivulets of manikins that were people; roofs and roofs and roofs, and
a low perpetual, multitudinous voice; and the sky over all, high and
clear and exhilarating the day they found the place. "I am going to
utter a bromide," said Hagar. "How marvellous is modern life!"
They went over it again. "Thomasine's room, and a guest-room, and
my room, and a fine room for Mary Magazine who is coming--Isham
having remarried--to look after us, and two baths and a great big
library-study-drawing-room, and a little room for what we please,
and plenty of closets, and a quiet and good café away up on the
roof--Rachel, it's fine!" They sat on a window-seat and Rachel produced
a pencil and notebook, and together they tinted the walls and laid
rugs and hung pictures and ran bookshelves around and furnished the
apartment. "There! that's quiet and perfect and not expensive. As
Thomson would say, 'It's quite _comme il faut_, Miss!'"
"Where is Thomson?"
"Mr. Greer, the artist, has taken him over. He wrote me that he was
making thousands, throwing the light on millionaires, and especially
millionairesses, and that he wanted Thomson, oh, so badly! He's the
type that Thomson likes, and so he joined him two months ago at
Newport. Dear old Thomson! Mahomet has gone back to Alexandria."
They looked around the big room. "Soft lights at night and all those
twinkling stars out there. It's going to be a dear home."
"You'll have people coming about you. Your own sort--"
Hagar laughed. "What is my sort? Everybody's my sort."
"Writers--artists--"
Hagar pondered the mantel-shelf with a view to what should go above
it. "I don't know many of them. I know more of them abroad than here.
We're a very isolated kind of craftspeople--each of us more or less on
a little Robinson Crusoe island of our own. It may be different in New
York, I don't know.... We could do a good deal if we'd put our heads
together and push the same wheel."
The apartment was not to be furnished in a day. They worked at it in
a restful and leisurely manner, and in the midst of operations, Hagar
went to see the Josslyns who had a house up on the Sound.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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