Kilo : being the love story of Eliph' Hewlitt, book agentButler, Ellis Parker
General
Kilo : being the love story of Eliph' Hewlitt, book agent
Butler, Ellis Parker
Book industries and trade -- Fiction; Love stories
Mrs. Tarbro-Smith received the book with a lady-like enthusiasm, and
immediately placed it upon Miss Sally's center table, where its bright
red cover added a touch of cheerfulness to the room, suggestive of
the knowledge, literature, science and art the book was guaranteed to
irradiate in any family. But Miss Sally never so much as looked inside
its covers. She avoided it as if the thought the book itself might seize
her and sell to her, against her will, one of its fellows. Mrs. Smith
said openly that she wished she might see more of Eliph' Hewlitt, and
that she thought him a most remarkable book agent, particularly after
she had heard of his selling the Missionary Society a wholesale lot of
Jarby's Encyclopedia, and after glancing through the book she admitted
that it was really an excellent thing of its kind, but Miss Sally merely
remarked that she didn't like book agents, and that she hated this one
more than most, he was so slick.
The energetic spirit of Mrs. Smith was sure to carry her into anything
that partook of a social nature, and she had arrived in Kilo in the
midst of the festival season, when out-door festivals of all varieties
were following one after another almost weekly for the benefit of the
church, which had a properly clinging and insatiable debt. In these
festivals she took a prominent part, for the brought her in contact
with the people of Kilo as nothing else could, and if she enjoyed the
affairs, so did Susan. Susan bloomed wonderfully. She sprang at once
from childhood to young womanhood, and Mrs. Smith was pleased to have
her protégée appear so well and receive so much attention, for she felt
that she had had the revision of her. She already saw in her the heroine
of the novel she meant to write, with the plot beginning in Kilo and
Clarence, and carried to New York and, perhaps, Europe.
The attorney and the editor were particularly nice to Susan, and
attentive to Mrs. Smith at all the festivals, and it amused the New
Yorker to find herself and her maid on and equal social plane. It is
quite different in New York. But lady's maids in New York are not all
like Susan. Maids in New York do not spend their spare time studying
Jarby's Encyclopedia of Knowledge and Compendium of Literature, Science
and Art, and Susan did. Even Eliph' Hewlitt could not have read the book
more faithfully than Susan did, nor have believed in it more trustfully.
Often when the editor or the attorney sought her at one of the festivals
they would find her talking with Eliph' Hewlitt, exchanging facts out of
Jarby's Encyclopedia.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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