California, Southern -- Fiction; Motion picture industry -- Fiction; Petroleum industry and trade -- Fiction; Political fiction
You rolled down the winding drive, through tumbled masses of rocks and
clumps of live oaks a century or two old, and came to a fork in the
road, and one way said “Delivery,” and the other said, “Guests.” If you
were so fortunate as to be a guest, your road led under a porte-cochere
big enough for half a dozen double-decker stages; a footman appeared,
and summoned a chauffeur to take your car to the garage, and you were
escorted into a living-room—well, it was like going into a cathedral,
your eyes would follow the arches overhead, and you might trip yourself
on the skin of an aurochs or a gnu or whatever the dickens it was. What
grim sardonic architect had played this jest of Gothic towers and
steeples and crenellations and machicolations—here in the midst of a
new pagan empire, and called by such a very suggestive name! Assuredly,
the Monastery would need to be of pre-reformation style, to fit the ways
of the monk who occupied it!
The transept of the cathedral concealed an elevator, Bunny discovered;
and out of it tripped suddenly a diminutive vision in lemon-colored
chiffon, with lemon-colored stockings and shoes, and a big lemon-colored
hat such as shepherdesses used to wear when having their portraits
painted. It was complete and costly enough for a fancy-dress ball; and
no introduction was needed, for Bunny was one of that ninety percent of
all males in the civilized world, and perhaps seventy percent in
Madagascar, Paraguay, Nova Zembla, Thibet and New Guinea, who could have
told the number of lashes in each of Annabelle Ames’s eyelids, or drawn
a diagram of her dimples, and the exact course of a tear down her cheek.
He had seen her as the “wild” daughter of a Pittsburg steel king, duly
chastened and brought to faith in mother, home and heaven; as the
mistress of a French king, dying elegantly to expiate elegant sins; as
the mistreated and eloping heiress of a Georgian manor-house; as a
bare-legged “mountainy-girl” in the Blue Ridge—“Howdy, stranger, be
you-all one of them revenooers?” All this in the “movies”; and now here
she was in the “speakies!”
“So this is Mr. Ross!” Her “speakie” was a queer little high treble.
“Papa has told me so much about you!” (Papa was Mr. Roscoe.) “I’m so
glad to have you here, and do make yourself at home. Do whatever you
please, for this is liberty hall.” Bunny recalled the caption—but was
it from “Hearts of Steel,” or from “The Maid of the Manor?”
“And here is Harve,” the mistress of the manor was saying. “Oh, Harve,
come here, this is Bunny Ross; Harvey Manning. It’s the first time Mr.
Ross has been here, and please be nice to him so he’ll come back. He’s
going to college, and reads a lot and knows everything, and we’re going
to seem so ignorant and frivolous!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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