City and town life -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
Then he was inside, standing in an enormous hall filled with furnishings
such as he had never seen or heard of before. Carved oak, suits of
armor, stone urns, portraits, another flight of church steps mounting
upward to surrounding galleries, stained-glass windows, tigers' and
lions' heads, horns of tremendous size, strange and beautiful weapons,
suggested to him that the dream he had been living in for weeks had
never before been so much a dream. He had walked about as in a vision,
but among familiar surroundings. Mrs. Bowse's boarders and his hall
bedroom had helped him to retain some hold over actual existence. But
here the reverently saluting villagers staring at him through windows
as though he were General Grant, the huge, stone entrance, the drive
of what seemed to be ten miles through the park, the gloomy mass of
architecture looming up, the regiment of liveried men-servants, with
respectfully lowered but excitedly curious eyes, the dark and solemn
richness inclosing and claiming him--all this created an atmosphere
wholly unreal. As he had not known books, its parallel had not been
suggested to him by literature. He had literally not heard that such
things existed. Selling newspapers and giving every moment to the
struggle for life or living, one did not come within the range of
splendors. He had indeed awakened in that other world of which he had
spoken. And though he had heard that there was another world, he had had
neither time nor opportunity to make mental pictures of it. His life so
far had expressed itself in another language of figures. The fact that
he had in his veins the blood of the Norman lords and Saxon kings may or
may not have had something to do with the fact that he was not abashed,
but bewildered. The same factor may or may not have aided him to
preserve a certain stoic, outward composure. Who knows what remote
influences express themselves in common acts of modern common life?
As Cassivellaunus observed his surroundings as he followed in captive
chains his conqueror's triumphal car through the streets of Rome, so
the keen-eyed product of New York pavement life “took in” all about
him. Existence had forced upon him the habit of sharp observance. The
fundamental working law of things had expressed itself in the simple
colloquialism, “Keep your eye skinned, and don't give yourself away.” In
what phrases the parallel of this concise advice formulated itself in
55 B.C. no classic has yet exactly informed us, but doubtless something
like it was said in ancient Rome. Tembarom did not give himself away,
and he took rapid, if uncertain, inventory of people and things. He
remarked, for instance, that Palford's manner of speaking to a servant
was totally different from the manner he used in addressing himself. It
was courteous, but remote, as though he spoke across an accepted chasm
to beings of another race. There was no hint of incivility in it,
but also no hint of any possibility that it could occur to the person
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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