Children of the rich -- Fiction; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
She hesitated, went into her room, not quite closing the door behind her.
He stared at it with a baffled look. "And," he was thinking, "I imagined
I had trained myself to indifference." An object near the window caught
his eye--a table at which he could work standing. He recalled that he had
seen its like in a big furniture display at Paris when they were there
together, and that he had said he would get one for himself some day.
This hint that there might be more than mere matter in those surroundings
set his eyes to roving. That revolving bookcase by the desk, the circular
kind he had always wanted, and in it the books he liked to have at
hand--Montaigne and Don Quixote, Shakespeare and Shelley and Swinburne,
the Encyclopedia, the statistical yearbooks; on top, his favorites among
the magazines. And the desk itself--a huge spread of cleared surface--an
enormous blotting pad, an ink well that was indeed a well--all just what
he had so often longed for as he sat cramped at little desks where an
attempt to work meant overflow and chaos of books and papers. And that
big inlaid box--it was full of his favorite cigarettes; and the
drop-light, and the green shade for the eyes, and the row of pencils
sharpened as he liked them--
He knocked at her door. "Won't you come out here a moment?" cried he,
putting it in that form because he had never adventured her intimate
threshold.
No answer, though the door was ajar and she must have heard.
"Please come out here," he repeated.
A pause; then, in her voice, shy but resolute, the single word, "Come!"
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE DEAD THAT LIVE
On the green oval within and opposite the entrance to the main campus of
the great university there is the colossal statue of a master workman.
The sculptor has done well. He does not merely show you the physical
man--the mass, the strength, of bone and sinew and muscle; he reveals the
man within--the big, courageous soul. Strangers often think this statue a
personation of the force which in a few brief generations has erected
from a wilderness our vast and splendid America. And it is that; but to
Arthur and Adelaide, standing before it in a June twilight, long after
the events above chronicled, it is their father--Hiram.
"How alive he seems," says his daughter.
And his son answers: "How alive he _is_!"
End of Project Gutenberg's The Second Generation, by David Graham Phillips
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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