Americans -- England -- Fiction; Children of the rich -- Fiction; Marriage -- Fiction; Sisters -- Fiction
The revelation dawned upon him during his intercourse with G. Selden.
The young man in his cheap bicycling suit was a new development. He was
markedly unlike an English youth of his class, as he was neither shy,
nor laboriously at his ease. That he was at his ease to quite an amazing
degree might perhaps have been remotely resented by the insular mind,
accustomed to another order of bearing in its social inferiors, had it
not been so obviously founded on entire unconsciousness of self, and
so mingled with open appreciation of the unanticipated pleasures of the
occasion. Nothing could have been farther from G. Selden than any desire
to attempt to convey the impression that he had enjoyed the hospitality
of persons of rank on previous occasions. He found indeed a gleeful
point in the joke of the incongruousness of his own presence amid such
surroundings.
“What Little Willie was expecting,” he remarked once, to the keen joy
of Mr. Penzance, “was a hunk of bread and cheese at a village saloon
somewhere. I ought to have said 'pub,' oughtn't I? You don't call them
saloons here.”
He was encouraged to talk, and in his care-free fluency he opened up
many vistas to the interested Mr. Penzance, who found himself, so to
speak, whirled along Broadway, rushed up the steps of the elevated
railroad and struggling to obtain a seat, or a strap to hang to on a
Sixth Avenue train. The man was saturated with the atmosphere of the
hot battle he lived in. From his childhood he had known nothing but
the fever heat of his “little old New York,” as he called it with
affectionate slanginess, and any temperature lower than that he was
accustomed to would have struck him as being below normal. Penzance was
impressed by his feeling of affection for the amazing city of his birth.
He admired, he adored it, he boasted joyously of its perfervid charm.
“Something doing,” he said. “That's what my sort of a fellow
likes--something doing. You feel it right there when you walk along
the streets. Little old New York for mine. It's good enough for Little
Willie. And it never stops. Why, Broadway at night----”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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