Aunts -- Fiction; Courtship -- Fiction; Mate selection -- Fiction; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
Those who care for details in these matters may be interested to know
that the Asolando is tucked away among print-shops and exclusive
haberdashers, a stone's throw from Fifth Avenue. The Asolando Tea-Room
has a history of its own, but it is not the office of this chronicler
to record it. Weightier matters are ahead of us; and it must suffice
that the Asolando is sacred to wooers of the flute of Pan, secession
photographers, and confident believers in an early revival of the
poetic drama. One of my friends, who has probably done more to
popularize Nietzsche than any other American, had frequently urged me
to visit the Asolando, where, he declared, the daintiest imaginable
luncheons could be obtained at nominal prices; but I should not have
paid this second visit had it not been for Jewett's history.
It was common gossip in studios where I loafed between my professional
engagements, that the monthly deficit at the Asolando was cared for by
a retired banker whose weakness is sonnet-sequences. As to the truth
of this I have no opinion. It will suffice if I convey in the fewest
possible lines a suggestion of the tranquillity, the charming cloistral
peace of the little room, with its Arts and Crafts chairs and tables,
its racks of books, its portraits of Browning, Rossetti, Burne-Jones
and kindred spirits; nor should I fail to mention the delightful
inadvertence with which neatly framed excerpts from the bright page of
British song are scattered along the walls. Nowhere else, many had
averred, was one so likely to learn of the latest Celtic poet, or of a
newly-discovered Keats letter; and lest injustice be done in these
suggestions to the substantial scholarly attainments of the habitués, I
must record that it was over a cup of tea in the Asolando that Bennett
made the first notes for his revolutionary essay on the Sapphic
fragments in a dog-eared text still treasured among the Room's
memorabilia.
I chose a table, sat down, and suggested (one does not order at the
Asolando) a few articles from the card an attendant handed me.
"We 're out of the Paracelsus ginger-cookies," she replied, "but I
recommend a Ruskin sandwich with our own special chocolate. The
whipped cream is unusually fine to-day."
She eyed me with a severity to which I was not accustomed, and I
acquiesced without parley in her suggestion. Before leaving me she
placed on my table the latest minor poet, in green and gold.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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