Twin Tales: Are All Men Alike, and, The Lost TitianStringer, Arthur
General
Twin Tales: Are All Men Alike, and, The Lost Titian
Stringer, Arthur
Canadian fiction
Teddie, as a matter-of-fact girl, had scant patience with the undue
attribution of the romantic to the commonplace. Yet the manner in which
she had first met Raoul Uhlan, it must be admitted, was not without its
touch of the picturesque.
Teddie, still a little intoxicated with her new-found liberty, and
further elated by the sparkling morning sunshine of Fifth Avenue, was
swinging smartly up that slope which an over-busy world no longer
remembers as Murray Hill. She was in a slightly shortened blue serge
skirt that whipped against her slim young knees suggestively akin to the
drapery of the _Nike_ of Samothrace, and was just approaching the
uplands of the Public Library Square when she caught sight of a
violet-peddler.
A glimpse of the seven earthy-smelling clumps of bloom, buskined in
tin-foil and neatly arranged on their little wooden tray, promptly
intrigued the girl into stopping, fumbling in her none too orderly
hand-bag, and passing over to the sloe-eyed Greek a bank-note with
double-X’s imprinted on its silk-threaded surface. And having adjusted
the sword-knotted clump to her belt by means of one of the peddler’s
glass-headed pins, she looked up to see this same peddler contemplating
the bank-note with a frown of perplexity. He was explaining, in broken
English, that his exchequer stood much too limited to make change for a
hill so big. Then, with a smile of inspiration, he placed the tray of
violets in the girl’s hands, pointed toward a near-by store on the
side-street, and plainly implied that he would break the twenty and
return with more negotiable currency.
So Teddie stood patiently holding the tray of violets, in the clear
white light of the sunny Avenue, happy in the flowery perfumes which
were being wafted up to her delicately distended nostril.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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