United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
The Temple of Art, after rooting itself in drama and oratory, after
throwing out a sturdy limb of chaste traffic in bibelots here and
instruments of music there and books and engravings elsewhere, and after
putting forth much foliage in the shape of string-scraping and
key-teasing and anguished vocalizing and determined paper-reading and
indomitable lecture-hearing, blossomed forth at last in a number of
skylights, and under one of these lofty covers Daffingdon Dill carried on
his professional activities. Eudoxia sank down upon his big settle
covered with Spanish leather, and took her tea and her biscuits, and
declined the pink peppermints, and looked around to discover, by the dim
help of the Japanese lantern and the battered old brass lamp from
Damascus, just who might be present. Several people were scattered about
in various dusky corners, and Virgilia Jeffreys was no doubt among them.
"I don't know just how all this is going to end," sighed Eudoxia
dubiously. "I presume I'm as responsible as anybody else," she added, in
a reflective, judicial tone. "More so," she tacked on. "Altogether so,"
she added further, as she took a first sip.
Daffingdon Dill was a newcomer, but he had taken hold of things in a
pretty confident, competent fashion and had made more of an impression in
one year than many of his confreres had made in five or ten. To begin
with, he had unhesitatingly quartered himself in the most desirable
building the town could boast. Many of his colleagues, no less clever
(save in this one respect), still lingered in the old Rabbit-Hutch, a
building which had been good enough in its day but which belonged, like
the building that Andrew P. Hill was preparing to leave, to a day now
past. Fearful of the higher rents that more modern quarters exacted, they
went on paying their monthly stipend to old Ezekiel Warren, with such
regularity as circumstances would admit, and made no effort to escape the
affectionate banter that grouped them under the common name of the
Bunnies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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