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A Fountain Sealed By: Anne Douglas Sedgwick (1873-1935) |
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by ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK (Mrs. Basil de Sélincourt) Author of 'The Little French Girl,' 'Franklin Winslow Kane,' 'Tante,' etc.
I
Three people were sitting in a small drawing room, the windows of which
looked out upon a wintry Boston street. It was a room rather empty and
undecorated, but the idea of austerity was banished by a temperature
so nearly tropical. There were rows of books on white shelves, a pale
Donatello cast on the wall, and two fine bronze vases filled with roses on
the mantelpiece. Over the roses hung a portrait in oils, very sleek and
very accurate, of a commanding old gentleman in uniform, painted by a
well known German painter, and all about the room were photographs of young
women, most of them young mothers, with smooth heads and earnest faces,
holding babies. Outside, the snow was heaped high along the pavements
and thickly ridged the roofs and lintels. After the blizzard the sun was
shining and all the white glittered. The national colors, to a patriotic
imagination, were pleasingly represented by the red, white and blue of the
brick houses, the snow, and the vivid sky above. The three people who talked, with many intimate pauses of silence, were all
Bostonians, though of widely different types. The hostess, sitting in an
easy chair and engaged with some sewing, was a girl of about twenty six.
She wore a brown skirt of an ugly cut and shade and a white silk shirt,
adorned with a high linen collar, a brown tie and an old fashioned gold
watch chain. Her forehead was too large, her nose too short; but her lips
were full and pleasant and when she smiled she showed charming teeth. The
black rimmed glasses she wore emphasized the clearness and candor of her
eyes. Her thick, fair hair was firmly fastened in a group of knobs down the
back of her head. There was an element of the grotesque in her appearance
and in her careful, clumsy movements, yet, with it, a quality almost
graceful, that suggested homely and wholesome analogies, freshly baked
bread; fair, sweet linen; the safety and content of evening firesides. This
was Mary Colton. The girl who sat near the window, her furs thrown back from her shoulders,
a huge muff dangling from her hand, was a few years younger and exceedingly
pretty. Her skin was unusually white, her hair unusually black, her velvety
eyes unusually large and dark. In. her attitude, lounging, graceful,
indifferent, in her delicate face, the straight, sulky brows, the coldly
closed lips, the coldly observant eyes, a sort of permanent discontent was
expressed, as though she could find, neither in herself nor in the world,
any adequate satisfaction. This was Rose Packer. The other guest, sitting sidewise on a stiff chair, his hand hanging over
the back, his long legs crossed, was a young man, graceful, lean and
shabby. He was clean shaven, with brown skin and golden hair, an unruly
lock lying athwart his forehead. His face, intent, alert, was veiled in
an indolent nonchalance. He looked earnest, yet capricious, staunch, yet
sensitive, and one felt that, conscious of these weaknesses, he tried to
master or to hide them. These three had known one another since childhood. Jack's family was old
and rich; Mary's old and poor; Rose Packer's new and of fantastic wealth.
Rose was a young woman of fashion and her whole aspect seemed to repudiate
any closeness of tie between herself and Mary, who passed her time in
caring for General Colton, her invalid father, attending committees, and,
as a diversion, going to "sewing circles" and symphony concerts; but she
was fonder of Mary than of any one else in the world. Rose, who had, as
it were, been brought up all over the world, divided her time now between
two continents and quaintly diversified her dancing, hunting, yachting
existence by the arduous study of biology. Jack, in appearance more
ambiguous than either, looked neither useful nor ornamental; but, in point
of fact, he was a much occupied person. He painted very seriously, was
something of a scholar and devoted much of his time and most of his large
fortune to intricate benevolences... Continue reading book >>
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