From: Ventrella <tr...@ro...> - 2009-12-05 18:44:49
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To rehearsals. "You are going with us, Mother?" Roma asked as they rose. "I think so dear. Your father will want to go to bed early, and I shall sleep better if I go out. I am going to town tomorrow to pour tea for Harold. We must get him some new silver, Paul. I am quite ashamed of his spoons." Harold, the only son, was a playwright--as yet "unproduced"--and he had a studio in Washington Square. A half-hour later, Wanning was alone in his library. He would not permit himself to feel aggrieved. What was more commendable than a mother's interest in her children's pleasures? Moreover, it was his wife's way of following things up, of never letting die grass grow under her feet, that had helped to push him along in the world. She was more ambitious than he,--that had been good for him. He was naturally indolent, and Julia's childlike desire to possess material objects, to buy what other people were buying, had been the spur that made him go after business. It had, moreover, made his house the attractive place he believed it to be. "Suppose," his wife sometimes said to him when the bills came in from Celeste or Mme. Blanche, "suppose you had homely daughters; how would you like that?" He wouldn't have liked it. When he went anywhere with his three ladies, Wanning always felt very well done by. He had no complaint to make about them, or about anything. That was why it seemed so unreasonable--He felt along his back incredulously with his hand. Harold, of course, was a trial; but among all his business friends, he knew scarcely one who had a promising boy. The house was so still that Wanning could hear a faint, metallic tinkle from the butler's pantry. Old Sam was washing up the silver, which he put away himself ev |