"
"Hoh!" said Condy, touching his scarf nervously, "it's--it's very
swell. Is it too loud?" he asked uneasily.
Blix put her fingers in her ears; then:
"Condy, you're a nice, amiable young man, and, if you're not
brilliant, you're good and kind to your aged mother; but your
scarfs and neckties are simply impossible."
"Well, look at this room!" he shouted--they were in the parlor.
"You needn't talk about bad taste. Those drapes--oh-h! those
drapes!! Yellow, s'help me! And those bisque figures that you get
with every pound of tea you buy; and this, this, THIS," he
whimpered, waving his hands at the decorated sewer-pipe with its
gilded cat-tails. "Oh, speak to me of this; speak to me of art;
speak to me of aesthetics. Cat-tails, GILDED. Of course, why not
GILDED!" He wrung his hands. "'Somewhere people are happy.
Somewhere little children are at play--'"
"Oh, hush!" she interrupted. "I know it's bad; but we've always
had it so, and I won't have it abused. Let's go into the dining-
room, anyway. We'll sit in there after this. We've always been
stiff and constrained in here."
They went out into the dining-room, and drew up a couple of arm-
chairs into the bay window, and sat there looking out. Blix had
not yet lighted the gas--it was hardly dark enough for that; and
for upward of ten minutes they sat and watched the evening
dropping into night.
Below them the hill fell away so abruptly that the roofs of the
nearest houses were almost at their feet; and beyond these the
city tumbled raggedly down to meet the bay in a confused, vague
mass of roofs, cornices, cupolas, and chimneys, blurred and
indistinct in the twilight, but here and there pierced by a new-
lighted street lamp.
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