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His chief, a little, gray, bent, brusque Gerreeted hiood health, and then they set to work In thirty seconds he had forgotten the desert, the face of Viola, all his energies concentrated on the segernat's toe, shut out the valley of the Colorow All day hea wilderness of tubes, jars, and copper ovens, peering, observing--and in a sense happy
But at night, when alone with his pipe in his study, the lavender sands, the violet peaks, the vivid saffron skies returned with power Viola, too, ca, to make his microscopic world of shadowy substance and the s further of her Britt wrote once or twice, but did not allude to either Clarke or the Lamberts, and Serviss did not care to ask particularly about them It was better for hiular history He hated the irregular, the pretentious His own life, so clear, so well regulated, made her daily performances the more monstrous The whole had beco of it, even to his sister
It was not quite true that he saw little of New York, for his sister, Mrs Rice--a ith two children--who kept his house, or, rather, his double flat, was a social soul, and not ularly They lived handsomely, and the world in which they moved was croith duties as well as with sane pleasures They entertained at their table artists frohts fro the richer and more ostentatious families of the city as little as they despised the poor of Hester Street The one quality which they insisted upon in their guests was intellectual cleverness Perhaps they were a little severe on bores
Their ere quite as remote from the so-called captains of industry as from the farmers of Jersey, and the roar of Broad Street was so far away it reached them but as the hum of hornets outside their -pane To the explorer of Tibet this life was narrow To the gay dinner-parties of upper Fifth Avenue it would have seemed dull To the wrecker of railroads on Wall Street it was indubitably petty To the merchant it was unprofitable, and yet they were quite content with it, and looked out upon the bustling throngs of fashion and the hustling world of business with equal word of good-natured contempt