"I scarcely feel," I could not forbear saying, "as if we had ever met
before. How many years ago it seems since we last sat beneath
Eliot's pulpit, with Hollingsworth extended on the fallen leaves, and
Priscilla at his feet! Can it be, Zenobia, that you ever really
numbered yourself with our little band of earnest, thoughtful,
philanthropic laborers?"
"Those ideas have their time and place," she answered coldly. "But I
fancy it must be a very circumscribed mind that can find room for no
other."
Her manner bewildered me. Literally, moreover, I was dazzled by the
brilliancy of the room. A chandelier hung down in the centre,
glowing with I know not how many lights; there were separate lamps,
also, on two or three tables, and on marble brackets, adding their
white radiance to that of the chandelier. The furniture was
exceedingly rich. Fresh from our old farmhouse, with its homely
board and benches in the dining-room, and a few wicker chairs in the
best parlor, it struck me that here was the fulfilment of every
fantasy of an imagination revelling in various methods of costly
self-indulgence and splendid ease. Pictures, marbles, vases,--in
brief, more shapes of luxury than there could be any object in
enumerating, except for an auctioneer's advertisement,--and the whole
repeated and doubled by the reflection of a great mirror, which
showed me Zenobia's proud figure, likewise, and my own. It cost me,
I acknowledge, a bitter sense of shame, to perceive in myself a
positive effort to bear up against the effect which Zenobia sought to
impose on me.
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