" "Bad
taste this," connoisseurs will say; but the perfection of human
enjoyment is to pursue one's own tastes independently of Mrs. Grundy,
whether musical, or literary, or artistic, according to my mode of
thinking. In all the pauses of the opera, however, I saw that handsome
and agitated face, that had last caught my eye at the box-door, rise
before me like a spell; and anxiety for the safety of my strange
champion--some curiosity too, mingled therewith, I do not deny, to know
his name and lineage--beset me during the whole of a sleepless night and
the dreaming day that succeeded it.
We were sitting around a cheerful spring fire in the front parlor, our
ordinary sitting-room, opening as this did into the dining-room beyond
on one hand, and the wide intersecting hall of entrance on the other, on
the opposite side of which lay the long, double-chimneyed drawing-room,
less cheerful than our smaller assembly-room by half, and therefore less
often used (there, you have our whole first-floor arrangement now, my
reader, I believe, and I must begin over again, to catch the clew of my
long sentence). We were sitting, then, around the cheerful fire in the
parlor in question, when Morton, my father's "own man," announced "Mr.
Bainrothe and son," and a moment afterward the two gentlemen so heralded
entered the room together.
Pages:
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93