THE BOOK OF EVELYN
The star of the occasion was calm and confident
THE
BOOK OF EVELYN
By
GERALDINE BONNER
Author of
TOMORROW’S TANGLE, THE PIONEER
RICH MEN’S CHILDREN, ETC.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
ARTHUR WILLIAM BROWN
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Copyright 1913
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.
[Pg 1]
THE BOOK OF EVELYN
I
I have moved. I am in.
The household gods that have lain four yearsin storage are grouped round me, showing familiarfaces. It’s nice of them not to have changed more,grown up as children do or got older like one’sfriends. They don’t harmonize with the furniture—thisis an appartement meublé—but I can melt themin with cushions and hangings.
It’s going to be very snug and cozy when I get settled.This room—the parlor—is a good shape, anoblong ending in a bulge of bay window. Plenty ofsun in the morning—I can have plants. Outside thewindow is a small tin roof with a list to starboardwhere rain-water lodges and sparrows come to takefussy excited baths. Across the street stands a rowof brownstone fronts, blank-visaged houses with awhite curtain in every window. The faces of such[Pg 2]houses are like the faces of the people who live inthem. They tell you nothing about what’s going oninside. It’s a peculiarity of New York—after livingin a house with an expressionless front wall you getan expressionless front wall yourself.
From the windows of the back room I look outon the flank of the big apartment-house that standson the corner, and little slips of yard, side by side,with fences between. Among them ours has a lostor strayed appearance. Never did an unaspiring,city-bred yard look more homesick and out of place.It has a sun-dial in the middle, circled by a flaggedpath, and in its corners, sheltered by a few discouragedshrubs, several weather-worn stone ornaments.It suggests a cemetery of small things that had tohave correspondingly small tombstones. I hear fromMrs. Bushey, the landlady, that a sculptress oncelived on the lower floor and spent three hundreddollars lifting it out of the sphere in which it wasborn.
I am going to like it here. I am going to makemyself like it, get out of the negative habit into thepositive. That’s why I came back from Europe, thata sudden longing for home, for Broadway, and thelights along the Battery, and dear little Dian