What favour of his fellow clergymen a slight
precociousness of manner and pronunciation cost him was more than
balanced by the visible ecstasies of ladies. They blossomed at his
touch.
He had just entered Mrs. Bassett's front door, when the son of the
house, followed by an intent and earnest company of four, opened the
alley gate and came into the yard. The unconscious Mrs. Bassett was
about to have her first experience of a fatal coincidence. It was her
first, because she was the mother of a boy so well behaved that he had
become a proverb of transcendency. Fatal coincidences were plentiful
in the Schofield and Williams families, and would have been familiar to
Mrs. Bassett had Georgie been permitted greater intimacy with Penrod and
Sam.
Mr. Kinosling sipped his iced tea and looked about, him approvingly.
Seven ladies leaned forward, for it was to be seen that he meant to
speak.
"This cool room is a relief," he said, waving a graceful hand in
a neatly limited gesture, which everybody's eyes followed, his own
included. "It is a relief and a retreat. The windows open, the blinds
closed--that is as it should be. It is a retreat, a fastness, a bastion
against the heat's assault. For me, a quiet room--a quiet room and a
book, a volume in the hand, held lightly between the fingers. A volume
of poems, lines metrical and cadenced; something by a sound Victorian.
We have no later poets."
"Swinburne?" suggested Miss Beam, an eager spinster.
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