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Young Lives by Richard Le Gallienne
page 5 of 266 (01%)
That parlour, a room of good size, was unostentatiously furnished with
good bourgeois mahogany. A buxom mahogany chiffonier, a large square
dining-table, a black marble clock with two dials, one being a
barometer, three large oil landscapes of exceedingly umbrageous trees
and glassy lakes, inoffensively uninteresting, more Atlantic liners, and
a large bookcase, apparently filled with serried lines of bound
magazines, and an excellent Brussels carpet of quiet pattern, were
mainly responsible for a general effect of middle-class comfort, in
which, indeed, if beauty had not been included, it had not been wilfully
violated, but merely unthought of. The young people for whom these
familiar objects meant a symbolism deep-rooted in their earliest
memories could hardly in fairness have declared anything positively
painful in that room--except perhaps those Atlantic liners; their
charges against furniture, which was unconsciously to them accumulating
memories that would some day bring tears of tenderness to their eyes,
could only have been negative. Beauty had been left out, but at least
ugliness had not been ostentatiously called in. There was no bad taste.

In fact, whatever the individual character of each component object,
there was included in the general effect a certain indefinable dignity,
which had doubtless nothing to do with the mahogany, but was probably
one of those subtle atmospheric impressions which a room takes from the
people who habitually live in it. Had you entered that room when it was
empty, you would instinctively have felt that it was accustomed to the
occupancy of calm and refined people. There was something almost
religious in its quiet. Some one often sat there who, whatever his
commonplace disguises as a provincial man of business, however
inadequate to his powers the work life had given him to do, provincial
and humiliating as were the formulae with which narrowing conditions had
supplied him for expression of himself, was in his central being an
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