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The Helpmate by May Sinclair
page 65 of 511 (12%)
"A friend of Edith's."




CHAPTER VI


There is a polite and ancient rivalry between Prior Street and Thurston
Square, a rivalry that dates from the middle of the eighteenth century,
when Prior Street and Thurston Square were young. Each claims to be the
aristocratic centre of the town. Each acknowledges the other as its
solitary peer. If Prior Street were not Prior Street it would be Thurston
Square. There are a few old families left in Scale. They inhabit either
Thurston Square or Prior Street. There is nowhere else that they could
live with any dignity or comfort. In either place they are secure from
the contamination of low persons engaged in business, and from the wide
invading foot of the newly rich. These build themselves mansions after
their kind in the Park, or in the broad flat highways leading into the
suburbs. They have no sense for the dim undecorated charm of Prior Street
and Thurston Square.

Nothing could be more distinguished than Prior Street, with its sombre
symmetry, its air of delicate early Georgian reticence. But its
atmosphere is a shade too professional; it opens too precipitately on
the unlovely and unsacred street.

Thurston Square is approached only by unfrequented ancient ways paved
with cobble stones. It is a place of garden greenness, of seclusion and
of leisure. It breathes a provincial quietness, a measured, hallowed
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