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The American Claimant by Mark Twain
page 51 of 254 (20%)
procrastinations. Meantime, Sally Sellers, who was as practical and
democratic as the Lady Gwendolen Sellers was romantic and aristocratic,
was leading a life of intense interest and activity and getting the most
she could out of her double personality. All day long in the privacy of
her work-room, Sally Sellers earned bread for the Sellers family; and all
the evening Lady Gwendolen Sellers supported the Rossmore dignity. All
day she was American, practically, and proud of the work of her head and
hands and its commercial result; all the evening she took holiday and
dwelt in a rich shadow-land peopled with titled and coroneted fictions.
By day, to her, the place was a plain, unaffected, ramshackle old trap
just that, and nothing more; by night it was Rossmore Towers. At college
she had learned a trade without knowing it. The girls had found out that
she was the designer of her own gowns. She had no idle moments after
that, and wanted none; for the exercise of an extraordinary gift is the
supremest pleasure in life, and it was manifest that Sally Sellers
possessed a gift of that sort in the matter of costume-designing. Within
three days after reaching home she had hunted up some work; before Pete
was yet due in Washington, and before the twins were fairly asleep in
English soil, she was already nearly swamped with work, and the
sacrificing of the family chromos for debt had got an effective check.

"She's a brick," said Rossmore to the Major; "just her father all over:
prompt to labor with head or hands, and not ashamed of it; capable,
always capable, let the enterprise be what it may; successful by nature--
don't know what defeat is; thus, intensely and practically American by
inhaled nationalism, and at the same time intensely and aristocratically
European by inherited nobility of blood. Just me, exactly: Mulberry
Sellers in matter of finance and invention; after office hours, what do
you find? The same clothes, yes, but what's in them? Rossmore of the
peerage."
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