THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.


VOL. IV.--OCTOBER, 1859.--NO. XXIV.



DAILY BEAUTY.

Toward the end of a city morning, that is, about four o'clock in the
afternoon, Stanford Grey, and his guest, Daniel Tomes, paused in an
argument which had engaged them earnestly for more than half an hour.
What they had talked about it concerns us not to know. We take them as
we find them, each leaning back in his chair, confirmed in the opinion
that he had maintained, convinced only of his opponent's ability and
rectitude of purpose, and enjoying the gradual subsidence of the
excitement that accompanies the friendliest intellectual strife as
surely as it does the gloved set-tos between those two "talented
professors of the noble science of self-defence" who beat each other
with stuffed buck-skin, at notably brief intervals, for the benefit of
the widow and children of the late lamented Slippery Jim, or some other
equally mysterious and eminent person.

The room in which they sat was one of those third rooms on the first
floor, by which city house-builders, self-styled architects, have made
the second room useless except at night, in their endeavor to reconcile