Читать книгу At the Sign of the Fox. A Romance онлайн

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“Adam’s always been too busy ever to have much of a settled home. They travelled about mostly of summers, and since they left the house down town two years ago, where the children were born, they’ve lived in a big sort of apartment arrangement, half flat, half hotel, as near as I can make it out—‘It gives mamma no responsibility,’ Brooke wrote in telling of it. But without some responsibility you can’t get much home comfort, to my thinking.

“Now that Brooke is educated and at home, I hear her father is building a big city house and another down by the sea somewhere, and so perhaps—when he has money enough—he will slow up and take a rest. The Lawtons and Wests are both long-lived, and Adam never drank or dissipated, I guess; but I should think at the pace he’s trotted these thirty years he’d be footsore by this, and like a back-stairs sitting room out of reach, and a loose pair of slippers.”

Miss Keith grew more careless of her speech as she warmed to her subject, and Dr. Russell laughed outright at the idea of the Adam Lawton whom he had met, tall and distinguished, a bundle of steel nerves bound by will power, sitting to rest anywhere, much less in loose slippers out of the sound of the Whirlpool’s eddying.