THE BOOK OF EVELYN: Demanding Books on Fiction : Short Stories (single author): THE BOOK OF EVELYN

The household gods that have lain four years in storage are grouped round me, showing familiar faces. It’s nice of them not to have changed more, grown up as children do or got older like one’s friends. They don’t harmonize with the furniture—this is an appartement meublé—but I can melt them in with cushions and hangings.

It’s going to be very snug and cozy when I get settled. This room—the parlor—is a good shape, an oblong ending in a bulge of bay window. Plenty of sun in the morning—I can have plants. Outside the window is a small tin roof with a list to starboard where rain-water lodges and sparrows come to take fussy excited baths. Across the street stands a row of brownstone fronts, blank-visaged houses with a white curtain in every window. The faces of such houses are like the faces of the people who live in them. They tell you nothing about what’s going on inside. It’s a peculiarity of New York—after living in a house with an expressionless front wall you get an expressionless front wall yourself.

From the windows of the back room I look out on the flank of the big apartment-house that stands on the corner, and little slips of yard, side by side, with fences between. Among them ours has a lost or strayed appearance. Never did an unaspiring, city-bred yard look more homesick and out of place. It has a sun-dial in the middle, circled by a flagged path, and in its corners, sheltered by a few discouraged shrubs, several weather-worn stone ornaments. It suggests a cemetery of small things that had to have correspondingly small tombstones. I hear from Mrs. Bushey, the landlady, that a sculptress once lived on the lower floor and spent three hundred dollars lifting it out of the sphere in which it was born.

I am going to like it here. I am going to make myself like it, get out of the negative habit into the positive. That’s why I came back from Europe, that a sudden longing for home, for Broadway, and the lights along the Battery, and dear little Diana poised against the sky. Four years of pension tables and third-class railway carriages do not develop the positive habit. I was becoming negative to the point of annihilation. I wanted to be braced by the savage energies of my native city. And also I did want some other society than that of American spinsters and widows. The Europeans must wonder how the land of the free and the home of the brave keeps up its birth-rate— But I digress...