Just the
toy-villages in boxes, uniform as graves and ugly as bricks"--
"Brick houses are not such ugly things. I remember one, low and wide,
possessed of countless gables, covered with vines and shaded with
sycamores; it could not have been so picturesque, if built of the marble
of Paros, and gleaming temple-white through masks of verdure."
"It seems to me that I, too, remember such a one," said she, dreamily.
"_Mais non, je m'y perds_. Yet, for all that, I shall not find the New
York avenues lined with them."
"No; the houses there are palaces."
"I suppose, then, I am to live in a palace," she answered, with a light
tinkling laugh. "That is fine; but one may miss the verandas, all the
whiteness and coolness. How one must feel the roof!"
"Roofs should be screens, and not prisons, not shells, you think?" said
Mr. Raleigh.
"At home," she replied, "our houses are, so to say, parasols; in those
cities they must be iron shrouds. _Ainsi soit il!_" she added, and
shrugged her shoulders like a little fatalist.
"You must not take it with such desperation; perhaps you will not be
obliged to wear the shroud."
"Not long, to be sure, at first.
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