FluentPlex

Six stories from The Four Million

MAMMON AND THE ARCHER

Original text Public domain Source

Public domain.

Read with the dictionary

“And then you didn’t—”

“My purchaser from Peoria,” said Joe, “and Gen. Pinkney are both creations of the same art—but you wouldn’t call it either painting or music.”

And then they both laughed, and Joe began:

“When one loves one’s Art no service seems—”

But Delia stopped him with her hand on his lips. “No,” she said—“just ‘When one loves.’”

MAMMON AND THE ARCHER

Old Anthony Rockwall, retired manufacturer and proprietor of Rockwall’s Eureka Soap, looked out the library window of his Fifth Avenue mansion and grinned. His neighbour to the right—the aristocratic clubman, G. Van Schuylight Suffolk-Jones—came out to his waiting motor-car, wrinkling a contumelious nostril, as usual, at the Italian renaissance sculpture of the soap palace’s front elevation.

“Stuck-up old statuette of nothing doing!” commented the ex-Soap King. “The Eden Musee’ll get that old frozen Nesselrode yet if he don’t watch out. I’ll have this house painted red, white, and blue next summer and see if that’ll make his Dutch nose turn up any higher.”

And then Anthony Rockwall, who never cared for bells, went to the door of his library and shouted “Mike!” in the same voice that had once chipped off pieces of the welkin on the Kansas prairies.

“Tell my son,” said Anthony to the answering menial, “to come in here before he leaves the house.”

When young Rockwall entered the library the old man laid aside his newspaper, looked at him with a kindly grimness on his big, smooth, ruddy countenance, rumpled his mop of white hair with one hand and rattled the keys in his pocket with the other.

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