| | 1 | Author: | Wharton, Edith, 1862-1937 | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | "The Angel at the Grave."  | | | | Published: | 1995 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | THE House stood a few yards back from the elm-shaded village
street, in that semi-publicity sometimes cited as a democratic
protest against old-world standards of domestic exclusiveness.
This candid exposure to the public eye is more probably a result of
the gregariousness which, in the New England bosom, oddly coexists
with a shrinking from direct social contact; most of the inmates of
such houses preferring that furtive intercourse which is the result
of observations through shuttered windows and a categorical
acquaintance with the neighboring clothes-lines. The House,
however, faced its public with a difference. For sixty years it
had written itself with a capital letter, had self-consciously
squared itself in the eye of an admiring nation. The most
searching inroads of village intimacy hardly counted in a household
that opened on the universe; and a lady whose door-bell was at any
moment liable to be rung by visitors from London or Vienna was not
likely to flutter up-stairs when she observed a neighbor "stepping
over." | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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