Etchings. In the magazine stories he read,
aside from the very rich characters who had galleries of old masters,
there were two classes: one without taste that littered its rooms with
expensive but ill-advised bric-a-brac; and one that wisely contented
itself with "a few good etchings." He bought a few good etchings at a
department store for $1.97 each, and felt irreproachable. And when he
had arranged his books--about Napoleon I and ancient Egypt--he was ready
to play the game of living. Mrs. Cassidy "did" his rooms, and Cassidy
already showed the devotion of an old and tried retainer. The Cassidys
made him feel feudal.
At night, while Nap fought a never-decided battle with a sofa-pillow, or
curled asleep on the couch with a half-inch of silly pink tongue
projecting from between his teeth, he read of Egypt, the black land,
where had been the first great people of the ancient world. He devoured
the fruit of the lotus, the tamarisk, the pomegranate, and held cats to
be sacred. (Funny, that feeling he had always had about cats--afraid of
them even in childhood--it had survived in his being!) There he had
lived and reigned in that flat valley of the Nile, between borders of
low mountains, until his name had been put down in the book of the dead,
and he had gone for a time to the hall of Osiris.
Or, perhaps, he read reports of psychical societies, signed by men with
any number of capital letters after their names: cool-headed scientists,
university professors, psychologists, grave students all, who were
constantly finding new and wonderful mediums, and achieving
communication with the disembodied.
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