...
That evening Cope made his announcement. They were all seated round the
reading-lamp in the back parlor, where the old Brussels carpet looked dim
and where only venerated age kept the ornate French clock from seeming
tawdry. Cope looked down at the carpet and up at the clock, and spoke.
Yes, they must have it.
His mother took the shock first and absorbed most of it. She led a humdrum
life and she was ready to welcome romance. To help adjust herself she laid
her hands, with a soft, sweeping motion, on the two brown waves that drew
smoothly across her temples, and then she transferred them to his, held his
head, and gave him a kiss. Rosalys took his two hands warmly and smiled,
and he tried to smile back. His father twisted the tip of his short gray
beard, watched his son's mien, and said little. Day after to-morrow, with
the major part of their small Christmas festivities over, he would ask how
this unexpected and unwarranted situation had come about, and how, in
heaven's name, the thing was to be carried through: by what means, with
whose help?... In his complex of thought the word "thesis" came to his
tongue, but he kept from speaking it.
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