"
I darted forward, but she was too quick for me and the chase ended in
the lower hall in a group of people--her parents, my father, visitors
and servants--and I saw her disappear with a backward glance, in which,
I could swear, I saw two pouting lips.
My father was overjoyed to return to our really very comfortable
quarters on "Martian Hill," as Mr. Dodan, in reference to my father's
infatuation over his imaginary (?) population of Mars, was accustomed to
call our professional home.
It was, I think, only a few weeks after this that my father called me to
his room. He was standing in his morning apparel, a strange garb which
he sometimes affected, made up of a black velvet gown brought together
at the waist by a stout yellow cord, a bright red skull cap, a sort of
sandal shoe, picked out with silver ornaments, his arms covered with
loose, puckered sleeves of lace, dotted with black extending up to the
close fitting sleeves of the velvet gown which only descended to his
elbow. Beneath the gown, when he was thus theatrically attired, he wore
a shirt of pale blue silk with a flat collar, over which came a black
vest meeting his black trunks and blue hose.
My father was a really striking and beautiful picture in his incongruous
habiliment. His strong and thoughtful face, over which yet clustered the
curly hair of boyhood, just touched with gray, lit up by his earnest,
sad eyes, seemed--how distinctly I recall it--almost ideally lovely that
morning, and I compared him in my thoughts with the father of Romola,
only as wearing a more youthful expression.
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