Richelieu, who walked with kings, presided always at the stitching of
his red robes. Boswell says somewhere that a badly starched stock could
kill his Johnson's morning. It was the hanging of his own chintzes that
first swayed William Morris from epic mood to household utensils.
Seneca, first in Latin in the whole Silver Age, prepared his own
vegetables. There is no outgrowing the small moments of life, and to
those lesser ones of us how often they become the large ones!
To Samuel Lipkind, who, in a span of thirty years, had created and
carried probably more than his share of this world's responsibilities,
there was no more predominant moment in all his day, even to the signing
of checks and the six-o'clock making of cash, than that matinal instant,
just fifteen minutes before the stroke of seven, when Mrs. Lipkind, in
a fuzzy gray wrapper the color of her eyes and hair, kissed him awake,
and, from across the hall, he could hear the harsh sing of his bath in
the drawing.
There are moments like that which never grow old. For the fifteen years
that Samuel Lipkind had reached the Two Dollar Hat Store before his two
clerks, he had awakened to that same kiss on his slightly open mouth,
the gray hair and the ever-graying eyes close enough to be stroked, the
pungency of coffee seeming to wind like wreaths of mundane aroma above
the bed, and always across the aisle of hallway that tepid cataract
leaping in glory into porcelain.
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