Manchurian Books

"It gives me pleasure, Miss Holland, to tell
you that your father has no doubt had these very plates set before
him."
Upon a little table he deftly arranged the dishes with all the
smiling ease of one to whom afternoon tea is the only business
toward, and to whom an attempted murder is wholly alien. He
impressed St. George vaguely as one who seemed to have risen from
the dead of the crudities of mere events and to be living in a rarer
atmosphere. The lawyer's face was a study. Mr. Augustus Frothingham
never went to the theatre because he did not believe that a man of
affairs should unduly stimulate the imagination.
There was set before them honey made by bees fed only upon a
tropical flower of rare fragrance; cakes flavoured with wine that
had been long buried; a paste of cream, thick with rich nuts and
with the preserved buds of certain flowers; and little white
berries, such as the Japanese call "pinedews"; there was a tea
distilled from the roots of rare exotics, and other things savoury
and fantastic.


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