A Fountain Sealed

1907. The book begins: In a small drawing-room, whose windows looked out upon a wintry Boston street, three people were sitting. It was a room rather empty and undecorated, but its intense warmth seemed in some degree to furnish it; one couldn't associate austerity with such an almost tropical temperature. There were rows of books on white shelves, a pale Donatello cast on the wall, and two fine bronze vases filled with roses on the mantelpiece. Over the roses hung a portrait in oils, very sleek and very accurate, of a commanding old gentleman in uniform, painted by a well-known German painter, and all about the room were photographs of young women, most of them young mothers, with smooth heads and earnest faces, holding babies. Outside, the snow was heaped high along the pavements and thickly ridged the roofs and lintels. After the blizzard the sun was shining and all the white glittered. The national colors, to a patriotic imagination, were pleasingly represented by the red, white and blue of the brick houses, the snow, and the vivid sky above.