Quotation from: The Little Lady of the Big House

Written by: Jack London


When Lute and Ernestine departed for Santa Barbara, Bert Wainwright
and his sister remembered their long-neglected home in Sacramento. A
pair of painters, proteges of Paula, arrived the same day. But they
were little in evidence, spending long days in the hills with a trap
and driver and smoking long pipes in the stag room.


The free and easy life of the Big House went on in its frictionless
way. Dick worked. Graham worked. Paula maintained her seclusion. The
sages from the madrono grove strayed in for wordy dinners--and wordy
evenings, except when Paula played for them. Automobile parties, from
Sacramento, Wickenberg, and other valley towns, continued to drop in
unexpectedly, but never to the confusion of Oh Joy and the house boys,
whom Graham saw, on occasion, with twenty minutes' warning, seat a
score of unexpected guests to a perfect dinner. And there were even
nights--rare ones--when only Dick and Graham and Paula sat at dinner,
and when, afterward, the two men yarned for an hour before an early
bed, while she played soft things to herself or disappeared earlier
than they.

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