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Updated: May 22, 2025
Twining, Western, and Twining, where we shall find Mr. Western about consigning to the waste-paper basket a large pile of letters. This gentleman was very fashionably dressed, of dark complexion, with the languid air and drawling intonation of a Southerner. At an adjoining desk sat an elderly sharp-faced gentleman, who was looking over his spectacles at the movements of his partner.
He was barely in time at the big insurance office, for Wicks was preparing to leave. No less nervous, snappy, or pugnacious than before, the little sharp-faced man appeared more smiling than ever, and yet with an expression even more sardonic. "Well?" he said, as he ushered Garrison into a small, private room. "What have you to report?"
There were the fat old women in holiday market costumes, strong-featured, positive, who shook their heads at each other and nodded violently and incessantly, and all talked at once; the old men in rusty suits, thin, with a deprecatory manner, as if they had heard that clatter for fifty years, and perky, sharp-faced girls in vegetable hats, all long-nosed and thin-lipped.
Mendicants, an exceeding great army! They do not all knock at area-doors for old clothes and broken victual, nor hold out hats at street-crossings, nor expose sharp-faced babies to win pity, nor send their infant tatterdemalions to torture the ears of the wealthy with scratchy fiddles and wheezing accordions.
Then we see that baby grow up to a child, and, if he is fat and stout and red and lively, we expect to find him troublesome and noisy, and, perhaps, sometimes disobedient more or less; that's the way each new generation breaks its eggshell; but if he is very weak and thin, and is one of the kind that may be expected to die early, he will very likely sit in the house all day and read good books about other little sharp-faced children just like himself; who died early, having always been perfectly indifferent to all the out-door amusements of the wicked little red-cheeked children.
My first impression of it all was anything but favorable. It looked rather tawdry and cheap. The men themselves who filled the room were pretty tough-looking specimens. I noticed a few Italians of the fat class and one or two sharp-faced Jews, but for the most part these men were the cheaper element of the second and third generation. They were the loafers the ward heelers.
The people who blocked his progress were of the class unknown to him. Their looks were anxious, furtive, miserable. They stood in little groups, listening eagerly to a sharp-faced lawyer, or, in sullen despair, eying each other. At a door a tipstaff laid his hand roughly on the arm of Mr. Thorndike. "That's all right, Joe," called young Mr.
"What have you got to do?" again asked Mrs. Corfield. "I shall not tell you," answered Leam, holding her head very high. How, indeed, should she tell this little sharp-faced woman that she was thinking how she could prevent madame from coming here as her home?
There was a blue-eyed, sharp-faced, rather loose-jointed young girl, who had the manner of being familiar with the boat, and talked readily and freely with anybody, keeping an eye occasionally on her sister of eight years, a child with a serious little face in a poke-bonnet, who used the language of a young lady of sixteen, and seemed also abundantly able to take care of herself.
Right after she had gone the others began to come out of school, and at last the five girls I told you about came out. They were all talking at once, but I heard the horrid, sharp-faced, dark girl say that someone was stingy and deceitful and a lot of other unpleasant things. I thought the Picture Girl was going to stand up for the person, but that mean little Evil Genius wouldn't let her.
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