Отрывок из книги
Seth Curtis Beach
Published by Good Press, 2019
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A winter in New York, where she afterward spent so much of her time, was her first absence from home. She had a married sister there whose husband was in government employ, and her oldest brother was there studying law. She was eleven years old; the date was 1801; and her business in New York seems to have been to attend a French Dancing School of which at that era there was but one in the city. She saw her first play, and used to dry the still damp newspaper, in her eagerness to read the theatre announcements. She also experienced a very severe humiliation. She, with her brother, Theodore, attended a large dinner party at the house of a friend of her father. "Our host asked me, the only stranger guest, which part of a huge turkey, in which he had put his carving fork, I would take. I knew only one point of manners for such occasions, dear Alice—that I must specify some part, and as ill luck would have it, the side-bone came first into my head, and 'Side-bone, sir,' I said. Oh what a lecture I got when we got home, the wretched little chit that compelled a gentleman to cut up a whole turkey to serve her! I cried myself to sleep that night." It was too bad to spoil that dinner party for the little girl.
Her mother died when Miss Sedgwick was seventeen; her father when she was twenty-three. All her brothers and sisters were married and living, three of them in New York city, one in Albany, and one, her youngest brother, in Lenox. With this brother in Lenox, Miss Sedgwick for many happy years, had her home, at least her summer home, having five rooms in an annex to his house built for her, into which she gathered her household gods and where she dispensed hospitality to her friends. For many years, New York city was generally her winter home.
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