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The Man of the Hour (Rediscovered Fiction By American Women)
The Man of the Hour - Rediscovered Fiction By American Women Author:Octave Thanet, Alice French Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE HOUSE OF WINSLOW "Josiah Curwen Winslow was born in Merfield, Massachusetts, April i, 1830, eighth in descent from the Pilgrim Father, Gover... more »nor Edward Winslow. Through his mother (Miss Lydia Ann Curwen), our distinguished fellow citizen claims descent from the first families of Salem and the noblest stock of the Puritans." The writer quotes from the biography in a massive and expensive volume entitled Prominent Citizens of Winfield County, Iowa. The book is the bulkier that it includes not only the prominent citizens, but any gentleman of the county willing to be thus enshrined in the hearts of his countrymen, at the publishers' price. With a grim smile Winslow signed a check and pushed it across the desk, midway in the agent's glib exordium. "Awful trash!" he muttered to himself whenever he remembered, "but never mind, maybe Johnny'll like it! and perhaps Olga'll see that there are other folks with ancestors besides the Galitsuins." As a matter of fact, no one could set less value on ancestry than Mrs. Winslow, who was of the new order of thinkers in Russia, and was proud of simplifying herself. Nevertheless, it was imbedded in her husband's sonl that she scorned him and his friends as bourgeoisie, because once that unlucky word had slipped off her tongue. The occasion was an outburst of her indignation over the absurd social distinctions in America, where she had dreamed all men were brothers, and found them hard er in their contempt of the poor than Russian boyars. But Josiah made small account of her mood; the word scorched him. That same day he despatched a clever young art student of Boston to Plymouth to secure large oil copies of his ancestors' portraits which deck the walls of the town's little Temple of Fame. This is how the pensive Pilgrim schola...« less