Alice Duer Miller 
Happiest Time of Their Lives 

Excerpt: "Little Miss Severance sat with her hands as cold as ice. The stage of her coming adventure was beautifully set – the conventional stage for the adventure of a young girl, her mother’s drawing-room. Her mother had the art of setting stages. The room was not large, – a New York brownstone front in the upper Sixties even though altered as to entrance, and allowed to sprawl backward over yards not originally intended for its use, is not a palace, – but it was a room and not a corridor; you had the comfortable sense of four walls about you when its one small door was once shut. It was filled, perhaps a little too much filled, with objects which seemed to have nothing in common except beauty; but propinquity, propinquity of older date than the house in which they now were, had given them harmony. Nothing in the room was modern except some uncommonly comfortable sofas and chairs, and the pink and yellow roses that stood about in Chinese bowls."