People Like That

People Like That

The Project Gutenberg eBook, People Like That, by Kate Langley
Bosher
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Title: People Like That
Author: Kate Langley Bosher
Release Date: July 20, 2004 [eBook #12972]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PEOPLE
LIKE THAT***
E-text prepared by Al Haines

PEOPLE LIKE THAT
A NOVEL
by
KATE LANGLEY BOSHER
Author of "Mary Cary" etc.
Illustrated
1916

BOOKS BY
KATE LANGLEY BOSHER
PEOPLE LIKE THAT. Illustrated. Post 8vo HOW IT HAPPENED.
Frontispiece. Post 8vo THE HOUSE OF HAPPINESS. Frontispiece.
Post 8vo MARY CARY. Frontispiece. Post 8vo MISS GIBBIE
GAULT. Frontispiece. Post 8vo THE MAN IN LONELY LAND.

Frontispiece. Post 8vo

TO
LUCY BOSHER JANNEY

CHAPTER I
One of the advantages of being an unrequired person of twenty-six,
with an income sufficient for necessities, is the right of choice as to a
home locality. I am that sort of person, and, having exercised said right,
I am now living in Scarborough Square.
To my friends and relatives it is amazing, inexplicable, and beyond
understanding that I should wish to live here. I do not try to make them
understand; and therein lies grievance against me. Because of my
failure to explain what they are pleased to call a peculiar decision on
my part, I am at present the subject of heated criticism. It will soon stop.
What a person does or doesn't do is of little importance to more than
three or four people. By Christmas my foolishness will have ceased to
cause comment, ceased to interest those to whom it doesn't matter
really where or how I live.
I like living in Scarborough Square very much. After many years spent
in the homes of others I am now the head of half a house, the whole of
which is mine; and even though it is situated on the last square of
respectability in a part of the town long forgotten by the descendants of
its former residents, I am filled with a sense of proprietorship that is
warm and comforting, and already I have learned to love it--this nice,
old-fashioned house in which I live.
Until very recently Scarborough Square was only a name. There had
been no reason to visit it, and had I ventured to it I would have seen
little save a tiny park bounded on four sides by houses of shabby
gentility, for the most part detached, and of a style of architecture long
since surrendered to more undesirable designs. The park is but an open
space whose straggly trees and stunted shrubs and dusty grass add
dejection to the atmosphere of shrinking respectability which the

neighborhood still makes effort to maintain; but that, too, I have
learned to love, for I see in it that which I never noticed in the large and
handsome parks up-town.
As a place of residence this section of the city I am just beginning to
know has become very interesting to me. No one of importance lives
near it, and the occupants of its houses, realizing their social
submergence and pecuniary impotence, have too long existed in the
protection of obscurity to venture into the publicity which civic
attention necessitates, and on first acquaintance it is not attractive. I
agree with my friends in that. I did not come here because I thought it
was an attractive place in which to live.
They cannot say, however, even my most protesting friends, that I am
not living in a perfectly proper neighborhood. The front of my house
faces, beyond the discouraged little park, a strata of streets which
unfold from lessening degrees of dreariness and dinginess to
ever-increasing expensiveness and unashamed architectural
extravaganzas, to the summit of residential striving, called, for
impressiveness, the Avenue, but behind it is a section of the city of
which I am as ignorant as if it were in the depths of the sea or the wilds
of primeval forest. I have traveled much, but I do not know the city
wherein I live. I know but a part of it, the pretty part.
There was something Mrs. Mundy wanted to say to me to-night, and
did not say. I love the dear soul. I could not live here without her, could
not learn what I am learning without her help and sympathy and loyalty,
but at times I wish she were a bit less fond of chatting. She is greatly
puzzled. She, too, cannot understand why I have come to Scarborough
Square to live, and I am