Natural Selection

By H. C. Bunner

"Natural Selection" by H. C. Bunner. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Good Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2020
• ISBN: 4064066422110

Book preview

H. C. Bunner

Natural Selection

Published by Good Press, 2022

[e-mail]

EAN 4064066422110

Table of Contents

PART I.

PART II.

PART III.

PART I.

Table of Contents

CHELSEA Village has never had the aggressive exclusiveness of Greenwich. It exists to-day, and vaguely knows itself by name, close to the heart of the great city that has swallowed it up; but it is in nowise such a distinct entity as the brave little tangle of crooked streets a few blocks to the south. Greenwich has always been Greenwich, and the Ninth Ward has been the centre of civilization to the dwellers therein. But Chelsea has tried to be fashionable, has opened its doors to foreign invaders, and has even had an attack of Anglomania, and branched out into Terraces in the true London style. And so it has lost homogeneity and originality, and it has only a peculiar and private air of ambitionless and uninviting gloom to set it apart as a special quarter of New York. But Chelsea certainly does look like the inhabitants of its own boarding-houses—most respectable people, who have only tried too hard at elegant gentility for their own comfort or prosperity. And the place has one other strong individuality. I do not know that there are very many ailanthus-trees in Chelsea; but there is, to me, a pervading odor of that gruesome exotic in all the streets, and I think an imaginative person might detect the smell even in the midwinter blasts that howl up from the North River.

Contemplation of one Chelsea street had a depressing effect upon Miss Celia Leete, as she sat by her window at five o'clock of a summer Saturday afternoon. Her room was in the front of a third story of a comfortable white wooden house, one of a little squad that stood well back from the street, the first two stories all but hidden by green-latticed verandas.

Miss Celia Leete looked through the thin and dusty Leaves of the horse-chestnut-tree on the sidewalk, and her gaze roved idly up and down the hue of boarding-houses across the way. They were boarding-houses with certain aspirations. They had also high stoops and elaborate cast-iron balconies. Yet, somehow, they did not look like even the second-cousins of those lordlier structures within the sacred one block's space east and west from Fifth Avenue. Perhaps this was partly because right next to them came the little tailor's shop, red brick, painted redder yet, ten feet wide and one story high, with the German tailor's wife forever standing in the door-way, holding her latest baby in her bare red arms.

The children of shabby and not over clean gentility were playing in shrill-voiced chorus on the sidewalk in front of the high-stoop houses. Occasionally one of them would recognize a home-returning father, and, without pausing in the merry round of Spanish Fly or Par, would give his parent the hail of easy equality, H'lo, Pa!

The heads of families in the boarding-house colony were sometimes employed in the wholesale houses down-town; but oftener were clerks or floor-walkers in large dry-goods shops, or proprietors of smaller establishments on the West-side avenues. One of these gentlemen arrived at his domicile as Miss Celia Leete looked out of her window. He mechanically took his night-key from his pocket, but he replaced it, for the door was open, and most of the ladies of the house were disposed about the steps, in all the finery that the bargain counters of Fourteenth Street could furnish. Then this conversation fell sharply upon the dull and sultry air:

Why, Mr. Giddens, that you? Early to-night, ain't you? Wasn't it awful hot down-town?

By a delicate convention of the place, even the boarder who was in charge of the Gent's Furnishing Goods Department of Messrs. Sonnenschein and Regenschirm, a mile up Eighth Avenue, was supposed to transact bis business down-town.

"Hot enough for me [a responsive ripple of merriment]. I ain't a hog, Miss Seavey. Why, Miss Wicks, you down again? Haven't seen yon in three days. Quite a stranger. How's the neuralger?"

Better now, thank you, Mr. Giddens; but I had an awfle siege of it this time. I was most afraid to show myself, I've run down so.

"Idersed you'd run up, 'stid 'f down. Never saw you lookin' better."

"Oh, Mr. GKddens, you're so gallant! I wonder your wife ain't jealous of you, you're so gallant to all the ladies. There, you go right along to her, or she'll say somethin' to me, I know she will." And with a gentle push, and amid much tittering, Mr. Giddens disappeared in the dark door-way.

Celia Leete turned from her window. She was sick of life, of the place, of herself—of something, she could not quite tell what.

And yet her ailment was common enough, and simple enough, and she defined her longing sufficiently well when she said to herself, as she sometimes did: I wish I was someone else.

It would not require a profound psychologist, knowing who and what Miss Celia Leete was, and knowing also that she had spent one year of the most purely formative period of her young life in a semi-fashionable boarding-school, to deduce from this statement a general idea of what manner of person Miss Celia Leete wished to be, could she he someone other than herself.

Miss Celia Leete was the younger daughter of David Leete, the