Fragment of a Review

I am halfway into reading Three Girls in a Flat, a neat American classic written by Enid Yandell, Jean Loughborough, and Laura Hayes in Chicago in 1892. This novella with its colourful Parisian setting and weighty European style boasts a soothing flavour that makes for excellent bedtime reading.

My favourite pictured paragraph at the moment is possibly this:

"First I sent for the steward and instructed him as to the serving of the coffee, tea and chocolate; then I went to Boissiers myself and ordered the confections and the delicious little cakes for which that establishment is so justly famous, and finally to the flower market on the corner by the Madeleine, where I bought to my heart's content, taking a whole mass in my "voiture," while two stout men ran down the boulevard beside it, each with a load on his back. I worked with a will and I must say the rooms looked charming, for I had often decorated them before on flower-market day for the mere pleasure it gave us all to see them looking so pretty."

Already, I love it.

Women camaraderies huddled with their roomful of secrets, fragile emotions and all other unpredictable aspects that breed for a similiar schoolgirl friendship with its understanding of whispered sincerity.

Throw in chaperones, dates, balls, giggles, shopping and the busybody trying-to-live-it-up vixen of a neighbour, next door and I am immediately drawn into this new discovery of a classsic like a startled eye to a diamond.

Perhaps it is the freedom and peace of my own heart at this time of my life while reading Three Girls in a Flat. Which is why my description would lie in this vein:

I feel myself catch a blush when a man looks my way, I close my eyes to the rub of lace on my skin when I pretend an exquisite shawl is thrown around my shoulders. My imaginary footsteps run to hide behind the heavy muslin curtains with a shyness I did not know I possessed and finally, I catch the cosy firelight like a rosy fable in the dark. - Susan Abraham -