[Looking Backwards from 2000 to 1887 by Edward Bellamy]@TWC D-Link book
Looking Backwards from 2000 to 1887

CHAPTER 14
2/13

She intimated that it would be considered an extraordinary imbecility to permit the weather to have any effect on the social movements of the people.
Dr.Leete, who was walking ahead, overhearing something of our talk, turned to say that the difference between the age of individualism and that of concert was well characterized by the fact that, in the nineteenth century, when it rained, the people of Boston put up three hundred thousand umbrellas over as many heads, and in the twentieth century they put up one umbrella over all the heads.
As we walked on, Edith said, "The private umbrella is father's favorite figure to illustrate the old way when everybody lived for himself and his family.

There is a nineteenth century painting at the Art Gallery representing a crowd of people in the rain, each one holding his umbrella over himself and his wife, and giving his neighbors the drippings, which he claims must have been meant by the artist as a satire on his times." We now entered a large building into which a stream of people was pouring.

I could not see the front, owing to the awning, but, if in correspondence with the interior, which was even finer than the store I visited the day before, it would have been magnificent.

My companion said that the sculptured group over the entrance was especially admired.

Going up a grand staircase we walked some distance along a broad corridor with many doors opening upon it.


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