He
also was bald-headed, but his baldness formed a smaller patch
than the lawyer's
The two brothers did most of the talking, and, among other things,
they informed Miss Tevkin and myself that they were graduates of
the City College. With a great display of reading and repeatedly
interrupting each other they took up the cudgels for the "good old
school." I soon discovered, however, that their range was limited
to a small number of authors, whose names they uttered with great
gusto and to whom they returned again and again. These were
Victor Hugo, Dumas, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot,
Coleridge, Edgar Poe, and one or two others. If the lawyer added a
new name, like Walter Pater, to his list, the real-estate man would
hasten to trot out De Quincey, for example. For the rest they
would parade a whole array of writers rather than refer to any one
of them in particular. The more they fulminated and fumed and
bullied Miss Tevkin the firmer grew my conviction that they had
scarcely read the books for which they seemed to be ready to lay
down their lives
Miss Tevkin, however, took them seriously.
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