Read "Van Zorn" by Edwin Arlington Robinson online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
A diagonal view of a room in Mrs. Lovett's house. The right corner is revealed, with half of the right wall. In the corner is a small grand piano, and to the right is a window. To the left, half way down, is the entrance, a wide arched doorway with curtains. Well down in front, somewhat to the right, is a table, before which are two comfortable chairs that partly face each other. Against the wall, to the left and below the entrance, is a couch. There are several pictures on the walls, and over the piano is a portrait of Mrs. Lovett's late husband, showing the beardless face of a man of fifty, melancholy and rather glowering. The room has the unmistakable appearance of a place where people live and make themselves at home.
As the curtain rises, Villa Vannevar is at the piano, playing in a listless, abstracted manner the cantabile part of Chopin's Nocturne, Op. 37, No. 2. Mrs. Lovett, sitting in the chair at the right of the table, listens, frowns, stamps her foot, and finally speaks out with evident impatience.