United States or Puerto Rico ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
From my almost solitary perch I watched the fluttering and excited crowd. The town band in the organ gallery at the further end discoursed martial music. From the main door beneath them ran the central gangway to the platform. I recognised many friends. In the front row with her two aunts sat Betty, very demure in her widow's hat relieved by its little white band of frilly stuff beneath the brim.
This was more like the speeches Kate made in her own head than anything she had ever said to her aunts; and it was quite just besides, and not spoken in naughtiness, and Lady Barbara did not think it wrong to show that she attended to it. "You are right, Katharine," she said; "no one wishes you to be either proud or ungrateful.
One result of the estrangement was that we hardly seemed to belong to our own family; and I remember a lady, who had some very vague and shadowy claims to a distant connection with the family at Hellifield, asking one of my aunts in a rather patronizing manner if she also did not "claim to be connected" with the Hamertons of Hellifield Peel.
Being, when she chose, a clear- sighted young woman, she realized this, but she also knew that Francis Sales would find the obvious meaning in the blow. For herself, she sanely determined to blot that episode from her mind: it was maddening to think of it as an insult and dangerous to remember its delight, and she was able calmly to tell her aunts that Mr. Sales had seen her home.
He ascended and laid down his gun and pouch in the anti-chamber, the servant ushered him in, and he found only a small circle, the young lady's two old aunts and a few younger ladies of the town of Nismes, established at two card tables and entertained, as usual, by an old Captain.
It is conceivable that the aunts would not have approved of a girl who never set foot on the ground if a horse were within hail; who rode to dances with a shawl thrown over her skirt; who wore her hair cropped and curling all over her head; who answered indifferently to the name of William or Bill; whose speech was heavy with the flowers of the vernacular; who could act in amateur theatricals, play on the banjo, rule eight servants and two horses, their accounts and their diseases, and look men slowly and deliberately between the eyes even after they had proposed to her and been rejected.
'But your mother knew what was right, I suppose? 'I have no mother, madam. 'Your father, then? 'I have no father. 'Well, she said, more softly, 'your sisters, aunts, or cousins. 'They didn't think anything about it. 'You didn't ask them, I suppose. 'No. 'You should have done so, then. Why didn't you? 'Because I haven't any of them, either. Miss Aldclyffe showed her surprise.
That is why the supply of trained aunts is always so precarious. There is my Aunt Agatha, par exemple, who sent me a pair of gloves last Christmas, and even got so far as to choose a kind that was being worn and had the correct number of buttons. But they were nines!
She had been saved from foolishness and error; kept from troubling her poor mother; prevented from angering and mortifying her aunts.
But it was not only on his account that she avoided the invitation, she by no means wished to show Bayford to her fastidious aunts, and felt as if to keep them satisfied and comfortable would be beyond her power. Set free from this dread, and his familiarity with his brother-in-law renewed, Mr. Kendal came out to great advantage at the early dinner.
Word Of The Day