United States or Anguilla ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I'd be ashamed for any of the folk around here to see you like that and if Arthur Alce, or any other man, came in, I'd either have to send you out or wrap the table-cover round you." Ellen took refuge in a haughty silence, and Joanna began to feel uneasy and depressed. She thought that Ellen was "fast." Was this what she had learned at school to flout the standards of her home?
The first person to see what was happening was Joanna herself. She had been glad for some time of Ellen's increased friendliness with Alce, but had pat it down to nothing more than the comradeship of that happy day at Lord John Sanger's show.
That was the strong hidden growth that had heaved up her flat little plans of a mere victory in tattle if she married she would be her own mistress, free for ever of Joanna's tyranny. She could do what she liked with Alce she would be able to go where she liked, know whom she liked, wear what she liked; whereas with Joanna all these things were ruthlessly decreed.
She had never felt this during the years that her sister had lived with Alce; the thought of his affection had brought her nothing but happiness and content.
Joanna felt annoyed with her for dressing up all quiet as a water-hen, but she could see that, in spite of it, her sacrifice in having her party transferred from the glamorous evening hour had been justified. Both the Old Squire and his sister were obviously interested in Ellen Alce he in the naïve unguarded way of the male, she more subtly and not without a dash of patronage. Mrs.
"There's more than he gives a double arsenic dip, surelye." "Surelye but they mixes the can a bit. Broadhurst says as Socknersh's second dip was as strong as his first." The feeling about Socknersh's incapacity reached such a point that more than one warning was given Joanna for her father's sake, and one at least for her own, from Arthur Alce.
By leaving the neighbourhood he gave colour to the mysteriously-started rumour that he was not so easy to get on with as you'd think ... after all, it's never a safe thing for a girl to marry her sister's sweetheart ... probably Alce had been hankering after his old love and Ellen resented it ... the Woolpack suddenly discovered that Alce was leaving not so much on Ellen's account as on Joanna's he'd been unable to get off with the old love, even when he'd got on with the new, and now that the new was off too ... well, there was nothing for it but for Arthur Alce to be off.
"Whosumdever breaks pasture shall himself be broke," said Vine oracularly. "Surelye surelye," assented the table. "She's got pluck all the same," said Sir Harry. But he was only an amateur. "I don't hold for a woman to have pluck," said Vennal of Beggar's Bush, "what do you say, Mr. Alce?" "I say nothing, Mr. Vennal."
I hear Broadhurst about the yard. Mene Tekel, see as there's no clinkers left in the grate; Mrs. Alce never got her bath yesterday evening before dinner as she expects it. When did you do the flues last?" She set her household about its business her dreams could not live in the atmosphere of antagonistic suspicion in which she had always viewed the younger members of her own sex.
Ellen despised Arthur Alce she did not like his looks, his old-fashioned side-whiskers and Gladstone collars, or the amount of hair and freckles that covered the exposed portions of his skin. She despised him, too, for his devotion to Joanna; she did not understand how a man could be inspired with a lifelong love for Joanna, who seemed to her unattractive coarse and bouncing.
Word Of The Day