United States or Tanzania ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
She wondered, for one thing, why they were so fond of eating and drinking, her own taste in those matters being of the simplest description. "I never deny myself anything," said Mrs. Guthrie Brimston. And she looked like it.
Her smouldering antagonism to Mrs. Malcomson was kept alight by a strong suspicion she had that Mrs. Malcomson was wont to ridicule her; and as a matter of fact the best jokes of that winter were made by Mrs. Malcomson at the expense of Mrs. Guthrie Brimston. It was not likely, therefore, that the latter would spare Mrs.
She had none of the trials peculiar to married life to injure her health and break her spirit, none of the restrictions imposed upon a girl to limit her pleasures, and she enjoyed her independence thoroughly. But of course there were drawbacks, and the thing of all others she disliked most was being toadied. There was one pair of inveterate toadies in the garrison, Major and Mrs. Guthrie Brimston.
She talked to all the men at once, and they appeared to appreciate her sallies; but their own replies were vapid. She seemed to be the only one of the party with any wit. Mrs. Beston joined her. She was a little dark woman with a patient anxious face, and eyes that wandered incessantly till she discovered her husband with Mrs. Guthrie Brimston.
For he says he knows for a fact that they travelled together for three hundred miles down country, sleeping at all the dak bungalows by the way, before they were married!" "Waiting until they came to some place where they could be married, I suppose?" Evadne suggested. Mrs. Guthrie Brimston laughed. "Taking a sort of trial trip, I should say!" she ventured.
He had forgotten Evadne for the moment, and she was so transformed by the beautiful lines of her dress that he had looked at her hard and admiringly before he recognized her. "Who's the lady with the Grand Duke?" Major Livingston exclaimed. "Someone with a figure, by Jove!" said old Lord Groome. "Loyal Egypt herself!" said Mrs. Guthrie Brimston, always apt at analogy.
But I am thankful to say I have never known anyone who found the knowledge of evil anything but distressing except Mrs. Guthrie Brimston, and she only delights in it so long as it is made a jest of. But they are all alike in that set she belongs to. Their ideas of propriety are bounded by their sense of pleasure.
Guthrie Brimston as soon as he could possibly excuse himself without giving offence, and went at once to call upon Evadne in order to inspect her from this unexpected point of view. He found her talking tranquilly to Mr. St. John, Edith, and Mrs. Beale; and although he sat for half an hour, she never said a word of the slightest significance.
Guthrie Brimston was a nasty-minded woman, of extremely coarse conversation, and, without compromising herself, she was a fecund source of corruption in others. No younger woman of undecided character could come under her influence without being tainted in mind if not in manners. She delighted in objectionable stories, and her husband fed her fancy from the clubs liberally.
Malta was enlivened that winter by a joke which Mrs. Guthrie Brimston made without intending it. Mrs. Malcomson had written a book. She was thirty years of age, and had been married to a military man for ten, and in that time she had seen some things which had made a painful impression upon her, and suggested ideas that were only to be got rid of by publishing them.
Word Of The Day