United States or Chile ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
And this characteristic aspect made her attractive; an individual touch you know. The dog had run on ahead and now gazed at us by the side of the Fyne's garden-gate in a tense attitude and wagging his stumpy tail very, very slowly, with an air of concentrated attention. The girl-friend of the Fynes bolted violently through the aforesaid gate and into the cottage leaving me on the road astounded.
My appetite at breakfast was not affected by my ignorance of the facts, motives, events and conclusions. I think that to understand everything is not good for the intellect. A well-stocked intelligence weakens the impulse to action; an overstocked one leads gently to idiocy. But Mrs. Fyne's individualist woman-doctrine, naively unscrupulous, flitted through my mind.
Fyne's outburst of sincerity in a matter in which neither my affections nor my vanity were engaged. That's why, may be, she ventured so far. For a woman she chose to be as open as the day with me. There was not only the form but almost the whole substance of her thought in what she said. She believed she could risk it.
"I found her in the night nursery crouching on the floor, her head resting on the cot of the youngest of my girls. The eldest was sitting up in bed looking at her across the room." Only a nightlight was burning there. Mrs. Fyne raised her up, took her over to Mr. Fyne's little dressing-room on the other side of the landing, to a fire by which she could dry herself, and left her there.
Fyne's uplifted bass voice startled them down there, the butler coming up, staring and in his shirt sleeves, very suspicious at first, and then, on Fyne's explanation that he was the husband of a lady who had called several times at the house Miss de Barral's mother's friend becoming humanely concerned and communicative, in a man to man tone, but preserving his trained high-class servant's voice: "Oh bless you, sir, no!
In fact nothing less than partly murdering her. This seems a very extreme effect to flow from Fyne's words. But Anthony, unaccustomed to the chatter of the firm earth, never stayed to ask himself what value these words could have in Fyne's mouth.
And when he was informed that the girl was in bed, not feeling well at all he showed an unsympathetic alarm. She wasn't an invalid was she? No. What was the matter with her then? An extreme distaste for that respectable member of society was depicted in Fyne's face even as he was telling me of him after all these years.
But her misery was his opportunity and he rejoiced while the tenderest pity seemed to flood his whole being. He pointed out to her that she knew who he was. He was Mrs. Fyne's brother. And, well, if his sister was the best friend she had in the world, then, by Jove, it was about time somebody came along to look after her a little.
It was nothing of the sort, Mrs. Fyne assured me with some resentment, as though I had aspersed little Fyne's sanity. Fyne very sensibly had set himself the mental task of discovering the self-interest. I should not have thought him capable of so much cynicism. But the girl was absolutely destitute. The father was in prison after the most terribly complete and disgraceful smash of modern times.
He was very unobservant except as to the peculiarities of footpaths, on which he was an authority. I thought with amazement and some admiration that Mrs. Fyne's young disciples were to her husband's gravity no more than evanescent shadows. However, with but little hesitation Fyne ventured to affirm that yes, her hair was of some dark shade.
Word Of The Day