United States or Lithuania ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Many a time, in later years, would they smile together, remembering incidents that had happened in the square old red brick house with the green blinds, and the orderly terrible courtyard with the straight narrow seats set bolt upright against a speechless wall, and the little green pump that only grown-up persons were permitted to touch; remembering, too, the long low-backed benches in the schoolroom, row after row to the end of the low-ceiled room, and the tiny gray blackboard, and the painful corner behind the stove where recalcitrant pupils were stood, awaiting the approach of tardy contrition or increased mental attainments; remembering, above all, the grave, kind face of the teacher herself, Miss Dorcas Kingsbury of the Kingsburys reduced in her middle age to conducting a "cultural institute," but as undeviating and inflexible in her idea of duty as was the very line of her uncompromising brow.
The lieutenant looked as if he had swallowed a couple of his buttons, and found the bullion rather indigestible; the rector was a pensive youth, of the daffydowndilly sort; and the swell from Nahant was a very weak tidal wave indeed. The women were much better, as they always are; the two Miss Kingsburys of Philadelphia, staying at the Seashell House, two bright and engaging girls.
Nevertheless the two women loved each other dearly, and it was a great part of the life of each of them that these weekly visits should be made. There was one great fact, as to which Mrs. Demijohn and Holloway were in the wrong. Mrs. Roden was not a widow. It was not till the Kingsburys had left London that George told his mother of his engagement.
But the Miss Kingsburys of the smaller county towns are an especial menace to such as Flamby, although charity rarely assumes the dimensions of a vice among any of the natives of England's southern shires. "And your father had intended that you should become a painter?"
Word Of The Day