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Updated: July 3, 2025
I have vague remembrance of a somewhat heated discussion, in which everybody but myself appeared to be taking extreme interest of Miss Sellars in her most ladylike and chilling tones defending me against the charge of "being no gentleman," which Mrs. Peedles was explaining nobody had said I wasn't. The argument seemed to be of the circular order.
Peedles, thus corrected, allowed that maybe frivolous was too sweeping an accusation: say sportive. "But a good wife to him I always was," asserted Mrs. Peedles, with a fine sense of justice; "never flighty, like some of them. I challenge any one to accuse me of having been flighty." We felt we should not believe any one who did, and told her so. Mrs.
"The poor dears!" she sobbed. "But there, there's no telling. Perhaps they'll be happy. I'm sure I hope they may be. He looks harmless." Jarman, stretching out a hand to me from the other side of Mrs. Peedles, urged me to cheer up. "Don't wear your 'eart upon your sleeve," he advised. "Try and smile." In the vestry I met old friends.
Both ladies were weeping; the Signora silently, one tear at a time clinging fondly to her pretty face as though loath to fall from it; Mrs. Peedles copiously, with explosive gurgles, as of water from a bottle. "It is such a beautiful service," murmured the Signora, pressing my hand as I settled myself down. "I should so so love to be married."
The ladies forgave him; the gentlemen said it was a damned lucky thing for the girl. Altogether, Minikin took a good deal of explaining. Lady Peedles, our guests decided among themselves, must be the widow of some one in the City who had been knighted in a crowd. They made fun of her behind her back, but to her face were most effusive.
His career up to a point appeared to have been brilliant. "What he mightn't have been," according to Mrs. Peedles, there was practically no saying; what he happened to be at the moment of conversation was an unpromising inmate of the Hanwell lunatic asylum. "I've always noticed it," Mrs. Peedles would explain; "it's always the most deserving, those that try hardest, to whom trouble comes.
Everything and everybody appeared to be a long way off, but, whether because of this or in spite of it, exceedingly attractive. Never had I noticed the Signora so bewitching; in a motherly sort of way even the third floor front was good to look upon; Mrs. Peedles I could almost have believed to be the real Flora MacDonald sitting in front of me.
Miss Sellars thoughtfully removed it, and threw it away. Our lips met. Her large arms closed about my neck and held me tight. "Well, I'm sure!" came the voice of Mrs. Peedles, as from afar. "Nice goings on!"
As a delicate attention to Mrs. Peedles and her costume he sunk his nationality and became for the evening, according to his own declaration, "a braw laddie." With her his "sonsie lassie," so he termed her he flirted in the broadest, if not purest, Scotch. The O'Kelly for him became "the Laird;" the third floor "Jamie o' the Ilk;" Miss Sellars, "the bonnie wee rose;" myself, "the chiel."
Peedles hung on her hook behind the kitchen door, dingy, limp, discarded; out of the wardrobe with the silks and satins was lifted down to be put on as an undergarment Miss Lucretia Barry, like her costumes somewhat aged, somewhat withered, but still distinctly "arch." In the room next to me lived a law-writer and his wife. They were very old and miserably poor. The fault was none of theirs.
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