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Penniman, faltering and wavering, declared Catherine was very stupid, put off the great scene, as she would have called it, from day to day, and wandered about very uncomfortably, primed, to repletion, with her apology, but unable to bring it to the light. Morris's own scenes were very small ones just now; but even these were beyond his strength.
Penniman, among the little Almonds, was an object of more admiration than sympathy. Her manners were strange and formidable, and her mourning robes she dressed in black for twenty years after her husband's death, and then suddenly appeared one morning with pink roses in her cap were complicated in odd, unexpected places with buckles, bugles, and pins, which discouraged familiarity.
Penniman, who had bethought herself what she should say to Catherine, but was not provided with a line of defence against her brother, so that indignant negation was the only weapon in her hands. "He has begged for a reprieve, then, if you like that better!" "It seems to make you very happy that your daughter's affections have been trifled with."
Brampton, with its wide-shadowed green, and terrace-steepled church; home once of the Social Library and Lucretia Penniman, now famous; home now of Isaac Dudley Worthington, whose great mills the stage driver had pointed out to them on Coniston Water as they entered the town. Then came a drive through the cool evening to Coniston, Ephraim showing them landmarks.
Mrs. Penniman had at last been fancy in her dressmaking for her child, and now stood by to exclaim at her handiwork. Winona, with surprising aplomb, bore the scrutiny of the family while she pulled long white gloves along her bare arms. A feathered fan dangled from one of them. "Now, I guess you believe me," said Mrs. Penniman. "Haven't I always said what a few little touches would do for you?"
On the Penniman front porch the judge was throned in a wicker chair. He was a nobly fronted old gentleman, with imposing head, bald at the top but tastefully hung with pale, fluffy side curls. His face was wide and full, smoothly shaven, his cheeks pink, his eyes a pure, pale blue.
So little did she think so that she fell, presently, into a despondency which in all her troubles had not overtaken her the despondency which comes even to the pure and the strong when they feel the unjust strength of the world against them. In this state her eyes fell on the letter she had started to Miss Lucretia Penniman, and in desperation she began to write.
Penniman also was silent; Morris Townsend had told her that her niece preferred, unromantically, an interview in a chintz-covered parlour to a sentimental tryst beside a fountain sheeted with dead leaves, and she was lost in wonderment at the oddity almost the perversity of the choice.
The druggist thrust out a bottle already wrapped in a printed cover, and the price, as became a cut-rate pharmacy, proved to be ninety-eight cents. A wish was now expressed that the advertising placard might also be taken in order that Judge Penniman might see just what sort of new man the invigorator would make of him.
Merrill knew, as is not given to many here below. And there was Cynthia's love for him. Mrs. Merrill had suffered that morning thinking of this tragedy also. "I do not think he is a proper guardian for her, Miss Penniman." It was then that the tears came to Mrs. Merrill's eyes for there is a limit to all human endurance.
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