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Updated: June 27, 2025
Diana's disillusion about her cousin was, so far, no very lofty matter. It hurt; but on her run to the village the natural common-sense Mrs. Colwood had detected had wrestled stoutly with her wounded feelings. Better take it with a laugh! To laugh, however, one must be distracted; and Mrs. Roughsedge, bubbling over with gossip and good-humor, was distraction personified.
In her descent upon the terrace she dropped her gloves; stooping to pick them up, she dropped her boa; in her struggle to recapture that, she trod on and tore her dress. "Damn!" said the young lady, furiously. And at the voice, the word, the figure, Mrs. Roughsedge stood arrested and open-mouthed, her old woman's bonnet slipping back a little on her gray curls. The young woman was Fanny Merton.
Roughsedge knew too much about these cottages. In this one to the left a girl had just borne her second illegitimate child; in that one farther on were two mentally deficient children, the offspring of feeble-minded parents; in the next, an old woman, the victim of pernicious anæmia, was moaning her life away; in the last to the right the mother of five small children had just died in her sixth confinement.
She pleaded not without tears to be given the happiness of knowing they were pledged, and her Muriel safe in harbor. So Roughsedge had his say; a quiet engagement began its course in the world; Brookshire as yet knew nothing; and the doctor triumphed over Patricia.
Oh! she would do nothing singular or rude. But she was often tired and weak not physically, but in mind. Mrs. Roughsedge knew and Muriel. Dear Hugh Roughsedge! he was indeed a faithful understanding friend. She was proud of his letters; she was proud of his conduct in the short campaign just over; she looked forward to his return in the autumn. But he must not cherish foolish thoughts or wishes.
News had arrived that afternoon of an indecisive engagement, in which the lives of three English officers and some fifty men of a Sikh regiment had been lost. Mr. Barton, in taking up the evening paper, lying beside Diana, which contained the news, had made very much the remark foretold by Captain Roughsedge in the afternoon.
One of her chief friends was a secularist cobbler who lived under the very shadow of the church. The Miss Bertrams shuddered at his conversation. Mrs. Roughsedge found him racy company, and he presented to her aspects of village life and opinion with which the Miss Bertrams were not at all acquainted.
Colwood could only say that Miss Mallory seemed to be in love with everything the house, the church, the village, and the neighbors. Mrs. Roughsedge shook her gray curls, smiling, as she replied that this was no doubt partly due to novelty. After her long residence abroad, Miss Mallory was it was very evident glad to come home.
With all her impetuosity, indeed, there was about her something markedly virginal and remote, which is commoner, perhaps, in Irish than English women. Mrs. Colwood watched the effect of it on Captain Roughsedge. After her third day of acquaintance with him, she said to herself: "He will fall in love with her!" But she said it with compassion, and without troubling to speculate on the lady.
But these women have minds for the impersonal. Diana was not talking to make an effect on Captain Roughsedge that was the strange part of it. Hundreds of women can make politics serve the primitive woman's game; the "come hither in the ee" can use that weapon as well as any other. But here was an intellectual, a patriotic passion, veritable, genuine, not feigned.
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