United States or Liberia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Watton, with a tone and air, however, that seemed to class her rather with the Sons of Thunder than the Sons of Consolation. She was standing on the steps of the Ladies' Gallery entrance to the House of Commons, and Harding, who had just called a cab for her, was beside her. "Could you see from the Gallery whether George had left?" "He was still there when I came down," said Mrs.
But both became more and more conscious of two figures, and two figures only, at the crowded table Letty Tressady, who was listening absently to Edward Watton with oppressed and indrawn eyes, and Lady Maxwell. George, indeed, watched his wife constantly.
"She tells me that the system works on the whole extremely well," said Edward Watton, whose heightened colour alone betrayed the irritation of his mother's chronic aggression, "and that Maxwell is not at all unlikely to adopt it on his own estate." Mrs. Watton threw up her hands again. "The idiocy of that man! Till he married her he was a man of sense.
At this there was an incautious protest from Edward Watton against the word "corrupt," followed by a confirmatory clamour from his mother and brother which seemed to fill the dining-room.
The expression of the young man's eye, which was bent on Tressady, changed ever so slightly as he replied: "Oh yes, she knows. As soon as the others got back Mrs. Watton went up to tell her. She didn't show at lunch." "Mrs. Watton came to tell me naughty man!" said the lady whom George had addressed as his mother, tapping the speaker on the arm with her fan.
It seems impossible, unfitting, to grant to such persons le beau role they claim. It outrages a certain ideal instinct, even, to be asked to believe that they too can yield, in their measure, precisely the same tragic stuff as the hero or the saint. Letty was at home, just about to share her lunch with Harding Watton, who had dropped in.
Meanwhile, he was man enough not to require that anything should be added to Torfrida's penance; and that was enough to prove him a man in those days, at least for a churchman, as it proved Archbishop or St. Ailred to be, a few years after, in the case of the nun of Watton, to be read in Gale's "Scriptores Anglicaniae." Then he showed the letter to Alftruda.
As for this passion, that was creeping into all his veins, poisoning and crippling all his vitalities, he was still independent enough of it to be able to handle it with the irony it deserved. For it was almost as ludicrous as it was pitiable. He did not want any man of the world, any Harding Watton, to tell him that. What amazed him was the revelation of his own nature that was coming out of it.
To-night, almost for the first time, she could bear to think of it; she could even smile at it. Vanity and ambition alone had been concerned, and to-night these wild beasts of the heart were soothed and placable. Well, it was no great match, of course if it came off. All that Aunt Watton knew about the Tressadys had been long since extracted from her by her niece.
A half-contemptuous smile crossed Lord Fontenoy's worn face. "Well, really, I'm not inclined to make Lady Maxwell the scapegoat. Let them bear their own misdeeds." "Besides, what worse can you say of English Ministers than that they should be led by a woman?" said Mr. Watton, from the bottom of the table, in a piping voice. "In my young days such a state of things would have been unheard of.
Word Of The Day