United States or Bolivia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"There would not be the slightest chance of that," Mrs. Gregory declared. And then she pronounced a sentence that was truly oracular: "She's coming at once to see for herself." To which Mrs. Weguelin added with deeper condemnation than she had so far employed at all: "There is a rumor that she is actually coming in an automobile."
"You have told us much that we are not accustomed to hear in Kings Port." "Oh, I haven't begun to tell you!" I exclaimed cheerily. "You certainly have not told us," said Mrs. Gregory, "how your 'precocity' escapes this divorce degradation." "Escape it? Those people think it is well, provincial not to have been divorced at least once!" Mrs. Gregory opened her eyes, but Mrs. Weguelin shut her lips.
"Ah!" said Gazza, bending to read the quaint words cut upon one of them, as we stopped while the door at the rear of the church was being opened, "French!" "It was the mother-tongue of these colonists," Mrs. Weguelin explained to him. "Ah! like Canada!" cried Gazza. "But what a pretty bit is that!"
"And Hugh found that girl in Minneapolis, Julia, where there was doubtless no pick for the poor fellow. And remember that George chose a lady, at any rate." Mrs. Weguelin gave to this a short assent. "Yes." It portended something more behind, which her next words duly revealed. "A lady; but do any ladies ever seem quite like our own? "Certainly not, Julia."
Gregory looked at me she wanted more. Not so Mrs. Weguelin; she gave me disapproval; it was shadowed in her beautiful, lustrous eyes that burned dark in her white face with as much fire as that of youth, yet it was not of youth, being deeply charged with retrospection. In what, then, had I sinned? For the little lady's next words, coldly murmured, increased in me an uneasiness, as of sin:
Here, then, stood my two sins revealed; everything I had imparted, and also my tone of imparting it, had displeased Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, not with the thing, but with me. I had transgressed her sound old American code of good manners, a code slightly pompous no doubt, but one in which no familiarity was allowed to breed contempt.
Weguelin, and the whole company of aunts and cousins, and handing to them the rescued John with the single but sufficient syllable: "There!" He was in apparent spirits, was John, at that hour of our departure for Udolpho; he pretended so well that I was for a while altogether deceived.
And if Mrs. Gregory and Mrs. Weguelin seemed to me at moments as narrow as those streets, they also seemed to me as lovely as those serene gardens; and if I had smiled at their prejudices, I had loved their innocence, their deep innocence, of the poisoned age which has succeeded their own; and if I had wondered this day at their powers for cruelty, I wondered the next day at the glimpse I had of their kindness.
Gazza was not looking at the old furniture of Kings Port, which must have filled his Vatican soul with contempt; he was strolling back and forth in the street, with his head in the air, humming, now loudly, now softly "La-la, la-la, E quando a la predica in chiesa siederia, la-la-la-la;" and I thought to myself that, were I the Pope, I should kick him into the Tiber. When Mrs. Weguelin St.
Again I dragged my attention by force away from that quiet, relentless monologue, and listened as well as I could to Mrs. Weguelin.
Word Of The Day