They tried
letting lodgings. Even lodgers rebelled against their untidiness and
want of punctuality.
The eldest was very energetic and very determined, and the youngest very
pretty and very conciliatory. Nevertheless, business is business, and
lodgings are lodgings, and the Misses Blake were on the verge of
beggary, when Mr. Elmsdale proposed for Miss Kathleen and was accepted.
Mr. Craven, by that time a family man, gave the bride away, and secured
Mr. Elmsdale's business.
Possibly, had Mrs. Elmsdale's marriage proved happy, Mr. Craven might
have soon lost sight of his former love. In matrimony, as in other
matters, we are rarely so sympathetic with fulfilment as with
disappointment. The pretty Miss Blake was a disappointed woman after she
had secured Mr. Elmsdale. She then understood that the best life could
offer her was something very different indeed from the ideal duke her
beauty should have won, and she did not take much trouble to conceal her
dissatisfaction with the arrangements of Providence.
Mr. Craven, seeing what Mr. Elmsdale was towards men, pitied her.
Perhaps, had he seen what Mrs. Elmsdale was towards her husband, he
might have pitied him; but, then, he did not see, for women are
wonderful dissemblers.
There was Elmsdale, bluff in manner, short in person, red in the face,
cumbersome in figure, addicted to naughty words, not nice about driving
fearfully hard bargains, a man whom men hated, not undeservedly; and
yet, nevertheless, a man capable of loving a woman with all the veins of
his heart, and who might, had any woman been found to love him, have
compassed earthly salvation.
Pages:
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28