A call : $b The tale of two passionsFord, Ford Madox
General
A call : $b The tale of two passions
Ford, Ford Madox
English fiction -- 20th century
place, it was put off, and the death of Mr. Lascarides, occurring four
months later, and with extreme suddenness, the match was broken off,
for no reason that anyone knew altogether. Mr. Lascarides had, it was
known, died intestate, and apparently, according to Greek law, Robert
Grimshaw had become his uncle’s sole heir. But he was understood to
have acted exceedingly handsomely by his cousins. Indeed, it was a fact
Mr. Hartley Jenx had definitely ascertained, that upon the marriage of
Ellida to Paul Langham, Robert Grimshaw had executed in her benefit
settlements of a sum that must have amounted to very nearly half his
uncle’s great fortune. Her sister Katya, who had been attached to
her mother with a devotion that her English friends considered to be
positively hysterical, had, it was pretty clearly understood, become
exceedingly strange in her manner after her mother’s death. The reason
for her rupture with Robert Grimshaw was not very clearly understood,
but it was generally thought to be due to religious differences. Mrs.
Lascarides had been exceedingly attached to the Greek Orthodox Church,
whereas, upon going to Winchester, Robert Grimshaw, for the sake of
convenience and with the consent of his uncle, had been received
into the Church of England. But whatever the causes of the rupture,
there was no doubt that it was an occasion of great bitterness. Katya
Lascarides certainly suffered from a species of nervous breakdown, and
passed some months in a hydropathic establishment on the Continent;
and it was afterwards known by those who took the trouble to be at
all accurate in their gossip that she had passed over to Philadelphia
in order to study the more obscure forms of nervous diseases. In this
study she was understood to have gained a very great proficiency,
for Mrs. Clement P. Van Husum, junior, whose balloon-parties were
such a feature of at least one London season, and who herself had
been one of Miss Lascarides’ patients, was accustomed to say with
all the enthusiastic emphasis of her country and race--she had been
before marriage a Miss Carteighe of Hoboken, N.Y.--that not only had
Katya Lascarides saved her life and reason, but that the chief of the
Philadelphian Institute was accustomed always to send Katya to diagnose
obscure cases in the more remote parts of the American continent. It
was, as the few friends that Katya had remaining in London said, a
little out of the picture--at any rate, of the picture of the slim,
dark and passionate girl with the extreme, pale beauty and the dark
eyes that they remembered her to have had.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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