Country life -- England -- Fiction; England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Families -- Fiction
"Have you, darling? It's the fifty-third."
"Ah, but you wait till you see. Abington Abbey. What do you think of
that for a name? Just come into the market. There are cloisters, and a
chapel. Stew ponds. A yew walk. Three thousand acres, and a good head of
game. More can be had by arrangement, and we'll arrange it. Presentation
to living. We'll make Bunting a parson, and present him to it. Oh, it's
the very thing. I haven't told you half. Come and have a look at it."
George Grafton spread out papers and photographs on a table. His
daughter, Caroline, roused herself from her book and her easy chair in
front of the fire to come and look at them. He put his arm around her
slim waist and gave her a kiss, which she returned with a smile.
"Darling old George," she said, settling his tie more to her liking, "I
sometimes wish you weren't quite so young. You let yourself in for so
many disappointments."
George Grafton did look rather younger than his fifty years, in spite of
his grey hair. He had a fresh complexion and a pair of dark, amused,
alert eyes. His figure was that of a young man, and his daughter had
only settled his tie out of affection, for it and the rest of his
clothes were perfect, with that perfection which comes from Bond Street
and Savile Row, the expenditure of considerable sums of money, and exact
knowledge and taste in such matters. He was, in fact, as agreeable to
the eye as any man of his age could be, unless you were to demand
evidences of unusual intellectual power, which he hadn't got, and did
very well without.
As for his eldest daughter Caroline, her appeal to the eye needed no
qualification whatever, for she had, in addition to her attractions of
feature and colouring, that adorable gift of youth, which, in the case
of some fortunate beings, seems to emanate grace. It was so with her. At
the age of twenty there might have been some doubt as to whether she
could be called beautiful or only very pretty, and the doubt would not
be resolved for some few years to come. She had delicate, regular
features, sweet eyes, a kind smiling mouth, a peach-like soft-tinted
skin, nut-coloured hair with a wave in it, a slender column of a neck,
with deliciously modulated curves of breast and shoulders. She looked
thorough-bred, was fine at the extremities, clean-boned and long in the
flank, and moved with natural grace and freedom. Half of these qualities
belonged to her youth, which was so living and palpitating in her as to
be a quality of beauty in itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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