Boston Neighbours In Town and OutPoor, Agnes Blake
General
Boston Neighbours In Town and Out
Poor, Agnes Blake
Boston (Mass.) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories
He made enthusiastic, but very brief, love to all of us in turn. I don't
know whether any of us could have had him; if one could, all could; but,
supposing we could, I don't believe any of us would have had the courage
to venture on Willie Williams. But we expected that his marriage would
be romantic and exciting, and his wedding something out of the common.
Opinions were divided as to whether his ardent love-making would induce
some lovely young Italian or Spanish girl of rank to run away from a
convent with him, or whether he would rashly take up with some artist's
model, or goose-girl, or beggar-maid. We were much disappointed when,
after all, he married in the most commonplace manner a very ordinary
girl named Loulie Latham.
We all knew Loulie too; she went to school at Miss Woodberry's, in the
class next below mine; and she was a nice girl, and we all liked her
well enough, but there never was a girl who had less in her. She was not
bad-looking, but no beauty; not at all the kind of looks to attract an
artist. Blanche Livermore said that he might have married her for her
red hair if only there had been more of it. The Lathams were very well
connected, and knew everybody, and she went about with the other girls,
and had a fair show of attention at parties; but she never had friends
or lovers. She had not much chance to have any, indeed, for she married
very young.
She was a very shy, quiet girl, and I used to think that perhaps it was
because she was so overcrowed by her mother. Mrs. Latham was a large,
striking-looking if not exactly handsome, lady-like though loud, woman,
who talked a great deal about everything. She was clever, but eccentric,
and took up all manner of fads and fancies, and though she was a
thoroughly good woman, and well born and well bred, she did know the
very queerest people--always hand in glove with some new crank. Hygiene,
as she called it, was her pet hobby. Fortunately she had a particular
aversion to dosing; but she dieted her daughter and herself, which, I
fear, was nearly as bad. All her bread had husks in it, and she was
always discovering that it was hurtful to eat any butter or drink any
water, and no end of such notions. She dressed poor Loulie so
frightfully that it was enough to take all the courage out of a girl:
with all her dresses very short in the skirt, and big at the waist, and
cut high, even in the evening, and thick shoes very queerly shaped, made
after her own orders by some shoemaker of her own, and loose cotton
gloves, and a mushroom hat down over her eyes. Finally she took up the
mind-cure, and Loulie was to keep thinking all the time how perfectly
well she was, which, I think, was what made her so thin and pale. Mrs.
Latham always said that no one ever need be ill, and indeed she never
was herself, for she was found dead in her bed one morning without any
warning.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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