Daughters of Belgravia; vol. 1 of 3Fraser, Alexander, Mrs.
General
Daughters of Belgravia; vol. 1 of 3
Fraser, Alexander, Mrs.
Fiction
A fair young girl, with a pure soft face, that owns a magnificent pair
of eyes, big and grey and black lashed, a little straight nose, and a
mouth sweet to distraction. Her hat has fallen back, and her hair looks
all afire with ruddy gleam as the bright moonlight touches it, and even
through the long loose cloak the perfection of her tall, slender figure
is visible.
The man she has elected her lord and king for evermore is a man to whom
most women give a second glance.
Women like height and strength in man, and this one stands over six feet
two, and has broad shoulders, and carries his brown, cropped head as
haughtily as if he were a prince instead of a pauper, and what in social
parlance is too awful--a detrimental.
He has large brown eyes (sleepy as a rule but quite capable of suddenly
kindling into passion), set deeply under straight well defined brows,
aquiline thin-cut features, firmly moulded lips, a slight moustache, and
a sort of _debonnair_ style that suits him admirably.
Altogether Carlton Conway, “_jeune amoureux_” at the Bagatelle Theatre,
is very much worth looking at, and is just the sort a romantic girl
falls down before in abject adoration.
“We must take our lives into our own hands, Zai,” he says very
passionately, marking how sweet his love looks under the soft moonbeams.
“We must run away, my child!”
One arm is round her slim waist, her cheek, lovelier and whiter and
purer than a white rose, is against his breast, her small snowflake of a
hand lies restfully in his strong clasp.
Zaidie Beranger starts.
“Run away, Carl?” she asks in an awed voice. Such a frightful defiance
of the convenances has never been known in the annals of the Berangers,
and it sounds quite too awful in her tiny pink ears. Possibly, or rather
probably, she has passed hours, delightful fleeting hours, in her own
little sanctum sanctorum in Belgrave Square, picturing the pretty
wedding at St. George’s or St. Peter’s, with the organ pealing out “The
voice that breathed o’er Eden,” the bevy of aristocratic bridesmaids,
with Gabrielle and Trixy and Baby among them, attired in cream satin and
dainty lace, and overladen with baskets of Marshal Niel roses, the
central and most attractive figures on the scene her Carl and herself.
It is heartrending to think of the demolition of her lovely picture.
“Run away, Zai,” Carl Conway answers impetuously, for the moonbeams are
falling full on her face, deepening the lustre of the sweet grey eyes,
dancing and quivering on the wealth of fair hair and making her seem if
possible doubly desirable in his eyes. “If they won’t let us have our
way quietly and comfortably, of course we must run away. Shall we let
them part us for ever? Could you bear it, my Zai? Could you know that
for the rest of our natural existence (and we may both live to a
hundred) that we shall never see each other, speak to one another, kiss
each other again, and live?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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