Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Mothers and daughters -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
“She sat by the door one cold afternoon,
To hear the wind blow and look at the moon;
So pensive was Edith, my dear, darling Edith.”
He did not get any farther, for something in his light badinage jarred
upon my feelings just then, and assuming a severe dignity, I said:
“You mistake the name. I am not Edith. I am Miss Lyle.”
He looked surprised an instant, and then, with a comical smile and a
shaking down of his pants, he said:
“I beg your pardon, Miss Lyle. I meant Kathleen O’Moore, of course,
but seeing you at the moment I made a mistake in the name, and no
wonder, dazed as I am with a letter just received from Alice, who
hopes I shall return from my foreign travel greatly improved in mind,
and taste, and manners, as if the latter could be improved. She sent
her picture too. Would you like to see it?”
He passed me the _carte-de-visite_, and I saw the likeness of a girl
who he said was only sixteen, but whom I should have taken for twenty,
at least, judging from the dress and the expression of the face, which
I did not like. It was too supercilious, if not insolent, to suit me,
while the turned-up nose added to the look. And still there was a
style about her which marked her as what is called a “high-bred city
girl,” and I have no doubt she will eventually become a belle, with
her immense fortune and proud, arrogant demeanor.
“What do you think of it?” Godfrey asked; and feeling sure that with
regard to her his feelings could not be wounded, I answered:
“I do not quite like her expression, and she looks too old for you.”
“Good! I’ll tell her that some time when she is nagging me
unmercifully,” Godfrey said, adding: “I had a letter from Jule too,
with her photograph, and also one of our house and grounds. This is
Julia.”
It was the face of a brunette, dark, handsome, but proud and
imperious, and I was glad that she was not to be my step-daughter.
“Jule is handsome, except her ears, which are as big as a palm-leaf
fan,” Godfrey said, and I replied:
“Yes, she is handsome, and will make a brilliant woman.”
“This is our home,” he continued, and he put into my hand a large
photograph of the house on Schuyler Hill, and a considerable portion
of the grounds.
There were the tops of the evergreens, and there was a white stone
shining through the green, and I said to Godfrey,
“Whose monument is that?”
“That? Let me see. Why, that is young Lyle’s, the man who saved my
life. You remember I told you about him? Mother’s is farther on and
out of sight.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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