Emily Fox-Seton : being The making of a marchioness and The methods of Lady WalderhurstBurnett, Frances Hodgson
General
Emily Fox-Seton : being The making of a marchioness and The methods of Lady Walderhurst
Burnett, Frances Hodgson
Aristocracy (Social class) -- Fiction; Household employees -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
Lord Walderhurst found an interest in watching her and her methods. He
was a man who, in certain respects, knew himself very well and had few
illusions respecting his own character. He had always been rather given
to matter-of-fact analysis of his own emotions; and at Mallowe he had
once or twice asked himself if it was not disagreeably possible that the
first moderate glow of his St. Martin's summer might die away and leave
him feeling slightly fatigued and embarrassed by the new aspect of his
previously regular and entirely self-absorbed existence. You might think
that you would like to marry a woman and then you might realise that
there were objections--that even the woman herself, with all her
desirable qualities, might be an objection in the end, that any woman
might be an objection; in fact, that it required an effort to reconcile
oneself to the fact of a woman's being continually about. Of course the
arriving at such a conclusion, after one had committed oneself, would be
annoying. Walderhurst had, in fact, only reflected upon this possible
aspect of affairs _before_ he had driven over the heath to pick Emily
up. Afterwards he had, in some remote portion of his mentality, vaguely
awaited developments.
When he saw Emily day by day at South Audley Street, he found he
continued to like her. He was not clever enough to analyse her; he could
only watch her, and he always looked on at her with curiosity and a
novel sensation rather like pleasure. She wakened up at sight of him,
when he called, in a way that was attractive even to an unimaginative
man. Her eyes seemed to warm, and she often looked flushed and softly
appealing. He began to note vaguely that her dresses were better, and
oftener changed, than they had been at Mallowe. A more observant man
might have been touched by the suggestion that she was unfolding petal
by petal like a flower, and that each carefully chosen costume was a new
petal. He did not in the least suspect the reverent eagerness of her
care of herself as an object hoping to render itself worthy of his
qualities and tastes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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