Gray youth: The story of a very modern courtship and a very modern marriageOnions, Oliver
General
Gray youth: The story of a very modern courtship and a very modern marriage
Onions, Oliver
Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Marriage -- Fiction; Women -- Social and moral questions -- Fiction
Corin and Bonniebell, Amory's twins, did not attend Walter's Lectures.
It was not deemed advisable to keep them out of bed so late at night.
But Miss Britomart Belchamber, the governess, could have passed--had
in fact passed--an examination in them. It had been Amory who, so to
speak, had set the paper. For it had been at one of the Lectures--the
one on "_The Future Race: Are We Making Manacles?_"--that Miss
Belchamber had first impressed Amory favourably. Amory had singled
her out, first because she wore the guarantee of Prince Eadmond's
Collegiate Institution--the leather-belted brown sleeveless djibbah
with the garment of fine buff fabric showing beneath it as the fruit
of a roasted chestnut shows when the rind splits--and secondly because
of her admirable physique. She was splendidly fair, straight as an
athlete, and could shut up her long and massive limbs in a wicker chair
like a clasp-knife; and for her movements alone it was almost a sin
that Walter's father could not secure her for the New Greek Society's
revival of "Europa" at the Choragus Theatre. And she was not too quick
mentally. That is not to say that she was a fool. What made Amory sure
that she was not a fool was that she herself was not instinctively
attracted by fools, and it was better that Miss Belchamber should be
ductile under the influence of Walter's ideas than that she should have
just wit enough to ask those stupid and conventional and so-called
"practical" questions that Walter always answered at the close of the
evening as patiently as if he had never heard them before. And Miss
Belchamber told the twins stories, and danced "Rufty Tufty," with them,
and "Catching of Quails," and was really cheap at her rather stiff
salary. Cosimo loved to watch her at "Catching of Quails." If the
children did not grow up with a love of beauty after that, he said,
he gave it up. (The twins, by the way, unconsciously served Amory as
another example of Dorothy Tasker's unreasonableness. As the mother
of Noel and Jackie, Dorothy seemed rather to fancy herself as an
experienced woman. But Amory could afford to smile at this pretension.
There was a difference in age of a year and more between Noel and
Jackie. No doubt Dorothy knew a little, but she, Amory, could have told
her a thing or two).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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