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
And--though this was better now that Stan was earning--the thought
of the money that was being squandered at The Witan had sometimes
made her ready to cry. For at the Nursing Home she had had one other
visitor, and this visitor had opened her eyes to the appalling rate at
which Cosimo's inheritance must be going. This visitor had been Katie
Deedes. Katie too, was an old fellow-student of Dorothy's; it had
not taken Dorothy long to see that Katie was full of a grievance; and
then it had all come out. There had been some sort of a row. It had
been simply and solely because Katie ran a Food Shop. Amory thought
that _infra dig_. And just because Katie had given the children a few
chestnuts Amory had practically said so.
"_I_ shan't go there again," Katie had said, trying on Dorothy's
account to keep down her tears. "_I_ didn't marry a man with lots of
money, and turn him round my finger, and make him write my _Life and
Works_, and then snub my old friends! And none of the people who go
there are really what she thinks they are. _She_ thinks they go to see
_her_, but Mr. Brimby only goes because Dickie does, and because he
wants to sell the "Novum" something or other, and Mr. Strong of course
has to go, and Mr. Wilkinson goes because he wants Cosimo to stop the
"Novum" and start something else with him as editor, and Laura goes
because they get things printed about Walter's Lectures, and I don't
know what those Indians are doing there at all, and anyway _I've_ been
for the last time! I'm just as good as she is, and I should like to
come and see you instead, Dorothy, and of course I won't bring your
babies chestnuts if you don't want.... But I'm frightfully selfish; I'm
tiring you out.... May an A B C girl come to see you?"
And Katie had since been. There is no social reason why the manager of
a Vegetarian Restaurant may not visit the house of a film acrobat.
As it happened, Katie came in that very night when the weary
breadwinner was painstakingly explaining to his thoughtful spouse his
reasons for doubting whether he would ever have got very rich had he
remained one of Fortune and Brooks' well-dressed drummers. Katie had
a round face and puzzled but affectionate eyes, and Stan was just
beginning to school his own eyes not to rest with too open an interest
on her Greenaway frocks and pancake hats. Katie for her part was
intensely self-conscious in Stan's presence. She felt that when he
wasn't looking at her clothes he was, expressly, _not_-looking at them,
and that was worse.... But she couldn't have worn a hobble skirt and
an aigrette at the "Eden."... Stan had told Dorothy that when he knew
Katie better he intended to get out of her the remaining gruesome and
Blue-Beard's-Chamber details which the hoof and the forequarter seemed
to him to promise.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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