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
"'I'm afraid I wrote you a hatefully skimpy letter last time--,'"
h'm, we can skip that; here's where they started: "'It was the
beastliest journey that I ever made. To begin with, we were the
eighteenth tonga that day, so we got tired and wretched ponies; we
had one pair for fifteen miles and couldn't get another pair for
love or money. We left Murree at two o'clock and got to Pindi at
nine. The dust was ghastly. Mercifully Baba slept like a lump in
our arms from five till nine, so he was all right. We had from nine
till one to wait in Pindi Station, and had dinner, and Baba had a
wash and clean-up and a bottle, and we got on board the train and
off. Baba's cot, etc.; and we settled down for the night. Nurse and
Baba and Mary and I were in one carriage and Jim next door. I slept
beautifully till one o'clock, and then I woke and stayed awake.
The bumping was terrific, and it made me so angry to look down on
the others and see them fast asleep! I had an upper berth. Baba
slept from eleven-thirty till six-thirty! So we had no trouble at
all with him----
"Well, and so they got to Kohat. (I hope this isn't boring you, Katie.)"
"'It was most beautifully cool and fresh, and we had the mess tonga
and drove to the bungalow. The flowering shrubs here would delight
Auntie Grace. I've fallen in love with a bush of hibiscus in the
compound, but find it won't live in water, but droops directly one
picks it. The trees are mostly the palmy kind, and so green, and
the ranges of hills behind are exactly like the Red Sea ranges.
The outside of our bungalow is covered with purple convolvulus,
and the verandah goes practically all round it. Jim's room is just
like him--heads he's shot, study, dressing-room, and workshop, all
in one, and it's quite the fullest room in the house. Beyond that
there's my room, looking out over the Sinai Range----'
"Then there are the drawing and dining-rooms----"
"'The curtains are a pale terra-cotta pink over the door and dark
green in the bay-windows, with white net in front. The drawing-room
is all green. The durrie (that's the carpet) is green, with a
darker border, and the sofa and chairs and mantelpiece-cover and
the screen behind the sofa all green. There's another bay-window,
with far curtains of green and the near ones chintz, an awfully
pretty cream spotted net with a green hem let in. That makes three
lots, two in the window itself and a third on a pole where the arch
comes into the room. Then over the three doors there are chintz
curtains, cream, with a big pattern of pink and green and blue,
just like Harrods' catalogue----'
"Can't you _see_ it all!--H'm, h'm!... Then on the Sunday morning they
got the mess tonga and went out to Dhoda, with butterfly-nets, and Jim
went fishing--h'm, h'm--and she says--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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