Boarding school students -- Fiction; College students -- Fiction; England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Love stories
At The Towers I became an interested and uneasy spectator of the
continued reformation of my friend Dicky Mainwaring. During the same
period I had constant opportunities of comparing the characters and
dispositions of his first and (presumably) second choices, Mesdames
Beverley and Damer, and in a lesser degree of his sister Sylvia.
Further acquaintance with Miss Beverley confirmed my first impression of
her. She struck me more and more as exactly the kind of girl whom a
careful mother would select as a helpmeet for a somewhat erratic son.
She was cool, aloof, capable, and decided, with very distinct ideas upon
the subject of personal dignity and good form. She had already cured
her fiancé of many regrettable habits. Dicky, I found, no longer
greeted under-housemaids upon the stairs with "Hallo, Annie! How is
your bad knee getting on?" Instead, he hurried past the expectant
damsel with averted eyes. He no longer slipped warm shillings into the
hands of beggar-women who assailed him with impossible tales of woe in
the back drive: instead, he apologetically handed them tickets of
introduction to the Charity Organisation Society, with a packet of which
Miss Beverley had relentlessly provided him. He kept accounts. He
answered letters by return of post. He perused closely printed volumes,
and became enrolled in intellectual societies with mysterious aims and
titles difficult to remember.
"Tiny, my bonny boy," he enquired of me one morning after breakfast, "do
you happen to have any sort of notion what Eugenics is--or are?"
"I believe," I replied hazily, "that it is some sort of scheme for
improving the physique of the race."
Dicky nodded appreciatively.
"I see," he said. "One of old Sandow’s schemes. His name is Eugen.
That is better than I thought. I was afraid it was going to be another
kind of political economy. Hilda wants me to become a local
vice-president of the Eugenic Society; and as it seems to be a less
pois--complicated business than most of her enterprises, I think I will
plank down five bob and win a good mark."
And off he went, money in hand, to gain an indulgent smile from his
Minerva.
Of Sylvia Mainwaring I need only say at present that she was a pale
shade of Miss Beverley.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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