In Trust: The Story of a Lady and Her LoverOliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
General
In Trust: The Story of a Lady and Her Lover
Oliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
Fiction
The other people did not see any difference in it; and to her the
wonderful thing was that there was no difference in it. She had been in
paradise, caught up, and had seen unspeakable things; but now that she
had dropped down again, though for a moment the earth seemed to jar and
tingle under her feet as they came in contact with it, there was no
difference. Her plans were there just the same, and the question still
to settle about how far the pigsty must be distant from the house; and
old Saymore re-emerged to view making up his bouquets for the vases, and
holding his head on one side as he looked at them, to see how they
‘composed;’ and Mrs. Worth, who all this time had been making dresses
and trying different shades to find out what would best set off Miss
Rose’s complexion. They had been going on like the figures on the
barrel-organ, doing the same thing all the time--never varying or
changing. Anne looked at them all with a kind of doleful amusement,
gyrating just in the old way, making the same little bobs and curtseys.
They had no want of interest or occupation, always moving quite
contentedly to the old tunes, turning round and round. Mr. Mountford sat
so many hours in his business-room, walked one day, rode the next for
needful exercise, sat just so long in the drawing-room in the evening.
His wife occupied herself an hour every morning with the cook, took her
wool-work at eleven, and her drive at half-past two, except when the
horses were wanted. Anne came back to it all, with a little giddiness
from her expedition to the empyrean, and looked at the routine with a
wondering amusement. She had never known before how like clockwork it
was. Now her own machinery, always a little eccentric, declined to
acknowledge that key: some sort of new motive power had got into her,
which disturbed the action of the other. She began again with a great
many jerks and jars, a great many times: and then would stop and look at
all the others in their unconscious dance, moving round and round, and
laugh to herself with a little awe of her discovery. Was this what the
scientific people meant by the automatic theory, she wondered, being a
young woman who read everything; but then in a law which permitted no
exceptions, how was it that she herself had got out of gear?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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