Life's Little Ironies: A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted CharactersHardy, Thomas
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Life's Little Ironies: A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters
Hardy, Thomas
Short stories, English; Wessex (England) -- Fiction
The next time we get a glimpse of her is when she appears in the
mournful attire of a widow.
Mr. Twycott had never rallied, and now lay in a well-packed cemetery to
the south of the great city, where, if all the dead it contained had
stood erect and alive, not one would have known him or recognized his
name. The boy had dutifully followed him to the grave, and was now
again at school.
Throughout these changes Sophy had been treated like the child she was
in nature though not in years. She was left with no control over
anything that had been her husband’s beyond her modest personal income.
In his anxiety lest her inexperience should be overreached he had
safeguarded with trustees all he possibly could. The completion of the
boy’s course at the public school, to be followed in due time by Oxford
and ordination, had been all previsioned and arranged, and she really
had nothing to occupy her in the world but to eat and drink, and make a
business of indolence, and go on weaving and coiling the nut-brown
hair, merely keeping a home open for the son whenever he came to her
during vacations.
Foreseeing his probable decease long years before her, her husband in
his lifetime had purchased for her use a semi-detached villa in the
same long, straight road whereon the church and parsonage faced, which
was to be hers as long as she chose to live in it. Here she now
resided, looking out upon the fragment of lawn in front, and through
the railings at the ever-flowing traffic; or, bending forward over the
window-sill on the first floor, stretching her eyes far up and down the
vista of sooty trees, hazy air, and drab house-façades, along which
echoed the noises common to a suburban main thoroughfare.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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