Labrador (N.L.) -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction; Love stories, English
The dress was duly admired, and then Aunt Plessington--assuming the
hearthrug and forgetting the little matter of their career--explained
quite Napoleonic and wonderful things she was going to do with her
Movement, fresh principles, fresh applications, a big committee of all
the "names"--they were easy to get if you didn't bother them to do
things--a new and more attractive title, "Payment in Kind" was to give
way to "Reality of Reward," and she herself was going to have her hair
bleached bright white (which would set off her eyes and colour and the
general geniality of appearance due to her projecting teeth), and so
greatly increase her "platform efficiency." Hubert, she said, was
toiling away hard at the detail of these new endeavours. He would be
down in a few minutes' time. Marjorie, she said, ought to speak at their
meetings. It would help both the Traffords to get on if Marjorie cut a
dash at the outset, and there was no such dash to be cut as speaking at
Aunt Plessington's meetings. It was catching on; all next season it was
sure to be the thing. So many promising girls allowed themselves to be
submerged altogether in marriage for a time, and when they emerged
everyone had forgotten the promise of their début. She had an air of
rescuing Marjorie from an impending fate by disabusing Trafford from
injurious prepossessions....
Presently the guests began to drop in, a vegetarian health specialist, a
rising young woman factory inspector, a phrenologist who was being
induced to put great talents to better uses under Aunt Plessington's
influence, his dumb, obscure, but inevitable wife, a colonial bishop, a
baroness with a taste rather than a capacity for intellectual society, a
wealthy jam and pickle manufacturer and his wife, who had subscribed
largely to the funds of the Movement and wanted to meet the lady of
title, and the editor of the Movement's organ, _Upward and On_, a young
gentleman of abundant hair and cadaverous silences, whom Aunt
Plessington patted on the shoulder and spoke of as "one of our
discoveries." And then Uncle Hubert came down, looking ruffled and
overworked, with his ready-made dress-tie--he was one of those men who
can never master the art of tying a bow--very much askew. The
conversation turned chiefly on the Movement; if it strayed Aunt
Plessington reached out her voice after it and brought it back in a
masterful manner.
Through soup and fish Marjorie occupied herself with the inflexible
rigour of the young editor, who had brought her down. When she could
give her attention to the general conversation she discovered her
husband a little flushed and tackling her aunt with an expression of
quiet determination. The phrenologist and the vegetarian health
specialist were regarding him with amazement, the jam and pickle
manufacturer's wife was evidently deeply shocked. He was refusing to
believe in the value of the Movement, and Aunt Plessington was
manifestly losing her temper.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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