Labrador (N.L.) -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction; Love stories, English
When it was time for Marjorie to return to London, spring had come round
again, and Trafford's conceptions of life were adapting themselves to
the new scale upon which they were now to do things. While he was busy
creating his factory in the East End, Marjorie was displaying an equal
if a less original constructive energy in Sussex Square, near Lancaster
Gate, for there it was the new home was to be established. She set
herself to furnish and arrange it so as to produce the maximum of
surprise and chagrin in Daphne, and she succeeded admirably. The Magnets
now occupied a flat in Whitehall Court, the furniture Magnet had
insisted upon buying himself with all the occult cunning of the humorist
in these matters, and not even Daphne could blind herself to the
superiority both in arrangement and detail of Marjorie's home. That was
very satisfactory, and so too was the inevitable exaggeration of
Trafford's financial importance. "He can do what he likes in the rubber
world," said Marjorie. "In Mincing Lane, where they deal in rubber
shares, they used to call him and Sir Rupert the invaders; now they call
them the Conquering Heroes.... Of course, it's mere child's play to
Godwin, but, as he said, 'We want money.' It won't really interfere with
his more important interests...."
I do not know why both those sisters were more vulgarly competitive with
each other than with any one else; I have merely to record the fact that
they were so.
The effect upon the rest of Marjorie's family was equally gratifying.
Mr. Pope came to the house-warming as though he had never had the
slightest objection to Trafford's antecedents, and told him casually
after dinner that Marjorie had always been his favourite daughter, and
that from the first he had expected great things of her. He told Magnet,
who was the third man of the party, that he only hoped Syd and Rom would
do as well as their elder sisters. Afterwards, in the drawing-room, he
whacked Marjorie suddenly and very startlingly on the shoulder-blade--it
was the first bruise he had given her since Buryhamstreet days. "You've
made a man of him, Maggots," he said.
The quiet smile of the Christian Scientist was becoming now the fixed
expression of Mrs. Pope's face, and it scarcely relaxed for a moment as
she surveyed her daughter's splendours. She had triumphantly refused to
worry over a rather serious speculative disappointment, but her faith in
her prophet's spiritual power had been strengthened rather than weakened
by the manifest insufficiency of his financial prestidigitations, and
she was getting through life quite radiantly now, smiling at (but not,
of course, giving way to) beggars, smiling at toothaches and headaches,
both her own and other people's, smiling away doubts, smiling away
everything that bows the spirit of those who are still in the bonds of
the flesh....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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