Labrador (N.L.) -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction; Love stories, English
"I don't deserve all this love," this side of Marjorie told Magnet. "But
I mean to learn to love you----"
"My dear one!" cried Magnet, and pressed her hand....
A third Marjorie among the many was an altogether acuter and less
agreeable person. She was a sprite of pure criticism, and in spite of
the utmost efforts to suppress her, she declared night and day in the
inner confidences of Marjorie's soul that she did not believe in Mr.
Magnet's old devotion at all. She was anti-Magnet, a persistent
insurgent. She was dreadfully unsettling. It was surely this Marjorie
that wouldn't let the fact of his baldness alone, and who discovered and
insisted upon a curious unbeautiful flatness in his voice whenever he
was doing his best to speak from the heart. And as for this devotion,
what did it amount to? A persistent unimaginative besetting of Marjorie,
a growing air of ownership, an expansive, indulgent, smiling disposition
to thwart and control. And he was always touching her! Whenever he came
near her she would wince at the freedoms a large, kind hand might take
with her elbow or wrist, at a possible sudden, clumsy pat at some erring
strand of hair.
Then there was an appraising satisfaction in his eye.
On the third day of their engagement he began, quite abruptly, to call
her "Magsy." "We'll end this scandal of a Girl Pope," he said. "Magsy
Magnet, you'll be--M.M. No women M.P.'s for _us_, Magsy...."
She became acutely critical of his intellectual quality. She listened
with a new alertness to the conversations at the dinner-table, the bouts
of wit with her father. She carried off utterances and witticism for
maturer reflection. She was amazed to find how little they could
withstand the tests and acids of her mind. So many things, such wide and
interesting fields, he did not so much think about as cover with a large
enveloping shallowness....
He came strolling around the vicarage into the garden one morning about
eleven, though she had not expected him until lunch-time; and she was
sitting with her feet tucked up on the aged but still practicable
garden-seat reading Shaw's "Common Sense of Municipal Trading." He came
and leant over the back of the seat, and she looked up, said "Good
morning. Isn't it perfectly lovely?" and indicated by a book still open
that her interest in it remained alive.
"What's the book, Magsy?" he asked, took it out of her slightly
resisting hand, closed it and read the title. "Um," he said; "Isn't this
a bit stiff for little women's brains?"
All the rebel Marjories were up in arms at that.
"Dreadful word, 'Municipal.' I _don't_ like it." He shook his head with
a grimace of humorous distaste.
"I suppose women have as good brains as men," said Marjorie, "if it
comes to that."
"Better," said Magnet. "That's why they shouldn't trouble about horrid
things like Municipal and Trading.... On a day like this!"
"Don't you think this sort of thing is interesting?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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