Mary Cary: "Frequently Martha"Bosher, Kate Langley
General
Mary Cary: "Frequently Martha"
Bosher, Kate Langley
Children -- Juvenile fiction; Orphans -- Juvenile fiction
It looks as if everybody who knows Miss Katherine wants her to be
married from their house. Her brothers want her to be married from
theirs. Her aunt, Mrs. Powhatan Bloodgood, who lives in Loudon County,
and whose husband is as rich as a real lord, begs her to be married in
hers; and everybody in Yorkburg--I mean the coat-of-arms
everybodies--has invited her to have the wedding in their home.
But she just smiles and says no to them all. Says she is going to be
married from her house, which is the Orphan Asylum, though the ceremony
will be at the church. It's going to be in the morning at twelve
o'clock, so they can take the two-o'clock train for Richmond and go on
to New York.
Miss Katherine wants it to be quiet, but it can't be quiet. There's
nothing on human legs that can use them who won't be at the church to
see that wedding take place.
Everybody has been paying her a lot of attention of late. It's real
strange what a difference a man makes in a marriage, even if he isn't
noticed much in person at the time. If he's rich and prominent,
everybody is so pleasant and sociable you'd think they were real
intimate. If he's just good and poor, few take notice.
When Miss Vickie Toones married Mr. Joe Blake they didn't get hardly any
presents. They had a lot of dead relations who used to be rich and
haughty, but their living ones are as poor as the people they didn't
used to know, and hardly anybody gave them anything handsome.
Miss Katherine's presents are just amazing, and my eyes are blistered by
the shine of them. I didn't know before such things were in the world.
People say Uncle Parke has made a lot of money in some mines out West,
besides being a doctor, and that he doesn't have to work. "But a man who
doesn't work hasn't any excuse for living," I heard him tell somebody,
and maybe it's so, though I don't know.
I don't know anything these days. I'm the shape and size of Mary Cary,
but I see and hear so many things I never saw and heard before that I'd
like to borrow a dog to see if he knows whether I am myself or somebody
else. And another thing I'd like to find out is, How do other people
know so much?
Mrs. Philip Creekmore has a cousin whose wife's brother lives in the
same place Uncle Parke does, and Miss Amelia Cokeland wrote out there
and found out all about him. But it doesn't matter whether she truly
knows anything or not. Miss Webb says she is like those fish scientists.
Give her one bone, and she can tell you all the rest. She's had a grand
time telling more things about Uncle Parke than Miss Katherine will ever
learn in this world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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