Bildungsromans; Love stories; Young women -- England -- Fiction
The Archdeacon returned to Carlingford before Thursday, as he had
anticipated; but in the interval Mr Cavendish had not recovered his
courage so far as to renew his visit to Miss Marjoribanks, or to face
the man who had alarmed him so much. Everybody in Grange Lane remarked
at the time how worried poor Mrs Woodburn looked. Her eyes lost their
brightness, which some people thought was the only beauty she had, and
her nerves and her temper both failed her, no one could tell why. The
personal sketches she made at this moment were truculent and bitter to
an unheard-of degree. She took off Mr Beverley with a savage force which
electrified her audience, and put words into his mouth which everybody
admitted were exactly like him, if he could ever be imagined to have
fallen into the extraordinary circumstances in which the mimic placed
him. In short, Mrs Woodburn made a little drama out of the Archdeacon.
Mr Beverley, of course, knew nothing about this, and showed some
surprise now and then at the restrained laughter which he heard in the
corners; but when anybody spoke of Mrs Woodburn, he showed an
instinctive want of confidence. "I have not studied her sufficiently to
give an opinion of her," he said, which was certainly the very reverse
of her deliverance upon him. To tell the truth, she had rather studied
him too much, and gave too keen an edge to his characteristic qualities,
as is natural to all literary portraiture, and even went so far that,
in the end, people began to ask whether she had any personal spite
against him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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