Cities and towns -- Growth -- Fiction; Wales -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
June will never be prettier than she is now. She is indeed very
pretty--apple-blossom and cream, bright-haired, freshly starched, back
straight and elbows well down, and as glossy from top to toe as the
broad mauve ribbon of her sash. Soon she will be as tall as her mother;
already she is taller than her father, the landscape-gardener; and the
thought of whether she will marry or not, and whether brilliantly or
otherwise, never enters her head. Of course she will marry, and of
course her marriage will be a brilliant one. "Marriage" and "brilliant
marriage" are one and the same thing. In this, as in most other things,
Wygelia is of the same opinion as June. A close understanding, which has
not yet outgrown the form of surreptitious kicks under the table, and
private and abbreviated words, exists between the two sisters. Other
things being equal, they would probably prefer to marry two brothers.
"I tell the prit-ty miss a harder thing than that--I tell her how to
keep her man when she has got him," Belle replied amid laughter; and she
proceeds to describe June's husband. He is to come over the water
(landing at Newhaven, Mrs. Lacey instantly concludes, and taking the
first train to the Boarding School at Brighton), and he shall be devoted
to her, and she shall have such-and-such a number of children. (Mrs.
Lacey straightens her back; this is something like; her grandfather,
whom she remembers quite well, was June's great-grandfather, and will
have been the great-great-grandfather of June's boys and girls, which is
getting on, especially when you remember the younger sons and grandsons
of somebodies, who are estate-bailiffs and engine-drivers and carriers
of milk-cans in the Colonies.) When June's fortune is finished all
applaud her, as if she had performed some feat of skill, and then Mr.
Morrell seizes Wy.
"Come on, Wy--no hanging back--let's see what sort of a fist Wy's going
to make of it----"
And Wy also is haled forward, blushing and conscious and biting her lip,
and is told that for her too somebody is languishing, and that presently
he will drink out of her glass and thenceforward think her thoughts,
which are already complex. And Hilda's palm is read, and little Victoria
Smythe's fat one, and Val Clayton's, and others, and silver rains into
Belle's palm. Chaffingly Mr. Morrell offers her a sovereign for her
takings, uncounted, but is refused. Then Mrs. Briggs "wants the boys
done," and somebody is despatched along the shore for Percy and John
Willie, and as they arrive, bearing their bottles of milk and parcels of
jam-sandwiches (for the blue-and-white boat had been paid off), there
comes up also Minetta, carrying her sketching-kit. She stands peering at
Ynys, more as seeing in her a subject than as at a fellow-being.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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