Penelope's English Experiences: Being Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope HamiltonWiggin, Kate Douglas Smith
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Penelope's English Experiences: Being Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton
Wiggin, Kate Douglas Smith
Americans -- England -- Fiction; England -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
The manner of my changing from West to North Belvern was this. When I
had been two days at Holly House, I reflected that my sitting-room faced
the wrong way for the view, and that my bedroom was dark and not large
enough to swing a cat in. Not that there was the remotest necessity
of my swinging cats in it, but the figure of speech is always useful.
Neither did I care to occupy myself with the perennial inspection and
purchase of raw edibles, when I wished to live in an ideal world and
paint a great picture. Mrs. Hobbs would come to my bedside in the
morning and ask me if I would like to buy a fowl. When I looked upon the
fowl, limp in death, with its headless neck hanging dejectedly over the
edge of the plate, its giblets and kidneys lying in immodest confusion
on the outside of itself, and its liver 'tucked under its wing, poor
thing,' I never wanted to buy it. But one morning, in taking my walk,
I chanced upon an idyllic spot: the front of the whitewashed cottage
embowered in flowers, bird-cages built into these bowers, a little
notice saying 'Canaries for Sale,' and an English rose of a baby sitting
in the path stringing hollyhock buds. There was no apartment sign, but
I walked in, ostensibly to buy some flowers. I met Mrs. Bobby, loved
her at first sight, the passion was reciprocal, and I wheedled her
into giving me her own sitting-room and the bedroom above it. It only
remained now for me to break my projected change of residence to my
present landlady, and this I distinctly dreaded. Of course Mrs. Hobbs
said, when I timidly mentioned the subject, that she wished she had
known I was leaving an hour before, for she had just refused a lady
and her husband, most desirable persons, who looked as if they would be
permanent. Can it be that lodgers radiate the permanent or transitory
quality, quite unknown to themselves?
I was very much embarrassed, as she threatened to become tearful; and
as I was determined never to give up Mrs. Bobby, I said desperately, “I
must leave you, Mrs. Hobbs, I must indeed; but as you seem to feel so
badly about it, I'll go out and find you another lodger in my place.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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