Priscilla and Charybdis: A Story of AlternativesMoore, Frank Frankfort
General
Priscilla and Charybdis: A Story of Alternatives
Moore, Frank Frankfort
Fiction
“Not I. But I’m sure she’ll do it. She wears no frills.”
“You met her yesterday?”
“Well, I was going to speak to Lady Cynthia Brooks about the Mixed
Doubles, when she rushed into the arms of Miss Wadhurst--there was
kissing and all that; it seems that they had been at school together,
and very chummy. Lady Gainsforth was tremendously taken with her.”
He did not think that it was absolutely necessary for him to tell his
mother that he first made the acquaintance of Miss Wadhurst in the
room next to that in which they were sitting; and he saw no harm in
introducing the name of a countess and her daughter in the course of his
account of meeting Miss Wadhurst.
“Cynthia Brooks was always a nice girl,” said Mrs. Wingfield. “I’m not
sure that going about from one tennis meeting to another is very good
for a girl; but if her mother doesn’t mind---- Wasn’t it at Biarritz
we met them? That was three years ago--just before you went to South
America.”
“Yes; it was at Biarritz. We carried off the M.D.s; but we had a very
shady lot against us. We should have no chance playing together at such
a meeting as this.”
Not another word passed between them on the subject of Miss Wadhurst,
and Mrs. Wingfield went to her bed in a condition of great uncertainty
on the subject of her son and the young woman who was to come to pay her
a visit. A farmer’s daughter, with views of dairy management; that was
rather a curious sort of young person for Jack to take up--if he had
taken her up. But Jack was, she knew, like many other young men of
whom she had been hearing recently--ready to do the unexpected. It was
shocking to hear of them marrying girls who danced and did things. She
had not quite succeeded in determining whether dancing or a dairy
was the worse. Hadn’t some well-known man written a poem about a
dairymaid?--or was it a musical comedy? But here was a dairymaid with a
romantic story swirling round her like one of those gauzy robes in which
some _premiere danseuse_ was accustomed to make her gyrations. Mrs.
Wingfield had a horror of being in anyway associated with a person
who had had a romance in his or her life. She connected romance with
unrespectability just as she did cleverness and scheming.
She sighed at the thought of her son’s marrying a dairymaid; but if
he had set his heart on marrying her and failed to do so, would he not
forthwith start once again upon his wanderings?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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