England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Orphans -- Fiction; Uncles -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
The Dean worked harder than ever when his youngest sons were removed;
and Jasmine, finding that she was being useful enough to be able to
shake off the thought that she was an infliction, and that there was no
hint of a wish for her departure from the Deanery, was anxious to
prevent anything's happening to upset what so far were the jolliest
weeks she had passed since she left Sirene. Although she had thought a
certain amount about Harry Vibart, she had not allowed herself to grow
sentimental over him, and after this sojourn at the Deanery, she had
quite convinced herself that it would be wiser not to see him again. She
had, of course, no reason to suppose that he wanted to see her again; at
the same time she had had no reason to suppose as much at Rouncivell
Lodge before he suddenly turned up with such disastrous results. His
interruption had not mattered so much there, because she was only
negatively happy at the time. Here she was something like positively
happy, and it seemed from every point of view prudent to write him a
letter and as sympathetically as possible to ask him not to disturb the
present situation. She wondered whether if she sent it to him in the
care of his uncle at Spaborough it would ultimately reach him. By a
series of roundabout questions she arrived at the discovery that by
looking up Sir John Vibart in Burke she could ascertain his address.
When she had found that Sir John Vibart lived at Whiteladies, near Long
Escombe in the North Riding of Yorkshire, she devoted herself to the
composition of the following letter:--
The Deanery,
Silchester,
_August 6th._
_Dear Harry,_
She had been tempted to go back to _Mr. Vibart_, but inasmuch as she was
writing to ask him not to see her again, the formal address seemed to
lend a gratuitous and unnecessary coldness to her request, and even to
give him the idea that she was offended with him.
_I am staying down here with my uncle the Dean, who is very nice and is
writing a history of England before the Norman Conquest. I went with
him to see the remains of the Roman city of something or other, a very
long name, but it is quite near here, and fancy, in the rubbish heaps of
the old Roman camp, they have actually found the skins--husks, I
mean--of pinocchi. In case you do not know what a pinocchio is, I must
tell you that they are the nutty part of the pinecombs from the big
umbrella pines that grow all round Naples and Rome. It made tears come
into my eyes to think of those Roman soldiers having those boxes of
pinocchi sent to them by their mothers and friends all the way to
England._
She had written _sweethearts_ at the first draft, but the word looked
wrong somehow in a letter that was meant to be discouraging.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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