England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Orphans -- Fiction; Uncles -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
"Perhaps you don't realize, Aunt Ellen," said Jasmine, "that Edward has
been making love to me for weeks, and that I've had to laugh at him to
prevent his doing something silly."
"What do you mean, doing something silly, you wicked and vulgar girl? I
cannot think where you got such a mind. A servant would not get such
disgusting ideas into her head. I suppose we must put it down to your
mother."
"Stop!" said Jasmine, white with anger. "Stop, will you? Or I shall
throw this inkpot at you." And when Aunt Ellen did stop, she was half
sorry, because she was hating her so much that she was really wanting to
throw the inkpot at her. However, she put it back on the table, rushed
from her aunt's presence up to her own room, where, after weeping for an
hour, she sat down and wrote to Harry Vibart.
_Dear Mr. Vibart,_
_I hope you realize by now that you acted abominably in coming down
here after what I said in my letter. I never want to see you
again. Please understand that I mean it this time. However, I'm
going back to Italy almost at once where people know how to behave
themselves. I hate England. I've been miserable here, and you've
made me more miserable than anybody._
Then she signed herself _Jasmine Grant_ and fiercely blotted him out of
her life.
_Chapter Nine_
After the scene with her aunt, Jasmine longed to leave the Deanery at
once, for she suffered torments of humiliation in having to stay on
there in a disgrace that was being published all over Silchester. The
Dean himself was kind, and perhaps it was because he understood the
difficulty of her position that he asked her to come and work with him.
But such an easy way out for Jasmine did not please his wife, who was
continually coming up to the study and worrying him with her fears about
the progress of Edward's fracture in order to impress both him and
Jasmine with their heartless conduct in thus working away regardless of
the martyr downstairs. The Dean was a kind-hearted man, but he
considered his work on pre-Norman Britain the most important thing in
life; finding it impossible to proceed under the stress of these
continual interruptions, he presently announced that he must go to
Oxford for a week or two and do some work in the Bodleian.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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