Domestic fiction; England -- Fiction; Mothers and sons -- Fiction; Religious fiction; Unmarried mothers -- Fiction
"Oh, dear! Sally, when will you understand what I mean? I want to
know how I am to keep remembering how old I am, so as to prevent
myself from feeling so young? I was quite startled just now to see my
hair in the glass, for I can generally tell if my cap is straight by
feeling. I'll tell you what I'll do--I'll cut off a piece of my grey
hair, and plait it together for a marker in my Bible!" Miss Benson
expected applause for this bright idea, but Sally only made answer:
"You'll be taking to painting your cheeks next, now you've once
thought of dyeing your hair." So Miss Benson plaited her grey hair in
silence and quietness, Leonard holding one end of it while she wove
it, and admiring the colour and texture all the time, with a sort of
implied dissatisfaction at the auburn colour of his own curls, which
was only half-comforted away by Miss Benson's information, that, if
he lived long enough, his hair would be like hers.
Mr Benson, who had looked old and frail while he was yet but young,
was now stationary as to the date of his appearance. But there was
something more of nervous restlessness in his voice and ways than
formerly; that was the only change six years had brought to him.
And as for Sally, she chose to forget age and the passage of years
altogether, and had as much work in her, to use her own expression,
as she had at sixteen; nor was her appearance very explicit as to the
flight of time. Fifty, sixty, or seventy, she might be--not more than
the last, not less than the first--though her usual answer to any
circuitous inquiry as to her age was now (what it had been for many
years past), "I'm feared I shall never see thirty again."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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