Sally Bishop : $b A romanceThurston, E. Temple (Ernest Temple)
General
Sally Bishop : $b A romance
Thurston, E. Temple (Ernest Temple)
Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
"Yes--I'm sure of it. I remember, the day I went away from home--when
I came in to say good-bye to him, he was writing a sermon for Easter.
It was just Easter then, don't you remember? I went to the little
church on Kew Green. He read a bit of it out to me--something about
there being the promise of everlasting life in the rising of Christ
from the dead--and yet I know, in his heart, he was cast down in the
very lowest depth of despair."
Janet shook her head up and down. Not one of us is too old to learn
some new mystery in the inner workings of the human machine. To Janet
it was a fairy tale, what had been life and death to the Rev. Samuel
Bishop. But she had achieved her object. Sally was quieter after the
relation of that little story and, seeing in her mood a good
opportunity for suggesting some plans about the future, Janet said
quietly--
"What are your mother and sisters doing now?"
"They've gone back to Cailsham. They've got a school there for little
boys--sons of gentlemen--preparatory for the Grammar School at
Maidstone. The sort of thing that nearly every woman takes up when
she gets as poor as mother is."
Janet left it at that, and set about the getting of a meal, talking
all the time in a light and flippant way about her studio; pointing
humorous descriptions of the managers of firms with whom she had to
deal in her business of designing.
"There's one man," she said. "You know the place up the Tottenham
Court Road--he weighs seventeen stone if he weighs an ounce, and he
comes up to business in the morning, all the way from Turnham Green
in a motor-car that makes the noise of thirty horses galloping over
a hard road, with the power of six of them in its inside. He asked
me down to dinner one night; I went. It meant business. His wife
weighs the ounce that he ought to weigh if he didn't weigh seventeen
stone, and they sit at each end of a huge table in a tiny room filled
with maroon plush against a green carpet, and all through dinner they
talk about carburetters and low-tension magnetos, and Mr. Cheeseman
discusses what friend living in the row of houses, of which theirs
is one, they would get most out of in return for a drive in the motor
next Sunday. 'There's one fellow I know,' I remember him saying.
'He's something to do with the stage--his brother's in the
booking-office at Daly's. He might get us some seats if we took him
out.'"
Sally laughed. The first moment that her lips had parted to the sound
since Janet had been with her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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