City and town life -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
That the story should be related by Mrs. Braddle gave it extraordinary
flavor. No man or woman of his own class could have given such a
recounting, or revealed so many facets of this jewel of entertainment.
He and those like him could have seen the thing only from their own
amused, outraged, bewildered, or cynically disgusted point of view.
Mrs. Braddle saw it as the villagers saw it--excited, curious, secretly
hopeful of undue lavishness from “a chap as had nivver had brass before
an' wants to chuck it away for brag's sake,” or somewhat alarmed at the
possible neglecting of customs and privileges by a person ignorant
of memorial benefactions. She saw it as the servants saw it--secretly
disdainful, outwardly respectful, waiting to discover whether the
sacrifice of professional distinction would be balanced by liberties
permitted and lavishness of remuneration and largess. She saw it also
from her own point of view--that of a respectable cottage dweller whose
great-great-grandfather had been born in a black-and-white timbered
house in a green lane, and who knew what were “gentry ways” and what
nature of being could never even remotely approach the assumption of
them. She had seen Tembarom more than once, and summed him up by no
means ill-naturedly.
“He's not such a bad-lookin' chap. He is na short-legged or
turn-up-nosed, an' that's summat. He con stride along, an' he looks
healthy enow for aw he's thin. A thin chap nivver looks as common as a
fat un. If he wur pudgy, it ud be a lot more agen him.”
“I think, perhaps,” amiably remarked the duke, sipping his beef tea,
“that you had better not call him a `chap,' Braddle. The late Mr. Temple
Barholm was never referred to as a `chap' exactly, was he?”
Mrs. Braddle gave vent to a sort of internal-sounding chuckle. She had
not meant to be impertinent, and she knew her charge was aware that she
had not, and that he was neither being lofty or severe with her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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