Americans -- England -- Fiction; England -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction
'I'm afraid my waist is too tight in the sleeves for me to do my hair
up here; it'll have to wait till I get down to the hotel,' she said
gaily. I suppose she meant that she tight-laced, though I couldn't see
how her waist could be tight in the sleeves. I was quite determined
she should not walk to the hotel in my company with her hair in that
state.
'I will stick these in,' I said firmly, indicating the hairpins, of
which I had picked up about a bushel, 'if you will do the rolling up.'
It got done somehow, and I stuck in the pins. I never touched a
woman's hair before; how beastly it must be to have all that on one's
head--unhealthy, too. I dare say it accounts for the feebleness of
women's brains. Miss Pomeroy's cheeks got pinker and pinker during
this operation--a sort of rush of blood, I suppose; it is all right as
long as it does not go to the nose. She is not a bad-looking girl,
certainly.
We got back to the hotel without any further disagreeables.
CECILIA EVESHAM
GREY TOR INN, DARTMOOR
If a policeman's 'lot is not a happy one,' neither is a companion's: I
lay this down as an axiom. I have lived now for two years with Mrs.
MacGill, and know her every frailty of character only too well. She
has not a bad temper; but oh! she is a terrible, terrible bore! Not
content with being stupid herself, she desires to make me stupid along
with her, and has well-nigh succeeded, for life with her in furnished
apartments at Tunbridge Wells would dull a more brilliant woman than I
have ever been.
Mrs. MacGill has lately had the influenza; it came almost as a
providential sending, for it meant change of air. We were ordered to
Dartmoor, and to Dartmoor we have come. Now I have become interested
in three new people; and that, after the life I have lived of late in
Mrs. MacGill's sickroom, is like a draught of nectar to my tired
fancy. We met these three persons for the first time in the train, and
at the hotel at Exeter where we stopped for the night; or rather, I
should say that we met two of them and sighted the third. The two were
a mother and her daughter, Mrs. Pomeroy and Virginia Pomeroy by name,
and Americans by nation; the third person was a young man, Sir
Archibald Maxwell Mackenzie, of Kindarroch, N.B. The Americans were
extremely friendly, after the manner of their nation; the young man
extremely unfriendly, after the manner of his. We found that the
Pomeroys were coming on to this inn, but the Scotchman whizzed off in
his motor car, giving us no hint of where he intended to go. I thought
we had seen the last of him, but it was to be otherwise.
The morning after our arrival at the Grey Tor Inn Mrs. MacGill assumed
a Shetland shawl, closed the window of the sitting-room, and sat down
to do a bit of knitting. I sat by the window answering her little
vapid remarks and looking out. As I sat thus, I heard a puffing noise
and saw a scarlet motor steam up to the door of the inn. It was, of
course, Sir Archibald.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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