Artists -- Fiction; British -- France -- Paris -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
All the little familiar objects, the intimate associations of the
furniture of a room that has been for years your boudoir as well as
your sleeping room, all the decorations that you fondly dreamed gave to
your room a _cachet_--the mark of a distinctive personality,--these
are of no more comfort to you than would be strange bare stone walls
and a close unfamiliar iron grating.
Betty tried to shake the window bars, but they were immovable. She
tried to force the door open, but her silver buttonhook was an
insufficient lever, and her tooth-brush handle broke when she pitted
it in conflict against the heavy, old-fashioned lock. We have all read
how prisoners, outwitting their gaolers, have filed bars with their
pocket nail-scissors, and cut the locks out of old oak doors with the
small blade of a penknife. Betty's door was only of pine, but her
knife broke off short; and the file on her little scissors wore itself
smooth against the first unmoved bar.
She paced the room like a caged lioness. We read that did the lioness
but know her strength her bars were easily shattered by one blow of
her powerful paw. Betty's little pink paws were not powerful like the
lioness's, and when she tried to make them help her, she broke her
nails and hurt herself.
It was this moment that Letitia chose for rapping at the door.
"You can't come in. What is it?" Betty was prompt to say.
"Mrs. Edwardes's Albert, Miss, come for the Maternity bag."
"It's all ready in the school-room cupboard," Betty called through the
door. "Number three."
She resisted an impulse to say that she had broken the key in the lock
and to send for the locksmith. No: there should be no scandal at Long
Barton,--at least not while she had to stay in it.
She did not cry. She was sick with fury, and anger made her heart beat
as Vernon had never had power to make it.
"I will be calm. I won't lose my head," she told herself again and
again. She drank some water. She made herself eat the neglected
breakfast. She got out her diary and wrote in it, in a handwriting
that was not Betty's, and with a hand that shook like totter-grass.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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