The Red Court Farm: A Novel (Vol. 2 of 2) — John Shaqi
The Red Court Farm: A Novel (Vol. 2 of 2)Wood, Henry, Mrs.
General
The Red Court Farm: A Novel (Vol. 2 of 2)
Wood, Henry, Mrs.
English fiction -- 19th century
Two other young ladies connected in a degree with this history are at
Miss Jupp's this evening; the rest of the pupils have left. One of the
two we have met before, one not. They are in the room now, and you may
look at them. All three, including Miss Thornycroft, are about the
same age--between eighteen and nineteen. She, Mary Anne, is the same
tall, stately, fair, handsome, and (it must be owned) haughty girl
that you knew before; the fine face is resolute as ever, the cold blue
eyes as honest and uncompromising. She had been allowed to dress as
expensively at Miss Jupp's as her inclination leads: to-day she wears
a rich pale-blue silk; blue ribbons are falling from her fair hair.
She is standing doing nothing: but sitting in a chair by her side,
toying with a bit of fancy-work, is a plain, dark, merry-looking girl
in a good useful nut-brown silk, Susan Hunter. She is the sister of
Robert Hunter, several years his junior, and has been sent up from
Yorkshire by her aunt, with whom she lives, to have two years of
"finish" at a London school. Accident--not their having once known
something of her brother--led to the school fixed on being Miss
Jupp's. And now for the last.
In a grey alpaca dress, trimmed with a little ribbon velvet of the
same hue, her head bent patiently over a pile of drawings that she is
touching up, sits the third. A very different footing in the school,
hers, from that of the other two; _they_ pay the high, full terms;
_she_ pays nothing, but works out her board with industry. Have you
forgotten that pale, gentle face, one of the sweetest both in feature
and expression ever looked upon, with the fine silky chestnut hair
modestly braided round it, and the soft brown eyes that take all the
best feelings of a genuine heart by storm? The weary look telling of
incessant industry, the pile of work that she does not look up from,
the cheap holiday-dress (her best) costing little, all proclaim
sufficiently her dependent position in the house--a slight, graceful
girl of middle height, with a sort of drooping look in her figure, as
if she were, and had been all her life, in the habit of being pushed
into the background?
It is Anna Chester. Her life since we saw her has been like that
of a dray horse. Mrs. Chester placed her at an inferior school as
pupil-teacher, where she had many kinds of things to do, and the
mistress's own children to take care of in the holidays. For a year
and a half she stayed at it, doing her best patiently, and then the
Miss Jupps took her. She has to work very much still, and her health
is failing. Captain and Mrs. Copp have invited her to Coastdown for a
change, and she goes down to-morrow with Miss Thornycroft. Miss Hunter
spends the holidays at school.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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