Americans -- England -- Fiction; Children of the rich -- Fiction; Marriage -- Fiction; Sisters -- Fiction
Selden had never seen Miss Vanderpoel in his Sunday paper, and here he
was lying in a room in the same house with her. And she coming in to see
him and talk to him as if he was one of the Four Hundred himself! The
comfort and luxury with which he found himself surrounded sank into
insignificance when compared with such unearthly luck as this. Lady
Anstruthers came in to see him also, and she several times brought with
her a queer little lame fellow, who was spoken of as “Master Ughtred.”
“Master” was supposed by G. Selden to be a sort of title conferred upon
the small sons of baronets and the like. The children he knew in New
York and elsewhere answered to the names of Bob, or Jimmy, or Bill. No
parallel to “Master” had been in vogue among them.
Lady Anstruthers was not like her sister. She was a little thing, and
both she and Master Ughtred seemed fond of talking of New York. She had
not been home for years, and the youngster had never seen it at all.
He had some queer ideas about America, and seemed never to have seen
anything but Stornham and the village. G. Selden liked him, and was
vaguely sorry for a little chap to whom a description of the festivities
attendant upon the Fourth of July and a Presidential election seemed
like stories from the Arabian Nights.
“Tell me about the Tammany Tiger, if you please,” he said once. “I want
to know what kind of an animal it is.”
From a point of view somewhat different from that of Mount Dunstan and
Mr. Penzance, Betty Vanderpoel found talk with him interesting. To her
he did not wear the aspect of a foreign product. She had not met and
conversed with young men like him, but she knew of them. Stringent
precautions were taken to protect her father from their ingenuous
enterprises. They were not permitted to enter his offices; they were
even discouraged from hovering about their neighbourhood when seen and
suspected. The atmosphere, it was understood, was to be, if possible,
disinfected of agents. This one, lying softly in the four-post bed,
cheerfully grateful for the kindness shown him, and plainly filled with
delight in his adventure, despite the physical discomforts attending
it, gave her, as he began to recover, new views of the life he lived in
common with his kind. It was like reading scenes from a realistic novel
of New York life to listen to his frank, slangy conversation. To her,
as well as to Mr. Penzance, sidelights were thrown upon existence in the
“hall bedroom” and upon previously unknown phases of business life in
Broadway and roaring “downtown” streets.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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