Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Fiction
Lyddon realized one price which Angela had to pay for the training he
had given her--she had no intimate girl friends. She had plenty of girl
companions--Dr. Yelverton’s granddaughters, Colonel Carey’s daughters;
but there was no real community of soul between these young creatures
and Angela. These other girls were satisfied with the quiet country
life in which they dwelt as their mothers and grandmothers had dwelt,
but their ideas of splendor were confined to a larger house and more
servants than they possessed at present and to an annual trip to the
White Sulphur Springs. Not so Angela Vaughn. She longed for palaces
and parks and for the mysterious joys and splendors which she imagined
therein could be found. The Greeks were her soul ancestors, and she had
an adoration for beauty in form, color, and sound. She made Lyddon,
who was quite insensible to music, repeat to her all the details of
the few operas to which he had been dragged and which had bored him to
excess during his European life. Richard’s years in Paris and Neville’s
visits to New York and Saratoga had filled Angela’s girlish heart with
longing, a longing which Mrs. Tremaine thought positively wicked and
the girls of Angela’s acquaintance considered eminently foolish.
Lyddon, in his profession as a trainer of youth, had always reckoned as
a positive detriment any education which segregated a human being from
his fellows. He had reckoned all education which is totally derived
from books as light without warmth. He had good reason for this belief,
his own passion for books having separated him from men in general and
having quenched in him most of the living and vivifying emotions. He
had not been able to quench love, although he had hid it in a sepulcher
and closed the door with a great stone. It was his fate, not having
children of his own, to love the children of others and when he had
grown to love them, they slipped easily from his grasp, except Richard
and Neville Tremaine. But Lyddon believed that he should still hold to
Archie and to that charming child Angela, for he could never reckon
Angela as wholly grown up. There was an eternal simplicity about her,
the frankness of a child in which Lyddon had never perceived any change
from the time she wore pinafores.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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