This FreedomHutchinson, A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth)
General
This Freedom
Hutchinson, A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth)
Marriage -- Fiction; Women -- Social and moral questions -- Fiction
She saw it, sensed it, heard it--and stonily regarded it. A thing to
weep at, she knew it; but did not weep. A thing to stab her, it ought
to; but did not stab. What good could she do? Suppose she had got up
and gone down; suppose she now got up and went down and went back? What
good? All sentimentality that. Be sensible! If a thousand pounds would
do Keggo any good, and if she had a thousand pounds, freely and gladly
she would give the last penny of it. But to get down, to have got down,
what could she have done? Why should she worry about her? Keggo had had
her chance. Everybody had their chance. She now had hers. Why should
she...
She never saw Keggo again.
CHAPTER X
She had not good health in the week immediately following that great
day. She did not feel well. She did not look very well. Mr. Simcox,
profoundly sympathetic to every mood of her who was at once his protege
and his support, told her he thought she had been overdoing it. She
seized upon that excuse and tried to persuade herself that perhaps she
had; or, which amounted to the same thing, that she was suffering
from the revulsion of those huge excitements. But she did not persuade
herself. Her malaise, whatever it was, was not of that kind. Its
manifestations were not in lassitude or sense of disability. They
were in a curious dis-ease whose occasion was not to be defined; in a
consuming restlessness beneath whose goad even the significant apartment
had not power to charm and hold her; in a certain feverishness whose
exsiccative heat, leaving her palms and temples cool (she sometimes felt
them and had surprise) caused inwardly a dry burning that made her long
for quiet places.
She could not settle to anything. Her limbs, and they had their way,
desired not to rest; her mind, and it deposed her captaincy, would cast
no anchor.
Mr. Simcox, as the week drew on, suggested a weekend at home. It had
occurred to her, very attractively, but she had negatived it. Aunt Belle
(before the idea had come to her) had written an invitation to one of
the Saturday dinners in which she had “most particularly, my dear child”
desired her presence. Something most delightful was going to happen and
she must be there. She had accepted and she later told herself she
did not like to refuse. She knew, instantly as she read, what was the
identity of this delightful thing that was to happen and she decided,
with a sharp turn within her of some emotion, that certainly she would
be there. To whet her scorn! She was thereafter much aggravated that her
drifting mind, against her wish, swayed constantly towards it sometimes
with that same sharp turn of that same emotion (nameless to her and
without meaning) always with aggravation of her restlessness, of
her fever, of her dis-ease. When came Mr. Simcox’s suggestion of the
week-end at home she decided, as swiftly as she had first accepted, to
revoke her acceptance. She would not be there! She would not--waste her
scorn!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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