James, Henry, 1843-1916 / 2008-08-02 00:00:00
It represented a heavy-footed
person, incapable of further agility. Adela recognised too how well
it might have come over her that there were too many children.
Lastly the girl fortified herself with the reflexion, grotesque in
the conditions and conducing to prove her sense of humour not high,
that her father was after all not a man to be played with. It seemed
to her at any rate that if she HAD baffled his unholy purpose she
could bear anything--bear imprisonment and bread and water, bear
lashes and torture, bear even his lifelong reproach. What she could
bear least was the wonder of the inconvenience she had inflicted on
Godfrey. She had time to turn this over, very vainly, for a
succession of days--days more numerous than she had expected, which
passed without bringing her from London any summons to come up and
take her punishment. She sounded the possible, she compared the
degrees of the probable; feeling however that as a cloistered girl
she was poorly equipped for speculation. She tried to imagine the
calamitous things young men might do, and could only feel that such
things would naturally be connected either with borrowed money or
with bad women. She became conscious that after all she knew almost
nothing about either of those interests. The worst woman she knew
was Mrs. Churchley herself. Meanwhile there was no reverberation
from Seymour Street--only a sultry silence.
At Brinton she spent hours in her mother's garden, where she had
grown up, where she considered that she was training for old age,
since she meant not to depend on whist.
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