A Family and a Fortune Read Online Free PDF

generation and become your contemporaries.’
    â€˜I do not want you to. I like to have my children at their stage and my sister at hers. I shall be a very rich woman.’
    â€˜Well, you will, Mother dear. What a good thing you realize it! So many people do not until it is too late.’
    â€˜Then they are not rich,’ said Clement.
    â€˜People seem very good at so many things,’ said Dudley, ‘except for not being quite in time. It seems hard that that should count so much.’
    â€˜Mother will be rich in Aunt Matty,’ said Aubrey.
    â€˜I shall,’ said Blanche.
    â€˜Really, you boys contribute very tame little speeches,’ said Justine. ‘You are indifferent conversationalists.’
    â€˜If you wish us to be anything else,’ said Clement, ‘you must allow us some practice.’
    â€˜Do you mean that I am always talking myself? What a very ungallant speech! I will put it to the vote. Father, do you think that I talk too much?’
    â€˜No, my dear - well, it is natural for young people to talk.’
    â€˜So you do. Well, I must sit down under it. But I know who will cure me; Aunt Matty. She is the person to prevent anyone from indulging in excess of talk. And I don’t mean to say anything against her; I love her flow of words. But she does pour them out; there is no doubt of that.’
    â€˜We all have our little idiosyncrasies,’ said Blanche. ‘We should not be human without them.’
    â€˜It is a pity we have to be human,’ said Dudley. ‘Human failings, human vanity, human weakness! We don’t hear the word applied to anything good. Even human nature seems a derogatory term. It is simply an excuse for everything.’
    â€˜Human charity, human kindness,’ said Justine. ‘I think that gives us to think, Uncle.’
    â€˜There are great examples of human nobility and sacrifice,’ said Blanche. ‘Mr Penrose must know many of them.’
    â€˜People are always so pleased about people’s sacrifice,’ said Dudley; ‘I mean other people’s. It is not very nice of them. I suppose it is only human.’
    â€˜They are not. They can admire it without being pleased.’
    â€˜So I am to write - you wish me to write to your father, my dear,’ said Edgar, ‘and say that he is welcome as a tenant at a sacrifice to be determined?’
    â€˜Yes, of course. But you need not mention the sacrifice. And I am sure we do not feel it to be that. Just say how much we want to have them.’
    â€˜Father dear, I don’t think we need bring out our little family problems before Mr Penrose,’ said Justine. ‘They concern us but they do not - can hardly interest him.’
    â€˜Oh, I don’t think that mattered, dear,’ said Blanche. ‘Mr Penrose will forgive us. He was kind enough to be interested.’
    â€˜Yes, indeed, Mrs Gaveston. It is a most interesting piece of news,’ said Mr Penrose, relinquishing a spoon he was examining, as if to liberate his attention, which had certainly been occupied. ‘I must remember to tell Mrs Penrose. She is always interested in any little piece of information about the family - in the neighbourhood. Not that this particular piece merits the term, little. From your point of view quite the contrary.’
    â€˜We shall have to do up the lodge,’ said Blanche to her husband. ‘It is fortunate that it is such a good size. Matty must have remembered it. The back room will make a library for my father, and Matty will have the front one as a drawing-room. And the third room on that floor can be her bedroom, to save her the stairs. I can quite see it in my mind’s eye.’
    â€˜Drawing-room and library are rather grandiloquent terms for those little rooms,’ said Justine.
    â€˜Well, call them anything you like, dear. Sitting-room and study. It makes no difference.’
    â€˜No, it makes none, Mother, but