Brown on Resolution Read Online Free PDF

shrugged her shoulders and turned away; she sniffed with contempt as if she had been fourteen instead of twenty-nine and a budding mother. And that sniff completed Will’s exasperation. He boiled over with rage at being thus contemptuously treated by a mere woman—and especially at the thought of all that goodly money being taken out of the family.
    “Come here!” he said, and sprang across and seized her wrist.
    For a second or two the brother and sister stood and glared at each other. But Agatha rallied all her waning moral strength, and continued her amazing rebellion against the godlike male.
    “Let me go!” she said.
    She tore herself free, and shrank aside from his renewed attempt to grab hold of her. She evaded his grip, and forgetful of all decorum she brought her hand round in a full swing so that it landed with an echoing slap upon Will’s pudgy cheek. He staggered back with his ear singing and his heart appalled at this frightful rebellion. Then Agatha turned away and walked slowly from the room, and slowly upstairs to her bedroom, where, with calm, unthinking deliberation she packed the suitcase which had accompanied her on that wonderful trip to London nearly three months before. She included her jewel-case with her few petty pieces of jewellery; then, struck by a sudden thought, she opened it again, took out the wedding ring Samarez had bought her, and slipped it on to the third finger of her left hand. Then, suitcase in hand, she descended the stairs and walked slowly to the front door. The dining-room stood half open as she passed it, and her glance within showed her Dad huddled spiritlessly in his armchair, and Will and Harry collapsed and despondent in two chairs by the table. Perhaps if George, her favourite brother, had been there too, Agatha might even then have stayed her steps. But he had not yet returned from work, and the others hardly looked up as she went by. She opened the door and walked out down the pretentious, tiny carriage drive to the road, and turned to the left towards the station. Somehow as she walked thither panic came over her and she hastened her steps more and more until she was almost running. When she reached the station and found there was no up train for half an hour she could not bring herself to wait; instead she boarded the down train and travelled on it for a couple of stations, and then changed trains and returned back through Greenwich. And so Harry and George, sent out to make peace at any price by a despairing Dad ten minutes after she had left the house, quite missed her.

CHAPTER FIVE
    S O THAT AT midsummer, 1893, a pleasant-faced widow, Mrs. Agatha Brown, attired in all the hideous panoply of mourning for a newly-dead husband which the Queen’s example had made nearly compulsory, came to live in lodgings at Peckham. Her sympathetic landlady soon knew all about her—about the husband, rather a bad lot, seemingly, who had been in the greengrocery trade and had died suddenly of some rather vague disease, but leaving his widow well provided for by the standards of that simple place and time; about the happy event which was to be expected shortly; about her general friendlessness and the dislike with which her late husband’s family regarded her for intercepting the legacies they had come to look upon as their due. Mrs. Rodgers became a great admirer of Mrs. Brown. Mrs. Brown was so evidently a lady, yet withal she had so sound a knowledge of practical affairs, and, most important, she had round her that tremendous aura of ‘independent means’ which implies so much to a working-class dependent for its daily bread upon the whim of an employer. Mrs. Brown paid splendidly regular money for her furnished rooms, but she paid only a tiny amount more than the lowest market value, so that contempt could not creep in to adulterate Mrs. Rodgers’s admiration. Mrs. Brown knew all about the prices of things and how long they ought to last, and she always knew how much of