Crampton Hodnet Read Online Free PDF

reference to Miss Morrow, thus giving the impression that although he had indeed arrived, he had not yet been welcomed. And so Miss Doggett found herself with something definite to do and began showing him the rooms all over again.
    Miss Morrow slipped away to her bedroom and began scrubbing at her cheeks and lips with the already ruined handkerchief. Completely indelible, it had said in the advertisement; won’t come off when you’re eating, smoking or being kissed. I suppose if I had suddenly kissed Mr. Latimer, she thought detachedly, it would have left no mark. She went to the washstand. Surely soap and water would remove it? Ten minutes later she went downstairs, her face flushed and shining, but flushed only because she had had to rub so hard with her soapy face flannel. She hoped Miss Doggett hadn’t noticed.
    But Miss Doggett was quite taken up with Mr. Latimer and did not see her companion until she was sitting in a chair on the edge of the room.
    ‘Ah, Miss Morrow, I was wondering where you were,’ she said, turning her head. ‘I wanted you to hold my wool.’ She produced a rough navy skein, which was to be knitted up into a balaclava helmet for a seaman.

    Fierce was the wild billow,
    Dark was the night,

    thought Miss Morrow, as she arranged the wool on her hands.

    Wail of the hurricane
    Be thou at rest.

    Some versions had “Wail of Euroclydon”, which was much grander. Surely Mr. Latimer ought to be holding the wool? Wasn’t it one of the chief functions of curates, or had she been misinformed? It was just another of those small disillusionments which make up our everyday life on this earth, she decided.
    ‘Do you like a hot water bottle at night, Mr. Latimer?’ asked Miss Doggett. ‘And do you prefer China or Indian tea? A fire will be lit in your room every morning, of course.’
    But it’s only the twenty-eighth of October, thought Miss Morrow indignantly. So this is how it’s going to be. She glanced at Mr. Latimer, who sat like a handsome, complacent marmalade cat, telling Miss Doggett all his little fads. I’m certainly not going to fuss over him, thought Miss Morrow, jerking the wool vigorously round her thumbs; I won’t wait on him.
    While Miss Morrow was steeling herself to resist Mr. Latimer’s charms, Miss Doggett was telling him about the inhabitants of North Oxford and her own relations in particular. She became quite coy and skittish about Anfhea’s romance.
    ‘I happened to go into the drawing-room yesterday evening,’ she said, ‘and there were the young people sitting on the sofa, very far apart and rather pink in the face. Of course I  knew what they’d been up to. We’re only young once, aren’t we?’ She wagged her finger at Mr. Latimer, who seemed to draw back a little.
    Miss Morrow, too, was surprised. Miss Doggett usually disapproved of young people, especially of girls who ‘made themselves cheap’, as she called it. But of course, reflected Miss Morrow, it all depended on who was at the other end of the sofa, so to speak. If it was the only son of a sometime British Ambassador in Warsaw, whose mother lived in Belgravia, who took you to expensive restaurants and bought you orchids and whose college battels each term would have kept somebody like Miss Morrow clothed for many years, then Miss Doggett adopted a come-kiss-me-sweet-and-twenty attitude and observed that we are only young once. But supposing it had been a young man from one of the poorer colleges, who came from Huddersfield and had a state scholarship and wouldn’t wear suede shoes even if he could afford them? Supposing they had been sitting together, holding hands by the light of a gas-fire in a dreary room in one of the more remote streets leading off the Cowley Road, talking seriously about their future? Miss Morrow could see the room, the gas-fire flickering and popping, the table with its red or green baize cloth piled high with mathematical textbooks or Latin authors, while in Simon’s