Elizabeth Mansfield Read Online Free PDF Page A

eyelids flickered nervously as she pulled a large, lacy handkerchief from the bosom of her dress. “I very much fear the boy has set his heart on some female in London.”
    “It would serve Julie right if he has!” Madge Branscombe’s full bosom heaved in distress. “During Tris’s entire visit, did she once wear any of the new gowns I had made for her? No! Did she do up her hair, blacken her lashes or behave in any way like a girl trying to attract a man? Of course not! All she did during the entire fortnight was bicker with him. Honestly, their perpetual wrangling makes me wild. Sometimes I want to wring the girl’s neck!”
    “I know. They do seem to be always squabbling.” Phyllis’s eyes filled with tears. “Do you think,” she asked with a pitiful tremor, “that they will not marry after all?”
    Lady Branscombe winced. “If he’s given his heart to another, I suppose not.”
    “I know he seems to be behaving like a deuced coxcomb,” Phyllis admitted, “but he can’t actually have come to love someone else! He just can’t !Perhaps he’s only gone off to ... to keep an assignation with a... a...”
    “If you’re trying to say the word paramour, Phyllis Enders, then just say it! This is no time to be mealy-mouthed.”
    “Well, I don’t like to believe my son has a paramour, but I suppose that would be preferable to his falling in love with someone suitable. If he affianced himself to a proper sort of female, what could we do then?”
    Madge dropped her head in her hand. “I have no idea,” she mumbled in discouragement.
    Lady Phyllis dabbed at her eyes with one corner of her huge handkerchief. “You don’t think, do you, that it’s time to admit that the matter is hopeless?”
    Madge Branscombe threw her friend an angry glare. “I refuse to give up. We must not admit defeat. So long as the boy remains unmarried, there’s still a chance—”
    The smaller woman shook her head sadly while unwittingly twisting the handkerchief into a tight coil. “But, my dear, it may already be too late. During this past fortnight, I too looked in vain to discern a sign of a romantic spark between them, but there was never anything remotely affectionate. It’s our fault, you know. We raised them too closely. They’ve become utterly uninteresting to each other.”
    “It is our fault.” That was a difficult admission for Lady Branscombe to make; her whole body seemed to sag. “We should have kept them apart. If we’d forbidden them to associate, they would then have been delighted to defy us.”
    “Yes. I should have played Montague to your Capulet.
    But that chance is quite lost. By this time, Tris is so accustomed to the sight of your beautiful Juliet that he doesn’t even notice how lovely she is.”
    They both sighed together with the same hopelessness and fell silent with the same rapt concentration. The two women often showed this sort of similar reaction to the circumstances of life. Though their looks were very different, their tastes were very much alike. They’d become friends in girlhood, when they’d attended the same school. Phyllis, though she was the daughter of an earl, had from the first fallen under the spell of Madge Selwin, who, though her family had no titles, was the most clever and strong-willed girl in the school. Phyllis’s delicate reticence was a perfect match for Madge’s robust decisiveness.
    The friendship grew even stronger with time. One month after Phyllis married Sir Charles Enders, Madge wed his cousin, Edward Lord Branscombe. (It was often remarked by people who knew them well that Madge Branscombe had chosen for her husband a man whose character was very like her friend’s: a reticent, wistful fellow who permitted himself to be led round by the nose by his overbearing wife.) After their wedding, Madge convinced her husband to purchase Larchwood, an estate within walking distance of Enders Hall. From that time onward, there was rarely a day during which they did