The French Lieutenant's Woman Read Online Free PDF Page A

Mrs.
Fairley reads so poorly. I should be happy to provide a home for such
a person."
    " Very
well. If you so wish it. I will make inquiries." Mrs. Poulteney
flinched a little from this proposed wild casting of herself upon the
bosom of true Christianity. "She must be of irreproachable moral
character. I have my servants to consider."
    " My
dear lady, of course, of course." The vicar stood. "And
preferably without relations. The relations of one's dependents can
become so very tiresome."
    " Rest
assured that I shall not present anyone unsuitable." He pressed
her hand and moved towards the door. "And Mr. Forsythe, not too
young a person." He bowed and left the room. But halfway down
the stairs to the ground floor, he stopped. He remembered. He
reflected. And perhaps an emotion not absolutely unconnected with
malice, a product of so many long hours of hypocrisy--or at least a
not always complete frankness--at Mrs. Poulteney's bombazined side,
at any rate an impulse made him turn and go back to her drawing room.
He stood in the doorway.
    " An
eligible has occurred to me. Her name is Sarah Woodruff."
 

    5
O me, what
profits it to put
An
idle case? If Death were seen
At
first as Death, Love had not been,
Or
been in narrowest working shut,
Mere
fellowship of sluggish moods,
Or
in his coarsest Satyr-shape
Had
bruised the herb and crush'd the grape,
And
bask'd and batten'd in the woods.
-- Tennyson,
In Memoriam (1850)
The young
people were all wild to see Lyme.
-- Jane
Austen, Persuasion
    Ernestina had
exactly the right face for her age; that is, small-chinned, oval,
delicate as a violet. You may see it still in the drawings of the
great illustrators of the time--in Phiz's work, in John Leech's. Her
gray eyes and the paleness of her skin only enhanced the delicacy of
the rest. At first meetings she could cast down her eyes very
prettily, as if she might faint should any gentleman dare to address
her. But there was a minute tilt at the corner of her eyelids, and a
corresponding tilt at the corner of her lips--to extend the same
comparison, as faint as the fragrance of February violets-- that
denied, very subtly but quite unmistakably, her apparent total
obeisance to the great god Man. An orthodox Victorian would perhaps
have mistrusted that imperceptible hint of a Becky Sharp; but to a
man like Charles she proved irresistible. She was so very nearly one
of the prim little moppets, the Georginas, Victorias, Abertinas,
Matildas and the rest who sat in their closely guarded dozens at
every ball; yet not quite.
    When Charles departed
from Aunt Tranter's house in Broad Street to stroll a hundred paces
or so down to his hotel, there gravely--are not all declared lovers
the world's fool?--to mount the stairs to his rooms and interrogate
his good-looking face in the mirror, Ernestine excused herself and
went to her room. She wanted to catch a last glimpse of her betrothed
through the lace curtains; and she also wanted to be in the only room
in her aunt's house that she could really tolerate.
    Having duly admired the
way he walked and especially the manner in which he raised his top
hat to Aunt Tranter's maid, who happened to be out on an errand; and
hated him for doing it, because the girl had pert little Dorset
peasant eyes and a provokingly pink complexion, and Charles had been
strictly forbidden ever to look again at any woman under the age of
sixty--a condition Aunt Tranter mercifully escaped by just one
year--Ernestina turned back into her room. It had been furnished for
her and to her taste, which was emphatically French; as heavy then as
the English, but a little more gilt and fanciful. The rest of Aunt
Tranter's house was inexorably, massively, irrefutably in the style
of a quarter-century before: that is, a museum of objects created in
the first fine rejection of all things decadent, light and graceful,
and to which the memory or morals of the odious Prinny, George IV,
could be attached.
    Nobody could dislike
Aunt Tranter;