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

companion.
I have difficulty in writing now. And 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