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

Prinny, George IV, could be attached.
    Nobody could dislike Aunt
Tranter; even to contemplate being angry with that innocently smiling and
talking-- especially talking--face was absurd. She had the profound optimism
of successful old maids; solitude either sours or teaches self-dependence.
Aunt Tranter had begun by making the best of things for herself, and ended
by making the best of them for the rest of the world as well.
    However, Ernestina did her
best to be angry with her; on the impossibility of having dinner at five;
on the subject of the funereal furniture that choked the other rooms; on
the subject of her aunt's oversolicitude for her fair name (she would not
believe that the bridegroom and bride-to-be might wish to sit alone, and
walk out alone); and above all on the subject of Ernestina's being in Lyme
at all.
    The poor girl had had to
suffer the agony of every only child since time began--that is, a crushing
and unrelenting canopy of parental worry. Since birth her slightest cough
would bring doctors; since puberty her slightest whim summoned decorators
and dressmakers; and always her slightest frown caused her mama and papa
secret hours of self-recrimination. Now this was all very well when it
came to new dresses and new wall hangings, but there was one matter upon
which all her bouderies and complaints made no impression. And that was
her health. Her mother and father were convinced she was consumptive. They
had only to smell damp in a basement to move house, only to have two days'
rain on a holiday to change districts. Half Harley Street had examined
her, and found nothing; she had never had a serious illness in her life;
she had none of the lethargy, the chronic weaknesses, of the condition.
She could have--or could have if she had ever been allowed to--danced all
night; and played, without the slightest ill effect, battledore all the
next morning. But she was no more able to shift her doting parents' fixed
idea than a baby to pull down a mountain. Had they but been able to see
into the future! For Ernestina was to outlive all her generation. She was
born in 1846. And she died on the day that Hitler invaded Poland.
    An indispensable part of
her quite unnecessary regimen was thus her annual stay with her mother's
sister in Lyme. Usually she came to recover from the season; this year
she was sent early to gather strength for the marriage. No doubt the Channel
breezes did her some good, but she always descended in the carriage to
Lyme with the gloom of a prisoner arriving in Siberia. The society of the
place was as up-to-date as Aunt Tranter's lumbering mahogany furniture;
and as for the entertainment, to a young lady familiar with the best that
London can offer it was worse than nil. So her relation with Aunt Tranter
was much more that of a high-spirited child, an English Juliet with her
flat-footed nurse, than what one would expect of niece and aunt. Indeed,
if Romeo had not mercifully appeared on the scene that previous winter,
and promised to share her penal solitude, she would have mutinied; at least,
she was almost sure she would have mutinied. Ernestina had certainly a
much stronger will of her own than anyone about her had ever allowed for--and
more than the age allowed for. But fortunately she had a very proper respect
for convention; and she shared with
    Charles--it had not been
the least part of the first attraction between them--a sense of self-irony.
Without this and a sense of humor she would have been a horrid spoiled
child; and it was surely the fact that she did often so apostrophize herself
("You horrid spoiled child") that redeemed her.
    In her room that afternoon
she unbuttoned her dress and stood before her mirror in her chemise and
petticoats. For a few moments she became lost in a highly narcissistic
self-contemplation. Her neck and shoulders did her face justice; she was
really very pretty, one of the prettiest girls she knew. And as if to prove
it she raised her arms and unloosed her hair,