The Grand Sophy Read Online Free PDF Page A

doing that Mama has taken this—this unaccountable dislike to Augustus!”
    “Now, there,” said Lady Ombersley earnestly, “you are at fault, dearest, for I do not dislike him at all! Only I cannot think him an eligible husband!”
    “I don’t care for that!” declared Cecilia. “He is the only man for whom I could ever feel that degree of attachment which—In short, I beg you will abandon any notion you may have that I could ever entertain Lord Charlbury’s extremely flattering proposal, for I never shall!”
    Lady Ombersley uttered a distressful but incoherent protest; Mr. Rivenhall said in his prosaic way, “Yet you were not, I fancy, so much averse from Charlbury’s proposal when it was first told you.”
    Cecilia turned her lambent gaze upon him, and answered, “I had not then met Augustus.”
    Lady Ombersley appeared to be a good deal struck by the logic of this pronouncement, but her son was less impressionable. He said, “Don’t waste these high flights on me, I beg of you! You have been acquainted with young Fawnhope any time these nineteen years!”
    “It was not the same,” said Cecilia simply.
    “That,” said Lady Ombersley, in a judicial way, “is perfectly true, Charles. I am sure he was the most ordinary little boy, and when he was up at Oxford he had the most dreadful spots, so that no one would have supposed he would grow into such an excessively handsome young man! But the time he spent in Brussels with Sir Charles Stuart improved him out of all knowledge! I own, I never should have known him for the same man!”
    “I have sometimes wondered,” retorted Mr. Rivenhall, “whether Sir Charles will ever be the same man again either! How Lady Lutterworth can have reconciled it with her conscience to have foisted upon a public man such a nincompoop to be his secretary I must leave it to herself to decide! All we are privileged to know is that your precious Augustus no longer fills that office! Or any other!” he added trenchantly.
    “Augustus,” said Cecilia loftily, “is a poet. He is quite unfitted for the—the humdrum business of an ambassador’s secretary.”
    “I do not deny it,” said Mr. Rivenhall. “He is equally unfitted to support a wife, my dear sister. Do not imagine that I will frank you in this folly, for I tell you now I will not! And do not delude yourself into believing that you will obtain my father’s consent to this most imprudent match, for while I have anything to say you will not!”
    “I know well that it is only you who have anything to say in this house!” cried Cecilia, large teardrops welling over her eyelids. “I hope that when you have driven me to desperation you may be satisfied!”
    From the tightening of the muscles about his mouth it was to be seen that Mr. Rivenhall was making a praiseworthy effort to keep his none too amiable temper in check. His mother glanced anxiously up at him, but the voice in which he answered Cecilia was almost alarmingly even. “Will you, my dear sister, have the goodness to reserve these Cheltenham tragedies for some moment when I am not within hearing? And before you carry Mama away upon the tide of all this rodomontade, may I be permitted to remind you that so far from being forced into an unwelcome marriage you expressed your willingness to listen to what you have yourself described as Lord Charlbury’s very flattering offer?”
    Lady Ombersley leaned forward to take one of Cecilia’s hands in hers, and to squeeze it compassionately. “Well, you know, my dearest love, that is quite true!” she said. “Indeed, I thought you liked him excessively! You must not imagine that Papa or I have the least notion of compelling you to marry anyone whom you hold in aversion, for I am sure that such a thing would be quite shocking! And Charles would not do so either, would you, dear Charles?”
    “No, certainly not. But neither would I consent to her marriage with any such frippery fellow as Augustus