The Maid's Version Read Online Free PDF Page B

Bank.
    He was a tall young man who stood at the back of crowds and blended, but Corinne Jarman spotted him kindly helping an elderly and crabby customer in bibs down the bank steps to a mule-drawn wagon and asked her father for his name. Within a month he was invited to the Jarman house for a Sunday luncheon during which he ate heartily but barely spoke. It was a spectacular room of chandeliers and crystal goblets and objets d’art that Mrs. Jarman had purchased during her second Grand Tour of the Continent. Glencross felt obliged to concentrate fully on each act of the meal so he wouldn’t break any crystal or spill on the rug, spew food while speaking that stained the beautiful tablecloth. He could not proceed with such caution through the elaborate requirements of a meal so complicated and also follow the conversation flapping around him, so he missed several opportunities to engage with Corinne.
    She was tiny and thin and pale as a cloud that might be parted by a jaundiced thought. Her manners were exquisite but unforced and her eyes were compelling blue places. Each movement was as precise and fluid as those he’d seen actresses display onstage. Once the luncheon concluded she took his arm and walked with him under an umbrella into the bright garden where their courtship began when he spied a spread mimosa tree and quoted a snip from Wordsworth in response to the fragrant shade it cast. “Behold, within the leafy shade … on me the chance-discovered sight gleamed like a vision of delight.” Corinne seemed thrilled by the attempt at poetry and he seemed nervous, suddenly concerned that he might now be expected to have an apt quote for many sights or situations and he did not.
    It was difficult from the start for Glencross to accept that a local princess was truly and seriously interested in him, but he hopefully amassed a few phrases of French and read a book about table manners. He called on Corinne during a hot spell and they sat fanning themselves on the veranda where he spent all his French quips within an hour to great effect, judging by her smile, her lowered eyes, then invented on the spot much longer passages of Latinate sounds to further woo her. She seemed to believe every word she thought he’d purred to her in a Continental language and swooned. He felt masterful, nearly sophisticated, and though in the coming weeks he gave her a couple of chances to escape their involvement, to realize he was unfit for her world, she didn’t take them and an engagement was announced. Before the winter holidays of that year they were married, and while on their honeymoon to New York City she spoke to him in middling French daily just to see the captured expression it brought to his face.
    Their wedding gift from the Jarmans was a huge house so splendid and grand that it intimidated his own parents whenever they visited and they never would tour the entire place but kept to the parlor with their hands held clasped on their laps. But he promptly acclimated to the new facts of his life, began to dress the part, to learn how to spend money without gnawing regret at each expensive purchase, and all was fine except for this: Glencross did not know much about sex coming into marriage (he had one night experienced a few moments of mysterious fumbling of fingers and lips and buttons and belts behind the Columbia train station with a woman who needed another dollar to get home to her mother, and though something gooey had resulted between them during that dark transaction he was never certain that he’d truly lost his virginity there) and Corinne knew less. A merely awkward coupling between them was counted as an achievement, but most encounters seemed painful, perhaps degrading in several particulars, always to be conducted furtively even within the bonds of matrimony, and certainly unnecessary to the new Mrs. Glencross. She preferred to have her mind tickled intimately and to keep her clothes on. She loved Glencross but did