The Wheel of Fortune Read Online Free PDF

both horrifying and repellent, but far more horrifying and repellent was the knowledge that she could have cared deeply about someone other than myself. I had thought myself safe till she was eighteen and put her hair up—by which time I would be sixteen and, puberty permitting, fit to present myself as a future husband without arousing either her laughter or her incredulity. But now I was so young that I could hardly stake a claim without looking ridiculous. My voice had not finished breaking. I was too lanky. None of my clothes seemed to fit me. I had decided that surviving adolescence was purely an attitude of mind but now when I contemplated the utterly unfinished nature of my physique I was in despair. How could I ever compete with a full-grown male who displayed predatory intentions? The entire future had become a nightmare.
    In agony I reread the letter in the vain hope that I had misinterpreted it, and this time the news seemed so preposterous that I seriously wondered if my father had gone mad. The theory seemed all too plausible. I remembered my grandmother, locked up in a Swansea lunatic asylum and allowed home only once a year, and the next moment before I could stop myself I was writing urgently to my mother for reassurance.
    My dearest Mama, I began, determined to conceal my panic behind a civil, rational epistolary style, I have just had the most extraordinary letter from Papa. In it he appears to state that Ginette has left Oxmoon and is staying at All-Hallows Court. Is there perhaps some misunderstanding here? Ginette thinks Sir William Appleby an old bore and Lady Appleby dry as dust, and as for that lily-livered Timothy, Ginette and I both agree that you could put him through a mangle and wring out enough water to fill a well. How can she choose to live with such people? I suspect someone is not being quite honest with me about this.
    Have you and Papa thrown her out of Oxmoon because you suspect she’s lost her virtue? If so please accept my respectful assurance that you must be mistaken: she would never lose it. The heroines of those dreary novels she reads always preserve themselves most conscientiously, and Ginette is well aware that Fallen Women are inevitably doomed to a tragic fate. (Please excuse any indelicacy here and kindly attribute any unwitting coarseness to my inexperience in writing on such subjects.) Anyway, how could any cousin of the Kinsellas’ be less than sixty years old? I didn’t even know they had any relatives except for some bizarre Irish connection which they do their best to conceal.
    Dearest Mama, please believe me: even if Ginette were partial to gross behavior, for her to lose her virtue to a man over sixty must surely be physically impossible, and for her to lose her virtue to an Irishman of any age is mentally inconceivable. Please, I beseech you, write and tell me what’s really going on. Ever your affectionate and devoted son, ROBERT .
    I then wrote Ginette a fevered note in which I begged her to solve the mystery at once, but it was my mother who answered by return of post; Ginette failed to reply. My mother wrote with calm fluency: My dearest Robert, I am so sorry that you should have been so distressed. I know that was the last thing your father desired when he wrote to you, but your father, though acting with the best will in the world, finds it hard to adopt a blunt, or one might almost say an Anglo-Saxon, approach to unpalatable facts. This is neither a fault nor a virtue but merely a racial difference which one must recognize and accept. However let me do what I can to clarify the situation.
    First of all let me assure you that nothing bizarre has occurred. Alas, I fear such incidents happen only too frequently when a young girl is as beautiful as Ginevra and is heiress to a fortune of thirty thousand pounds. Second, let me quash your notion that the elopement was some extraordinary fiction. The man was, as you surmised, one of the Kinsellas’ Irish