Two Worlds and Their Ways Read Online Free PDF

enough.”
    â€œAnd are you a princess, Adela?” said Sefton.
    â€œNo. Servants are as good as anyone else,” said Adela, disposing of any need for the flight of fancy.
    â€œWell, no one seems to know it,” said Aldom.
    â€œWell, you would not expect them to act up to it, if you have noticed anything.”
    Adela was a lively, healthy-looking woman of thirty-five, with interested, busy eyes, a confident cast of feature, and an independent mien that could be decorous. She was one person with the children, another with their parents, with Miss Petticott a third, and with Aldom herself, though through all the characters went something of the same essence.
    Aldom had two characters, of which one was his own. Whether or no he was a prince in disguise downstairs, he was someone in disguise.
    â€œI expect we can do as we like about going to school,” said Clemence, swinging her feet from a window-seat.
    Sefton looked at her in question.
    â€œThen you will stay at home,” said Adela. “So we shall see if that is the truth.”
    â€œOne begins to look at the matter all round. There is more than one side to everything.”
    â€œShe has come on since I first knew her,” said Adela, looking at Aldom.
    â€œAs is natural, as that was thirteen years ago,” said Clemence.
    â€œHe is still a little boy,” said Adela, putting her arm round Sefton.
    â€œOh, look at the love,” said Aldom.
    â€œIt seems a shame to send a child like him away from his home.”
    Sefton proved his agreement by showing some emotion.
    â€œThere, there, perhaps it won’t happen. I don’t feel as if it would,” said Adela, successfully checking it.
    â€œYou won’t say anything to Mother or Father to make them send us,” he said to Clemence.
    â€œNo, I shall just let matters take their course.”
    â€œHe is going to school at eleven. I left school then,” said Aldom. “It was nearly twenty years ago, in the year eighteen hundred and seventy-five. I had gone as far as was required.”
    â€œOh, you!” said Adela, not accepting any parallel.
    â€œAnd how far had you gone?”
    â€œWe left in the end, wherever we were,” said Adela, leaving anything incidental to be inferred. “I never could see that schoolbooks led to anything. They are nothing to do with life, and it is life we are concerned with, not the records of what it used to be. And why send the two at the same time, when one of them is three years older?”
    â€œClemence is a girl,” said Aldom.
    â€œYou should really call me ‘Miss Clemence.’”
    â€œOh, the grandeur!” said Adela. “Not that you shouldn’t, Aldom. I wonder how you think of yourself.”
    â€œI told you as a prince in disguise.”
    â€œYou would not say ‘Clemence,’ if Mother or Father were here.”
    â€œWell, we shouldn’t, any of us, be quite the same then,” said Adela. “I daresay you are not the same in the dining-room as you are up here. What would you say, Aldom?”
    â€œWell, you might not say that I was the same then either.”
    â€œThe prince is even more disguised,” said Clemence. “I expect we shall get to be more the same, if we go to school.”
    Sefton looked at her with trouble in his eyes at her acceptance of the threat to their lives.
    â€œSo you are going to leave us behind, are you?” said Adela.
    â€œWell, of course, our position is different.”
    â€œThe person whose position I should not like, is Miss Petticott,” said Adela. “I would rather be one thing or the other, and know where I stood.”
    â€œI don’t find knowing it such an advantage,” said Aldom. “I would not mind its being a little less to the fore.”
    â€œI wish we could always go on in the life we know,” said Sefton. “We have not learned what to do in any other.”
    â€œIt may