Mrs. Oliphant

“ Blanche heard the stir in the kitchen as he came in hungry for his dinner, loudly demanding the cause of the delay; and guessed from the flutter and hurry of voices that the curious episode of the young lady shut up in the parlour was being told. It seemed to her that she could see the scene. The big wooden table drawn away as far as possible from the fire, the old farmer wiping his red-brown forehead, the mess of bacon and beans on the table. Blanche at home had seen cottage-life in all its aspects, the comfortable as well as the wretched. ”

“ To describe the feelings of Blanche Fontaine arrested in the middle of that country road, having committed herself to the most tremendous step in life, left her home, thrown off her natural allegiance, and cast herself upon the world—and now to have the curtain of the future abruptly lifted for her by Kate Dewsbury of the Woodlands Farm—is more than words are equal to. She saw it all at a glance. Those were the same eyes that had looked at her so often from under Edward Dewsbury's eyelids. ”

“ This was Blanche's own idea, who thought herself at twenty "just about the same age" as the clever contributor to the Evening Light: who was in reality half a world older not only than she, but than her mother, and even the Judge himself. He looked upon them all as innocents if the truth were known, and was fully minded to make them stepping-stones in his upward career. But this was not thought of in Portland Place when that terrible trouble rose between Blanche and her parents, and she thought herself the most ill-used girl in the world. ”

“ Nothing could have been more kind than this motherly soul. Her eyes did not dance with curiosity like her daughter's. She ran to fetch water, then to fetch milk, to do anything the poor young lady could want. "Oh, hold your tongue about the lodgings," she said, thrusting Kate aside with a vigorous push. "Let's get her well, poor thing. She's as white as a sheet." There were no cushions on the horsehair sofa except one covered with beadwork which Kate placed beneath the young stranger's head, but which her mother with an energetic hand drew away. ”

“ Soon it would become a matter of impossibility to see Edward, to have a word with any one who would take her side: for I need scarcely say that Blanche's friends in general looked upon her, not as the victim of her parents' selfish affection, but as a spoiled child of fortune whose every vagary her adoring family was ready to yield to. The interval of the Long Vacation was a very alarming one for Dewsbury also, but he could not suggest any way of escape, and could only implore his beloved to stand fast, not to throw him over. ”

“ I shall not want any man to work for me. However this is a complete digression; what I was saying was about fathers and mothers. Men are so much better off that they scarcely ever understand a girl's feelings on the subject. Sons are allowed to take up the struggle of life for themselves."
"Oh, very much so indeed," said Mr. Dewsbury with a laugh.
"Your parents treated you so?" cried Blanche. "Well, then you never can understand how fettered a girl is, how unable to move a step one way or another, how continually kept in a kind of hot-bed, shut out from life. ”

“ They like to see young men fluttering about, to make them fetch and carry, to drag a set of captives at their chariot wheels! Poor Lady Fontaine was the last person in the world to drag captives at her chariot wheels, but the angry Judge did not discriminate. He fell upon her as soon as Dewsbury was gone and sacrificed her as the handiest victim; and as Blanche was made the witness during the dreadful dinner which followed of her mother's tortures, the cause of them could not long be concealed from her. ”

“ Dewsbury?" said Sir William in his gruffest voice. "It is time enough to talk of settlements when you are in the position of an accepted lover; and we are as yet a long way from that. You don't seem to see that I might have grave objections to giving you my daughter at all."
"That is surely for the young lady herself to settle, sir, said the lover.
"There are some suits that are never allowed to come to a young lady's ears," cried Sir William angrily. ”

“ BLANCHE FONTAINE was a girl who was not very happy at home: at least she thought so, which in many cases comes to the same thing. She was the only child of her parents, who believed on their side that no girl in England had so many reasons for being happy. They had no other object so dear to their hearts as this: that their child should be surrounded with everything that is best and most delightful in life ”

“ But if you come to think of it, poor creatures as men are—that's allowed, I believe—it is the highest compliment the wretched fellow can pay you."
"What?" cried the young lady, "to ask a girl who perhaps has been very well taken care of all her life to step off from her pedestal and take care of him! to follow him wherever he likes to go, perhaps to India, for instance, she who has been the leader herself ever since she remembers! Is that what you call the greatest honour, the highest compliment, &c.? ”

“ But neither in the streets nor at the railway station did anybody take the least notice of Blanche. She was not a beauty of the overpowering kind (with which, I confess, I am not familiar) who cannot go anywhere without being stared out of countenance or followed by eager admirers; though she was indeed a pretty creature enough. It is my opinion however that a girl going quietly about her own business is as safe as if she were fifty, and so Blanche found. ”

“ But it did not seem so to Blanche. She had never corresponded with Edward Dewsbury, and as the Judge spent the Long Vacation in the Tyrol with his family, and afterwards consented, as the least of several evils, to allow his daughter to learn to draw in Paris during the following winter—the name of that rising young barrister vanished from sight and sound as if he never had been, and Portland Place knew him no more. ”

“ It was about noon when she arrived there, in the full flush of the day; and except herself there was but one person who got out upon the little platform. This was a—what was she? a young woman, certainly not a lady, a good many years older than Blanche, dressed in a sort of travesty of the simple dress which Blanche wore, so that an ignorant and undiscriminating male creature might have supposed that they were dressed alike. This young person regarded Blanche with very curious eyes as she set out hesitating from the railway station. ”

“ To go to Paris into M. Fleur-de-Chaux's studio, she, a young lady in the best society, at the beginning of the season, when all the world was flocking into London, and invitations were coming in every day! to work ten hours a day (which was what Blanche stated as the easiest possible hours) among all the vagrants of art that flock to such places! ”

“ Mothers should never be unsuspecting when their daughters are in question: this was what the Judge said to her when one fine day Mr. Dewsbury called on Sir William before dinner and requested his consent to his marriage with Blanche. The young man did everything in the most perfect good taste, nobody could say that his conduct was not that of a gentleman. He explained that; feeling himself in so many ways her inferior, he could not address himself to Blanche without her father's consent ”

“ He was a kind of man captivating to the maiden imagination of the present day as the young soldier was to that of an earlier and milder development of womankind—a man of literature, chiefly journalistic, saying his say daily in the papers, and thus influencing, as he himself half fictitiously, and his feminine friend most sincerely, believed, not only the opinions but the action of the world. ”

“ Yet why? for he was not changed by any such discovery: and oh! how contemptible on her, or any woman's, part to change her opinion of her lover because his family was simple and poor!
There was a knock at the door, and Mrs. Dewsbury entered carrying a tray. "Here, miss," she said, "I've boiled a nice fresh egg as you don't often get the like of in town as you call it, and a nice strong cup o' tea; and see if that don't set you all to rights. Ah, you're looking at them photographs! You would not think, would you now, that a gentleman like that belonged here? ”

“ Dewsbury had only a sort of paternal kindness for their daughter, which was perhaps rather remarkable, considering that there was but a dozen years or so between them in point of age, which, as everybody knows, is only enough to put a young man and a young woman upon a level. ”

“ My authority, whom I have already quoted, says there is no such camaraderié as that between two young people married; and it stands to reason don't you know—a man and a woman get on together much better than two men, or two women. ”

“ Blanche put down the photograph as if it had burned her fingers, but Mrs. Dewsbury, wholly occupied with her own subject, took no notice. "He's a going to get married," she said, "to a lady of title, a grand lady, one of them as you see their names in the papers—and another grand lift that'll give him. Oh, he's been a lucky boy! and to think it was just Mr. Flete coming here, promiscuous like, for country lodgings that gave him his schooling and made a gentleman of him! 'Mrs. Dewsbury, ma'am,' he said to me, 'it's a shame wasting a bright boy like that on a farm.' 'And so it is, Mr. ”