Mrs. Oliphant

Name: The Rector; and, The Doctor's Family — The Doctor's Family, Chapter 9
Author: Mrs. Oliphant

The Rector; and, The Doctor's Family… (1863)

Summary

“The Rector; and, The Doctor's Family — The Doctor's Family, Chapter 9”, published in 1863, is a work by Mrs. Oliphant. It explores elements such as Nettie, Susan and Marjoribanks.

Quotes from The Rector; and, The Doctor's Family… (Mrs. Oliphant)

Mrs. Oliphant, The Rector; and, The Doctor's Family… (1863)

“ Nettie took up her work, impatient, perhaps almost disappointed, with the dead calm in which nothing ever happened. Susan came in stealthy, pale, trembling with cold and fright. She came forward to the table in her white night-dress like a faded ghost. "Fred has never come in," said Susan, in a shivering whisper; "is it very late? He promised he would only be gone an hour. Where can he have gone? Nettie, Nettie, don't sit so quiet and stare at me. I fell asleep, or I should have found it out sooner; all the house is locked up, and he has never come in." ”

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Source: Wikisource

Mrs. Oliphant, The Rector; and, The Doctor's Family… (1863)

“ It got to be very silent in the house and without; not a sound in the rooms where everybody was asleep; not a sound outside, except an occasional rustle of the night wind through the bare willow-branches—deep night and not a creature awake but herself, sitting in the heart of that intense and throbbing silence. Somehow there was a kind of pleasure to Nettie in the isolation which was so impossible to her at other hours. She sat rapt in that laborious quiet as if her busy fingers were under some spell.
When suddenly she heard a startled motion up-stairs, as if some one had got up hastily ”

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Source: Wikisource

Mrs. Oliphant, The Rector; and, The Doctor's Family… (1863)

“ Labours, disgusts, endurances of all kinds: what cannot one undertake so long as one has that cordial at one's heart? When the endurance and the labour remain, and the cordial is gone, it is a changed world into which the surprised soul enters. This was what had happened to Nettie. Nobody suspected the sudden change which had passed upon everything. The only individual in the world who could have divined it, had persuaded himself in a flush of anger and mortification that she did not care. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Mrs. Oliphant, The Rector; and, The Doctor's Family… (1863)

“ All the world—everything round about them, to the veriest atom—seemed asleep. The cricket had stopped his chirrup in the kitchen, and no mouse stirred in the slumbering house. By times Susan dozed on the sofa, shivering, notwithstanding her shawl, and Nettie took up her needlework for the moment to distract her thoughts. When Susan started from these snatches of slumber, she importuned her sister with ceaseless questions and entreaties. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Mrs. Oliphant, The Rector; and, The Doctor's Family… (1863)

“ In her youth and buoyant freshness, half contemptuous of the outside troubles which were no match for her indomitable heart, Nettie had been fighting against hard external circumstances for a great part of her valorous little life, and had not hesitated to take upon herself the heaviest burdens of outside existence. Such struggles are not hard when one's heart is light and sound. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Mrs. Oliphant, The Rector; and, The Doctor's Family… (1863)

“ We know what is about the worst that will happen to Fred. He will come home like that you know, as he did before. We can't mend it, but we need not break our hearts over it. Lie down on the sofa, and put up your feet and wrap the shawl round you if you won't go to bed. I can fancy all very well how it will be. It is nothing new, Susan, that you should break your heart."
"It's you that have no feeling. Oh, Nettie, how hard you are! I don't believe you know what it is to love anybody," said Susan. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Mrs. Oliphant, The Rector; and, The Doctor's Family… (1863)

“ Men have done such things before now, and been none the worse for it. If you will go and lie down, I'll see after it, Susan. Now it's daylight, you know, no great harm can happen to him. Come and lie down, and leave me to look for Fred."
"But you don't know where to go, and he won't like to have you going after him. Nettie, send to Edward," said Susan; "he ought to come and look after his brother: he ought to have done it all through, and not to have left us to manage everything; and he hasn't even been to see us for ever so long. But send to Edward, Nettie—it's his business. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Mrs. Oliphant, The Rector; and, The Doctor's Family… (1863)

“ The girl steadied herself as she could on the brink of the sluggish current, and collected her thoughts. The conclusion to her search, and answer to all her questions, lay, not to be doubted or questioned, before her. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Mrs. Oliphant, The Rector; and, The Doctor's Family… (1863)

“ He, injured and indignant and angry, thought first of all of revenging himself upon Nettie—of proving to her that he would get over it, and that there were women in the world more reasonable than herself. Dr Marjoribanks, who had already made those advances to the doctor which that poor young fellow had gone to carry the news of, not without elation of heart, on that memorable night, to St Roque's, asked Edward to dinner a few days after ”

Mrs. Oliphant

Summary

Quotes from The Rector; and, The Doctor's Family… (Mrs. Oliphant)

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