Nancy Lammeter

“ Drummond's? I'm sorry for it. I don't like the man's looks at all."
"He may be a good man. He was kind to invite me."
"He isn't a good man," said Nancy, positively. "He's got a mean sort of look to his face."
"You mustn't try to prejudice me before I go to him, Nancy."
"You'll think as I do before you've been there a week," said Nancy, shaking her head. "I took a good look at him when he was here, and I didn't like his looks."
[Pg 56]
"He isn't very handsome," said Walter, smiling; "but everybody can't be handsome." ”

“ The Berringers wouldn't have had him, the Hollisters and Dickinsons wouldn't have had him if his work lacked taste."
"And Nancy wouldn't have had him," added Maude, and she smiled once more.
"Well, I haven't consulted Nancy, or anyone else," I replied—a little tartly, perhaps. "You don't seem to realize that some fashions may have a basis of reason. They are not all silly, as Lucia seems to think. If Lammerton builds satisfactory houses, he ought to be forgiven for being the fashion, he ought to have a chance." ”

“ Loomis counted her stitches, "though he appears to me to be very true and steadfast. He may not be exactly what you might consider temperamental, but certainly he is appreciative and devoted to you; moreover, he is a young man of fine character, and that is worth everything. I am sure he loves you deeply."
"No, no," Nancy sprang to her feet and waved away the suggestion with a dramatic gesture, then she seated herself at her mother's feet on the doorsill, resting her chin in her hands. "No man who was devoted to a girl could be content with such a humdrum, settled state of affairs. ”

“ Will Mather was about two years older than Nancy—a fine youth, attending the same school, and evidently an admirer of Nancy. Mine was the love of comparative boyhood; but his was a passion gradually ripening (as the charms of Nancy budded into womanhood) into a manly and matrimonial feeling. I loved the girl merely as such—his eye, his heart, his whole soul were in his future bride. Marriage in no shape ever entered into my computations; but his eager look and heaving bosom bespoke the definite purpose—he anticipated felicity. ”

“ Nancy looked fixedly at the small side-table where the stranger had just placed himself as if he were etched upon the whiteness of the wall behind him. He sat erect and brooding,—his dark, rather melancholy eyes staring straight ahead, and a slight frown wrinkling his really fine forehead. He wore an Inverness cape slung over one shoulder.
“Looks like one of Rembrandt’s portraits of himself,” Caroline suggested.
“He looks like a brigand,” Betty said. “Nancy’s struck dumb with the privilege of adding fuel to a flame of genius like that. Wake up and eat your peach Melba, Nancy.” ”

“ I found that a short holiday was quite necessary for my health, and, oddly enough, I just hit off the Orotava at Gibraltar. That overland service is very useful. So I thought I would come in and let you know how Nancy was."
There was a moment's tense silence, during which they looked at each other steadily, Lumsden with a touch of cold mirth twinkling in his handsome eyes.
"Well?" she said, with a half-mocking smile, while a great triumph swelled within her. ”

“ The Lippetts are a good old family, so are the Carters and the Gordons. Don't look so tragic, dear. I declare when those big eyes of yours get that expression you fairly frighten me. Why I had had half a dozen affairs before I met Mr. Loomis and I am sure no one could have been happier than we were. There is no more beautiful memory to me than our honeymoon in Cuba and Mexico. Everyone has said they never knew anything more romantic." She sighed a little.
"That is why you love Spanish, isn't it mamma?" said Nancy. ”

“ The Senator glances at Nancy Dampier; she is looking very lovely this afternoon, but her face is flushed, her manner is restless, agitated, she looks what he has never seen her look till to-day, thoroughly ill at ease, and yet, yes, certainly less listless, more alive than she looked yesterday—before Gerald's arrival.
What strange creatures women are! The Senator does not exactly disapprove of Nancy's decision, but he regrets it bitterly. If only she would throw in her lot with Gerald—come to America, her mind made up never to return to Europe again, why then even now they might all be happy. ”

“ The twilight deepened to dusk, to darkness. The storm, having spent the intensity of its passion in those first moments of heavy downpour and wind, had relaxed to a gentle rain that pattered on the roof, and from the stream came recurringly the dirge of the frogs. All I could see of Nancy was the dim outline of her head and shoulders: she seemed fantastically to be escaping me, to be fading, to be going; in sudden desperation I dropped on my knees beside her, and I felt her hands straying with a light yet agonized touch, over my head. ”

“ I suppose I ought to have thought Miss Lammas a very odd girl. There is, indeed, a sort of freemasonry between people who discover that they live near each other and that they ought to have known each other before. But there was a sort of unexpected frankness and simplicity in the girl's amusing manner which would have struck any one else as being singular, to say the least of it. ”

“ 'There never was another man with such a face as yours, unless it was your father, and I suppose he is singeing his grizzled red beard by this time, unless you came straight from the old 'un without any father at all betwixt you; which I shouldn't wonder at, a bit.'
Fagin offered no reply to this compliment: but, pulling Sikes by the sleeve, pointed his finger towards Nancy, who had taken advantage of the foregoing conversation to put on her bonnet, and was now leaving the room. ”

“ They walked, the three of them, across to the porte-cochère.
Nancy Dampier was now sitting crouched up in a corner of the fiacre; a handkerchief was pressed to her face, and she was trying, not very successfully, to stifle her sobs of nervous fear and distress.
With an eager, impulsive gesture the American girl leapt up the step of the little open carriage. "Don't cry," she whispered soothingly. "It will all come right soon! Why, I expect your husband just went out to see a friend and got kept somehow. ”

“ THE TIME ARRIVES FOR NANCY TO REDEEM HER PLEDGE TO ROSE MAYLIE. SHE FAILS.
Adept as she was, in all the arts of cunning and dissimulation, the girl Nancy could not wholly conceal the effect which the knowledge of the step she had taken, wrought upon her mind. ”

“ It might seem singular that Nancy—with her religious theory pieced together out of narrow social traditions, fragments of church doctrine imperfectly understood, and girlish reasonings on her small experience—should have arrived by herself at a way of thinking so nearly akin to that of many devout people, whose beliefs are held in the shape of a system quite remote from her knowledge—singular, if we did not know that human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barriers of system. ”

“ Tess soon perceived as she walked in the flock, sometimes with this one, sometimes with that, that the fresh night air was producing staggerings and serpentine courses among the men who had partaken too freely; some of the more careless women also were wandering in their gait—to wit, a dark virago, Car Darch, dubbed Queen of Spades, till lately a favourite of d’Urberville’s; Nancy, her sister, nicknamed the Queen of Diamonds; and the young married woman who had already tumbled down. ”

“ Nancy waded out to her own rocks and searched her own pools and let that couple look after themselves. She crouched low down and touched the smooth rubber-like sea anemones, who were stuck like lumps of jelly to the side of the rock. Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down. ”

“ Miss Nancy, indeed, had never been to any school higher than Dame Tedman’s: her acquaintance with profane literature hardly went beyond the rhymes she had worked in her large sampler under the lamb and the shepherdess; and in order to balance an account, she was obliged to effect her subtraction by removing visible metallic shillings and sixpences from a visible metallic total. There is hardly a servant-maid in these days who is not better informed than Miss Nancy ”

“ Fledgeby deserved Mr Alfred Lammle's eulogium. He was the meanest cur existing, with a single pair of legs. And instinct (a word we all clearly understand) going largely on four legs, and reason always on two, meanness on four legs never attains the perfection of meanness on two.
The father of this young gentleman had been a money-lender, who had transacted professional business with the mother of this young gentleman, when he, the latter, was waiting in the vast dark ante- chambers of the present world to be born. The lady, a widow, being unable to pay the money-lender, married him ”

“ I should never have married anybody else. But I wasn’t worth doing wrong for—nothing is in this world. Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand—not even our marrying wasn’t, you see.” There was a faint sad smile on Nancy’s face as she said the last words.
“I’m a worse man than you thought I was, Nancy,” said Godfrey, rather tremulously. ”

“ Nancy was more impulsive than industrious, more generous than wise, more plucky than prudent; she had none too much perseverance and no patience at all. ”

“ These circumstances exalted her inward drama in her own eyes, and deepened the emphasis with which she declared to herself that not the most dazzling rank should induce her to marry a man whose conduct showed him careless of his character, but that, “love once, love always”, was the motto of a true and pure woman, and no man should ever have any right over her which would be a call on her to destroy the dried flowers that she treasured, and always would treasure, for Godfrey Cass’s sake. And Nancy was capable of keeping her word to herself under very trying conditions. ”

“ However, the great subject of the happiness of Mr and Mrs Lammle must not be allowed to vanish with the other vanishments—with the vanishing of the murderer, the vanishing of Julius Handford, the vanishing of Lizzie Hexam,—and therefore Veneering must recall the present sheep to the pen from which they have strayed. Who so fit to discourse of the happiness of Mr and Mrs Lammle, they being the dearest and oldest friends he has in the world ”

“ Such is Francis Lamotte, and being such, he is voted, with one consent, the handsomest young man in W——. Francis Lamotte, too, is popular with the people of W——; handsome and fascinating, the son of a father whose fortune is said to be enormous; he is welcomed in every household circle, and he brings pleasure and courtesy wherever he enters.
"Constance, my child, what is this that I hear?" exclaims Jasper Lamotte, taking the hand of Miss Wardour as she advances to meet him. "Have they not exaggerated the truth? The village is full of rumors." ”

“ Again shaking her head, she returned: ‘They will never quarrel with the girl. They will never punish the girl. We must accept the girl, rely upon it.’
‘Well!’ cried Lammle, shrugging his shoulders, ‘so be it: only always remember that we don’t want her.’
‘Now, the sole remaining question is,’ said Mrs Lammle, ‘when shall I begin?’
‘You cannot begin too soon, Sophronia. As I have told you, the condition of our affairs is desperate, and may be blown upon at any moment.’
‘I must secure Mr Boffin alone, Alfred. If his wife was present, she would throw oil upon the waters. ”

“ "We'll never speak of 'last times,' Gilly, or where would any of us be? We'll always think of 'next' times. I shall trust Nancy next time, and next time and next time, and keep on trusting till I can trust her forever!" ”

“ This charming girl having the words repeated to her by Mrs Boffin (who was proud of her being admired, and would have done anything to give her pleasure) , naturally recognized in Mrs Lammle a woman of penetration and taste. Responding to the sentiments, by being very gracious to Mrs Lammle, she gave that lady the means of so improving her opportunity, as that the captivation became reciprocal, though always wearing an appearance of greater sobriety on Bella's part than on the enthusiastic Sophronia's. ”

“ Laminski's brow clouded when they spoke these things darkly; and when Laminski was angry it boded no good to anyone. However, in order that nobody should ever say he was seen too often coming down the stairs of that angel's house, he adopted an excellent and saving device: he removed from madame's, that Bohemian pension, and took a room au sixiéme, just above Essie's, in the self-same house in the Boulevard St. Michel. Sacred name of a dog, nobody can blame a man for being seen at night about his own apartments. ”

“ There, go, and don't look so abjectly hopeless. We have nothing to do at present, but to quiet Belknap. Good night."
With lagging steps, Frank Lamotte ascends the stairs, and enters his own room. He locks the door with a nervous hand, and then hurriedly lowers the curtains. He goes to the mirror, and gazes at his reflected self,—hollow, burning eyes, haggard cheeks, blanched lips, that twitch convulsively, a mingled expression of desperation, horror, and despair,—that is what he sees, and the sight does not serve to steady his nerves. He turns away, with a curse upon the white lips. ”

“ She’s been a naughty girl, and she needs discipline.”
“This isn’t funny,” grumbled Billy. “You get on the other side of the house, and catch her when she comes out. I’ll chase her out with this long stick.” Jane looked dubious, and he continued: “And don’t let her slip through your fingers!” He waved his branch, and out streaked Queenie, right through Janie’s outstretched hands and into Landry’s flower bed. There she sat nibbling on asters, and every time they would get close enough to lay hands on her, she would dash off to another corner of the yard. ”