Innocent : her fancy and his fact by Marie Corelli
page 87 of 503 (17%)
page 87 of 503 (17%)
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printed. But she never made the trial, for the reason that such
newspaper literature as found its way into Briar Farm filled her with amazement, repulsion and disgust. There was nothing in any modern magazine that at all resembled the delicate, pointed and picturesque phraseology of the Sieur Amadis! Strange, coarse slang-words were used,--and the news of the day was slung together in loose ungrammatical sentences and chopped-up paragraphs of clumsy construction, lacking all pith and eloquence. So, repelled by the horror of twentieth-century "style," she had hidden her manuscripts deeper than ever in the old bureau, under little silk sachets of dried rose-leaves and lavender, as though they were love-letters or old lace. And when sometimes she shut herself up and read them over she felt like one of Hamlet's "guilty creatures sitting at a play." Her literary attempts seemed to reproach her for their inadequacy, and when she made some fresh addition to her store of written thoughts, her crimes seemed to herself doubled and weighted. She would often sit musing, with a little frown puckering her brow, wondering why she should be moved to write at all, yet wholly unable to resist the impulse. To-night, however, she scarcely remembered these outbreaks of her dreaming fancy,--the sordid, hard, matter-of-fact side of life alone presented itself to her depressed imagination. She pictured herself going into service--as what? Kitchen-maid, probably,--she was not tall enough for a house-parlourmaid. House-parlourmaids were bound to be effective,--even dignified,--in height and appearance. She had seen one of these superior beings in church on Sundays--a slim, stately young woman with waved hair and a hat as fashionable as that worn by her mistress, the Squire's lady. With a deepening sense of humiliation, Innocent felt that her very |
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