Robert Elsmere by Mrs. Humphry Ward
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page 9 of 1065 (00%)
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wound up by administering some sal-volatile to her.'
'Well, and after the sal-volatile did you get anything coherent out of her on the subject of the young man?' 'By degrees,' said the girl, her eyes twinkling; 'if one can only remember the thread between whiles one gets at the facts somehow. In between the death of Mr. Elsmere's father and his going to college, we had, let me see,--the spare room curtains, the making of them and the, cleaning of them, Sarah's idiocy in sticking to her black sheep of a young man, the price of tea when she married, Mr. Thornburgh's singular preference of boiled mutton to roast, the poems she had written to her when she was eighteen, and I can't tell you what else besides. But I held fast, and every now and then I brought her up to the point again, gently but firmly, and now I think I know all I want to know about the interesting stranger.' 'My ideas about him are not many,' said Agnes, rubbing her cheek gently up and down the purring cat, 'and there doesn't seem to be much order in them. He is very accomplished--a teetotaller--he has been to the Holy Land, and his hair has been out close after a fever. It sounds odd, but I am not curious. I can very well wait till to-morrow evening.' 'Oh, well, as to ideas about a person, one doesn't got that sort of thing from Mrs. Thornburgh. But I know how old he is, where he went to college, where his mother lives, a certain number of his mother's peculiarities which seem to be Irish and curious, where his living is, how much it is worth, likewise the color of his eyes, as near as Mrs. Thornburgh can get.' |
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