2012年11月4日星期日

The union had been a happy one

The union had been a happy one, though the de Tracys of Stoke Revel had always regarded the unfortunately named architect more as a vegetable than a human being; and the daughter of the marriage was the young Mrs. Loring now driving in the station fly to the home of her mother's people.
Her father had died when she was fifteen and her mother followed three years after, leaving her with a respectable fortune but no relations,knockoff handbags; the entire family (happily, Mrs. de Tracy would have said) having died out with Harold. Robinette was unspeakably lonely, even with her hundred friends, for there was enough English blood in her to make her cry out inwardly for kith and kin, for family ties, for all the dear familiar backgrounds of hearth and home. Had a welcoming hand been stretched across the sea she would have flown at once to make acquaintance with the de Tracys, cold and indifferent as they had always been, but no bidding ever came, and the picture of the Manor House of Stoke Revel on her dressing-table was the only reminder of her connection with that ancient and honourable house.
It is not difficult to see, under the circumstances, how the nineteen-year-old Robinette became the wife of the first man in whom she inspired a serious passion.
It is incredible that women should confuse the passive process of being loved with the active process of loving, but it occurs nevertheless, and Robinette drifted into marriage with the vaguest possible notions of what it meant; feeling and knowing that she needed something, and supposing it must be a husband. It was better fortune, perhaps, than she merited, and equally kind for both parties,fake uggs, that her husband died before either of them realized the tragic mistake. David Loring was too absorbed in his own emotions to note the absence of full response on the part of his wife; Robinette was too much a child and too inexperienced to be conscious of her own lack of feeling.
It was death, not life, that opened her eyes. When David Loring lay in his coffin, Robinette's heart was suddenly seized with growing pains. Her vision widened; words and promises took on a new and larger meaning, and she became a serious woman for her years, although there was an ineradicable gaiety of spirit in her that needed only sunshine to make it the dominant note of her nature.
At the moment, Robinette, in the station fly on her way to Stoke Revel, was only in the making, although she herself considered her life as practically finished. The past and the present were moulding her into something that only the future could determine. Sometimes April, sometimes July, sometimes witch, sometimes woman; impetuous, intrepid, romantic, tempestuous, illogical,--these were but the elements of which the coming years of experience had yet to shape a character. Young Mrs. Loring had plenty of briars, but she had good roots and in favorable soil would be certain to bear roses.
But in the immediate present, the fly with the immense American wardrobe trunk beside the driver,cheap designer handbags, turned into the avenue of Stoke Revel, and Mrs. David Loring bestowed upon herself those little feminine attentions which precede arrival--pattings of the hair behind the ears, twitches of the veil, and pullings down about the waist and sleeves. A little toy of a purse made of golden chainwork, hanging from her wrist,mont blanc pens, was searched for the driver's fare, and it had hardly snapped to again when the fly drew up before the entrance to the house. How interesting it looked! Robinette put her head out of the carriage window and gazed up at the long row of windows, the old weather-coloured stones, and the carved front of the building. Here was a house where things might happen, she thought, and her young heart gave a sudden bound of anticipation.

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