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Some
Short Stories
We are
scattered now, the friends of the late Mr.
Oliver Offord; but whenever we chance to meet I
think we are conscious of a certain esoteric
respect for each other. "Yes, you too have been
in Arcadia," we seem not too grumpily to allow.
When I pass the house in Mansfield Street I
remember that Arcadia was there. I don't know
who has it now, and don't want to know; it's
enough to be so sure that if I should ring the
bell there would be no such luck for me as that
Brooksmith should open the door. Mr. Offord, the
most agreeable, the most attaching of bachelors,
was a retired diplomatist, living on his pension
and on something of his own over and above; a
good deal confined, by his infirmities, to his
fireside and delighted to be found there any
afternoon in the year, from five o'clock on, by
such visitors as Brooksmith allowed to come up.
Brooksmith was his butler and his most intimate
friend, to whom we all stood, or I should say
sat, in the same relation in which the subject
of the sovereign finds himself to the prime
minister. By having been for years, in foreign
lands, the most delightful Englishman any one
had ever known, Mr. Offord had in my opinion
rendered signal service to his country. But I
suppose he had been too much liked—liked even by
those who didn't like IT—so that as people of
that sort never get titles or dotations for the
horrid things they've NOT done, his principal
reward was simply that we went to see him...
The
Spoils of Poynton
Mrs. Gereth had said she would go with
the rest to church, but suddenly it seemed to
her that she should not be able to wait even
till church-time for relief: breakfast, at
Waterbath, was a punctual meal, and she had
still nearly an hour on her hands. Knowing the
church to be near, she prepared in her room for
the little rural walk, and on her way down again,
passing through corridors and observing
imbecilities of decoration, the æsthetic misery
of the big commodious house, she felt a return
of the tide of last night's irritation, a
renewal of everything she could secretly suffer
from ugliness and stupidity. Why did she consent
to such contacts, why did she so rashly expose
herself? She had had, heaven knew, her reasons,
but the whole experience was to be sharper than
she had feared. To get away from it and out into
the air, into the presence of sky and trees,
flowers and birds, was a necessity of every
nerve. The flowers at Waterbath would probably
go wrong in color and the nightingales sing out
of tune; but she remembered to have heard the
place described as possessing those advantages
that are usually spoken of as natural. There
were advantages enough it clearly didn't possess.
It was hard for her to believe that a woman
could look presentable who had been kept awake
for hours by the wall-paper in her room; yet
none the less, as in her fresh widow's weeds she
rustled across the hall, she was sustained by
the consciousness, which always added to the
unction of her social Sundays, that she was, as
usual, the only person in the house incapable of
wearing in her preparation the horrible stamp of
the same exceptional smartness that would be
conspicuous in a grocer's wife...
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