A PERFECT FOOL.
CHAPTER I. THE GREAT MAN OF A LITTLE TOWN.
“My dear, the girl’s a perfect fool. What her poor mother is going to do with her I don’t know. As for teaching, I don’t believe she knows anything herself. And as for getting married, why, I’m perfectly certain she doesn’t know beef from mutton, and couldn’t tell the difference between a cabbage and a cauliflower. I should be very sorry for the man who took Chris Abercarne for a wife!”
So spoke one of Chris Abercarne’s mother’s friends to another old lady, who was of exactly the same way of thinking, as a pretty girl, with dark-brown hair and merry dark blue eyes, passed the window of a dull house in a dull road in that part of Hammersmith which calls itself West Kensington.
Indeed, matters had come to a serious point with Chris and her mother. The widow of an officer in the army, Mrs. Abercarne, having only the one child, had got on very comfortably for some years, until one of those periodical upheavals of “things in the city” had caused a sudden diminution of her small income, and brought the two ladies face to face with actual instead of conventional, poverty. Poor Mrs. Abercarne felt utterly helpless; and Chris, merry Chris who hitherto had had nothing to do but to laugh and keep her mother and her friends in good spirits, found with surprising suddenness that some aspects of life are no laughing matter.
At first there had been a vague tendency on the ladies’ part to trust to the help of their rich and well-born relations. But this tendency was checked very early by the uncompromising tone of their relations’ letters. It was clear that to get out of their difficulties they had no one but themselves to rely upon. Mrs. Abercarne was a hopeful woman, however, with an enormous belief in her own untried powers. She had an unacknowledged belief that nothing very dreadful ever did, or ever could, happen to the widow of a Colonel, who was also the granddaughter of an Admiral, and first cousin to the son of a Marquis. She would manage, so she said a hundred times, to pull herself and her “little daughter” through their difficulties.
Chris she had always treated as a baby, a very sweet and charming child, but a creature to be tenderly cared for and played with, not to be trusted or confided in. Mrs. Abercarne had old-fashioned notions about the bringing-up of girls, and she would have been reduced to her last crust before consenting to allow her daughter to leave her, except as a wife.
Now Chris, without daring openly to combat her mother’s opinion that she was a mere baby, unfit by reason of her tender years to have a voice in any serious discussion, had her own views as to the wisdom of her adored mother’s behaviour, over which she brooded in secret. She could not help feeling that she was by no means the helpless creature her mother and her mother’s friends imagined, and she set about devising plans whereby she might bring such wits as she possessed to their common aid.
To this end she used to buy The Times, and the other daily papers, and search their columns with a view to finding a rapid and easy way of making a fortune.