"Oh, dear me, miss," the poor thing cried brokenly, "how should your young mind feel what an old woman feels: just grovelling in the past?"
She was gone; and, feeling very uncomfortable in my humiliation, I sat down and stared—at "the workbox." Why, why indeed, I thought angrily, why should I be responsible? Well, I suppose it's only when the poor fish—sturgeon or stickleback—struggles, that he really knows he's in the net.
Chapter Nineteen
One of the many perplexing problems that now hemmed me in was brushed away by Fortune that afternoon. Between gloomy bursts of reflection on Fanny's, Mr Crimble's, Mrs Bowater's, and my own account, I had been reading Miss Austen; and at about four o'clock was sharing Chapter XXIII. with poor Elinor:—
"The youthful infatuation of nineteen would naturally blind her to everything but her beauty and good nature, but the four succeeding years—years which, if rationally spent, give such improvements to the understanding—must have opened her eyes to her defects of Education, which the same period of time, spent on her side in inferior society and more frivolous pursuits...."
I say I was reading this passage, and had come to the words—"and more frivolous pursuits," when an unusually imperative rat-tat-tat fell upon the outer door, and I emerged from my book to discover that an impressive white-horsed barouche was drawn up in the street beyond my window. The horse tossed its head and chawed its frothy bit; and the coachman sat up beside his whip in the sparkling frosty afternoon air. My heart gave a thump, and I was still seeking vaguely to connect this event with myself or with Mr Bowater in Buenos Ayres, when the door opened and a lady entered whose plumed and purple bonnet was as much too small for her head as she herself was too large for the room. Yet in sheer dimensions this was not a very large lady. It was her "presence" that augmented her.
She seemed, too, to be perfectly accustomed to these special proportions, and with a rather haughty, "Thank you," to Mrs Bowater, winningly announced that she was Lady Pollacke, "a friend, a mutual friend, as I understand, of dear Mr Crimble's."