"But, of
course, if I could not get on without the young man, I should put up with
any conditions. But I can get on without him perfectly! I don't want to
marry him. But I do--I _do_ want to be friends!"
"Lydia! Mother says you'll be late if you don't get ready," said a voice
from the porch.
"Why, I am ready! I have only to put on my hat."
"Mother thought you'd change."
"Then mother was quite wrong. My best cotton frock is good enough for any
young man!" laughed Lydia.
Susan descended the garden steps. She was a much thinner and dimmer
version of her sister. One seemed to see her pale cheeks, her dark eyes
and hair, her small mouth, through mist, like a Whistler portrait. She
moved very quietly, and her voice was low, and a little dragging. The
young vicar of a neighbouring hamlet in the fells, who admired her
greatly, thought of her as playing "melancholy"--in the contemplative
Miltonic sense--to Lydia's "mirth." She was a mystery to him; a mystery
he would have liked to unravel. But she was also a mystery to her family.
She shut herself up a good deal with her books; she had written two
tragedies in blank verse; and she held feminist views, vague yet fierce.
She was apparently indifferent to men, much more so than Lydia, who
frankly preferred their society to that of her own sex; but Lydia noticed
that if the vicar, Mr. Franklin, did not call for a week Susan would
ingeniously invent some device or other for peremptorily inducing him to
do so.
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