Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope Read Free Book Online

neighbours. She bore much pain with calm unspeaking endurance, and she lived in trust of a better world. Alice Vavasor, who was after all only her cousin, she loved with an exceeding love, and yet Alice had done very much to extinguish such love. Alice, in the years of her childhood, had been brought up by Lady Macleod; at the age of twelve she had been sentto a school at Aix-la-Chapelle, – a comitatus of her relatives having agreed that such was to be her fate, much in opposition to Lady Macleod’s judgement; at nineteen she had returned to Cheltenham, and after remaining there for little more than a year, had expressed her unwillingness to remain longer with her cousin. She could sympathize neither with her relative’s faults or virtues. She madean arrangement, therefore, with her father, that they two would keep house together in London, and so they had lived for the last five years; – for Alice Vavasor when she will be introduced to the reader had already passed her twenty-fourth birthday.
    Their mode of life had been singular and certainly not in all respects satisfactory. Alice when she was twenty-one had the full command of her ownfortune; and when she induced her father, who for the last fifteen years had lived in lodgings, to take a small house in Queen Anne Street, of course she offered to incur aportion of the expense. He had warned her that his habits were not those of a domestic man, but he had been content simply so to warn her. He had not felt it to be his duty to decline the arrangement because he knew himselfto be unable to give to his child all that attention which a widowed father under such circumstances should pay to an only daughter. The house had been taken, and Alice and he had lived together, but their lives had been quite apart For a short time, for a month or two, he had striven to dine at home and even to remain at home through the evening; but the work had been too hard for him and he hadutterly broken down. He had said to her and to himself that his health would fail him under the effects of so great a change made so late in life, and I am not sure that he had not spoken truly. At any rate the effort had been abandoned, and Mr Vavasor now never dined at home. Nor did he and his daughter ever dine out together. Their joint means did not admit of their giving dinners, and thereforethey could not make their Joint way in the same cirde. It thus came to pass that they lived apart, – quite apart. They saw each other, probably daily; but they did little more than see each other. They did not even breakfast together, and after three o’clock in the day Mr Vavasor was never to be found in his own house.
    Miss Vavasor had made for herself a certain footing in society, though I amdisposed to doubt her right to be considered as holding a place among the Upper Ten Thousand. Two classes of people she had chosen to avoid, having been driven to such avoidings by her aunt’s preferences; marquises and such-like, whether wicked or otherwise, she had eschewed, and had eschewed likewise all Low Church tendencies. The eschewing of marquises is not generally very difficult. Young ladiesliving with their fathers on very moderate incomes in or about Queen Anne Street are not usually much troubled on that matter. Nor can I say that Miss Vavasor was so troubled. But with her there was a certain definite thing to be done towards such eschewal Lady Macleod by no means avoided her noble relatives, nor did she at all avoid Alice Vavasor. When in London she was persevering in her visitsto Queen Anne Street, though she considered herself, nobody knew why, not to beon speaking terms with Mr Vavasor. And she strove hard to produce an intimacy between Alice and her noble relatives – such an intimacy as that which she herself enjoyed; – an intimacy which gave her a footing in their houses but no footing in their hearts, or even in their habits. But all this Alice declined with asmuch consistency as she did those other