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

these would-be noble dimensions, and as ugly a form of chamber is produced as any upon which the eye can look. I wouldsay more on the subject if I dared to do so here, but I am bound now to confine myself to Miss Vavasor’s room. The monstrous deformity of which I have spoken was not known when that house in Queen Anne Street 1 was built. There is to be found no such abomination of shape in the buildings of our ancestors, — not even in the days of George the Second. But yet the drawing-room of which I speak wasugly, and Alice knew that it was so. She knew that it was ugly, and she would greatly have liked to banish the green sofa, to have re-papered the wall, and to have hung up curtains with a dash of pink through them. With the green carpet she would have been contented. But her father was an extravagant man; and from the day on which she had come of age she had determined that it was her special dutyto avoid extravagance.
    ‘It’s the ugliest room I ever saw in my life,’ her father once said to her.
    ‘It is not very pretty,’ Alice replied.
    ‘I’ll go halves with you in the expense of redoing it,’ said Mr Vavasor.
    ‘Wouldn’t that be extravagant, papa? The things have not been here quite four years yet.’
    Then Mr Vavasor had shrugged his shoulders and said nothing more about it. It was littleto him whether the drawing-room in Queen Anne Street was ugly or pretty. He was on the committee of his dub, and he took care that the furniture there should be in all respects comfortable.
    It was now June; and that month Lady Macleod was in the habit of spending among her noble relatives in London when she had succeeded in making both ends so far overlap each other at Cheltenham as to give herthe fifty pounds necessary for this purpose. For though she spent her month in London among her noblefriends, it must not be supposed that her noble friends gave her bed or board. They sometimes gave her tea, such as it was, and once or twice in the month they gave the old lady a second-rate dinner. On these occasions she hired a little parlour and bedroom behind it in King Street, Saint James’s,and lived a hot, uncomfortable life, going about at nights to gatherings of fashionable people of which she in her heart disapproved, seeking for smiles which seldom came to her, and which she excused herself for desiring because they were the smiles of her kith and her kin, telling herself always that she made this vain journey to the modern Babylon for the good of Alice Vavasor, and tellingherself as often that she now made it for the last time. On the occasion of her preceding visit she had reminded herself that she was then seventy-five years old, and had sworn to herself that she would come to London no more; but here she was again in London, having justified the journey to herself on the plea that there were circumstances in Alice’s engagement which made it desirable that she shouldfor a while be near her niece. Her niece, as she thought, was hardly managing her own affairs discreetly.
    ‘Well, aunt,’ said Alice, as the old lady walked into the drawing-room one morning at eleven o’clock. Alice always called Lady Macleod her aunt, though, as has been before explained, there was no such close connection between them. During Lady Macleod’s sojourn in London these morning visitswere made almost every day. Alice never denied herself, and even made a point of remaining at home to receive them unless she had previously explained that she would be out; but I am not prepared to say that they were, of their own nature, agreeable to her.
    ‘Would you mind shutting the window, my dear?’ said Lady Macleod, seating herself stiffly on one of the small ugly green chairs. She hadbeen educated at a time when easy-chairs were considered vicious, and among people who regarded all easy postures as being so; and she could still boast, at seventy-six, that she never leaned back. ‘Would you mind shutting the window? I’m so warm that