Miriam Monfort eBook

Catherine Anne Warfield
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 583 pages of information about Miriam Monfort.

Miriam Monfort eBook

Catherine Anne Warfield
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 583 pages of information about Miriam Monfort.

The autumn and winter passed very quietly.  In Mrs. Stanbury and Laura I again found my chief consolation.  George Gaston was in the South, for his health, on his own decayed plantation, with his uncle, who took charge of it.  But, in the spring, as Dr. Pemberton had stated, they were all to go to Europe for some years.  Laura would be married in Paris, if at all.  Every thing depended on some investigations Mr. Gerald Stanbury was to make in person as to the character and position of her betrothed.  “For a Prussian nobleman may be a Prussian boot-black for aught I know,” he observed, “and without derogation to his dignity, no doubt, in that land of pipes and fiddlers.  But an American sovereign requires something better than that when he gives away the hand of the princess, his relative, and endows her with a goodly dowry.  Every man, we feel, is a king in America.”

Our circle of society was much enlarged by Evelyn after our first year of mourning had expired.  She insisted on taking me with her in turn to Washington, Boston, and Saratoga Springs, then at their acme of fashion.  Mr. Bainrothe, who had by this time glided back into his old grooves of apparent sociability in our household, accompanied us, and did all in his power, it seemed, to promote our enjoyment and success.

Yet it was astonishing what an icy barrier still remained between us two, and how perfectly I managed, without a conscious effort, to set a limit to his approaches, even while treating him with apparent courtesy and confidence.

Something in his eye, his manner, had become extremely unpleasant to me since our social relations had been resumed.  There was a controlled ardor in his expression of face and even in his demeanor that I could not reconcile with his position toward me nor understand, and yet which froze my blood in spite of my best endeavors to repel the thoughts suggested.

“I am very morbid and fanciful, certainly,” I said to myself, “even to think such a thing possible.  At his age, and knowing full well my opinion of him, my sentiments toward him—­he surely would not dare—!” I could not even in my own heart finish out a conjecture that dyed my face and throat crimson, or mahogany-color, as Evelyn would have averred contemptuously could she have witnessed my solitary confusion.

“I have clung to him too much,” I thought; “it is my own fault if he throws too much of the tone of tenderness in his manner, when, distasteful as he is to me, his arm, his protection, have seemed to me preferable to those of a stranger, and I have accepted them merely to avoid the advances of others.

“I am not in the mood to be sentimental, or susceptible either, after my bitter experience, and the idea he so carefully instills is ever present to me—­strive as I will to repel it—­the thought that I am sought alone for my fortune!

“Yet I am not wholly unattractive, probably, though less beautiful than Evelyn.  But what, after all, is beauty?  Plainer women than I are loved and sought in marriage, who possess no gift of fortune or accomplishment.

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Project Gutenberg
Miriam Monfort from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.