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Frivolous Cupid By: Anthony Hope (1863-1933) |
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BY SIR ANTHONY HOPE HAWKINS (ANTHONY HOPE, PSEUD.)
Cupid, I met thee yesterday
With an empty quiver,
Coming from Clarinda's house
By the reedy river. And I saw Clarinda stand
Near the pansies, weeping,
With her hands upon her breast
All thine arrows keeping.
CONTENTS I. RELUCTANCE
II. WHY MEN DON'T MARRY
III. A CHANGE OF HEART
IV. A REPENTANT SINNER
V. 'TWIXT WILL AND WILL NOT
VI. WHICH SHALL IT BE?
VII. MARRIAGE BY COMPULSION
VIII. ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL
FRIVOLOUS CUPID.
I. RELUCTANCE. I. Neither life nor the lawn tennis club was so full at Natterley that the
news of Harry Sterling's return had not some importance. He came back, moreover, to assume a position very different from his
old one. He had left Harrow now, departing in the sweet aroma of a
long score against Eton at Lord's, and was to go up to Oxford in
October. Now between a schoolboy and a University man there is a gulf,
indicated unmistakably by the cigarette which adorned Harry's mouth as
he walked down the street with a newly acquiescent father, and
thoroughly realized by his old playmates. The young men greeted him as
an equal, the boys grudgingly accepted his superiority, and the girls
received him much as though they had never met him before in their
lives and were pressingly in need of an introduction. These features
of his reappearance amused Mrs. Mortimer; she recollected him as an
untidy, shy, pretty boy; but mind, working on matter, had so
transformed him that she was doubtful enough about him to ask her
husband if that were really Harry Sterling. Mr. Mortimer, mopping his bald head after one of his energetic failures
at lawn tennis, grunted assent, and remarked that a few years more
would see a like development in their elder son, a remark which
bordered on absurdity; for Johnny was but eight, and ten years are not
a few years to a lady of twenty eight, whatever they may seem to a man
of forty four. Presently Harry, shaking himself free from an entangling group of the
Vicarage girls, joined his father, and the two came across to Mrs.
Mortimer. She was a favorite of old Sterling's, and he was proud to present his
handsome son to her. She listened graciously to his jocosities,
stealing a glance at Harry when his father called him "a good boy."
Harry blushed and assumed an air of indifference, tossing his hair back
from his smooth forehead, and swinging his racket carelessly in his
hand. The lady addressed some words of patronizing kindness to him,
seeking to put him at his ease. She seemed to succeed to some extent,
for he let his father and her husband go off together, and sat down by
her on the bench, regardless of the fact that the Vicarage girls were
waiting for him to make a fourth. He said nothing, and Mrs. Mortimer looked at him from under her long
lashes; in so doing she discovered that he was looking at her. "Aren't you going to play any more, Mr. Sterling?" she asked. "Why aren't you playing?" he rejoined. "My husband says I play too badly." "Oh, play with me! We shall make a good pair." "Then you must be very good." "Well, no one can play a hang here, you know. Besides I'm sure you're
all right, really." "You forget my weight of years." He opened his blue eyes a little, and laughed. He was, in fact,
astonished to find that she was quite a young woman. Remembering old
Mortimer and the babies, he had thought of her as full middle aged.
But she was not; nor had she that likeness to a suet pudding, which his
newborn critical faculty cruelly detected in his old friends, the
Vicarage girls. There was one of them Maudie with whom he had flirted in his
holidays; he wondered at that, especially when a relentless memory told
him that Mrs. Mortimer must have been at the parties where the thing
went on. He felt very much older, so much older that Mrs. Mortimer
became at once a contemporary. Why, then, should she begin, as she now
did, to talk to him, in quasi maternal fashion, about his prospects?
Men don't have prospects, or, anyhow, are spared questionings thereon... Continue reading book >>
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Literature |
Romance |
Short stories |
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