Friendship and Folly: The Merriweather Chronicles Book I Read Free Page A

youngest children--Margaret, Louisa, and Idelette--were born; and there my heroine dwelt in great contentment until her nineteenth year, when her grandfather’s partiality sprang up in a rather unexpected form, and impelled her, willy-nilly, to London.
    **

Chapter III

    Let it at once be said in extenuation of Lord Meravon, that Julia seemed expressly fashioned to dazzle and reign in Society. One might have commented that Miss Parry was a very pretty girl, as one might comment that the surface of the sun is very hot--both assertions being notable for their truth, simplicity, and almost stunning inadequacy.
    In all likelihood Mrs. Northcott gave voice to the convictions of the majority when she opined to her daughter that, “If the Parrys persist in their intention not to take Julia up to Court, it will be an illustration of unworldliness indistinguishable from stupidity. She had not thought that even of them.”
    The Northcotts were the inhabitants of Hellwick Hall, a much smaller estate bordering Merriweather. It was accepted at Hellwick that the Parrys were to be indulged for their position, pitied for their contentment, and despised for opportunities left unseized; and if, in his efforts to conform to these correct but not altogether compatible sentiments, Mr. Northcott’s became on occasion so convoluted as to be easily mistaken for a kind of wistful envy, such lapses were not regarded. He was a quiet man, possessed of a comfortable income, and a lineage so riddled with titles of every description, that it was a source of amazement that one of them had not already devolved upon his person. This promising lineage had won for him his lady, who was possessed of an Ancient Name, and particularly elegant, Elizabethan hands, to which she was devoted. Her excesses in gloves, lotions and rings aside, Mrs. Northcott was a woman of sense, and having been denied that standing in society which would have made her arrival in town a matter of consequence and expectation, she had for years bowed to the unaccountable whims of Providence, and divided her year between Hellwick Hall and Bath. I do not say she was resigned to her lot: not for her, the meek renunciation of Thy-will-be-done. Rather, she acknowledged, with regret, her inability to persuade Providence of the superiority of her own designs, and inclined her head, as one stiffly conceding the victory to an opponent boasting an unfair advantage. Had she been the one to create the universe, you may be very sure she would not have abused her powers, by refusing her creatures the honors they deserved by prolonging, to a ridiculous extent, the respiration of various ancient in-laws.
    Nor was this her sole grievance. Heaven had apparently marked the Northcotts out for adversity from the very beginning of their connection, though as Mrs. Northcott was not, as she herself acknowledged, one to make a display of her afflictions, perhaps none but themselves knew how severe and unrelenting these were. For instance, instead of a son whom they might vaunt and spoil, and heap with all the educational privileges designed to turn out the Perfect Well-Bred Young Gentleman (after the model of the fourth Earl of Chesterfield, whom Mrs. Northcott claimed as a relation, though one distant-almost-to-the-point-of-invisibility), the Northcotts had been given, after many years’ wait, a mere daughter, and one, moreover, who was seen at once to have inherited a thoroughly commonplace pair of hands. Furthermore, Ann---named for an obdurate great-aunt who, declining to take the hint, left her fortune elsewhere--was not even prudent enough to come laden with the good looks and amenable disposition which must assure her, if nothing else, the approbation of her parents in the ease and advantage with which she could be puffed off and married. She was, on the contrary, in no way remarkable in either face or form, and further augmented her deficiencies by falling, Humpty-Dumptylike, off a wall at the age of