Jennie About to Be Read Free

that she’d be in it by her seventeenth birthday, though she was a gentle child and didn’t complain about being kept in the nursery now.
    â€œI owe it to Lottie to go away,” said Jennie virtuously. She rose from her knees and shut the casement on both the boy’s and the bird’s whistling. “Uncle and Aunt Higham needn’t reproach themselves with anything. They will have done their best. One cannot ask for more.”
    She put away the old robe and slippers and got back into bed. Her body strained so hard to be gone that her heart raced as if she were running. She picked up her volume of Mr. Wordsworth’s poems and began to read his “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” The eloquently simple lines gave dignity to her sadness.
    From Aunt Higham’s viewpoint the scheme should have been working well by now. The girl was educated, a disadvantage which might have been transcended if she’d had even a modest fortune, but she had only a pittance from her mother, just enough to keep her in hairpins and ribbons. However, she had good country manners, nothing artificial or simpering. She had fine, clean-cut features, she was naturally graceful without having attended deportment classes, and she liked to dance. She was thin but healthy. She had no monthly pains and vapors, a benefit which would cancel out the financial drawbacks if a man was looking for a strong young woman of good stock to give him heirs.
    â€œYou’ll make a fine wife if you know enough when to hold your tongue,” her aunt told her. “You’ll get nowhere with that saucy way of yours! You frighten a man, asking him what he thinks of this poet or that philosopher. George Vinton stares as if he can’t believe his ears. ‘Does God exist?’ I thought he’d strangle!”
    â€œI asked him theological questions, suitable for a curate,” said Jennie. “He must have studied Emmanuel Kant at Cambridge.”
    â€œFiddlesticks!” said her aunt. “Anyone would think you were trying to drive him and the rest off. Save that bluestocking talk until you’ve married the man and the first one’s on the way. Then he’ll run from you only as far as Almack’s or Newmarket, and he’ll always come home again.”
    â€œWhat sort of curate would go to Almack’s or Newmarket?” Jennie pondered aloud.
    â€œGeorge Vinton will have some money when his mother goes, and he has the reversion of a very fine living when his uncle dies. You’d be the mistress of a bigger rectory than William’s, and close to a cathedral town, too, with great chances of preferment for George.” It tasted good to Aunt Higham. “I will thank God if Charlotte has such a chance offered her.”
    â€œI think George would be willing to wait for her,” Jennie suggested.
    â€œFustian!” her aunt snapped. “You’re the one to be married off first. A woman like you could make George Vinton go far. He needs a strong hand. But you’ll have to keep your heretical thoughts to yourself and not go questioning the existence of God in ecclesiastical circles.”
    â€œI was only trying to stir George up,” Jennie explained. “He was sitting there looking quite torpid.”
    â€œMore like a bird hypnotized by a snake,” her aunt said dryly.
    â€œAnyway, I don’t question God’s existence. Only His motives.”
    â€œOh, Lord!” Her aunt rolled her eyes toward the plaster wreaths on the ceiling. She shook her head. But her mouth twitched at one corner. “You’re a good lass, Jennie, and you were always my favorite, for you look the most like my sister. You’re an Everden far more than any of my children are. You have her way of holding yourself, the long neck and the tilt of the head. And of laughing. When I see you dancing, if it weren’t for the difference in fashion