Flower And Weed And Other Tales Primary Source Edition

Author : M. E. Braddon
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781330671283
Total Pages : 262 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (712 download)

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Download or read book Flower and Weed (Classic Reprint) written by M. E. Braddon and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-04 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Flower and Weed Lord Ingleshaw is something of a recluse, and his only daughter has not yet made her entrance upon the bustling theatre of society, to be elbowed and hustled by that common herd to which the doting father deems his child an infinitely superior being. Her eighteenth birthday is terribly near, and next year, the father tells himself, his innocent simple-minded darling must needs be handed over to the high priestesses of the temple of fashion; must take her place in society, be wooed, won, and wedded; and then it would be to him almost as if he had no daughter. New associations, new loves, new joys, new hopes, new cares, would arise for her who was now all his own. 'Well, it is the common lot, ' he muses, dreaming in his library over an open folio of Bacon's Essays or Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial. 'I must wait for a girl-grandchild, whom I may train up to be something like the companion and friend my little girl has been to me. She will last my time. I shall be dead and gone before she need be presented at Court.' He has a fixed idea that from the hour his daughter enters society she will be in great measure lost to him. This comes, perhaps, from his profound contempt for modern society, which he despises the more intensely because he has held himself aloof from the vortex, and only contemplates its foolishness from the outside. This external view of fashionable life is like a deaf man's view of a ball-room. Lord Ingleshaw sees the puppets dancing, without hearing the music which is their motive power; and the whole thing seems rank folly: folly treading on the heels of vice. His sister, Lady Carlyon, a dowager countess, passing young for her years, as all dowager peeresses are nowadays, a lady who lives in society and for society, has told him that Lucille must take her proper place in the world, must be seen and admired and talked about, and even written about in the newspapers, before she can be properly and creditably married: and he is prepared to submit to the inevitable. He would rather his girl should be wooed by the interchange of a miniature and a few formal letters, and wedded by proxy, like a princess of the seventeenth century. Anything would be better than the turmoil and dissipation of fashionable society, the rubbing shoulders with doubtful beauty and tarnished rank, the inevitable brushing away of youth's tenderest bloom, sinless Eve's primitive innocence. One little year yet remains to the fond father. Lucille is not to be presented till next season. The Earl has begged hard for this extension of his happiness. 'She will be horridly old by that time, ' says Lady Carlyon, in her hard business-like way, staring at the unconscious Lucille, who is playing a dreamy gondolied of Mendelssohu's at the other end of the long low parlour. 'I'm afraid she is one of those girls whose looks will go off early. Half the beauty of her eyes depends upon that cabbage-rose bloom of hers. Nothing tells so well as youthful freshness just now. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.