The Lovels of Arden by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (ebook offline reader txt) 📕

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The painter can come to England now, and roam his native woods unburdened by care; but though this is very sweet to him once in a way, he prefers a Continental city, with its _café_ life, and singing and dancing gardens, where he may smoke his in the gloaming. He grows steadier as he grows older, paints better, and makes friends worth making; much to the joy of poor Bessie, who asks no greater privilege than to stand humbly by, gazing fondly while he puts on his white cravat, and sallies forth radiant, with a hot-house flower in his button-hole, to dine in the great world.

But this is only a glance into the future. The story ends in the orthodox manner, to the sound of wedding bells--Miss Granger's--who swears to love, honour, and obey Thomas Tillott, with a fixed intention to keep the upper baud over the said Thomas in all things. Yet these men who are so slavish as wooers are apt to prove of sterner mould as husbands, and life is all before Mrs. Tillott, as she journeys in chariot and posters to Scarborough for her unpretentious honeymoon, to return in a fortnight to a bran-new gothic villa on the skirts of Arden, where one tall tree is struggling vainly to look at home in a barren waste of new-made garden. And in the servants' hall and housekeeper's room at Arden Court there is rejoicing, as when the elder Miss Pecksniff went away from the little village near Salisbury.

For some there are no marriage bells--for Lady Geraldine, for instance, who is content to devote herself unostentatiously to the care of her sister's neglected children--neglected in spite of French and German governesses, Italian singing masters, Parisian waiting-maids, and half an acre or so of nursery and schoolroom--and to wider charities: not all unhappy, and thankful for having escaped that far deeper misery--the fate of an unloved wife.

THE END
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Publication Date: 09-15-2010

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