I've always said
that it ruined poor Jane, with all her pride. She got into her head all
kind of notions about that scamp Montjoy, with his pale face and his long
black hair. Poor girl, poor girl! I tried to bring her up on Homer and
Milton, but she took to her mother's bookshelf as a duck to water." He
wiped his eyes, and Betty patted his hand, and wondered if "the scamp
Montjoy" looked the least bit like his son.
When they reached Chericoke she shook hands with the servants and ran
upstairs to Mrs. Lightfoot's chamber. The old lady, in her ruffled
nightcap, which she always put on when she took to bed, was sitting upright
under her dimity curtains, weeping over "Thaddeus of Warsaw." There was a
little bookstand at her bedside filled with her favourite romances, and at
the beginning of the year she would start systematically to read from the
first volume upon the top shelf to the last one in the corner near the
door. "None of your newfangled writers for me, my dear," she would protest,
snapping her fingers at literature. "Why, they haven't enough sentiment to
give their hero a title--and an untitled hero! I declare, I'd as lief have
a plain heroine, and, before you know it, they'll be writing about their
Sukey Sues, with pug noses, who eloped with their Bill Bates, from the
nearest butcher shop. Ugh! don't talk to me about them! I opened one of Mr.
Dickens's stories the other day and it was actually about a chimney
sweep--a common chimney sweep from a workhouse! Why, I really felt as if I
had been keeping low society.
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