"He pressed the handsome chalked hand in his own andthen to his lips in a very un-English way."
FAIR MARGARET
A PORTRAIT
By
F. MARION CRAWFORD
AUTHOR OF "SARACINESCA," "SANT' ILARIO,"
"WHOSOEVERSHALL OFFEND," ETC., ETC.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
HORACE T. CARPENTER
NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1905,
By F. MARION CRAWFORD.
Copyright, 1905,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1905. Reprinted
November, December, 1905; April, 1906; July, September, 1908;
July, 1909; February, twice, 1910.
Thirty-seventh Thousand
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Co
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
FAIR MARGARET
CHAPTER I
'I am a realist,' said Mr. Edmund Lushington, as if that explainedeverything. 'We could hardly expect to agree,' he added.
It sounded very much as if he had said: 'As you are not a realist, mypoor young lady, I can of course hardly expect you to know anything.'
Margaret Donne looked at him quietly and smiled. She was not verysensitive to other people's opinions; few idealists are, for theygenerally think more of their ideas than of themselves. Mr. Lushingtonhad said that he could not agree with her, that was all, and she wasquite indifferent. She had known that he would not share her opinion,when the discussion had begun, for he never did, and she was glad ofit. She also knew that her smile irritated him, for he did not resembleher in the very least. He was slightly aggressive, as shy persons oftenare: and yet, like a good many men who profess 'realism,' brutalfrankness and a sweeping disbelief of everything not 'scientifically'true, Mr. Lushington was almost morbidly sensitive to the opinion ofothers. Criticism hurt him; indifference wounded him to the quick;ridicule made him writhe.
He was a fair man with a healthy skin, and his eyes were blue; but theyhad a particularly disagreeable trick of looking at one suddenly for aninstant, with a little pinching of the lids, and a slight glitter,turning away again in a displeased way, as if he had expected to beinsulted, and was sure that the speaker was slighting him, at the veryleast. He often blushed when he said something sharp. He wished he weredark, because dark men could say biting things without blushing, andpale, because he felt that it was not interesting to be pink and white.His hair, too, was smoother and softer than he could have wished it. Hehad tried experiments with his beard and moustache, and had finallymade up his mind to let both grow, but he still looked hopelessly neat.When he pushed his hair back from his forehead with a devastatinggesture it simply became untidy, as if he had forgotten to brush it. Atlast he had accepted his fate, and he resigned himself to what heconsidered his physical disadvantages, but no one would ever know howhe had studied the photographs of the big men in the front of things,trying to detect in them some single feature to which his own bore afaint resemblance. Hitherto he had failed.
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