The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Benefactress, by Elizabeth Beauchamp
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: The Benefactress
Author: Elizabeth Beauchamp
Release Date: October 20, 2009 [EBook #30302]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BENEFACTRESS ***
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
The Benefactress
BY THE AUTHOR OF "ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN"
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1901
_All rights reserved_
Copyright, 1901,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Norwood Press
J. S. Gushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
Man bedarf der Leitung
Und der maennlichen Begleitung.
WILHELM BUSCH.
THE BENEFACTRESS
CHAPTER I
When Anna Estcourt was twenty-five, and had begun to wonder whether the
pleasure extractable from life at all counterbalanced the bother of it,
a wonderful thing happened.
She was an exceedingly pretty girl, who ought to have been enjoying
herself. She had a soft, irregular face, charming eyes, dimples, a
pleasant laugh, and limbs that were long and slender. Certainly she
ought to have been enjoying herself. Instead, she wasted her time in
that foolish pondering over the puzzles of existence, over those
unanswerable whys and wherefores, which is as a rule restricted, among
women, to the elderly and plain. Many and various are the motives that
impel a woman so to ponder; in Anna's case the motive was nothing more
exalted than the perpetual presence of a sister-in-law. The
sister-in-law was rich--in itself a pleasing circumstance; but the
sister-in-law was also frank, and her husband and Anna were entirely
dependent on her, and her richness and her frankness combined urged her
to make fatiguingly frequent allusions to the Estcourt poverty. Except
for their bad taste her husband did not mind these allusions much, for
he considered that he had given her a full equivalent for her money in
bestowing his name on a person who had practically none: he was Sir
Peter Estcour
|