Tyson took his wife abroad for six months to finish her education (as if

to be Tyson's wife was not education enough for any woman!); and Drayton

Parva forgot about them for a time.

In fact, nobody had fully realized the existence of Molly Wilcox till she

burst on them as Mrs. Nevill Tyson.

It was the first appearance of the bride and bridegroom on their return

from their long honeymoon. The rector was giving an "At Home"

(tentatively) in their honor; and a great many people had accepted,

feeling that a very interesting social experiment was about to be made.

Everybody remembers how Mrs. Nevill Tyson fluttered down into that party

of thirty women to eleven men, in an absurd frock, and with a still more

absurd air of assured welcome. Poor little woman! Her comings and goings

from one Continental watering-place to another had been the progress of a

triumphant divinity; where she found an hotel she left a temple. I

sometimes think, too, that little look of expectant gladness may have

been due to the feeling that the Rectory was in England, and England was

home. She was dressed in the most perfect Parisian fashion, from the

crown of her fur toque to the tips of her little shoes; but she had never

learned to speak three words of French correctly. She informed everybody

of the fact that afternoon, laughing with the keenest enjoyment of her

remarkable stupidity; it seemed that her rôle was to be remarkable in

everything. However that may have been, in less than half an hour seven

out of those eleven men were gathered round her chair in the corner; two

out of the seven were the rector and Sir Peter Morley, and Mrs. Nevill

Tyson was talking to all of them at once.

Mrs. Nevill Tyson--she was an illusion and a distraction from head to

foot; her beauty made a promise to the senses and broke it to the

intellect. Coil upon coil, and curl upon curl of dark hair, the dark eyes

of some ruminant animal, a little frivolous curve in an intelligent nose,

a lower jaw like a boy's, the full white throat of a woman, and the mouth

and cheeks of a child just waked from sleep. Tyson had escaped one

misfortune that had been prophesied for him. His wife was not vulgar. She

sat at her ease (much more at her ease than Miss Batchelor), and

chattered away about her honeymoon, her bad French, the places she had

been to, the people she had seen, and all without any consciousness of

her delightful self. Now it was a continuous stream of minute talk,

growing shallower and shallower as it spread over a larger surface; and

now her mind had hardly settled on its subject before it was off and away

again like a butterfly. There was one advantage in this excessive

lightness of touch, that it left great things as it found them, for great

things lay lightly on her soul. She told everybody she had been to Rome;

but imagination simply, refused to picture Mrs. Nevill Tyson in Rome. Her

presence in the Eternal City seemed something less than her footprint in

its dust or her shadow on its walls. Nothing is more irritating than to

have your dream of a place destroyed by the light-hearted gabble of some

idiot who has seen it; but Mrs. Nevill Tyson spared your dreams. The most

delicate ideal would have been undisturbed by the soft sweep of her

generalities, or the graceful flight of her fancy from the matter in

hand.




readonlinefreebook.com Copyright 2016 - 2024