Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IL THE TWO CATHERINES. Half my life is fall of Borrow, Il;ilf of joy still fresh and new, One of these lives is a fancy; But the other one is true. A. A. Phoctkb. There are some things dull and shabby and uninteresting to one person, which to another are all shining with a mysterious light and glamour of their own. A dingy London hall, with some hats on pegs, a broad staircase with a faded blue and yellow Turkey carpet, occasionally a gloomy echoing of distant plates, and unseen pots and pans in the kitchens below; a drawing room up above, the piano which gives out the usual tunes over and over again, like a musical snuff box; the sofa, the table, the side table, the paper cutter, the ' Edinburgh,' and the ' Cornhill,' and the ' Saturday Review;' the usual mamma with her lace cap, sitting on the sofa, the other lady at the writing table, the young man just going away standing by the fireplace, the two young ladies sitting in the window with waves of crinoline and their headsA DOMESTIC BASTILLE. 39 dressed. The people outside the window passing, iepas sing, and driving through Eaton Square, the distant unnoticed drone of an organ, the steeple of St. Peter's Church. This one spot, so dull, so strange to Madaine de Tracy after her own pleasant green pastures, so like a thousand others to a thousand other people, was so unlike to one poor little person I know of; its charm was so strange and so powerful, that she could scarcely trust herself to think of it at one time. In after years she turned from the remembrance with a constant pain and effort, until at last by degrees the charm travelled elsewhere, and the sunlight lit up other places. My little person is only Miss George, a poor little twenty year old governess, part worried, part puzzled, part sad, an...
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