Joy in the Morning by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Random House Group Limited
Published: 2008-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

Florence was obviously in the grip of some powerful emotion. She quivered gently, as if in the early stages of palsy, and her face, as far as I could gather from the sketchy view I was able to obtain of it, was pale and set, like the white of a hard-boiled egg.

‘D’Arcy Cheesewright,’ she said, getting right off the mark without so much as a preliminary ‘What ho, there,’ ‘is an obstinate, mulish, pigheaded, overbearing, unimaginative, tyrannical jack in office!’

Her words froze me to the core. I was conscious of a sense of frightful peril. Owing to young Edwin’s infernal officiousness, this pancake had been in receipt only a few hours earlier of a handsome diamond brooch, ostensibly a present from Bertram W., and now, right on top of it, she had had a falling out with Stilton, so substantial that it took her six distinct adjectives to describe him. When a girl uses six derogatory adjectives in her attempt to paint the portrait of the loved one, it means something. One may indicate a merely temporary tiff. Six is big stuff.

I didn’t like the way things were shaping. I didn’t like it at all. It seemed to me that what she must be saying to herself was ‘Look here upon this picture and on this,’ as it were. I mean to say, on the one hand, a suave, knightly donor of expensive brooches; on the other, an obstinate, mulish, pigheaded, overbearing, unimaginative, tyrannical jack in office. If you were a girl, which would you prefer to link your lot with? Exactly.

I felt that I must spare no effort to plead Stilton’s cause, to induce her to overlook whatever it was he had done to make her go about breathing like an asthma patient and scattering adjectives all over the place. The time had come for me to be eloquent and persuasive as never before, pouring oil on the troubled waters with a liberal hand, emptying the jug if necessary.

‘Oh, dash it!’ I cried.

‘What do you mean by “Oh, dash it”?’

‘Just “Oh, dash it!” Sort of protest, if you follow me.’

‘You do not agree with me?’

‘I think you’ve misjudged him.’

‘I have not.’

‘Splendid fellow, Stilton.’

‘He is nothing of the kind.’

‘Wouldn’t you say he was the sort of chap who has made England what it is?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘I said no.’

‘Yes, that’s right. So you did.’

‘He is a mere uncouth Cossack.’

A cossack, I knew, was one of those things clergymen wear, and I wondered why she thought Stilton was like one. An inquiry into this would have been fraught with interest, but before I could institute it she had continued.

‘He has been abominably rude, not only to me but to father.

Just because father would not allow him to arrest the man in the potting shed.’

A bright light shone upon me. Her words had made clear the root of the trouble. I had, if you remember, edged away from the Stilton-Florence-Uncle Percy group just after the last named had put the presidential veto on the able young officer’s scheme of pinching J.

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