He sat down to read them at
once, and, as he read, the smile of welcome became a shrewd and deeply
interested one.
"She has undertaken a good-sized contract," he was saying to himself,
"and she's to be trusted to see it through. It is rather fine, the
way she manages to combine emotions and romance and sentiments with
practical good business, without letting one interfere with the other.
It's none of it bad business this, as the estate is entailed, and the
boy is Rosy's. It's good business."
This was what Betty had written to her father in New York from Stornham
Court.
"The things I am beginning to do, it would be impossible for me to
resist doing, and it would certainly be impossible for you. The thing I
am seeing I have never seen, at close hand, before, though I have taken
in something almost its parallel as part of certain picturesqueness of
scenes in other countries. But I am LIVING with this and also, through
relationship to Rosy, I, in a measure, belong to it, and it belongs
to me. You and I may have often seen in American villages crudeness,
incompleteness, lack of comfort, and the composition of a picture,
a rough ugliness the result of haste and unsettled life which stays
nowhere long, but packs up its goods and chattels and wanders farther
afield in search of something better or worse, in any case in search
of change, but we have never seen ripe, gradual falling to ruin of what
generations ago was beautiful.
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