Читать книгу Within the Precincts онлайн

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Lottie held her head as high as usual when she came back. It no longer drooped with diffidence and delight. Once more she had come down with a jar into the realms of reality from those of hope. She was not received with open arms in that higher celestial world. Miss Augusta Huntington said, “How do you do, Miss Despard?” very sweetly, but Lady Caroline only bowed with her eyelids—a new mode of salutation which Lottie did not understand—and kept aloof; and no one else said anything to Lottie, except about the music. They gave her a cup of tea when all was over, but Lottie had to drink it in silence, while the others laughed and chatted. She was not of them, though they had brought her among them for the sake of her voice. “Are you going, Miss Despard?” said the Dean’s daughter, putting on the same sweet smile. “We are so much obliged to you for coming. The next practice is next Tuesday. Will you come as early as possible, please?” It was on Lottie’s lips to say “No”—to tell them that she was a lady too, a better gentlewoman than they were, since she would not have treated any stranger so. But she was fortunately too shy to say anything, and made her exit hastily, and not so gracefully as the others, who were at home. But she would not allow, even to herself, that she had come down again in that painful tussle with reality, which is so much different from dreams. She kept very quiet and said nothing, which seemed the wisest way. And as she walked home with a much more stately gravity than was her wont—a state put on to console herself for humiliation and disappointment, and to vindicate, so to speak, her own dignity to herself, but which the lookers-on gave a very different interpretation of—Mrs. O’Shaughnessy, nodding and smiling, and in a state of great excitement, threw up the window and called to her, as she was going past. “Come up, come up, and tell me all about it,” the old lady said, so audibly that some of the ladies and gentlemen who had been in the Deanery turned round to look, and smiled at each other, making Lottie furious. As she could not stand there and explain before all the world, Lottie obeyed the call, and rushing upstairs to the kind old Irishwoman’s little bit of a drawing-room, appeared, crimson with shame and wrath at the door.