[Margaret Ogilvy by J. M. Barrie]@TWC D-Link bookMargaret Ogilvy CHAPTER IX--MY HEROINE 7/15
Had Jess a silk of any kind--not to speak of a silk like that ?' 'Well, she had no silk, but you remember how she got that cloak with beads.' 'An eleven and a bit! Hoots, what was that to boast of! I tell you, every single yard of my silk cost--' 'Mother, that is the very way Jess spoke about her cloak!' She lets this pass, perhaps without hearing it, for solicitude about her silk has hurried her to the wardrobe where it hangs. 'Ah, mother, I am afraid that was very like Jess!' 'How could it be like her when she didna even have a wardrobe? I tell you what, if there had been a real Jess and she had boasted to me about her cloak with beads, I would have said to her in a careless sort of voice, "Step across with me, Jess and I'll let you see something that is hanging in my wardrobe." That would have lowered her pride!' 'I don't believe that is what you would have done, mother.' Then a sweeter expression would come into her face.
'No,' she would say reflectively, 'it's not.' 'What would you have done? I think I know.' 'You canna know.
But I'm thinking I would have called to mind that she was a poor woman, and ailing, and terrible windy about her cloak, and I would just have said it was a beauty and that I wished I had one like it.' 'Yes, I am certain that is what you would have done.
But oh, mother, that is just how Jess would have acted if some poorer woman than she had shown her a new shawl.' 'Maybe, but though I hadna boasted about my silk I would have wanted to do it.' 'Just as Jess would have been fidgeting to show off her eleven and a bit!' It seems advisable to jump to another book; not to my first, because--well, as it was my first there would naturally be something of my mother in it, and not to the second, as it was my first novel and not much esteemed even in our family.
(But the little touches of my mother in it are not so bad.) Let us try the story about the minister. My mother's first remark is decidedly damping.
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