Mr. Popham exaggerated nothing, but on the contrary left much unsaid in
his narrative of the family at the House of Lords. Henry Lord, with the
degree of Ph.D. to his credit, had been Professor of Zoology at a New
England college, but had resigned his post in order to write a series of
scientific text books. Always irritable, cold, indifferent, he had grown
rapidly more so as years went on. Had his pale, timid wife been a rosy,
plucky tyrant, things might have gone otherwise, but the only memories
the two children possessed were of bitter words and reproaches on their
father's side, and of tears and sad looks on their mother's part. Then
the poor little shadow of a woman dropped wearily into her grave, and a
certain elderly Mrs. Bangs, with grey hair and firm chin, came to keep
house and do the work.
A lonelier creature than Olive Lord at sixteen could hardly be imagined.
She was a tiny thing for her years, with a little white oval face and
peaked chin, pronounced eyebrows, beautifully arched, and a mass of
tangled, untidy dark hair. Her only interests in life were her younger
brother Cyril, delicate and timid, and in continual terror of his
father,--and a passion for drawing and sketching that was fairly
devouring in its intensity. When she was ten she "drew" the cat and the
dog, the hens and chickens, and colored the sketches with the paints her
mother provided. Whatever appealed to her sense of beauty was
straightway transferred to paper or canvas.
Pages:
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136