I had begun to imagine myself the
lucky centre of a thousand and one happy possibilities. I was grown
up, and out in the world, the wife of a very rich man, with costly
plumes in my bonnet, and rich lace on my showy parasol, like the lady
who had just driven by: I was quite my own mistress, with servants and
other people to obey me. I had a dashing barouche of my own, and was
rolling in conscious grandeur past my step-mother's window, with the
back of my expensive bonnet turned towards the half-closed shutter,
through which she was sure to be peering enviously--when the laths of
the very shutter in question were shaken impatiently, and a hasty,
authoritative voice cried out, "If you've nothing else to do but spoil
your new pink frock out there, Amelia Hampden, I wish you would come
in and play with your baby-brother for awhile;" and then, as the blind
and voice were lowered, I heard the usual "enough to provoke a saint,"
which was the finishing touch to every reprimand I either did, or did
not, deserve.
History repeats itself; nothing is surer. Here was I hand in hand with
a well-known hero of the Arabian Nights, weeping in open-mouthed
sorrow and astonishment over my basket of shattered glassware. I had
broken the salutary precept which exhorts us sanguine mortals not to
count our chickens before they are hatched, and now mourned the
prescribed result, an ice-cold shower bath in a Canadian December
could hardly be a more undesirable and unlooked for intrusion than was
this unappreciated and pressing invitation of Mrs.
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