WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
Shadows and sunbeams: Being a second series of Fern leaves from Fanny's portfolio cover

Shadows and sunbeams: Being a second series of Fern leaves from Fanny's portfolio

Chapter 15: CURIOUS THINGS.
Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

About This Book

A varied collection of short essays, sketches, and soliloquies mixes humor and sentiment to portray domestic and civic life. Vignettes range from rural scenes and bereavement to city routines and boarding-house experience, emphasizing financial dependence, household labor, and the social pressures on women. The pieces alternate pointed satire of fashion, clergy, and public manners with practical reflections on housekeeping, parenting, and charity, using anecdote and direct address to balance wit, moral observation, and sympathetic portraiture.

CURIOUS THINGS.

Curious: The exaggerated anxiety of wives to see the women who were formerly loved by their husbands.—Exchange.

Well, yes—rather curious; there are a great many curious things in this world. Curious, your husband always perceives that you are “sitting in a draft,” whenever one of your old lovers approaches you in a concert room; curious he insists upon knowing who gave you that pretty gold ring on your little finger; curious that you can never open a package of old letters, without having his married eyes peeping over your shoulder; curious he never allows you to ride on horseback, though everybody says you have just the figure for it; curious he always sends his partner on all the little business trips of the firm; curious such an ugly frown comes over his face when he sees certain cabalistic marks, in a masculine hand, in the margin of your favourite poet; curious that he will not let you name your youngest boy Harry, unless you tell him your confidential reasons; curious he is almost most gracious to the most uninteresting men who visit the house; and very curious, and decidedly disagreeable, that whenever you ask him for money, he is so busy reading the newspaper that he can’t hear you.