tripe

A girl of a little more than seventeen, looking, I believe, younger still; slight and rather tall, with a great deal of golden hair, dark grey-eyed, and with a countenance6 rather sensitive and melancholy7, was sitting at the tea-table, in a reverie. I was that girl.

 

The only other person in the room — the only person in the house related to me — was my father. He was Mr. Ruthyn, of Knowl, so called in this county, but he had many other places, was of a very ancient lineage, who had refused a baronetage often, and it was said even a viscounty, being of a proud and defiant8 spirit, and thinking themselves higher in station and purer of blood than two-thirds of the nobility into whose ranks it was said, they had been invited to enter. Of all this family lore9 I knew but little and vaguely10; only what is to be gathered from the fireside talk of old retainers in the nursery.

 

I am sure my father loved me, and I know I loved him. With the sure instinct of childhood I apprehended11 his tenderness, although it was never expressed in common ways. But my father was an oddity. He had been early disappointed in Parliament, where it was his ambition to succeed. Though a clever man, he failed there, where very inferior men did extremely well. Then he went abroad, and became a connoisseur13 and a collector; took a part, on his return, in literary and scientific institutions, and also in the foundation and direction of some charities. But he tired of this mimic14 government, and gave himself up to a country life, not that of a sportsman, b rather of a student, staying sometimes at one of his places and sometimes at another, and living a secluded15 life.

 

Rather late in his life he married, and his beautiful young wife died, leaving me, their only child, to his care. This bereavement16, I have been told, changed him — made him more odd and taciturn than ever, and his temper also, except to me, more severe. There was also some disgrace about his younger brother — my uncle Silas — which he felt bitterly.