Violet Lisle — page 38: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

33 Pwo ARISTOCRATS. — and was driven over to the village, feeling quite at ease with herself, and with no premonition of the reception she would receive from Melville Lisle, a man whose life of poverty had only accentuated his pride, so that it stood out the one feature of his otherwise monotonous existence. CHAPTER VIII. TWO ARISTOCRATS, Looking at Melville Lisle it was easy to see where Vio- let got her beauty ; but the same glance would also betray the fact that it was not from her father that she received her sweet and wholesome nature; for on his face was set- © tled the expression of an angry, discontented pride, draw- ing down the corners of a well-cut mouth and lengthening the curve of the nostrils. | Too proud to do anything to lighten his poverty, he yet had a brain too active to be content with sloth, and so he had long since turned his thoughts to literature as a field in which he might without disgrace exercise his faculties. Nothing so frivolous as a tale of love ever came from his | pen, however. ‘ It was a thing he could not understand, nor could he tolerate it as a factor in a properly regulated life. His great work was a disquisition on the correlation and conservation of forces—a work that would have doubtless created a revolution in the thought of the world if it had ever found a publisher, which, for some reason, it never did find. The cottage was a small one, but if it had been half the size it would have found one room for his library, if Vio-. let and Goody White had slept on the roof. Melville Lisle’s books were for the most part a portion of the over- flow from the library of Granthorpe, which had been given to his father by the then earl, and which typified to Mel- ville Lisle the aristocratic pretensions to which he clung as to the most precious thing of his life. He was sitting in his library, adding a thought or two — to a new work on “diaphragmatic propulsion of impalpa- — ble particles,” when Goody White, in a tremor of intense — excitement, burst into the sacred room without the cus- — tomary knock of respectful deprecation. “Oh, Mr. Lisle!” she gasped, “Mr. Lisle!” “What is the meaning of this intrusion?” demanded Mr. Lisle, with a coldness that should have had its effect on Goody, as it usually did, but in this case did not. EComichooks*com ;