The Argosy — page 294: what you’re looking at

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

The Hammonds’ Ugly Duckling. a78 round the world on the frontispieces of polkas? I call it positively indecent.” “Cousin Priscilla!” protested Gertrude, in amazed consternation. ‘‘An absolute prostitution!” continued Miss Priscilla, with in- creasing vigour of denunciation. ‘She might just as well be a ballet- girl, I never thought to see the day when one of your family would consent to the degradation of notoriety.” “‘T cannot comprehend why Joan should not write music, just as well as Peter can scribble accounts !” suddenly broke in Edith, with unwonted fire. ““For Heaven’s sake, don’t you try to be sharp,” retorted the old lady, turning upon her exasperatedly. ‘Stick to your proper charac- ter, my dear. Your chief merit is your want of in I mean your want of pretension to superior intelligence.” “Why, Cousin Priscilla, I always thought you had a very good opinion of me,” said Edith resentfully, beginning to cry. ‘So I have,” answered Miss Upton, with a mollified smile of curiously grim enjoyment. ‘‘ You are my ideal of a young woman; the very girl for my—approbation” (Edith had raised a tear-stained face, but buried it in her handkerchief again at the word ‘ approba- tion”). ‘So stop crying, do. I like you all. Al except Joan, and I shall never be easy until she 1s once again living respectably under her father’s roof.” And, with returning irritation, Miss Priscilla wrapped her red woollen shawl round her spare form, and precipitately left the room. ‘“‘T wish I were thirty,” sighed Edith naively. ‘Think, if Z am to get that money, how convenient it would be now!” “You will be thirty quite soon enough,” replied Gertrude, with some natural asperity, that age being past for her. ‘‘ But as for Cousin Priscilla’s money, I don’t believe we shall ever get it. I think she takes a spiteful pleasure in dangling the expectation of it before our eyes; but I am certain that the condition attached to it 1s some- thing impossible for us to do. Sometimes I think she wants one of us to go out as a missionary to Central Africa.” One morning Mrs. Meredith called early, with a countenance of the utmost gloom. ““Ned is going to be married,” she said, and sat down in the nearest chair. "To whom ?” asked Mr. Hammond, lugubriously. “To a German girl, a pianist from Munich,” replied Mrs. Meredith. Gertrude and Edith gave an exclamation of dismay, Miss Priscilla a savage laugh. “That comes of studying the arts,” she remarked, in unconscious contradiction to Sir Andrew Aguecheek. “The name of this person?” inquired Mr. Hammond, with the air of a man inured to the buffets of fate. COMIC OOO SS (CO) a